Black Bird of the Gallows

  Kiera’s brows rise in twin arches of condescension, and my stomach dips. “What’s your problem, little freak?”

  My bravado is tremulous, but I take a sip of water, then give her a level look. “Is that a rhetorical question?”

  She stares me down, and the air around me thickens. My face warms. My gaze drops to my tray. You would think, after all I’ve been through, that I would be tough as bricks, but my defenses are membrane-thin and easily shattered.

  “Don’t let her get to you,” Lacey hisses. “She’s hot air.”

  My cheeks burn and my hands fist at my sides, and it’s all magnified because of the boy sitting next to her, staring at me with a look I can’t interpret.

  “That’s right. Look away.” Kiera’s sugar-sweet voice drips with disdain. “Poor Angie. How do you get by without your mother’s pervert boyfriends around to keep you company?”

  The air rushes from my lungs. That was a low blow. The lowest. And the worst part is, I don’t even know why. Our school is pretty small and chilled out. For reasons unknown, Kiera singled me out to torture.

  Our corner of the cafeteria goes quiet. Just our corner, thankfully.

  “I mean, I’m sure you had your hands full with—”

  “Stop it,” Reece clips out. “Seriously. That’s messed up.”

  Kiera gives him a well-practiced down, boy look, but her cheeks flush. “It’s okay, Reece. Angie knows we’re just playing.” She aims a pinched smile my way. “Don’t you, sweetie?”

  Reece frowns at her, eyes narrowed, like he finds her as filthy as the thing she just implied about me. Then, he looks at me, and the weight of his gaze is breathlessly intense. He doesn’t blink, doesn’t shift his attention away. Cafeteria Reece is gone. The boy from the bus stop, with all that hidden pain, looks back at me. For a second—just a second—Kiera blinks out of existence. So does everything and everyone except for me and the boy with those deep, dark eyes.

  “What’s your problem, Kiera?” Deno’s voice crashes into my head. “You don’t say stuff like that.”

  Suddenly, the intensity of everyone’s attention is too much. I close my eyes, shuttering Reece, Kiera, my classmates’ stares. I can’t take it. I push away from the table. The room closes in around me. I grab my bag and head for the door.

  “Get over yourself, you hipster wannabe,” I just barely hear Kiera reply. “She’s a tabloid freak show and everyone knows it. Or they should.”

  I don’t hear anything else. I exit the cafeteria as tears blur my vision. The miserable truth is, I am a tabloid freak show. The way the police found me and returned me to my father, my mother’s death—it made national news for a whole week: Private Investigator Finds Man’s Daughter Living in Van; Girl Reunited with Father After Seven Years; Woman Charged with Drug Possession and Child Abuse, Dies from Overdose; Witness Says Girl Abused by Mother’s Boyfriends.

  The headlines went on and on. Each one more outrageous than the next. I know what some people think: I was abused, a drug mule, a child prostitute. They don’t care that none of it was true. Stories are so much more interesting than the truth, and interesting sticks.

  I lean against the locked stall door in the bathroom and ignore Lacey’s calls for me. Later, we’ll spend some therapeutic time bitching about Kiera, but right now…that just hurt. Most of the time, I can take what Kiera dishes, or ignore it, or stay unnoticed. Most of the time, I can count the months until graduation and let it roll. But now, the thought of facing Reece again makes my stomach turn. I’m sure Kiera is filling him in on the sordid details of my past, and some of it won’t be lies. My mother was an addict. I did fight the police when they took me away from her. She did die from a drug overdose.

  I wipe my eyes and count the reasons why this. Doesn’t. Matter.

  Screw Kiera. I have a show three days from tonight, and maybe Reece will be there. Maybe he’ll find Sparo more interesting than little Angie Dovage. Maybe more interesting than Kiera Shaw.

  Maybe I’ll find out Friday night.

  3- the dark way home

  Deno drives me home from school in his 1999 Chevy Venture minivan. It’s rusty, smelly, and makes an ominous front-end rattle that Deno willfully ignores. What had once been someone’s kid-shuttle is now gutted and sticker-covered, used primarily for hauling musical equipment. He drives Lacey to school since she doesn’t have a car. She bought a hundred-year-old violin, instead.

  I sit in the one remaining back seat, thankful that they’re not making me talk. Lacey has the sense to not deconstruct the cafeteria scene. But Deno has difficulty with silent spaces. He likes to fill them with sound—any sound. Even now, his fingers tap the steering wheel to a beat in his head, because the radio stopped working six months ago. I curl up and press against the threadbare seat. Tomorrow will be better. It always is. How long until graduation? Four months and eleven days.

  “That was decent of your neighbor,” Deno says. “He didn’t have to say anything to Kiera.”

  I close my eyes, wishing the radio worked. “No, he didn’t.”

  “Risky, too. Being his first day and all.”

  “What’s your point, Deen?” Lacey asks.

  “No point.” Deno shrugs. “Just saying he might not be an asshole, that’s all.”

  A harsh breath hisses from Lacey’s teeth. “You might have spoken too soon,” she murmurs, pointing to an old black sedan turning down the street toward my neighborhood. “Isn’t that Kiera’s car?”

  My eyes fly open and snap to the window. Kiera does drive an old black sedan, along with about a half dozen other kids, but she doesn’t live in my neighborhood. The only reason she’d be here is to give Reece a ride home.

  “Nah.” Deno turns into my development right behind the sedan. “See the hockey mask sticker on his bumper? That’s Trevor Bent’s car.”

  Lacey squints. “Oh. You’re right.”

  “Angie.” Deno swivels, shoots me a curious look. “Am I driving you home today because the new kid saw Kiera’s ugly in the cafeteria?”

  Lacey smacks his arm. “I told you, she’s upset.”

  “Over the new kid?”

  “Over the whole awful thing,” Lacey says. “You are so dense sometimes.”

  I relax into the seat with pointless relief. So Reece is getting a ride home from Trevor. That doesn’t mean he isn’t into Kiera. It doesn’t mean anything.

  “Geez, Angie.” Deno leans forward to look up through the windshield. “What’s with all the crows in your neighborhood? Someone not bagging up their garbage?”

  “What?” I sit up and look out, pulled out of my sulk. Sure enough, there are about a dozen crows flying around the van and the black car in front of us. “There’ve been a lot, lately.” I say it casually, but I don’t like this. I’m very happy to be inside a layer of metal and glass right now.

  “They’re quite large for crows,” Lacey adds. “I think they’re ravens.”

  “What’s the difference?” Deno asks, braking at a stop sign.

  “They’re different species.”

  I am about to agree with Lacey, when one of the crows—or ravens—flies up right alongside the minivan. It hooks its claws on the window frame and squawks at me.

  “Whoa!” I jerk back, even though I know it can’t get in. The crow cocks its glossy black head at me, as if peering inside. It blinks a round eye and, even through the tinted glass, I can see the bird’s eye is not black, but garnet red. It glitters like a cut gem in the cold afternoon light.

  It’s got something—a speck of gold glints in its closed beak. I lean forward to take a better look.

  “What the hell is that?” Deno hits the gas and the crow loses its tenuous hold on the window frame. The bird takes to the air and soars into the trees with a rough kraa.

  I keep a death grip on the seat, gaze locked on the birds, flying circles around the cars. The sedan pulls into Reece’s driveway. Rock music burns through the seams of Trevor Bent’s car.

  Something’s up with th
ose birds. Something not entirely natural. The bunch of them diving at Reece this morning could be explained—the birds might be tame. But the red eyes on that one were too strange to ignore. I’d still like to know what it had in its beak. I didn’t imagine it. I’m beginning to think I didn’t imagine the man with the changing face from this morning, either, and I don’t know what to make of that.

  Deno puts the van in park in front of my three-car garage. Lacey gets out to open the sliding side door for me because the handle on the inside is broken.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I say to Deno.

  “Sure thing,” he says, shaking his head. “You should try driving your own car to school. This hill you live on kills my gas mileage.”

  I give Deno a mock salute, and he grins as I climb out of the minivan.

  Lacey pauses before getting back inside. She glances at the border of trees between my house and Reece’s. The branches are thick with crows. “There’s something wrong with those birds,” she says in a quiet voice. Her eyes are troubled. Unlike myself, Lacey is a believer in things like omens and signs and superstitions. She likes to think she’s tuned in to the vibes of the world, or something like that.

  “They’re birds,” I say.

  Her dark eyes narrow. “Well, yeah. I’m just not sure that’s all they are.”

  I nod, wishing I could argue with her. “What else do you think they could be?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just saying it.” She tilts her head toward mine. “So. Are you okay with what happened at lunch today?”

  “Yeah.” I hunch my shoulders against the chill and thoughts of Kiera Shaw. “Nothing some time in the basement with my guitar can’t fix.”

  She hugs me, a little too tight, then pulls back and turns a leery eye to the sky. “It’s going to rain.”

  Not today, it isn’t. “I’ll take anything but more snow.”

  Her brow knits. “No, this is different.”

  Overhead, the sky is blue. One dark cloud tumbles in amongst the white puffy ones. I stifle a shiver and tug my coat tighter. I have no clairvoyance. I’m not tuned in to the vibes of anything, but I can’t deny the uneasy feeling uncurling through the air like a dark ribbon.

  Also, there are facts. Since the Ortley family murders, the neighborhood has been quiet. Nothing strange has happened until the Fernandez family moved in. Along with vibes and omens, I also don’t believe in coincidences.

  Upstairs in my room, I toss my backpack on my bed and go to the window. I have a partial view of Reece’s house and notice a few lights illuminate windows as a quiet curl of smoke winds from the chimney. Trevor Bent’s car has left.

  My gaze catches on something small, gleaming in the dirt of the flower box outside my window. Gold. I unlock the window and shove it and the sliding screen up enough to reach for the object. Cold air pushes through the narrow space and bites my hand. The begonia stems, which had bloomed there in the summer, look like brown veins trailing over the soil. I reach out and pluck the thing from the dirt. It’s a small gold earring, missing its back. The tarnished setting once held a stone but is now empty. I close the window, locking the cold back outside, and peer at the earring in confusion. It’s not mine. I’m sure of it.

  A low krahhh sounds from the deck below. I glance down to see a crow sitting on the railing, looking up at me. It tips its head up and cocks it to the side. It looks pleased with itself, if that’s possible. Logical answers are usually the correct ones, but here, the logical answer is that someone dropped it there. But…who? The only other person who comes to my room with pierced ears is Lacey, and as far as I recall, she has never even looked out my window, let alone leaned out of it.

  I swallow hard and glance at the crow. It’s starting to make a racket down there. Um, didn’t that bird have something shiny in its beak when it came to the van window? The crow flaps its wings a few times but doesn’t fly off. One of its wing feathers is pure white. Red eyes and a white feather. That’s…different. I stare down at the bird, working to make sense of this. I suppose it’s possible—remotely—that it put the earring in my flower box for me to find.

  With a scowl to the crow, I yank my curtains closed and turn away from the window. I move to throw out the earring, but I hear that gentle krahhh again and drop the gold stud into a glass dish on my dresser. A shiver wiggles down my spine. It may not be wise to throw away gifts from this bird. It’s clearly trying to communicate something.

  I collapse on the bed and fling an arm over my eyes. What if that really is an earring of mine I forgot about? I don’t remember owning any gold studs. All my jewelry is silver. Also, I only got my ears pierced four years ago, but hell—I don’t even know anymore. Maybe this is all in my head. I groan into my pillow, because if I’m imagining these things, it’s very bad news for me. What if the mental demons that plagued my mother have finally come for me? She didn’t survive them. Would I?

  4- the music

  The music thumps fast and deep and loud. It’s an amped-up Zero 7 remix that most people here haven’t heard but I’m particularly fond of. Mel, owner of The Strip Mall, gives me a lot of leeway to play what I want. Over the past six months, I’ve proven that the place won’t empty out if the people can’t mouth along to the songs. Quite the opposite, actually. Friday night attendance has increased, from what I hear. They keep me on the schedule, so I must be doing something right. A bunch of my classmates come, and the club has become popular with the Somerset College kids who think anything played on the radio is garbage. They think I’m “enlightened,” which I think is hilarious. All I do is play music I like.

  I hold one half of my headphones to my ear and queue up my next track. The songs transition seamlessly, thanks to a swirly filler beat I put in between songs that shifts and builds to the next. Transitions are when everything could go wrong, and the only part of my set that’s all me. I move to the pulse of music, filling up those empty, hungry parts of the night, of me.

  The energy of the packed dance floor floods my veins, pounds through my bones, but there’s a weird agitation to the floor tonight, as if everyone is dancing slightly off beat. The clientele is usually docile, but two guys have already been kicked out—one for threatening the bartender and another for punching a guy who bumped into his girlfriend. A few others got stern warnings. None of this is typical. The Strip Mall’s bouncers usually stand around bored out of their minds. Tonight, they’re prowling the floor, watching the crowd with sharp eyes.

  My gaze flickers over the unsettled floor as I fade in a six-minute house remix I made myself last week. I signal Deno, who works the booth with me, to adjust the pre-amp settings. There’s some weird feedback going on.

  Aside from Deno and Lacey, no one knows I am Sparo, the Friday night DJ. It blows my mind, honestly. I never let anyone near enough to look at me closely, but just in case, the lighting is set up to make it hard to get a good view at the girl in the booth. Plus, my outfit is pretty intense. Six-inch platform boots make me super tall, and my transformation includes an array of wigs, massive green sunglasses, and about three pounds of makeup. If my dad saw me in full Sparo gear, he’d die. Thankfully, he’s given up asking to see my set. “A lot of teenagers,” and “very loud music,” were both effective in deflecting him. Instead, I make him playlists for his iPod.

  Most patrons are looking more at one another’s asses than at me, but I thought someone eventually would see through my disguise. I figured Deno would blow my cover or people would figure it out, since we’re together so much in and out of school, but no. It helps that Deno is always here. The Strip Mall is his second home. He assists three other DJs and fills in whenever the owner has an empty shift. He could have his own set if he didn’t prefer working behind the scenes.

  Someone appears at the booth for another song request. I glance over and see Kiera Shaw, writing her song on the Post-it note Deno gives anyone with a request. She would lose her mind if she knew Sparo is me—Angie Dovage—the “little freak” she likes to spew ver
bal bile on. It’s been three days since her lunchroom humiliation. I’m over it, but I cannot wait until I don’t have to see her face every day.

  Kiera hands the yellow Post-it over and tries to peek around him to get a look at me. Deno deftly blocks her view, but I’m not worried. Sparo looks way older than seventeen and nothing like me, anyway. My shoulder-length hair is hidden under a vivid purple wig and huge headphones. Angie doesn’t wear lipstick, but Sparo’s lips are slicked up Blow-Pop pink. Sparo’s clothes are flamboyant, weird, colorful, while Angie wears dark, don’t-notice-me clothes. I like to think maybe somewhere in between Sparo and Angie is me.

  Deno hands me Kiera’s request with raised brows. It doesn’t matter what she requests or how many Post-its she hands Deno—I’m not playing her requests. I ball it up and flick it to the floor, and Deno firmly waves her off. She makes a pouty face, says something to Deno, and then huffs away. A smile tugs at my lips. It’s not nice of me, but I do enjoy denying her. She shouldn’t get everything she wants.

  She returns to her group of friends. A guy comes up behind them with a cup in each hand. He hands one to Kiera, and the smile falls off my face.

  It’s him. Reece. Here with Kiera Shaw. We share a few classes and lunch, but we haven’t spoken since his first day. His mom, or someone, drives him to school, I guess, because that champagne Lexus rolled by while I walked to the bus stop every day. It had been a relief and a disappointment to not face him every morning. I wasn’t sure if he was giving me space after the lunchroom incident, or if he decided I was too much of a social liability, or if he was just busy. Whatever the reason, I must have misread him. Maybe that connection I thought we had was another thing my head invented.

  Still. I hadn’t thought he’d want to hang out with Kiera after what she said. He’d appeared upset at that. But that’s the problem these days: few things are what they appear.