Under Suspicion

Though my rent includes an underground parking space, the cavernous darkness of the parking garage gives me the heebie-jeebies. So on the rare occasion that I can find aboveground parking in my zip code, it’s too good to pass up. Today the parking gods and Gavin Newsom must have been smiling down on me because I caught a cherry spot almost directly across the street. Sure, I had to shoehorn my little Accord into the space and make a forty-seven-point turn in the process, but kicking open the car door and having sunlight—or the graying drizzle that passed for sunlight in San Francisco—was wonderful.

 

I really wish I had given the underground spot a second thought.

 

“Oh no.”

 

I didn’t realize I was standing in the middle of the street until a Muni bus came barreling past me. The driver was laying on the horn that wailed like a dying duck. I jumped out of the way and tried to press myself flat against my car door, but my car door wasn’t flat.

 

Also, it wasn’t attached to my car.

 

I felt my lower lip start to wobble; I felt the moist heat of tears behind my eyes. The hood of my car was bashed so solidly that the metal roof undulated like hard green ocean waves. Every window was smashed out and the car seemed to sink under its own destitution. I sniffed, trying to blink away tears, but I was still able to see that every single tire had been slashed repeatedly until the rubber flopped out in jaunty ribbons. I took a second step closer and felt the crunch of a car window underneath my sneaker. I tried to take a step closer, to run my hands over the puckered metal, but something was pinning me back. When I turned to look, I realized that a hunk of headlight—the size of my fist—had snagged my shoelace. I shook it off and rounded the car, somehow hoping the damage might not be so severe on the sidewalk side.

 

That so wasn’t the case.

 

“Wow, lady, looks like you really pissed someone off,” a kid said as he wandered by. His baggy pants pooled at the ankles and he walked with the kind of exaggerated limp that was meant to call up images of Snoop Dogg and original gangsters. Instead, he just looked like he was trying to keep his pants up.

 

A low whistle from the other side of the car caught my attention. I peered through the broken-out passenger-side window and met Will’s gaze as he smiled at me through the driver’s-side window.

 

“Good thing your car alarm went off,” he told me.

 

“Oh God, Will. What am I going to do?”

 

“You’ve got insurance, don’t you?”

 

I sighed and leaned against the battered car door as Will came around to join me. “Yeah, but this car was new. Or sort of new. And now I have to report once again that my car got mysteriously bashed in.”

 

“Did they take anything?”

 

I yanked on the door handle and the door swung open easily, leaving a confetti-like spray of broken glass in its wake. I was about to slide into the car when Will grabbed me by the shoulder, slipped out of his sweatshirt, and laid it on the car seat.

 

“There’s glass everywhere. You don’t want your arse to look like—”

 

“My tires?” We shared a small smile and I crawled onto Will’s sweatshirt, taking inventory of my front seat.

 

“Bad news,” I said, pushing my head out. “They got my American Idol CD.”

 

I could see the smile in Will’s eyes. “That’s rather good news, actually.”

 

I turned in my seat—the selection of broken window glass crunching loudly underneath me—and felt my eyes go wide. “Wow.”

 

Scrawled on the inside of the battered windshield was the word freak.

 

I swallowed slowly, my own saliva choking me, crawling up the back of my neck. “I have to get out of here.” I pushed past Will and edged out of the car. I stumbled on the sidewalk and doubled over, taking little short breaths of cold night air.

 

From the corner of my eye I saw Will’s head disappear into the cab of the car; he pulled out again, looking slightly confused. I expected at some point I should fill him in on me and why a five-letter word would spur me to nausea.

 

Though I comfortably live with a vampire, have spent a good chunk of time talking to my dead grandmother through a hunk of fruit, and share an office wall with a hobgoblin who has to use a slobber tray, the freak thing is something that, to this day, still cuts to the spine.

 

 

 

 

 

Like every other teenager in the world, I had only wanted two things: to be popular or to be invisible. The invisibility thing was pretty much a lock all through junior high. I never made many friends and the school bus (thankfully) dropped me off a full seven blocks from the little stuccoed house that I shared with my grandmother and the four-foot-high neon hand that flashed PALM READING ... PALM READING ... PALM READING through the front window.

 

Without knowing about my grandmother’s occupation, and every day, clad in a rotating collection of Guess? jeans and oversized B.U.M. sweatshirts, I looked just like any other anonymous mid-1990s high schooler.

 

Until they came to my house.

 

They were the popular girls who had scrunchies that matched everything they owned, and they drove enviable cars, like the Geo Storm. On one Saturday in May they thought it would be hilarious to have their futures foretold. Of all the days of the year for the Psychic Friends Network to go on hiatus.