Crow’s Row

  The laundromat was a good block-and-a-half down our street, so carrying the heavy load of clothes was not an option. But my roommates and I had already devised a first-rate system. I unlocked the padlock that kept our permanently borrowed grocery cart chained to the front porch; the stolen cart kept getting stolen on us, so we had to keep it under lock. I heaved the basket into the cart and rolled it down the street, fitting in with the rest of the neighborhood.

  It was remarkable to me how far I had come in less than a year’s time, since I had escaped to Callister. I had gone from having no idea how to do anything without hired help to being completely self-sufficient—well, most days anyway. There were signs of my abnormality, of course—like the time I had tried to make hard-boiled eggs. I found out the hard way that you needed to add water to the pot, and the house reeked of burnt eggshells for a week. I learned through observation and a lot of trial and error.

  Inside, the laundromat was bright, with blue plastic chairs lined against the white walls and tumbleweeds of lint rolling on the checkered floor. I loved the smell of the laundromat—to me it smelled of fresh starts, possibilities, independence.

  I started by going through all my pockets—good thing I did, or I would have washed my new pocket-sized music player—before stuffing two machines with as much clothes as they could take and threw half a roll of quarters in. Then I sat on one of the machines, threw my feet over on the lid of the other machine, and waited. The most important rule of the laundromat: never leave your clothes unattended, not even for a second, even when the place seems to be completely deserted of people. Otherwise, you’ll see some local flavor walking around the next day wearing your tweed pants as a scarf, your underwear as a hat … another lesson I had learned the hard way.

  I wasted my idle time playing with my new toy. It took me a good five minutes to remember how to turn it on, and then another half hour to navigate through the different features to find music. Bob Marley was there, along with every one of his albums that was ever made or remade. Who knew there were so many remakes of “One Love”?

  I scrolled down to the next name on the list: this obscure band called Purple Faced Ragamuffins—I didn’t even know they had recorded an actual album. I had seen them play once in this dingy bar in Soho when I was still totally underage. I had snuck out of school with a girl from my soccer team. She was stalking the drummer.

  The music-thingy must have had over a thousand songs, most of which I recognized—surprising given my limited music knowledge. But, in the end, I settled with what was safe and familiar and finished laundry night with Bob.

  When I got back from the laundromat, a red dot was blinking on my cell phone. Skylar had left me a message from an airport phone—it was rapidly worded, like he had been afraid that I might pick up the line and he would be forced to actually talk to me. I could hear his flight being called in the background—nothing like waiting to the very last minute. He said all the right things: that he wasn’t mad, that he would miss me, that he would call me as soon as he got settled at home. And then the line went dead. I wondered if it was normal that I wasn’t sad.

  Chapter Three:

  Haunted

  Day two of my four-month escape from civilization, and another sleepless night. Insomnia was becoming a bad habit.

  My brain was cluttered with things I didn’t need: the fear of boredom, of being alone with my thoughts without distraction, Skylar’s effortless desertion … the boy in the gray sweater. I spent more time thinking about the latter.

  There was no question in my mind that this boy was odd and beautiful—a dangerous combination. Something about his guardedness, something about the way others in the projects had looked at him with fear, made me think that I should probably run the other way next time and concentrate on not thinking about him.

  I had spent the night trying to figure out why I had been the target of his, at weird times, moments of anger. And then there was the final warning—or was it a threat? When the light of morning rose, I still didn’t have an answer to my questions. He was a roller coaster of incomprehensible emotions—and I was borderline obsessed.

  At midnight I had given up trying to sleep, stuck my new earphones in, and cleaned the house. By five a.m., the house was museum spotless, but I had exhausted the sole source of entertainment originally saved for the now-looming, lonely weekend.

  At work, I was a speed demon with my new music blaring in my ears. By the time lunchtime came around, I looked at the cart of scanned books in horror—it was already full. I would have a hard time trying to explain that much evidence away. I decided to take an extra-long lunch to think about what I’d done.

  Lunch bag in hand, I walked out of the library, careful to take the stairs and do a quick scan of the perimeter so that I wouldn’t run into another awkward moment with Jeremy … or his cute blonde.

  It was humid outside. The sun was beating down on the abandoned university grounds; the smart people were hiding in the air-conditioned cafeteria. I considered doing just that myself, but that would be tempting fate with more Jeremy-awkwardness.

  I settled on a table that sat under the shade of a maple tree, took my peanut butter and stale bread sandwich out, and opened the book that I had borrowed from my scanned stack. Dummy Variables for Stata—it turned out to be not as interesting as it sounded.

  My life was marred by events of turmoil and self-mutilation. When I was five, I played hairdresser with Barbie before turning the scissors on myself. When I was done, Barbie looked like a model walking into rehab after a couple months of hard partying. I looked like the lopsided top of a carrot muffin.

  In third grade, Tyler Brown convinced me that everyone had freckles but that they hid them with paper Wite-Out—it made perfect sense to an eight-year-old. So I spackled it on before I went to bed and left it overnight, to make sure that the paint was well embedded before my big reveal at school in the morning. At least I got to stay home from school for a week while my skin recovered from the paint thinner that the maid had to scrub into my skin.

  It was hard being the kid who just wanted to get lost in the crowd when my head was like a flare being set off in an ocean of blondes and brunettes. People were always drawn to the girl with the fire-engine hair, in the same way that they couldn’t help themselves from slowing down to stare at car accidents on the side of the road—hoping that it was as bad as it looked, wanting to witness some shocking thing that only an elite few have ever seen up close.

  I also wasn’t blind to the attention that I reaped from the opposite sex. It had started with the boys in grade school who would dare each other to run up to me and pull my hair; those boys would later grow up to be frat boys who were looking to do more than pull my hair. I was a rite of passage for most of the male species, at any age.

  But, as an almost adult, I was getting a little better at singling out the guys who were looking for the red-headed experience. So when a man with red-rimmed glasses approached me, my red-radar was up right away.

  “Excuse me,” he said, standing across the table.

  I sighed through my nose, looking up. He was rail thin and tall. His spiked hair, which was sporadically present, made it ever more obvious that his hair was thinning at the crown and that he was trying very hard to hide this.

  “Would you mind if I sat here?” he asked pointing to the bench across from me. “There are no other tables in the shade.”

  I gave a nod and went back to my dumb variables while he sat down.

  But he didn’t get my cues of indifference.

  “I’m Anthony Francesco,” he started, though it had sounded more like a question.

  I glanced over the edge my book. He was staring expectantly at me, obviously waiting for a response.

  “Emily,” I said without emotion and tried to go back to my book; but I somehow knew that he wasn’t done. I instantly regretted my decision to not bring my earphones.

  “No last name, Emily?” he said, nervously chuckling. “Are you lik
e Madonna or something?” I flipped a page of my book, even though I hadn’t finished reading it.

  “So … do you go to school here, Emily?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Are you from around here?” he asked.

  I started to mow down my sandwich faster, just in case I needed a quick exit, and thought of a good vague response that I had recently heard.

  “Not really,” I said, hiding my smile.

  “ … Yeah, I’m not really from around here either.” There was another blissful moment of silence, and then he continued, “Do you live close to school?”

  “Kind of,” I answered, my eyes never leaving the page, my lips never more than an inch away from my sandwich.

  “I’ve got my own place a couple of blocks from here,” he said. “Do you still live with your parents?”

  “Yep,” I lied.

  “Do you have any siblings?” he hurriedly asked, likely noticing that I was shoveling the food into my mouth as quickly as possible. But he was too late. I was done eating, and for the first time, gladly offered more than a few syllables.

  “Sorry, my break is over. I’ve got to go before my boss freaks out.”

  I picked up my stuff and rushed off before he had a chance to find something else to question me about. I would have run out of there, but that would have made it a little too obvious.

  “What a freak,” I whispered to myself, as I walked back into the library—though he was probably thinking the same thing about me.

  I was back at work, half an hour early from my lunch. And my fake boss didn’t freak out.

  By the time I strolled out of the library at the end of my work day, the weather had changed dramatically; the sky was dark, and black clouds were rolling in like a tsunami. With all of the humidity from the past few days, I expected that I didn’t have much time to spare before the rain came crashing down, hard.

  Back at the house, I spent more time than I had squinting in the mirror, fixing my devastatingly frizzed hair, trying to find something to wear.

  When I reached the cemetery’s entrance, black clouds were already threatening overhead. With only two or three people idling under the shadows of the trees, the cemetery was almost desolate—the smart people were indoors again.

  But when I took a quick right at the decaying catacomb, I stopped dead in my tracks.

  Someone had thrown a crushed pop can and candy wrapper on top of my brother’s grave. I knew it was unfair of me to be upset that my brother Bill’s grave had been desecrated—especially when the rest of the cemetery had never been anything but disrespected—but I had no sense of justice when it came to my big brother.

  I took a few steps to Bill’s tombstone and crouched down to push the garbage away. I grabbed the bottom of my T-shirt and wiped the soda that had been spewed onto the stone. And I then stopped, forgetting my purpose, tracing my hand along the engraved lines of his name.

  You’re supposed to hold your breath when going past a cemetery, or, as the superstition goes, you’ll breathe in the spirit of the dead. You’re also supposed to stick your thumbs into your fists to protect your parents. I did neither and ran through the cemetery almost every day—if only that was enough to explain why I was so haunted, and why my parents were … the way they were. I missed Bill—every second of every day.

  I had little recollection of my life before things started to go so wrong in my family. Burt and Isabelle had had an affair when Burt was still married to someone else and Bill was just a baby. When Burt left Bill’s mother and married my mom, Bill’s mother committed suicide. And I was born in the middle of all of this, a soap opera that my big brother had tried to shield me from. Through all of this, in spite of how I came into this world, he was my biggest, my only, ally.

  Most of my family memories were of the heated arguments between Burt and my brother. Bill getting into fights, Bill selling drugs, Bill getting kicked out of eight different private schools—Bill, the Shame of the Sheppard family. The last argument was on the night that Bill was brought home in a police cruiser when my parents were having a dinner party, and there were too many witnesses to the shame. Burt shipped my brother off to Callister to live with his uncle Victor, who was his birth mother’s brother, and a police officer. A few months later, Victor called Burt—Bill had run away.

  But Bill still came to visit me, secretly. He’d climb into my room in the middle of the night on my birthday, on Christmas, whenever he felt like it, just to check up on me and make sure that I was doing whatever he thought I should be doing—going to school, not doing drugs … according to my brother, what was good for the goose wasn’t good enough for the gander.

  Then when I was thirteen, a police officer came to our front door. Bill’s body had been found in an empty apartment in Callister, the needle still hanging off his arm. There was an autopsy—Bill had died of a drug overdose. Heroin, I had overheard.

  I was awakened from my daze by a loud bang from the thunder roaring above the overhanging trees of the cemetery. I pressed my hand hard against the cold stone and took one last glance at the gravesite before being satisfied and speeding off, returning to my purpose. I quickly rounded the chestnut tree and by the time I reached the clearing into the projects, the sky was pitch-black and the thunder was now belching steadily.

  Unlike the previous few days, the clearing was completely desolate. My shoulders sunk when I saw he wasn’t there waiting for me at the picnic table, even though, logically, I knew that he wouldn’t be there and that I shouldn’t be looking for him.

  I reluctantly kept running until I heard the bark of the dog named Meatball.

  I slowed down to an almost walking pace and looked back. He was there in his gray sweater, leaning against the fence at the farthest point of where the cemetery and projects met, about two hundred feet from the entrance to the cemetery that I had just ran through.

  Following his leashed dog’s warning, he brought his eyes to me. But he wasn’t alone this time. There was another man at his side—a man with a shaved head and too many tattoos.

  While the boy in the gray sweater was pulling on the leash, struggling to keep Meatball from running off to greet—attack—me, the other man looked confusedly at his friend and his suddenly misbehaving dog, and eventually followed his friend’s quick glimpses to me. He glanced from me to his friend twice more, his confusion seemed to have turned to anger. The boy in the gray sweater turned his body away from me, toward the tattooed man.

  In that instant, I decided that today was not a good day to chat with my obsession. Pretending to have slowed down for a stretch, I extended my arms, bending them over my head, very quickly grabbing each elbow. And then I picked up my running pace again.

  I followed the pathway through the field that surrounded the projects, and, as it slowly veered to the right, I finally felt it was safe enough for me to look back. At a far distance, I could still see him standing there with the other man. They seemed deep in conversation, possibly arguing. Another runner came through the clearing of the cemetery, and I saw Meatball feverishly tugging on his leash once again. I made my way down the hill and out of sight, and I smiled to myself, glad that I wasn’t the only one that Meatball liked so much.

  I was coming close to completing the first third of my run when lightning split the sky a few yards ahead of me, thunder exploded, and the rain suddenly started to pour. I took my headphones off and put them in my pocket—I was already attached to my new toy and didn’t want it to get wet—and I kept soldiering on.

  The drops of rain quickly turned into buckets of water, and I was getting soaked. Lightning came to light up the black sky. The grounds were soaked. Either I gave in to the weather or I was going to get zapped. I turned around and retraced my steps back through the projects.

  The rain didn’t bother me, but the lighting was making me very nervous. I ran faster, looking forward to the shelter of the trees in the cemetery and their momentary refuge. I ran back up the small hill into the fields of
the projects, seeing through the gravel-sized drops that the boy in the gray sweater and the other scary man had left.

  I finally made it through the entrance back into the cemetery. Just as I thought, the lofty trees managed to keep most of the rain out. I slowed my pace a bit to catch my breath and shake off a bit of water. My sneakers were submerged canoes.

  With the sun out of sight, the cemetery was dark. I could barely make out the contours of the winding pathway. I squeezed some of the water out of the bottom of my T-shirt and sloshed forward. I had run this route so many times—I knew every curve, every bump in the road.

  I picked up a jogging pace, came around to the big chestnut tree … and heard a bone-chilling cry, as if an animal were being tortured.

  I was used to Bob’s voice here, not this.

  I stopped immediately, wondering if my horror-movie-infected brain was playing tricks on me. Then there was another cry, even more ear piercing this time.

  Too afraid to move, and beating myself up for having stupidly decided to run through a dark cemetery alone, I stood there like one of the tombstones. I could hear muffled voices, and then more cries of pain. Not knowing where the sounds were coming from or what was making that sound, I didn’t know whether to run away or stay put or even which direction was a safe way.

  My body decided for me, and I started to move quietly on the uneven footpath. Something, instinct or impulsivity, was leading me toward the quickest way home. I made it to the massive tree—a familiar mark. I didn’t have much further to go before I was on the street again.

  I took a few more steps … and heard a scream again, but this time it was much closer—I had picked the wrong direction. When I heard the bark that I recognized, I took a peek around the tree without thinking.