Chapter One:
Forever Freakish
By the time the instructor called time, I had already meticulously gone over my exam paper five times. It must have been at least two hundred degrees in that auditorium, like the school needed to make sure that absolutely no one would be spared the sweat of exam week. The crevasse, dug into the back of my neck by the steady stream of sweat, was proof that I too hadn’t been spared.
The few students that lagged behind left the stifling auditorium. Callister University was not an Ivy League school. It had probably never even been in the running for a top one hundred, top one thousand, any list of any schools in the country. But I still needed to maintain an A average to keep my full scholarship. So I took an extra second to check the dotted line at the right hand corner of my paper, on the off chance that Professor Vernon was one of those profs who still gave students an extra point just for spelling their names correctly. Emily Sheppard. My name was spelled right, though I still cringed, just a little.
Then I put my pencil down, turned my exam paper over, and had to let a very small sigh escape me. At the very least, I had survived one year of college, which meant that I was temporarily free of cramming for exams, of listening to endless lectures … school was such a great way to kill time. I would miss that.
I rushed back to the house and stepped into complete chaos—then again, when you share a three-bedroom hole with six other roommates, everyday is chaotic. You just learn to measure in degrees of chaos. In our house, chaos ranged anywhere from the morning run through the obstacle course of empty beer cases to get into the one bathroom … to keep your head down, and hope that nothing with sharp edges was within reach of the couch. Making it out the door in time for your next class was a challenge, to say the least.
Today was in the range of controlled anarchy. All of my roommates were moving out for the summer. There were hampers and garbage bags bunched at the door, most of them filled to the brim with dirty laundry—a common end-of-term gift for the parents. Everything was being packed—thrown really—into whatever container they could find, while their parents were shouting orders, trying to get out of our hole as quickly as possible.
Everyone who could escape Callister did so at their earliest opportunity. I was the only one of my roommates who wasn’t going home for the summer break. Burt and Isabelle, my parents, were spending the summer in France, where Isabelle was born and over-bred. Europe was a regular retreat for the Sheppard family. I had put an end to that too—even a hot summer in a dead city was better than that torture.
My roommates were rushed with their good-byes and have a great summer. And then they were gone, and I was left standing in the living room, alone with the abandoned school books and empty pizza boxes.
The house had been dubbed by some—mostly of the parental origin—a dump. I loved it. New and interesting stains appeared on the living room carpet, unrecognizable smells emanated from the basement, the kitchen housed a family of ants, the sole bathroom with the tub that often doubled as a beer bucket was booby trapped with rotting plywood. These were but a few of the marvels of this student housing. And I would have it all to myself for four glorious months.
I basked in silence for a few minutes more and then ran upstairs to my bedroom before I ran out of daylight.
My bedroom was the one at the end of the hall. Except that it wasn’t really a bedroom, but a broom closet that had been converted into a “rentable” space. In other words, if it was big enough for a semi-grown person to lay in, the landlord could charge student rent for it. It had no windows, no lights, no electrical outlets, and a curtain hung in place of a door because my single bed took up all of the floor space. I’d had to run a fire-hazard electrical cord from one of my roommates’ room into mine just to be able to plug in a lamp and an alarm clock.
What my room lacked in square footage it made up in character. My doll-sized bed, squeezed between three walls, stood on three-foot high stilts made of milk crates that had been secretly borrowed from the corner store. My clothes, my shoes, and my schoolbooks were stacked in Rubbermaid bins under the bed, and two-dollar Van Goghs hid most of the holes in the walls. The best part: it only cost me a hundred bucks a month—all inclusive.
I closed the curtain door, switched my jeans for sweatpants and ran back down the stairs.
After hiding the key under the front mat, I hit the ground running, literally, and zipped down the streets. I dodged people and the heaps of garbage that were piling up on the sidewalks—remnants of all the students who were gradually abandoning the city. By this time tomorrow, the city would be bare of the students that gave it life, the heaps would have been well looted, and only the real garbage would remain.
This part of Callister was considered the slum of the city—a stark contrast to the manicured lawns I had grown up with. What had been—probably a million years ago—a cute, middle-class neighborhood was now another dilapidated, though nicely affordable, sore spot on the city’s good standing. With its proximity to the university, it accommodated this weird mix of college students, underprivileged families, and drug dealers. It had a certain charm—most of the houses were small, wartime wooden homes built about three feet from the street and barely two feet apart from each other.
I was sure that the neighborhood must have been pretty at some point. Now most of the paint was chipping away. Multicolored layers started peering through spots as if the houses bared the scars left by the previous owners before being abandoned for good.
I hiked up one of the busier drags—my least favorite part of the run. Too many cars were driving by with practically everyone turning their eyes in my direction, like this was the first time they had ever seen someone run. I told myself that it was because of where I was—in this city, someone who ran was usually running away from something, like the cops or the barrel of a shopkeeper’s gun.
But somehow I knew it had nothing to do with the bad neighborhood, and everything to do with me—I was a beacon for curious stares. My hair was the color of spaghetti sauce. Not the expensive, gourmet kind, but the kind that was usually in a can, usually sold in bulk, and mostly made of carrots. And to say that I was pale was greatly fallacious. The reddish-brown freckles that speckled every inch of my ghostly skin were enough color for my taste. To top it off, I was skinny. Not the “you-should-be-a-model” type of skinny—but the bony, awkward kind of skeletal. I held out hope that I would someday add something, anything, to my bones, but given that I was still my skinny mother’s carbon copy, hope faded with every year that passed.
I wasn’t paranoid … but still, I turned up the sound on my Walkman. It’s easier to ignore people’s stares when you’ve got music blasting in your ears. Then I ran up the hill and took a right into an almost hidden alley.
Behind two brick buildings there was a small patch of trees that towered over the laneway, shedding a carpet of little white beans all over the street. It was one of the few areas in the ghetto that had anything green still living. I veered onto the pathway that led through the cemetery. Like the rest of the neighborhood, the cemetery had been left neglected, with weeds growing everywhere—around, and within the slow cracks of tombstones. Street-gang graffiti, spray-painted art covered almost every surface of the graveyard, including some of the stones.
It was among the broken beer bottles, cigarette butts, and fast-food wrappers that stood the only tombstone that had been maintained by the caretaker—he must have been paid handsomely by my parents to keep the weeds and garbage away from my brother Bill’s grave. I ran this same route almost every day after school. Some days I would stop and sit to talk to Bill or just stare at the head of his stone.
Today I kept running, trying to make the most out of the lingering daylight, because I was running late, because a graveyard was definitely not where I wanted to be after dark. I had watched too many movies for that.
The pathway snaked the cemetery and eventually led through a fence of overgrowth and trees. I ran into the opening of the field of weeds and into the projects. The projects were a city within the city, a bouquet of high-rise public-housing apartment buildings built by the good people of Callister. What they really were was ugly and, as far as I could tell, barely habitable. They were built quite hastily by the city in the middle of a large piece of land—an unusually large, vacant, removed, industrial piece of land. The city’s plan was to keep the poor off the streets, or away and out of sight from the rest of the city. Entering the projects was like entering another world.
While the cemetery had been virtually deserted, the field around the buildings was veiled with people. It had been the first really warm day of the year. The sun was shining, and the city—even the city within the city—was suddenly coming out of hibernation. Hard-up kids played and screamed in the tall grass, families were grouped around tiny barbeques, rap music was blaring, and foot traffic congested the walkways. So I made my way through the crowd, weaving in and out of the foot traffic to the beat of my breath and Bob Marley on my headphones.
Contrary to one of my roommate’s theory, I wasn’t trying to be retro with my ancient Walkman. I’d discovered it in our basement when we first moved into the house. It was free, and free was all I could afford. Yes, the Bob Marley tape that was already in there had melted into the Walkman. And yes, I was forced to listen to the same tape over and over again. But it didn’t matter—it was all I needed to quiet the voice in my head long enough to put one foot in front of the other without tripping.
But when I ran through the crowd today, I started to realize that something was different, wrong somehow. People were staring at me, maybe even more than usual. I stared ahead and tried to keep my mind on my pace, on my breath, away from my delusions.
Except that I wasn’t being paranoid—people were definitely staring. And then they were moving. Away from me. Parting to the sides as I ran past, like the sea in that book—though nothing about this felt biblical. Was there something on my face? I brought my hand to my sweaty face, as coolly as I could, quickly passing my fingers over my skin. As far as I could detect, there were no nose bleeds or anything else that was abnormal—abnormal for me. That was when I noticed a lady in front of me a few yards away. The fact that she was wearing a yellow hat, and had a plastic yellow purse made me notice her more than the fact that she was looking right at me. She was mouthing something, but all I could hear was Bob’s voice.
Before I could grasp that she was telling me to watch out, a large black shadow had sped to me. I never had time to react. Something hard and heavy had rammed into me from behind, and I was brought down to the ground.
I came crashing, face-first, into the pebbled walkway with barely enough time to pull my hands out in front of me to break some of my fall. And that was where I laid—pinned. Then something bounced off my back, and I felt something hot, wet and sticky on my face. It wasn’t blood.
Glimpsing up, dazed, I saw the cow-sized head of a dog too close to my face, very big teeth, leash hanging freely from its neck. I heard a winded voice but I didn’t think that I could respond. Even if I could, I wouldn’t—afraid the dog’s tongue would slip into my mouth if I tried to open it to speak. A man had come to grab the massive beast’s leash and pulled it away from my now-licked-clean face. I felt a strong hand on my arm, and I was tugged up to my shaky feet.
While I came back to life, I investigated my hands. They were pretty scraped up. And though I couldn’t see any tears in my sweatpants, I knew that I would have plum-sized bruises on my kneecaps tomorrow. On the ground I saw my prized Walkman, shattered to pieces all the way down the walkway. I pulled the now useless earphones away from my ears and let them drop to the ground.
“I’m okay,” I finally answered, though I wasn’t sure if anyone had asked me.
Glancing up, facing the westerly setting sun, I brought my hand to my forehead to rim my eyes from the blinding light. What I could see was the dog’s owner, the shadow of a boy or a man in a gray sweater. He was tall, and his face was hidden by the darkness of his gray hood and the ball cap that was pulled down to his eyebrows.
We stood there, studying each other like boxers do after they step into the ring.
I was waiting for what would generally come next after a dog attack, like an apology or an offer to get my clothes dry-cleaned or his lawyer’s name so that our lawyers could connect easily when I filed a lawsuit.
But the boy remained silent, fingering his watch and swiftly scanning the scene before returning his darkened eyes to me.
“I’m Emily.” I extended a hand out and moved in closer to see his face. Names, I thought, were a good start. But he stepped back and glanced down.
“Your shoelace is untied,” he told me, almost angrily.
I pulled my hand back, feeling a little like a moron, and followed his gaze to my feet.
I crouched down to tie my shoelace; this provoked the dog to bark and lunge to the end of its leash. I couldn’t tell if it was happy or angry. It didn’t matter—I jumped back, fell on my behind, wondered how long it would take before the leash snapped and the dog was back on me again.
“He’s not going to hurt you.” The owner had said this with irritation—like he was upset with my fear of the beast that had attacked me a few seconds before.
I huffed and tugged on my thread of a shoelace—of course, it snapped.
“You need new shoes,” he uneasily commented again.
“My shoes were fine till your dog used me as a springboard.”
While I struggled to tie what was left of my shoelace into a knot and try to make sense of this guy’s social awkwardness, I glared up and watched as his hands clenched into a fist and his shadowed jaw tightened. We were interrupted before the hairs on my arms had time to fully stiffen.
“Hey, girl,” said a voice behind me. “Think you dropped this.”
I came to my feet and spun around. A man in a baggy tracksuit handed me my Bob Marley tape: it had finally dislodged itself from my Walkman, taking pieces of the Walkman with it. I knew enough about the local gang colors and teardrop tattoos that this man was showing off to know that I should stay as far away as possible. It was clear to me that I was slowly being surrounded, outnumbered.
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
“What is this thing anyway?” he asked me.
When I extended my hand to meet his and quickly grab the tape, the Rottweiler went wild again, barking, growling, almost snapping its leash.
I came to be very still.
The gangbanger stepped back, but his frightened gaze was not directed to the hostile dog, but to the dog’s owner. “Sorry man,” he stuttered, taking a few short steps back before turning around. I watched him leave and noticed that everyone around us was doing their best to avoid looking in our direction. Accidents, like holes in the ground, usually attract crowds of gawkers and do-gooders—don’t they? Yet no one else had dared to come near us.
Perturbed, I turned back to the boy and confirmed that he looked quite plain—no signs of any gang affiliations. Though his dog had calmed down again, the boy holding the leash looked as if he were about to spontaneously combust. When he spoke, I realized it was me that he was angry with.
“You really shouldn’t be running by yourself in this neighborhood. It’s a really stupid thing to do.”
With this revelation, I took a moment, and waited for further enlightenment.
But nothing else came from him.
“Are you serious?” I probed after a few seconds.
He stayed silently erect.
I lashed out. “Must I remind you that your dog attacked me and your dog broke my Walkman? You’re not seriously blaming this on me?”
The boy once again scanned the grounds and stopped at me without any retort. I could feel my ears turning red, which meant that I probably looked like a tomato that was about to explode in the microwave.
“Am I keeping you from something more important?” I asked.
He continued to stare at me from the darkness.
I was at a loss for words, which was a strange, new feeling for me.
Finally, with a punch to his chest, I handed him my broken tape and let it drop in front of him. He caught it before it fell to the ground.
I couldn’t think of a good exit line like “See you in hell,” or “Have a great life,” or “Hasta la vista, baby”—nothing cool like that came to mind quickly enough. So I spun on my heels and started running again, before furious tears broke the surface.
I didn’t look back again, but I could sense that he was still standing there, staring from his darkness, watching me run off. I waited until I was sure that he couldn’t see me anymore before I slowed down to a walk, limping the rest of the way home.
I wished that I would have turned around the other way, back through the cemetery—this would have been a much shorter route home. But this would have also given him the benefit of seeing me limp away and cry a little. I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.
By the time I got back to the house, it was getting dark. The street lights were on, and Skylar was lounged on the front steps.
“Where were you? I’ve been waiting for almost half an hour,” he said with his casual smile, ignoring the fact that I was limping toward him.
“Sorry. I got tied up,” I said woodenly.
On my way to the door, when I had walked past him, I had caught a whiff of something—a vat of cheap cologne. Skylar was a pretty boy from Australia—the sandy-blond, tanned kind of pretty. But he was also a really big granola; he wore Birkenstock sandals, with socks, and corduroy pants year-round. He was a strict vegan and refused to put anything in his body that wasn’t natural—whatever that meant. So for him to wear a smelly chemical substance on his pure granola body … something was definitely up. And I had a hunch of what that might be.
I avoided his stare and lifted the rubber mat, revealing the hidden key.
“Since when do you guys bother to lock the door?” he asked, standing way too close to me while I jiggled the key in the lock.
“I’m by myself for the summer,” I said with a shaky voice. From my peripheral, I could see his wide smile turn wider as I said this, confirming my suspicions, my fears.
I left Skylar on the couch and went upstairs to have a shower.
This isn’t a big deal, I kept telling myself, the hot water sprinkling over me. But my throat was swelling shut and my skin stiffened; my body was rejecting the mere idea of being with Skylar, alone, without any tormenting or distraction from my roommates.
I would have normally been in and out of the washroom in ten minutes, tops. Our communal washroom was the most disgusting room in the house and there was almost always someone banging on the door, yelling at you to hurry up. Today though, I was going at a snail’s pace, taking my sweet time at detangling my wet hair and brushing my teeth. I got dressed and patted my dripping hair with a towel until not a drop fell from the ends. I thoroughly examined my knees; they were already turning a dark shade of purple. Then, I looked at my reflection in the mirror for half a second longer than usual or necessary. If I would have owned makeup or a hair dryer, I could have extended my bathroom stay for five, maybe even ten minutes more; but even after searching the washroom, I came up with nothing else to do. So I put my hair up in its standard wet ball, and with an elongated sigh, I unlocked the door and stepped out of my hiding place.
When I got back to my room, Skylar was lying on my canary yellow bedspread with his legs dangling over the edge. It was a good thing I didn’t make a habit of prancing around in a wet towel.
I threw my running clothes in the overflowing hamper. I would have to do laundry soon or run out of socks … again.
While my mind was distracting itself, Skylar had flipped to his side. “So, what do you want to do tonight, E?”
I was named after my grandmother, Burt’s mother; this was the same grandmother who could still, to this day, never remember my name. Since I was born not-a-boy—one who could have carried on the recreated family name—naming me after the matriarch of the family was, in Isabelle’s mind, a way to legitimize her affair with Burt. My big brother Bill used to call me Emmy … mostly because it irritated the hell out of Isabelle, his stepmother. I liked it, mostly for the same reason.
I didn’t really care that Skylar called me E. Anything was better than Emily. But I had a feeling that his reasons for doing so had nothing to do with any kind of special attachment he might have had to me; it was just easier to keep girls’ names straight if he only had to remember first initials. Maybe I could teach that trick to my grandmother.
I took my time dragging one of the Rubbermaid bins from under my bed and pulling out clothes for work.
“Umm … we could go see a movie,” I finally offered. “I think the one you were talking about the other day is out.”
He sat up, clasped his hands between his knees. “Or we could just stay here and spend a quiet night in.”
I held my breath … and the growl in my stomach saved me. “Are you hungry? I’m starving!”
“No, I’m not … but you go ahead.”
He had looked thoroughly disappointed, and I had already made my way past the curtain door before he had even finished his sentence.
The kitchen was a disaster zone. The counters were crusted with a year’s worth of grime, and dirty dishes were, as always, piled in and around the sink. The only way to get a clean dish was to wash it right before using it—which I did before putting the freshly cleaned pot of water on the stove to boil. I drew a sink of soapy water and started doing dishes, almost excited by the fact that the dishes I cleaned would actually stay clean for longer than a minute.
Skylar just loitered by the fridge.
“You know I’m leaving in a few days,” he reminded me for the thousandth time. “I don’t even know yet if my student visa will be renewed next year.”
“Yeah, I remember you telling me that. Hope they’ll let you come back,” I said, pouring the contents of the Kraft Dinner box into the pot of boiling water.
“Ew. I don’t know how you can eat that stuff.”
I just smiled and stirred, thankful that I didn’t have to cook for the both of us. Otherwise I would have been eating twigs and blades of grass for supper.
Skylar wandered back to the television in the living room while I finished up in the kitchen. I sat next to him on the couch, taking more joy than I should have in watching his face turn a nice shade of green while I poured ketchup over my orange pasta.
Unfortunately his aversion didn’t last—as soon as I’d rested my empty bowl on the coffee table, his arm was around my shoulders.
Dating a guy for two months in college was like a lifetime to the rest of the world, or so my roommates had educated me. There were things that you were supposed to, just had to, experience in college. Everything moved so fast here … and Skylar moved even faster. Before long, his free hand had crossed over and made its way to my thigh. And he kept turning his face to mine, trying to catch my eye.
“Do you think you did okay on your exams?” I asked him, finding ultimate interest in the Seinfeld rerun we were watching.
“Why wouldn’t I?” asked the A student.
“Then why do you think your visa won’t be renewed? I thought the school’s only condition was that you maintain your grades?”
He seemed to think about this. “Nothing’s ever guaranteed, I guess. There’s always a chance that they could deny my visa.”
Slim chance but good ploy, I thought.
“I’ll definitely be away all summer,” he added.
This was something I couldn’t argue with. So I got up to get a glass of water and stood at the kitchen sink.
I made a list in my head of everything that was right about Skylar. For all intents and purposes, he was perfect for that college-required experience. He was a nice enough guy. He was pretty smart. He showered somewhat regularly. These things must have meant something, right? And then my mind wandered, and making its way to the top of the list was the fact that Skylar’s forehead was too big—something that I had just happened to notice a minute before. His nose was too straight too—he must have had a nose job, I decided. I couldn’t be with someone who’d had a nose job.
I rushed back to the couch before I could talk myself out of anyone else.
Like he could sense my fickleness, Skylar didn’t miss a beat. “It’ll be hard to be away from you for four months, I’ll miss you like crazy.”
His blue eyes—dull blue I’d noticed just now—were unblinking.
He took my faint smile as a green light, and his lips were on mine before I could think of anything else to say to distract him with. He tasted like strawberry Starbursts. I wondered what I tasted like to him—probably like fluorescent-orange powdered cheese.
Then there were awkwardly flailing hands and arms—mostly from my end.
Skylar seemed to know what he was doing. His hands had made their way to my back and with a quick, barely discernible flutter of his fingers over my shirt, my bra became unclasped. He then unceremoniously lunged himself on top of me.
And that was when it happened, as it always did when it came down to moments like this … I panicked. Adrenaline rushed to my bony arms, the arms pushed out, and Skylar tumbled to the carpet, hitting his blond head against the coffee table on his way down.
Skylar stayed long enough for the shock to wear off his face, long enough to tell me—a bunch of times—that he wasn’t mad, that he could wait while he rubbed the bruise on his head, which was as big as his ego.
The thing that bothered me most was that I was going to remain a virgin … even after a whole year away at college. I was now past being a minority and entering the realm of historical figure. I imagined a grade school class in the future oohing and ahhing while the teacher up front told the tale of the eternally virginal Emily.
One more year and I would become a Greek myth.
I wasn’t dumb enough to think that you had to be in love to be with someone in that way … So why couldn’t I bring myself to that, like every other normal hormonal college freshman?
The problem was that normal wasn’t in my DNA. I was destined to be forever freakish.
At the end of the night, I sat on the stairs and watched Skylar leave, like the inconsequential ones before him.