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 like 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.
That was when I saw him, standing there with his dog, the gray sweater giving him away in the shade. He had his back to me, and the tattooed man that I had seen with him earlier was next to him—I could see a spiderweb tattooed on the back of his neck. There were two other men flanking both of them—I didn’t recognize either of them.
Meatball was a different dog. He looked vicious and rabid, slobbering madly and trying to crunch into something that I could not see.
When one of the men shifted his stance slightly, I saw what all four of them were looking at and what Meatball had been trying to sink his teeth into. There, crouched on the ground, was a man; he was groaning. His pants were ripped and blood-spattered. From the bloody wounds on his arms and legs, I could tell that Meatball had already had a taste.
The boy who I had obsessed over was murmuring to the crouched man. I couldn’t hear what he said, but whatever the crouched man said in response displeased the group. The tattooed man proceeded to punch and kick him.
The others stood around, silently, calmly watching him do this, while the man on the ground curled into a ball, his head hidden in his arms, wailing. With each punch and kick came a disgusting thudding sound, like meat being pulverized. My ears were drumming, and I thought I was going to be sick, but I could not move away, could not look away. I wanted to yell, beg them to stop, but even if I’d had the guts to say anything, the muscles of my mouth were numbed.
At last, the beating stopped.
The man slowly peered up from between the protection of his arms, and I was taken aback. Although he was bleeding profusely, I still recognized him—he was the runner who had come out of the cemetery shortly after I did, right before I had disappeared down the hill.
My hands came to my mouth, trying to suppress the cry that was building at the edge of my throat. And the man on the ground immediately turned his bloodied eyes to me. He must have seen my sudden movement in the shadows, I thought … like a coward, I withdrew further into the shadows for fear that he would betray my presence and present the attackers with an alternate prey.
When he turned to his aggressors and said something that I couldn’t hear, my heart dropped. I felt powerless. Was I still breathing?
Whatever the crouched man had whispered to the boy in the gray sweater, it had sent him over the edge. His arms started shaking. He brought his hand to his back, pulled a gun from the waist of his jeans and shots rang out in the dead air.
When my eyes came to refocus, the man on the ground had stopped moving. Blood spattered the ground, and the three other men who were flanking the shooter had spun around.
They looked at me with complete surprise on their face.
Without realizing it, I had been screaming and I was still screaming and shaking and I couldn’t stop or move any other part of my body … like my legs, to run away from them.
“Cameron,” breathlessly yelled the tattooed man, grabbing the shooter by the shoulder and forcing him to turn around.