Crow’s Row (5 page)

“I’m fine, and apology accepted.”

I tucked an errant hair behind my ear. The minute I touched my head I realized that most of the hair from my ponytail had fallen out in a sweaty mess. I immediately fingered my crazed hair back into a snug ponytail.

His lips twitched, like he was suppressing a smile. “Do I make you nervous?”

“No,” I swiftly answered, with a grimace. Of course it was a lie. He chuckled lightly and this time I glanced away from him. The projects were teeming with people again today, but no one seemed to notice that we even existed, or they were still avoiding us.

“So, do you live around here?” I asked, a veiled attempt at changing the subject.

“Not really,” he answered, his gaze wandering again.

Was that a yes or a no?

“I live a couple of blocks away from here,” I offered, leading by example—this was how normal people conversed.

His eyes shot back to my face. “You shouldn’t tell people where you live. What if I was some kind of psycho?”

The features of his face had instantly darkened, and a chill ran down my bare legs.

“Well, are you?” I asked, my voice slightly shaking.

“It’s a little late to be asking me that, isn’t it?” he snapped. His brown eyes searched my face. I didn’t know what he was looking for, but I pressed my lips together, just in case he found the spinach salad that I had for lunch still stuck in my teeth. He strained a smile. “You need to be more careful is all I’m trying to say.”

I shrugged coolly. “I can run pretty fast … and I’ve managed to keep myself out of trouble so far.”

“This isn’t a good place for you to test your courage. You shouldn’t be coming here. Find somewhere else to run,” he said, looking away.

“It’s a free country. I can go wherever I want to go, whether you like it or not,” I said, feeling something that had nothing to do with him brew inside me. “What gives you the right to tell me what to do?”

His face darkened again. We glared at each other for what seemed like an hour; in reality, it was more like five seconds—five really long seconds. A tension bubble seemed to have swallowed us.

I sucked a breath through my teeth. “It’s getting late,” I said, taking a step backward. “I better go.”

When I turned sideways to leave, his arm reached out to mine to stop me.

“Wait,” he half-shouted, “I forgot something.” He pulled his hand abruptly away. The warmth in my arm still tingled while he dug a small box out of his pocket and shoved it over to me, avoiding touching me again.

“To replace the one that I broke,” he explained.

I took it, almost dropping it in the process. I opened the clear plastic box and a rectangular silver plate fell out. It had a circle in the middle and a square screen on the top. “Umm …” I said awkwardly, “thanks.”

His eyes widened. “It plays music,” he said like I was mentally slow.

Of course I knew what it was—anyone with money to spare had one of these. Why would I need to know how to use one if I knew I would never actually be able to afford one?

I squinted, turning the music thingy in my hands. His laugh caught me off guard. I gazed up.

He grabbed the piece of metal from my hand—more softly than I had expected—and held it up for me to see. Pressing on the circle, the square screen lit up. He moved his finger along the circle line and showed me where to click to find music lists.

“You didn’t have to do that. My Walkman was pretty worthless.”

“Yeah, it was,” he quickly agreed. “But this one is brand new and it actually fits in your pocket.” He looked a little smug as he said this. “I even downloaded Bob Marley on there for you.”

“How did you know I liked Bob Marley?” I asked, tilting my head.

He raised an eyebrow. “You gave me the broken tape, remember?” He brought his fist to his chest to remind me that I had punched the tape into him.

“Oh … right,” was all I could say again, my cheeks afire.

He gave me back the music rectangle. “I can get you new running sneakers too, if you want. Better than the ones you’re wearing.” He smiled, but then his eyes darted around us again.

I looked down at my feet. “What’s wrong with my sneakers?”

When I heard him mumble something, I glanced back up. His face had suddenly turned ashen and he was backing away from me. He had turned back into the menacing boy I had encountered the day before.

“I gotta go,” he said. Just like that, he turned around and left.

I stood in place confused for a second longer, took a few breaths. Then I proceeded to turn around too.

“Emily,” I heard him call out. My heart jumped and I looked back to find that he had stopped in his tracks a few yards away. “I meant what I said. Don’t come back here.”

“I meant what I said too,” was what I had wanted to counter with, but he had already disappeared and I was too taken aback that he had remembered my name—nothing but quick breaths came out of my mouth.

I stuffed his gift inside my pocket—it did fit in there nicely, I noticed a little resentfully—and turned back on my heels.

I finished my run, more befuddled than ever … and with the realization that I still had no idea what his name was. He was the strangest person I had met, so far.

When I got home, I made myself a peanut butter sandwich—the bread was stale, but at least it filled one of the holes in my stomach. I took chokingly huge bites while I cleaned the broken glass in the sink that I hadn’t had time to get to that morning. I found a pair of sweatpants that hadn’t seen the light of day since ninth grade, and I threw a box of laundry detergent on top of my dirty clothes, stuffed a roll of quarters in my pocket, lugged the overflowing basket down the stairs, and headed out the door.

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.”