Authors: Julie Hockley
She was actually forced to look up at me, her eyes bugging out. “Can I help
you?”
“One of my,” I hesitated, “classmates, forgot his,” I stammered again, “book at my
house,” this was the most drawn-out sentence ever, “and I wanted to give it back to
him, but I don’t have his address
so …”
“So, you need me to look him up in the system and give you his address?” she finished
for me, a sweet smile on her
face.
“Right,” I said, taking a small jump forward as I said
this.
She pushed my student card back through the hole and rested her hands on her
lap.
“I’m sure you can understand, Miss—” she glimpsed at her screen and turned back to
me, “Miss Sheppard, the university has a policy of not sharing the personal information
of its students. Perhaps you could simply tell the boy that you like him instead of
lurking around his h
ouse?”
I pasted a smile on my face and took my student card
back.
I wished I would have put a little more thought and conviction into my plan. I expected
that the primrose behind the glass would be putting a note on my file, in red letters
and twenty-point Times New Roman font: sta
lker.
I spun on my heels and yelled over my shoulder, “You might want to send someone with
a mop to Auditorium B. One of the students made a real mess in front of the d
oors.”
****
From the row of chairs that were in the hall screwed into the wall, I watched the
janitor come and go. He had kept his headphones on and had the floor mopped up in
less than two minutes. He must have been through the puke drill multiple times during
frosh
week.
When the ethics class finally finished, Cassie was one of the first ones out the d
oors.
“Did the peanut butter bagel you ate this morning come back to haunt you?” she asked
me as she approa
ched.
Peanut butter was Meatball’s favorite. So I ate it every morning
…
I
used
to
eat it every morning. Just the thought of
it …
Cassie handed me my bag. “I was going to go look for you, but unlike some people,
I didn’t want to make a s
cene.”
I kept my eyes trained on the doors and got up as soon as I saw Jeremy walking thr
ough.
“Be right back,” I told Cassie as I had already started sprin
ting.
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be waiting. For you. Right here,” she shouted, sarcasm
h
eavy.
Jeremy was my plan B. Hopefully plan B was a better
plan.
“Jeremy,” I called out as I ran up to him and stopped, blocking his escape. “How are
you?”
“Hi,” Jeremy said carefully. “I’m
fine.”
He had been walking out with another guy, and I had interrupted their conversation.
His friend slapped Jeremy’s back and bowed
out.
We stood for a moment, while students herded out the doors, sidesteppin
g me.
“That was quite an exit you made earlier,” he said, clearly happy with my misery.
“I could hear you upchuck from the back
row.”
I cleared my throat. “So, you had … a good su
mmer?”
I remembered why I tended to avoid conversations generally and with ex-boyfriends.
Wholeheartedly awk
ward.
“Better than yours, I guess,” he said, bitterness coloring his tone. “Your ears seem
to be back to no
rmal.”
I wrinkled my nose, trying to grasp Jeremy’s meaning. Then it hit me, again. That
gash in my heart that would never heal, intent on torturing me. Once upon a time,
Cameron and Rocco had played a joke on Jeremy, telling him that I was in the hospital
with some unknown disease so that he would stop calling me. Memories that would never
be anything
more.
Jeremy had no idea how much his comment had wounded me. I took a breath and regro
uped.
“Yeah, sorry about that. I lost my phone for a couple days. Someone answered my calls
as a
joke.”
“Whatever. It wasn’t important. I just wanted to tell you about the computer thing
so you wouldn’t have to show up at work for not
hing.”
“What computer t
hing?”
“The computer program. At the library.” When a blank look came over my face, he arched
his eyebrows. “The program. That the library was using. To catalogue the book scans.”
Still nothing from me, even if he was spelling it out. So he continued. “It got hacked,
and the library lost all the data we had inputted. We all lost our jobs when the library
decided to abandon the electronic library project and bring the books back. Where
have you
been?”
Jeremy’s father was a professor in the political science department. When we had been
dating, he had used his connections to get me a job in the library arch
ives.
I thought I had lost this job because I hadn’t showed up. Turned out the job didn’t
even exist any
more.
My plan had been to ask for help getting my job back so that I could find a way to
get into the system. But it was pretty hard to get my job back when the job didn’t
even exist any
more.
Plan B was sucking alr
eady.
“I need a job,” I blu
rted.
“Good for you. What does this have to do wit
h me?”
“Jeremy,” I said slowly, almost pleading, “I wouldn’t ask unless I was desperate.
I’m broke. I’m going to get kicked out of my house if I don’t come up with rent
soon.”
He sighed. “I suppose I could get you in where I work. At the campus store. Selling
sweatshirts and bumper stickers. Think you could handle
that?”
I could, but that wasn’t what I had in
mind.
“How about working front desk in one of the departm
ents?”
“Yeah, that’s not going to happen. They only hire grad students to do that s
tuff.”
Cassie had come to my side, apparently tired of waiting patiently for me. Jeremy eyed
her for a second. Maybe, by the grace of whoever ruled the Graceland, he wouldn’t
remember her or how mean she and the rest of my roommates had been to him when we’d
d
ated.
“Please, Jeremy,” I full-out be
gged.
“Yeah, I’m late for my next class. I really can’t help
you.”
Jeremy left Cassie and me standing in front of the classroom doors, where the floor
was still moist from the janitor’s
mop.
Seemingly, he had remembered her and still hated my guts. Plan B was a
bust.
When Cassie and I stepped outside, she grabbed me by the shoulders. “He’s not the
one who did that to your face and your hand, i
s he?”
I shook my head and gave her her hands
back.
I should have taken Jeremy up on his offer for a job in the campus store when he had
offered it. Now I had no money coming in and no way of finding out more about Cameron.
Not a great
day.
****
The next morning, I ran out before anyone else could accost me outside my bedroom.
I needed to get to the clinic, get the splint off my fingers, and get the attention
off me. My day started off with waiting. Waiting to get checked in. Waiting in the
big waiting room while I waited to get invited past the receptionist into a smaller
waiting room. They called that last waiting room a consult room, where patients got
to wait for the doctor. It took a couple hours, but I finally made it to the consult
room. It was either the same room or identical to the room I had been in when I had
come in with my broken fingers a few weeks ago. They had obviously cleaned out the
trash bin after I had thrown up in it. But the room was mostly unchanged. There were
the quintessential germ-infested
Reader’s Digests
lying around. A few scattered boxes of free samples for students and faculty. None
of the good stuff, though. Mostly just sunscreen and dental sticks that no one ever
uses.
There was a dusty cardboard box of yellow rubber balls. To squeeze and relieve stress,
or something like that. It had a happy face painted on it. I grabbed one for Meatball.
He might like to chase after it. Then I took a second ball. Meatball might want to
play with this second ball after he devoured the first one. I also snagged the box
of Kleenex on the doctor’s desk because we were running low on toilet paper at
home.
I was pondering the box of Band-Aids when the doctor on duty appeared. He looked at
my chart, and refused to take the cast off until he was sure that the fingers had
healed properly. I had waited all morning for that five-minute de
nial.
“I’ll sign a release form. It’ll be our little secret. I promise not to sue
you.”
The doctor was already out of the room. He was like a waterspout. You’d never know
he’d been there unless you had actually witnesse
d it.
I stole the box of Band-Aids before being sent to another door down the hall, where
I was to meet yet another medical authority for an X-ray. As I came to open the door
to Callister University’s X-ray room, I happened to read the warning sign hanging
on the door, and I pa
used.
Insignificant details of the past few weeks started trickling through my
head.
Insignificant details became momentous signs. Life-alte
ring.
I headed back down the hall. When I got back to the clinic, I found and flagged down
the first medical staff I could find. A young nurse, in training. There were a lot
of those here. I pulled her aside, came close to this stranger’s ear, and whisp
ered.
When I was done, she took a breath, arched her head up, and smiled, obviously struggling
to control the inexpert fit of giggles that were climbing inside of her. She went
to the cabinet of free stuff for students, where college medical essentials were stocked.
Barf bags. Medication in samples, the better stuff (whatever the staff hadn’t already
looted). A shelf just for condoms, and in the corner, long white boxes that reminded
me of the jewelry boxes—diamond necklaces, diamond bracelets, diamond watches—my mother
would get as gifts from my father. Usually as an apology or bri
bery.
The nurse handed me a white box, and I took it into the wash
room.
I sat in a stall and waited for the umpteenth time that day, even though I already
knew. My world was spinning out of control. The signs had been ignored, by me, but
they had been there. The theatrical nausea, the throwing up in trash bins, in front
of the doors to the philosophy class. Even before the full five minutes was up and
the two lines on the complimentary pregnancy test had revealed themselves, I knew
I was preg
nant.
While I held the evidence—the pee stick—in one hand, my free hand had found itself
to my belly. When I noticed, I whipped it off like I’d been burned. Then I threw the
pregnancy test on the ground and used both my feet to systematically stomp it to pi
eces.
Revenge is a strange thing. It tests you. It changes you. It makes you do things that
you would have never thought yourself capable of d
oing.
Revenge feels a lot like survival. The need to hurt, the need to kill consumes you.
Except that when revenge turns to survival, hate is replaced by total despera
tion.
ERASED
I had spent so much of my time designing the Farm. Every board, every rock, every
shrub, I had placed there with Emmy flooding my brain—her likes, her dislikes, the
color of her eyes, her smile, her laugh. Though I would often daydream and see her
flowing through its rooms, I never thought she would actually ever see it, let alone
live in it. Still, the Farm had always been meant for
her.
Now all I wanted to do was burn it to the fucking gr
ound.
Maybe someday I would be so lucky, but for now I was forced to let our guards erase
all of us from it. Once we had finished packing, wiping it down, scraping the blood
out, we would board it up and va
cate.
Spider and I were outside leaning against the rail, watching through the glass doors
as our cleaning crew pulled the floorboards up. This was where my brother was murdered,
his blood left to soak through the floor, his ghost left to forever haunt me and this
p
lace.
Carly walked through the living room, keeping her eyes ahead and making an extra-wide
circle around the cleaners. She came to join us on the deck and wiped her blackened
hands on her j
eans.
“I hate moving,” she grum
bled.
She watched the guards carry out her millions of boxes from the pool h
ouse.
“Maybe moving wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t have so much crap,” I told
her.
Spider sneered, until Carly shot him the look of d
eath.
“It’s not like we don’t move every other month, Carly. You think you would have figured
this out by now,” I a
dded.
This comment would have normally gotten me my very own look of death, but Carly had
been very careful around me lately. Like I was holding a gun to my head. I hated that
she was doing this, so I provoked her whenever possible. And Spider let me get away
with it. This too irke
d me.
It had taken a while for us to feel safe enough to return to the Farm after Victor’s
men had stormed it and started the war against us. We could not return until we were
sure that the echo of shots being fired hadn’t attracted unwanted attention from the
distant neighbors or local po
lice.
We had just a few hours to pack up and go back into hi
ding.
We had over a hundred hideaways throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe.
Not counting my cabin, which Spider and Carly didn’t know about. We moved every other
month. Sometimes we moved, only to pack up the next day. No one was as good at disappearing
from civilization, so often, so quickly, a
s us.
My mom and I moved around all the time when I was a kid; I had learned to travel light
from birth. I didn’t get attached to anything, and Spider had the same philosophy.
Carly, on the other hand, had so much junk that she was running out of room for it
in the pool house. She was constantly picking up stuff at flea markets, garage sales,
curbside garbage. She was attached to all her junk and everybody el
se’s.
It had been a while since all three of us had been together for longer than a few
minutes at a time. I had created a mile-high pile of shit in the underworld, and the
captains were incensed. It hadn’t helped that I had brought up the subject of retaliation
against Shield. I couldn’t explain to them why we needed to risk notice by taking
out the union leader of the United States police force. I had no proof that he had
been the one to storm the Farm and kill off my men. The only person who had witnessed
the crime, and was still alive, was Emmy. As far as they were concerned, Emily Sheppard
did not exist. As far as they were concerned, Rocco had never been related to me.
As far as they were concerned, I was insulated—I had no lovers, family, or friends
who could be used to distract me from making them m
oney.
Because of my negligence, we had lost two drug shipments to Somalian pirates, our
Canadian allies were in a state of chaos, and the Mexican drug cartel had broken the
southern turf treaty. Just a couple months of Emmy, and I had lost control over the
underw
orld.
And Shield had used all of this to start campaigning against me with the captains
and helping some of them out by messing with the justice system, pulling favors. While
he may have denied involvement in any of this, we both knew that he was the cause
of my grief. He would have to pay for that, eventu
ally.
I had never made so many dumbass moves in my life. I needed to refocus on the one
thing I was good at—making money for the lords of the underworld. But this was easier
said than done because I missed Emmy so badly that at times I felt like doing exactly
what Carly expected me to do: shoot my brains out. Having had Emmy by my side—immediately
addicting—nothing would ever be as good a
gain.
I missed how her lips tasted. I missed the softness of her skin and how her hand fit
so securely into mine. I missed the smell of her hair and the puffiness of her face
when she was tired. I wanted to wake up next to her and have her all to myself every
day, for
ever.
I missed all of her, and I needed more. But all I could get nowadays were glimpses
into her life—something that used to be enough for me. Now, just seeing her walking
down the street made me ache even
more.
All of a sudden, I found myself walking through the glass doors and getting held back
by Carly’s hand on my shou
lder.
“Did you hear what I said?” she aske
d me.
I hadn’t heard a word. All I could hear was the echo of Emmy’s voice bouncing around
my head, pulling me back to her with the force of a magnetic f
ield.
Carly kept her hand on me. “Where are you g
oing?”
“I’ve got stuff to do before we head to Califo
rnia.”
“Like?” Spider was keeping his spot against the rail, his arms permanently crossed
over his chest. He still had traces of a black eye after Emmy had broken his nose
with her tiny
hand.
He thought he knew everything about the business—what I did, who I talked to, who
I killed. And that used to be true, but things had changed. He wasn’t involved in
everything I did anymore. He had been distracted himself over the last few weeks—disappearing,
bowing out of meetings. And I had made decisions that I had wanted to keep from him
and C
arly.
While I tried to figure out how to get out the door without further inquisition, Carly
looked to the heavens in exaspera
tion.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Cameron. We know where you’re g
oing.”
I shut the glass door in her face, stopped at the landing, and changed course to the
library at the end of the hall. A couple of guards were packing up the books into
cardboard b
oxes.
“Get out,” I ord
ered.
They sprung up and left, keeping their eyes ahead, as if I were never really t
here.
Most of the books had already been pulled off the shelves and packed. The packed boxes
were spread across the room, with a few tossed over the piano I had bought for Emmy.
This whole room had been for Emmy—the floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books,
the stone fireplace, the windows overlooking the forest. Out of every room in the
house, this one I had made especially for her, imagining her lounged on the couch,
reading in front of a
fire.
When Emmy had entered this room the first time, I had been nervous—and I
never
get nervous. But to see her fingers stroke the back of the books, to see her face
light up, I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to pull her off her feet and dance around
the room with her in my
arms.
As realization set in that I would never dance with Emmy in this room or any other
room, I wanted to take an ax t
o it.
I shoved the boxes off Emmy’s piano and started tearing open the boxes on the floor.
When the door slammed behind me, I kept going, hoping I would quickly find what I
was looking for so that I could escape the cross-examina
tion.
Spider and Carly sat on the couch in the middle of the room and watched me for a little
while. But Carly is the most impatient person I’ve ever
met.
“How was Emmy when you saw
her?”
There was an immediate squeeze to my h
eart.
I had been watching over Emmy from the apartment across the street. Sitting by the
front window for hours, hoping that I would be able to see her, even if it was just
to see her come and go. But she didn’t come out very much, just to take Meatball out
for w
alks.
I had never seen Emmy look so … despondent, as if the life had been sucked out of
her. She was frail, like a gust of wind would be enough to break her in half. She
didn’t look like herself. She didn’t look like my beautiful, strong Emmy. As happy
as I was to see her, seeing her in this way made my heart re
coil.
Carly had been analyzing my counten
ance.
“Cameron,” she pleaded, “enough already. Go get her. You can’t let her fall apart
like this. There’s still time to make it be
tter.”
I kicked the recently emptied box across the room and tore into the next one that
was closest to me. “Go get her, and do what? Have her stay here as a sitting target?
Wait ’til someone else has it in for us and takes it out on her? She’s not meant for
this shit
life.”
Carly locked eyes with me. “You don’t give her enough credit. She’s a lot tougher
than you give her credit for. Than we all gave her credit
for.”
“She deserves better than this,” I said, my tone severe. Emmy had the luck of being
born into privilege and could have had anything she wanted. She should have been happy.
Someday, she would forget; someday, she would be happy and safe and alive. I had convinced
myself of this. “We’re stuck living in this kind of shit. There’s no room for family
or friends
here.”
I watched as Carly and Spider shifted in their seats as I said this. And I saw Carly
draw
back.
But Spider wasn’t about to back
down.
“If you keep spying on that chick, she’ll eventually see you. For all we know, she
could have already seen
you.”
I kicked yet another emptied box across the room, and then kicked the loose crap that
I’d strewn on the floor so that I could clear a path to the last unopened box that
was next to the piano. “She
didn’t
see me. She
won’t
see me. I’ve been able to hide from her all these years. I know her too well. She
had no idea I was even t
here.”
This hadn’t been exactly true. Meatball had spotted me watching from the apartment
and had almost given me away to Emmy. I had to hide in the bathroom when Emmy came
to drag him back into the house. How could a dumb dog be so goddamn s
mart?
“Except that it’s not just her, Cameron,” Carly continued. “You know that Victor probably
has people watching her too. After everything we went through to make her believe
that you
were—”
Carly took a breath and stopped herself from reminding me of the most painful day
in my
life.
“We’ve worked hard to get them to think that you left her and that you don’t give
a shit about her,” Spider continued. “If they find you, they’ll know that we’ve been
playing them. And then we’re all in fucking trouble, including E
mily.”
I ripped open the last box and immediately found the books I had been searching for.
I got up and took the box wit
h me.
“You can’t keep living in between.” Carly’s face was drawn in concern. “If you’re
adamant that you’re not going to go get her, if you really want her to move on, then
let her grieve and give her a chance to liv
e on.”
“We have to get back to business,” Spider added. “The constant interruptions are not
going to get us back into the good b
ooks.”
I knew they were both right, but I wasn’t about to admit it. And staying away from
Emmy … forever … I didn’t think I would ever be able to, even if I knew in my heart
that it was in Emmy’s best inte
rest.
“You have to stay as far away from her as possible,” Spider
said.
While I stood, ready to leave, heavy goddamn box in arms, Spider and Carly watched
me and wa
ited.
“Did you forget the promise I made Bill?” I asked to Carly specifically. “I told him
I would always watch over Emmy. Keep her
safe.”
As expected, this made Spider irate. “Bill’s dead. Who cares if you break your promise
to that idiot? Besides, I don’t think he expected you to watch her so closely that
you’d be naked on
her.”
My fingers dug into the cardboard while Spider smirked. As much as I knew how to get
a rise out of him, he knew how to get a rise out o
f me.
Carly put up a white flag. “If you just want to make sure she’s safe, I can make that
happen. That way, you can still keep your promise to Bill without risking being around
her.”
This caught both Spider’s and my interest. “How?” I wond
ered.
“Do you trust me?” she aske
d me.
“Mo
stly.”
“Do you trust me to do everything possible to keep Emmy and the rest of us
safe?”
“Yes,” I said without hesita
tion.
“And do you promise to stay away from
Emmy?”