Shallow Imitations

chapter twenty-eight

       

After an eventful week, Kal doesn't text me again in two days. At first, I'm almost confused, wondering if these things really happened or if they were only in my mind. Kal was right about it seeming like a scene out of a movie when you realize the only one haunting you is yourself. Though he did mean it in a humorous way.

When he finally texts me, it feels like I've regained my sanity. His friend changed the password to something simple and gave it to him. Kal has been going over the emails for the last few days, putting all the important ones in a folder for us to review together and deleting the rest. Apparently whoever owns this email address—presumably Atlas—didn't delete his emails for a while. There are a couple of hundred spam emails piling up and a few account updates from websites he registered in. It would make sense as Atlas is now incapable of deleting emails.

It didn't occur to me that I probably don't know what his email address is. It's not his name, so we couldn't recognize it, but Kal thinks it belongs to Atlas. We never had to email each other before, so it would make sense for me not to know it. But I can't possibly imagine what exchanges are so important anyway.

I'm eager by the time Kal comes over, wanting to know everything he found out. He's silent as he goes over to the sofa. He usually goes to the desk right away and starts working.

"What is it?" I say, knowing there's something on his mind.

"Are you sure you wanna do this right now? Maybe we should take some time. Your sister is right, it's all a big too crazy," he says. "This is especially difficult for me to admit because you know how much I like crazy."

Sighing, I sit next to him. "Eleonora doesn't know what she's talking about. She was just overreacting, you know."

He sits up, running his fingers through his hair."Is she? I would be worried too if someone I care about was in this situation," he says. "Don't get me wrong. I think you're doing a fine thing keeping me company, but I would be concerned about this going too fast . . . if I was your sister, which I'm clearly not."

I laugh, a hearty giggle I haven't heard in a long time.

He's not laughing. There's a slight frown in his expression. "Maybe we should slow this down."

"Slow what down? You wanna read one email a day?"

He rolls his eyes, taking a deep breath. Kal points to the two of us. "I mean this. Let's take a step back. Eleonora is right."

My breath catches in my chest. "Are you saying you regret kissing me?"

Kal shakes his head frantically. "Not at all. Everything about that part was right. Just maybe give it some time. We've only known each other for a few weeks," he says, a sheepish smile on his lips. "Give it some time before we get into this."

"That's what we agreed to do a couple of days ago," I say. "But I still wanna see what's on this thing."

There's no clear evidence that says the email belongs to Atlas, but Kal says it can't possibly belong to the cat lady. She doesn't even look like she can use a computer. Most of the emails were spam and some were strange letters that didn't mean much. One letter in particular read in a weird format. The words made no sense as if written by someone who doesn't know much English. It was only then that Kal pointed out, "If you read the first letter of each sentence, it makes a secret message." He pulls out a paper from his notebook where he connected each letter to make a sentence. They read things like 'get out of town' or 'they're searching for us'. One particular email read 'you can't run forever'.

"The thing is, none of these emails have a name attached to them. The email is no longer in use, I found out, and its user is anonymous. None of them are signed either. It just ends abruptly," he says. "Until I stumbled upon this one email. The last one. It's the only one that's signed."