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.