i'm at a payphone trying to call home

[Deleted]

february 2024
london

Getting permission to leave the school to go to London had been more difficult than Jamie had anticipated. There were just a lot of things that she didn’t want to have to explain. She was making a lot of choices that some would deem illogical, but Jamie had never been a person driven by logic. Her heart had always come first, and it was coming first again this time. Jamie had managed to finagle her way out of having to give any personal information, and had gotten permission to leave the school for a few hours, on the condition that she submitted to a security check when she returned. Since Jamie was only planning on using a few minutes of the hours given to her, and she didn’t intend to take anything back into the school with her that she hadn’t left with, she agreed to the terms. She had walked the path down to Hogsmeade, and then had Apparated herself to a back alley off a quiet side street in London, where no one would notice the strange cracking noise.

Jamie peered around to make sure no one was watching her before exiting the alley and beginning to traipse down the street. She didn’t have a particular location in mind – she was just looking for a phone booth. Jamie was certain that once she got on the busier parts of the street, she would be able to find one easily. Getting the coinage necessary had been a bit of a feat, since she didn’t have much magical money to trade with, but eventually she had scrounged up the fee necessary for a short phone call, mostly by the generosity of her house mates willing to give up a few pence. Individually, it wasn’t much, but considering Jamie’s extensive social network, it quickly became enough, and now she just needed to find a place to make her call.

After turning off the side street, Jamie spotted a phone booth immediately. It looked to be in pretty good shape, and there was no line… but Jamie still didn’t go to it. She just sat on a bench across the street from the payphone, staring at it. In typical Jamie fashion, she was getting cold feet before making the plunge. After everything that had happened to her in the past eight months, it seemed wrong to call her mother off a random payphone in London and expect everything to turn out okay. She was still so angry, and really, the only reason she was doing this in the first place was because she was worried that something was going to happen to her mother. With the Wulfes having appeared in her life, Jamie knew that it was a matter of time before Fenrir found the people he was looking for, all clustered in one place. If he decided to go after Jamie’s mother again, this time she would have no bargaining chip. As much as Jamie hated having to be her mother’s shield… was it wrong to want the woman who raised her to live? To be safe? No, Jamie decided, it wasn’t wrong. The Hufflepuff had been holding onto the grudge against her mother for so long, and she was just… tired. Of being angry, of being resentful, and being scared. And if Jamie knew if she was the one to make the first contact, her mother would let her set the pace. She could go slowly, instead of being tossed headfirst into being a family again. That was a nice thought.

After a moment more of pondering, Jamie stood up from her place on the bench. She crossed the street at a crosswalk, and then made a beeline for the phone, even though no one else seemed to have any intention of using it. Muggles had cell phones, Jamie reminded herself, so payphones were only used by those who didn’t have a portable phone, or in emergency situations if the cell died. Once inside the booth, Jamie closed the door behind her, and carefully began to count out the coins she had in her pocket, dropping them into the meter one by one and watching her time credits go up as she did so. When she had purchased five minutes of speaking time, Jamie stared at the keypad. There was that fear again, clenching up her stomach and making it hard to breathe. Jamie had been so concerned with how she felt about the situation that she hadn’t considered what her mother thought. It had been eight months, and who was Jamie to say that her mother hadn’t already accepted that Jamie wasn’t going to come back, and was moving on with her life without her daughter? There were times that Jamie knew she had made her mother’s life harder, especially since she had been born when her mother was just a teenager… What if her mother was now just enjoying what life would have been like without an accidental child? Jamie was glad that there wasn’t anyone else waiting for the phone, or she was sure that they would have been thumping on the glass by now, demanding that she either make her call or get out. That was still the decision that Jamie had to make, though. She knew that she couldn’t walk away, not after she had come so far, both literally and figuratively. She was going to make this call if it was the last thing that she did.

Jamie had written the number to her home phone on a piece of parchment before she had left, even though she had it memorized. Her hand shook just the slightest bit as she began punching in the numbers. The receiver was cradled between her shoulder and ear, and after one last moment of hesitation (one last chance to run away, Jamie thought ruefully to herself), she hit the call button. The dial tone began to ring, and Jamie’s stomach did all manner of acrobatics as she waited to see whether or not her mother would pick up. The phone made a clicking noise, and Jamie swallowed. “Hi, m–”

“Our apologies, the number you have dialed is out of service. For more information, please press one.” The woman’s voice was smooth, cool, and obviously automated. If Jamie thought her hands had been shaking before, they were a hundred times worse now, and she had to hang the phone up before she dropped it or broke something. Jamie opened the door to the phone box, the glass walls suddenly seeming stifling. Even once she was in the open air, she couldn’t seem to get in enough air. Jamie was panicking, and she didn’t know why, because it was just a phone call. Just a disconnected phone line. She hadn’t even really wanted to do this in the first place – she had seen it more as an obligation than anything. And even if she had wanted to do it, she wasn’t expecting it to go well. Jamie still knew where her mother worked, so if she really wanted to… she could go to her. But this phone call had been so hard, and had taken so much out of Jamie, and it hadn’t even really happened. An actual meeting, in person, where Jamie couldn’t run away or hang up the phone, sounded terrifying. And she didn’t want to do it… at least not alone.

Jamie walked back across the street, and sat back on the bench, with the payphone still in her line of sight. She felt like she was staring it down, even though the Hufflepuff knew that it wasn’t the machine’s fault that her mother had disconnected their home phone. Maybe it was good that she was permitted to be out of school for a few hours. She needed time to process everything that had happened.

(More than that, she needed her mother.)