The world seemed to stop and then to spin, slowly, as if everything else in the little old cowshed drifted up and out and away while Arrietty and that phone regarded each other. She knew what it was. There had been one on the counter, in that house. And mostly, she had used it - the housekeeper who had been the real source of all their troubles. She had called the exterminators with it. Arrietty gulped and shuddered.

And yet...

She flexed her fingers, wondering what it would feel like - the hard plastic against her fingers. The housekeeper had called lots of people with the phone, not just the exterminators. She had called neighbors. She had called old friends. She had called her grandchildren. She had chatted for hours, the headpiece propped against her shoulder while she chopped and stirred and seasoned and opened the mail. Then she would hang up and complain about the crick in her neck. Arrietty remembered the wonder of that, of hearing her talk to the mysterious Other Voices on the other end of the phone line, while Arrietty sat inside the wall with her back against the wrong side of a kitchen outlet and pressed her ear to the crack.

There were no Other Voices for Borrowers. There were hardly even Other Borrowers, except for Spiller - who communicated, when he felt like it, in monosyllabic grunts and disappeared into the wild for weeks at a time. There was, in short, no one to talk to outside of the family. What would it be like, she wondered, to pick up a Borrower phone and hear another Borrower on the other end? What would it be like to have someone to call?

"Information, please."

Arrietty jumped, but the words had been her own, another half-memory of life before the great upheaval. The housekeeper had said that phrase all the time. When she didn't know something, she would pick up the phone and say "Information, please." Then she would ask for the temperature or the weather report, or for a friend's number that she had forgotten. Sometimes, when a delivery man came, she would stop him and ask to see the weather report on his cell phone, but she had never gotten a cell phone of her own. She had said she was too old to learn how to work them, but Arrietty had always suspected that she was just too lazy to learn something new, especially when Information, Please already knew everything.

Had Sho had a cell phone?

The thought stopped her cold. Whenever she had seen him during those fleeting summer days, he had always had a book, or he had put the book facedown to pet the cat. Whether he had a cell phone or not, she had never seen him use one.

Perhaps he, too, had had no one to call.

It wouldn't hurt just to pick it up, would it? Arrietty set the bucket down, following the handle with her hand so it wouldn't clang against the sides. She set the blanket on top. She glanced over her shoulder, out the open door. There was nothing; there was no one. Not the sound of an engine, not the cries of disturbed birds or the unnatural silence that usually preceded a Human Bean out for a stroll. And she knew, with a twinge of guilt, that there was no way anyone from the dugout could see or hear her from this far away...

She eased the phone off its hook. The plastic was cool, smooth, clean. To her surprise, someone was already talking.

"-and then the skunk crawled under the barn and died! I swear, it's going to smell for weeks!"

"Oh, but what a relief that the baby's okay."

"Indeed! Our Shep can do no wrong now!"

Fascinated, Arrietty sank down to perch on the bucket, eyes wide as she listened to two middle-aged women chattering. Eventually a third voice joined the conversation, a breathless teenage girl who needed the line right now. The two women gave place after a few good-natured remarks about boyfriend "emergencies" and hung up.

"Operator? This is AngelaandIneedtotalktoHarryrightnowit'sveryIMPORTANT-"

The teenage girl talked so fast that Arrietty couldn't follow her, but the operator was apparently used to this and put the call through without missing a beat. Harry picked up, sounding irritable and distracted. Angela went off into another hyperfast monologue, with a few tears thrown in for effect, and Harry grunted a few times and then said he would come over after dinner. Arrietty giggled to herself, imagining Spiller using a phone.

Arrietty had no way of knowing that the phone she was holding - used by farm hands to call the main house - was part of a rural party line, or that anyone on the party line could pick up and listen in on other people's conversations just as she was doing, or that the party line system was rare outside of small and isolated communities. All she knew was that a rich social world beckoned from inside that magical box.

Harry and Angela hung up and the line was silent for a few minutes. Then a pleasant female voice said, "Can I put your call through?"

It was the operator. And, Arrietty realized, she was talking to her.