“I’ve got a guardian angel.”
He got up, searched through the red duffel bag that he had flung on my bedroom floor, and threw a grocery-sized paper bag onto the bed.
“Go ahead,” he insisted when I hesitated. “Take a look.”
When I opened the bag, I found money. Stacks and stacks of hundred-dollar bills. I couldn’t hide my surprise when my head popped up. Griff mirrored my astonishment.
“A few days ago, a couple of guards came up to me, told me that I was done guarding the shed, and blindfolded me,” he explained and turned his eyes to the sky. “I thought for sure that I was a goner, Em. We drove for hours, or at least it felt like it. No one talked the whole way. Then the car stopped. They pulled me out, handed me the bag, and gave me a sealed envelope that had this in it.”
Griff took a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to me.
I unfolded it delicately, like I was disarming a bomb.
Emily. 1777 Riverside Road, Callister, NY.
My first name. My address. Neatly typed.
“I don’t understand,” I said as I held on to the piece of paper. My hands were shaking, and I didn’t know why.
“Neither do I,” he admitted, taking my hands, steadying them. “The guards told me to walk south and took off. When I took the blindfold off, I was alone on the side of a logging road with a bag of money, my stuff, and the only key I had to find you. I walked for two hours before I found a town and a convenience store, which was also their bus station.
“The weird thing is that I’d been planning my escape from hell for weeks, and I was about to run when they gave me my leave. I was going to come find you, rescue you from that asshole. That hellhole he was keeping you in.” A drop of water fell from my ceiling into the bucket on the floor. His mouth stretched thin. “What new level of hell have you gotten yourself into this time?”
I couldn’t really disagree with Griff. The house made a pigsty look like a palace. But it was the only thing I could count on. At least when I woke up in the morning, I knew where I was. With the rest of my life completely in turmoil, I needed this stability. This place was like the bully you befriended just so you could get a little peace.
“It’s really not that bad of a place,” I said. “It grows on you after a while.”
“If you say so. Doesn’t really matter, though. It’s not like we’re staying.”
“It’s not?”
He patted the paper bag. “There won’t be much left after I pay off my loan sharks, but I’m sure we can afford to live somewhere better than this shanty.”
We? It had suddenly dawned on me that Griff meant to live … with me. It had also struck me that I didn’t want Griff to leave. That I wanted to him to stay … with me. But I couldn’t leave this fleapit, either.
“I can’t leave, Griff,” I confessed, my heart racing just a little bit.
His head jerked back. “You can’t?”
“I go to school here. The school year has already started. We’re never going to be able to find a place that’s close to school and affordable.”
Though this was not the real reason I couldn’t leave, this was all true.
Griff was unshaven and dusty. He had let his short-cropped Mohawk grow out, and now his hair went helter-skelter. While he looked like he had been through a third-world car wash, his green eyes still managed to outshine the grime. I wished I had a hot shower to offer him, but our showerhead had been streaming out lukewarm water lately.
With the way he was looking, with what he had been through, telling him the truth now seemed like it would have been more information than he could have handled.
He assessed me for a few seconds, then he sighed. “You don’t want me around, do you?”
“No, that’s not it at all. I just meant … What if you moved in here?”
“Here?”
“Here.”
Though he seemed to be a little less crushed, the idea wasn’t fully winning him over.
“How many roommates do you have?”
“Just a few,” I embellished. I had six roommates, in a four-bedroom house, if I counted my broom closet as a room—nobody did. There were two new students who had moved into the other bedroom. I hadn’t met them yet, but that meant that the house was full.
“Where would I stay?”
My curtain door flew to the side, covering Meatball’s head.
“You can stay in my room,” Hunter offered in a squeak. I wondered how much he had overheard.
Griff closed his eyes and rubbed his temples with one hand.
“The lack of any privacy in this place is reason alone to want to stay,” he said, his tone heavy with sarcasm.
He opened his eyes and scanned my face. I waited and hoped, though probably not as much as Hunter hoped. When I saw the twinkle in Griff’s eyes, I remembered how his joyfulness was almost addictive.
“Well,” he exhaled, “can’t be all bad if you’re here.”
Hunter stood by grinning, as though Griff and I weren’t in the middle of an extremely personal moment.
Despite my reluctance, Griff didn’t seem to be deterred by Hunter’s presence. He held me in a long hug, as though years had passed since we had last seen each other, and yet as though no time had passed. As though this were the last time he would ever see me.
My head had started spinning, and the tiredness had made my nausea creep back.
It was all a little too overwhelming.
Griff must have sensed that I was running on fumes. He held me at arm’s length, worry creasing his own weary eyes. He brought his lips to my ear.
“Get some sleep,” he ordered in a whisper.
He went to examine his living quarters, with Hunter trailing him.
****
I didn’t see much of Griff over the next few days. He once told me that he had been a martial arts fighter but had to go into hiding after his gambling debts had overtaken his life. Now he had to go back in time and use the money to settle the score. I’d hear him come in very early in the mornings. He would poke his head through the curtain. But I was so exhausted I couldn’t even lift my head from the pillow to see him.
By the time I woke up in the morning, he was already gone.
I had assumed that catching up on my schoolwork would be easy. School was one of those things that I was good at. But I hadn’t counted on the waves of sheer exhaustion that would take my mind and body hostage throughout the day. Cassie had had to not-so-gently nudge me awake during our ethics class.
At least I was puking on a schedule now. No more running out in the middle of a class.
But every time I walked into class, I searched for him. Like Cameron would just magically appear out of unventilated air. When he didn’t appear, it was like a fresh nail being plunged into my heart. I didn’t know why I was so hell-bent on torturing myself like that.
I hadn’t given up hope of finding out more about Cameron. I wanted to know how many classes he had taken with me last year. And finding Cameron meant finding Spider. Of course, one day I would have to explain to Cameron’s child who his or her father was. But it was more than all that. Cameron had known everything about me, and I realized that I had barely scratched the surface of who this man that I loved really was.
Who was Cameron James Hillard?
All I knew was that he had been discarded since birth by an alcoholic mother and a delinquent father. The streets had raised him, and these same streets had raised his little brother Rocco and the rest of his half-siblings. Products of their mother’s womb—kids who were destined to stay on the streets and repeat their deadened parents’ cycle of misery. But Cameron had been the exception. He was exceptional in every way. He had used his adversities, learned from them, and created a position for himself as the leader of the underworld. He became the worst kind of man. Deceitful. Manipulative. Premeditated in his every action. His con-artist father, his cold and abusive mother, the knowledge he gained on the streets and in juvie—these misfort
unes had created the most dangerous criminal in the United States.
These were the things that Cameron had divulged to me.
Except that this wasn’t who Cameron had been. It had just been his smokescreen, his survival mode. The Cameron I knew, the real Cameron, had been gracious and fair. He had been warm. Tender. When you saw him—when he let you see him—Cameron was exquisite. He was all my love and my joy. My paradise.
My paradise lost.
If I were being honest with myself, what I was really looking for was someone to talk to, someone to share my pain. When Bill died, I had Maria. She loved Bill, and we had memories to share as we grieved and healed. But except for Meatball, who never answered me, I had no such channel to grieve Cameron. As far as the world was concerned, Cameron was a nameless thug. Nobody knew the truth.
The truth. The truth has so many layers, so many versions.
My deep-down truth was that I was afraid of forgetting him. His face, but most of all, his voice. How can you remember a voice after it disappears? With Bill, I had pictures and stories to fill my memories. But the day I realized that I couldn’t remember what his voice sounded like anymore, it was like getting crushed by a boulder, like I was losing him all over again. Forgetting his voice was the hardest part about Bill’s death.
A face at least can stay imprinted on your mind. Right now, if I closed my eyes, I could still see Cameron, hear his voice. But I had no pictures of him. All I had was my mind’s version of him. How long did I have before my mind started forgetting details? I was afraid that if I stopped thinking about him, even for a second, all those parts that made him would disappear, that he would disappear because I was the only one who remembered him.
Someone else had to have loved this beautiful man. Someone else must have seen what I saw in him.
For now, the most basic information I needed was locked away in the school informatics system. At least I hoped it was.
****
The admissions office was the hub of Callister University. It looked a lot like a bank, which was appropriate considering the amount of money they stole from students every year. While the admissions director’s assistant showed me around the office, I watched as student after student came up to the counter begging for more time to pay his or her tuition. I suppose it was preparation for what would come later in life when they couldn’t pay their mortgage either.
Jeremy wasn’t kidding when he had said that there wouldn’t be much to my new job. I would spend the few hours I was there every weekday shuffling incoming mail from one desk to the other, stacking it neatly on people’s desks and grabbing the outgoing mail. Turn around. Repeat. Mindless was good when my mind was already too crowded.
From the minute I walked into the admissions office, I analyzed everything and everyone I came into contact with. I was changing. I could feel myself changing inside. It was as if I were growing claws. Like I had grown a second set of teeth, and I was prowling underwater, hunting bait until I was ready to attack and pull them under. Roll until I drowned them. I needed information, and I needed it quickly.
While I shook hands with the people I was introduced to, I decided who would be my easiest target. I found her in the form of an overly friendly woman in her fifties. I had first spotted her working the front desk, smiling compassionately at the begging students while she tapped at her keyboard. We hadn’t been introduced yet because she was too busy trying to help the helpless.
As soon as the assistant released me from orientation, I headed into the staff room, where I had seen my target head earlier. The staff room had a few tables in the center and a small kitchenette for the staff to use during mealtimes. Around the edges were benches and doorless lockers. Each locker was preassigned by management. I knew this because the assistant had just told me this a few seconds before, and because each locker had its owner’s name clearly stuck to the first shelf. I also knew that my preassigned locker was in the corner. I realized now as I spotted my mark at her locker in the front that this was just too far. So I went to the locker that was next to the lady and hung my backpack on the hook inside.
The lady had an extra-large coffee sitting atop her locker, and she was bent over, recounting her change from her coffee purchase as she put it away in her wallet, one bill, one coin at a time. She was wearing an obviously self-knitted orange and green sweater, with a brooch pinned at the breast. The brooch looked like a hangman Mr. Pumpkin Head. I guessed it was meant as a conversation starter, a need for attention.
“I like your brooch,” I said, keeping my tone shy.
She glanced up and immediately smiled. “You must be our new recruit.”
“Emily.”
I tendered my hand over, and she grasped it between both of hers. “Welcome, dear. I am Betty Devinport.”
“I’ve been looking everywhere for a sweater like that. Where did you buy it?”
She stood a little straighter, almost on her tiptoes. “Thank you so much. You might not believe me, but I actually made this myself.”
I was about to guffaw when I was knocked forward.
“Is this your bag?”
I turned around to see a man in desperate need of a haircut who was holding my backpack by the top loop as though it were filled with dirty diapers.
“She’s new, Dave. She didn’t know.”
Dave gave Betty the stink eye and let my bag fall to the ground. “My name is on my locker. It’s not hard to see that.” He hung his lumberjack coat, kicked his saddlebag onto the bottom shelf, and left.
Betty placed a consoling hand on my shoulder. “Dave is our IT guy. He’s not very good with people.”
“I don’t think he likes me,” I said as I picked up my bag and turned around.
“Don’t take it personally. He doesn’t like anyone. And no one likes him.” Betty’s cheeks had all of a sudden colored. I had picked up on this.
I gave her another shy smile before walking away to put my bag in my designated locker.
****
My first shift ended shortly before lunchtime. I headed back to the staff room, straight for Betty’s locker. I quickly grabbed her wallet from her purse, glanced over the cat photos, and took the ten-dollar bill she had so neatly placed there earlier and stuffed it in Dave’s saddlebag, letting a small corner of the bill stick out. Then I left for the day.
The next morning, I was back in for day two of my mechanical shift. I arrived a bit early, hoping to catch Betty before work. I was glad to catch her reading alone at one of the staff-room tables, with another extra-large coffee cup in front of her. I dropped my bag in my designated locker and went to sit with her.
“Hi, Betty,” I said softly, enough to rouse her from her severely used Harry Potter book.
“How was your first day yesterday?”
“Okay,” I started, slumping my shoulders. “Most people have been really nice to me.”
“Most people?”
“The IT guy. Dave, I think you said his name was? He definitely doesn’t like me.”
“Oh? Why do you say that?”
“When I came back to the staff room yesterday to fetch my bag, he bolted as soon as I came in the room. Almost ran me over trying to leave.”
Her eyes veered to her locker, then to Dave’s. She glanced down to the bottom shelf, where Dave’s bag would have been, where she would have seen her ten-dollar bill sticking out after she found it missing from her wallet yesterday. When she returned her attention to me, she forced a smile. “I’m sure it’s nothing, dear.”
With a common enemy, Betty and I became fast friends, magically finding each other in the staff room at her every break. She told me about her three cats and her hopes for grand-kittens someday; I made up stories about my endearing parents. This wasn’t much of a stretch for me—I had been making up stories about my parents my whole life, though I usually reserved these for myself. As far as Betty was concerned, I was an all-American homesick schoolgirl just looking for a surrogate mom while I was away from home. br />
After graduating from Callister University some thirty years earlier, Betty had never left, turning a part-time gig as an admissions clerk into a full-time prison sentence. This was when I manufactured an interest in following in her footsteps one day and becoming an admissions clerk. This made her gleefully happy, as happy as my mother was whenever someone commented on her timeless beauty (usually after one of her nip-tuck vacations).
With so many years under her belt, Betty had built solid contacts. On my third shift, I happened to mention to her that my fabricated cat, Mr. Voldermort, had a cold, but I couldn’t afford to take him to the vet until I got paid. By the end of the day, the admissions director’s assistant came over to let me know that the director had approved an advance on my paycheck and that I would be getting it by Friday.
On my fourth shift, Dave walked into the staff room as Betty and I were sitting together during our break. He dumped his bag, gave his overgrown hair a toss back, and left without the slightest glance in our direction.
“Late as usual,” Betty whispered to me.
I leaned in, feeling opportunity knock. “You know what he said to me yesterday?”
“No. What?”
“When I told him that I couldn’t wait to graduate and become an admissions clerk, he said that the admissions clerks were useless. He said that his computer system does everything nowadays and that Callister University doesn’t even need frontline staff anymore. Actually, I think he used the term archaic.”
I shook my head as I remembered my imaginary conversation with Dave, the meanie IT guy. Betty’s kitten demeanor turned tigress.
Before I knew it, she was showing me how the system worked, how valuable her job was, and how Dave’s computer system badly buried student information. From this, I learned two things. One, I needed a student’s ID card to get into the system. I had initially assumed that the university was attempting to protect its students’ personal information, but Betty clarified that the university had changed the system when clerks were caught using it to search porn on the Internet.
Now, the system would shut down as soon as the inquiring student left and wouldn’t turn back on until a new card was handed over. This meant no more porn for the faculty, but it also meant that I needed to get someone’s card to get any information from the system. If I used my own card, I risked getting caught, because Betty told me that management kept track of all the ID numbers that were entered into the system—a good way to know which students came begging and which suffered in silence.