The Last Call

Mara sat on the edge of the bathtub, her iphone glowing in the dim light like a dying star. Three missed calls from Daniel. She let it ring again, watching his name pulse against the black screen—a rhythm she'd memorized over seven years of friendship.

Outside, the sky burned orange through the small window, that peculiar suffocating color of Los Angeles sunsets, beautiful and toxic all at once. Everything here was like that: gorgeous poison.

She'd stopped answering his calls three weeks ago, when he showed up at her apartment high enough that his eyes were two different sizes. He'd stood in her doorway, swaying, insisting he was fine, just needed a place to crash. But she knew the pattern. She'd seen it with her brother, the slow erosion of personality until you were left with a zombie who looked like someone you loved but was actually something else wearing their skin.

Daniel was becoming that thing. The zombie.

The iphone vibrated again—a text this time. "I'm scared."

Mara's thumb hovered over the screen. The bathroom mirror caught her reflection: mascara smudged under one eye, hair pulled back too tight, the weary face of someone thirty-two going on eighty. She'd sworn she wouldn't be the enabler, the codependent friend who couldn't set boundaries. She'd read all the books, sat through all the Al-Anon meetings after her brother died. You can't save people who don't want to be saved.

But she also knew what it felt like to be the one person someone still trusted enough to call.

She opened the text and typed: "Where are you?"

The orange light was fading now, surrendering to that peculiar purple-gray of dusk. Her phone lit up with his location. A 7-Eleven in Koreatown. Of course.

Mara stood up, her joints popping, and reached for her keys. She was a fool, she knew. A zombie in her own right, walking back into the fire. But as she grabbed her jacket, she understood something terrible and necessary: some friendships survive because you refuse to let them die, even when the person you loved has already been replaced by something else that wears their face and knows your name.

Her iphone buzzed again. Daniel's name. This time, she answered.