Grill finally relaxed and cocked his head to the side. “You alone again today, sir?”
I checked my watch again. Then I waved him off and walked away. The look of indignation on his
face told me that he didn’t appreciate being dismissed in this way in front of his troops. But
I had no time for ego-stroking.
Meatball shepherded us through the hoards of families that had gathered in the nearby clearing
to enjoy the rest of the sunny May afternoon. He tugged ahead, and we quickly worked our way
deeper into the clearing. I recognized some of the faces. From their stares, they recognized me
too. There was no love lost there—I was the face to their problems; I couldn’t hide the blood
that stained my hands. But I wasn’t trying to either. All I wanted, needed, today were a few
seconds of peace.
We found a vacated picnic table and hid in the crowd, waiting. I pulled my shirt over my gun.
After a few minutes, Meatball’s head shot up, and his ears went flat to his skull. My breath
quickened, the fist inside me loosened a quarter of an inch, and the dark voice inside my head
was made null and void, finally.
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.