An E-Mail From Birmingham

The cave was getting stuffy. I mean, I'm all for breathing the same air as Benedict Cumberbatch, but there was starting to be an extreme lack of air for either of us to breathe. He stood up, which was impressive in the confines of our cave; he was double the height of the last Ben I'd spoken to, a kid from school. He began to pace from the front door to the back door and I could see for the first time how seriously he was taking this problem.
"It's dark outside. You can see through the hinges in the door," he mumbled.
"That does tend to happen when the day's been going a while," I replied, my eyes following him like they would a hypnotist's pocket-watch.
"They haven't tweeted. They always tweet! Shannen's usually jailed by now!"
He was really starting to resemble Sherlock now, except ginger. Maybe that was what we needed. Maybe if Ben had a sociopathic God complex then we'd have escaped by now. But he wasn't Sherlock, and I wasn't exactly John Watson.
"YES!" he cried.
"What? What?!"
"My butt just vibrated!"
"I'm gonna hope you just got a tweet."
"Duh!"
"It could have been anyone. It could have been an @fact."
By now he had his phone in the palm of his hand and was hurriedly tapping his passcode in.
"It's Eliza! And it's actually an e-mail."
"What's she sayin'?"

 Today was a pretty strange day. So, I left the note, felt guilty until I remembered where you two were. I got a bus from Hemel Hempstead to London, then at the London train station, I met Shannen. I've got to say, I did not expect these to be the circumstances of when we eventually met.
We took a train to Birmingham, our first checkpoint, and we've got twin hotel rooms here. I skipped school today.

 Ben and I were both silent for a moment. Was there some way we could stop them? If there was I knew we were obliged to do so. There seemed to be nothing. And would we have, anyway? Were either of us strong enough to refuse to have our lives saved. Guiltily, I was glad about our inability to prevent what was going on around us because I genuinely didn't know what I would do. There were a lot of things I didn't know, and I was always acutely aware of my surroundings. Sometimes I'd sit in school and just watch, watch other people live their lives. It was like when you watch a TV show and yell at the characters. I watched, and I learned from their mistakes. It was rather calming to know I could understand what would happen next, when somebody missed something in a conversation and the misunderstandings piled up, you could always tell when it was going to spiral, and then when it'd be resolved.
 It was rather unnerving, therefore, to have no clue of my own life. How was I meant to react? What would happen next. Something Eliza said firmly cemented by loss of bearings in the world.
"Wow," I whispered.
"What?"
"I didn't realise it was a weekday."