Who I can’t trust.
I bypass people, those coming and going through store and restaurant doors; women walking dogs and men with other men, talking and laughing. I watch them all. I watch them all and wonder. Are you the one? Are you? Are you?
The question runs over and over again in my head: Has Esther hired someone to kill me?
I double-and triple-check for cars before crossing an intersection; I sidestep street gutters and storm drains in case they’ve been intentionally removed so that I will plummet to my death. Can one die in a storm drain? I don’t know. There’s no telling what kind of accident might befall me. I avoid walking too close to buildings with window air-condition units in case they might become loose and tumble down onto my head. Traumatic brain injury. That can certainly lead to death. Brain hemorrhaging. Intracranial pressure.
As I leave the more bustling streets of Clark and Foster, and head onto sleepy little streets like Farragut, I’m entirely overcome with the creeps. The willies. The heebie-jeebies.
It’s entirely possible I wet my pants.
I want to go home. I want to be home. And not in the walk-up apartment I share with Esther. I want to be in my mother and father’s home with my parents and my sister, Madison. I want to click my feet together and say it three times: There’s no place like home.
But I don’t go home.
The wind whips through the trees, tousling my hair, blowing it before my eyes so that I can’t see. It wraps around my eyes like a blindfold, inhibiting my vision. But just as I’m about to panic, the wind leaves the hair, slinking down my coat, copping a feel of the bare skin. I shudder, wanting to scream at the wind.
There’s the sound of traffic in the distance. A man in a three-piece suit stops and attempts to ask me for directions. “Can you tell me how to get to Catalpa?” he asks, but I tell him to go away, too. “I don’t know,” I say. Three or four times I say it, in rapid progression. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know—the words all blended together into an amalgam. The man gives me a dirty look and disappears into thin air.
And that’s when I hear my name, hissed on the breath of the wind. Quinn... Quinn...says the wind, or at least that’s what I hear.
And then a laugh, a gut-wrenching laugh.
From the shadows of the trees, he appears.
Him.
The yellow, misshapen teeth, the shaggy hair. He stands close, reaching his dirty hand out to me, trying to touch my hair. I draw back quickly, tripping over the sidewalk and falling to the ground.
“What do you want with me?” I cry from the cold concrete.
He doesn’t answer, but instead reaches out that dirty hand and tries to help me to my feet. I resist. I don’t want to touch the hand; I don’t want to touch him. I push myself up off the ground, cutting a palm on the rugged surface as I do. In the darkness, it starts to bleed. I rub at the injured hand, begging again, “Just leave me alone.”
I turn to run, but suddenly his hand is on my arm, holding tight. Curtailing the blood supply. “Let go of me!” I scream, but he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. I’m a wiggly worm on the end of a fishing hook, kicking and screaming for dear life.
And then there, in his hand, he brandishes something, a weapon, the light from a streetlamp a solid twenty feet away casting a faint glow on the shiny matter—steel, maybe, or maybe metal. Is it a gun, a knife? I don’t know. I tug at my arm. I try hard to pull away. I begin to cry.
“Don’t hurt me,” I beg. “Please, don’t hurt me.” His hand is hurting my arm, making it ache, the ligaments and muscles stretching in ways they aren’t meant to go.
But all he does is laugh.
There are three million people in all of Chicagoland and not a single one of them with me on this street tonight. I should scream. That’s what I should do. Help me! Help me! But my voice is nothing more than a whisper. I open my mouth to scream but nothing comes out.
“Hurt you?” he says. “I ain’t trying to hurt you.”
I say it again. “Let me go, let me go, let me go.”
“You left this on the bus, lady,” he tells me. “That’s all. You left this on the bus.”
And then I see the item in his hand. It makes a ting, a slight noise hardly audible over the sound of my cry. Not a gun, not a knife. But a phone. Esther’s phone. Which must have fallen out when I dropped my bag under a seat where I couldn’t reach. As I snatch the phone from his hand, he lets go of my arm and I draw back quickly, tripping again over my own two feet. But this time, I don’t fall.
An incoming text message has just arrived.
I don’t need a password to read this one. There it is, right on the display screen.
Payback’s a bitch, it says.
Alex
We’re sitting on the dusty, dirty floor of the old tract home. Homes likes these, there’s nothing unique about them. About a hundred of these very same homes popped up almost overnight, fifty or sixty years ago, so that this one is the same as the next, as the next, as the next. They’re all the same, every single one of them, except that one may be brown and one may be blue. But they’re all ugly and stodgy and just plain blah. Just like my very own home across the street from here. It’s ugly, too.
It’s dark outside, still night. We walked until we could walk no more, and then, instead of going back home and to bed, I came here. To this home. To Pearl’s home.
“Tell me about this ghost,” Pearl says. She sits on the floor before me, her legs pulled up into her. How I came to be here, I don’t know. I just did. She folds her hands into her lap. The scintilla of light that sneaks in through the edges of the boarded-up window reflects off the pointed, triangular tooth—my necklace, my shark’s tooth necklace, which lies over the neckline of her own T-shirt. It’s dark in here. Between the boarded-up windows and the lack of lights, I can no longer tell day from night. I’ve lost all sense of time. Pearl sits just two feet away, staring at me, until I can hardly dredge up my own name or the reason why I’m here.
“What ghost?” I ask, though of course I know what she means. She looks a bit tuckered out. Tired. I imagine it’s not easy sleeping on a hard floor, spending your days roaming some small town’s streets. Just passing through, she’d said, and I wonder how long until she leaves. Not that I want her to leave, because I don’t, but I wonder when the day will come that I’ll show up at this godforsaken home and she won’t be here.
“You told me this house was haunted,” she says. She won’t believe any of the stories I’m about to tell; I don’t even believe them. But it’s conversation. Small talk. And anyway, what’s more important than the ghost—or this stupid idea of a ghost that half the town has conjured up—is the little girl she used to be. The rest of it is just for fun. People like to make themselves feel scared. They like to tell the tales to scare other people, too. But it’s all just make-believe.