Scare Crow

by Julie Hockley

  Though now, agreeing to go to class with Cassie was just better than trying to explain to her and all of the other doorway assessors why I had no plans to go back to school, why that part of my life was over now.

  For the first time since he had come to live with me, I had to leave Meatball. My dog. He had followed me out of our room to the front door, where I was forced to order him to stay before I closed the door behind me.

  While I waited for Cassie, I started kicking at the loose pebbles on our small crosswalk, trying to block out the sound of Meatball’s whine through the door. My chew toy of a flip-flop brushed against something soggy, and I looked down to see a humidified piece of cardboard. It was a business card. It took me a minute to realize it was the one that had fallen when Carly had tried to hand me a piece of paper with Cameron’s bank account numbers. Before I had thrown it back at her. That had only happened a couple of weeks before, and yet, it felt like another life ago. Cruelly, the sun had been shining, brightly, happily ever since then. No stormy weather. No thunder or lightning. Not even one damn drop of rain to loyally commemorate Cameron’s death.

  I bent down and pried the card off the cement, being careful not to rip it. It was made of thick, indented paper. The really expensive stuff. Most of what had once been an accountant’s contact information had been washed away. Just a few letters and numbers remained.

  I pulled my notebook out of my bag and pressed the card under the hardcover. This sodden piece of cardboard was the sole connection I had left to the underworld.

  Cassie finally opened the front door, but she never had a chance—Meatball charged right through her, knocking her into the doorframe. While I was prepared to grab his collar, my arms extended, he darted around me and ran to the house across the street. He made his way up the wooden side steps to the second-floor apartment.

  I didn’t know who lived there. In fact, apart from my own roommates, I didn’t know and had never talked to anyone on our street. This wasn’t a mingling type of neighborhood, and I wasn’t a mingling type of gal.

  Whoever lived there, I knew they wouldn’t appreciate having a beast of a dog barking at their door.

  As I ran across the street, shouting at Meatball, my eyes did a quick once-over above to the second-floor front windows.

  I could have sworn—

  I stopped in the middle of the street, my breath cut short. It wasn’t possible. I knew that I was imagining it.

  Cameron’s face had flashed by the window. Hadn’t it?

  But that wasn’t possible.

  I knew that wasn’t possible.

  The week before, I had interrupted Meatball’s private business, pulling him leg up behind me while I ran after Cameron as he exited a coffee shop. The perfect stranger I grabbed by the shirt thought I was completely nuts. And he hadn’t even remotely looked like Cameron. The day before, I had caught myself yelling after a bus driver. He had also turned out to be not-Cameron.

  I was slowly losing my sanity. Yet as I ran up the steps and grabbed Meatball’s collar, I gazed ahead, debated, then peeked through the small window. Inside, it was completely empty, devoid of any furniture, of any Cameron.

  I was unequivocally nuts.

  “The landlord’s never going to let you keep the dog,” Cassie said to me as we headed to school, after I had dragged Meatball away from the empty flat. I practically had to shove him inside and quickly close the door before he could charge back out. I could still hear him barking as we rounded the corner.

  “I could always try to hide him.”

  “Yeah, good luck with that,” she said with a smirk.

  More walking. More silence. But I could feel her watching me with her peripheral vision.

  It wasn’t until we were stopped at a light, waiting for the walk signal, that she confronted me again. “You’re doing a really shitty job trying to hide that big scab on your lip.”

  I kept my eyes ahead, feeling nauseous all of a sudden.

  “I can give you a hand with the makeup stuff, if you want,” she offered to my muteness.

  “The light changed,” I answered and crossed the street. We made our way to school without speaking of what she really wanted to know: what the hell happened to you? What the hell is wrong with you?

  Last night, I dreamed of Rocco. Again. Almost every night, I dreamed of Rocco—in the same way that as a child I used to dream of my brother, Bill, for almost two years after he had passed away. Sometimes screaming in my sleep, sometimes waking up to a puddle on my pillow. Waking up and not really remembering what I had dreamed about, but having that lingering, aching feeling that it was about Bill. And now Rocco.

  But I never dreamed of Cameron. Not once.

  I needed to see him. To see his face.

  Just one more time, feel him next to me—breathing, even if it were only in my dreams.

  Waking up with a broken heart, it feels like being stabbed a million times by a jackhammer. I would wake up when all I wanted to do is sleep and never wake up again.

  Being forced to go to class, with Cassie on my tail, was another living-second strike of the jackhammer. And then Cassie and I actually got to this damn class, only to see my ex-boyfriend Jeremy chatting with another student outside the heavy classroom doors. This day was getting better and better. Jeremy darted in, obviously hoping that I hadn’t spotted him. We had dated for a short while last year. Now one year seemed like an eternity ago.

  We followed the herd as the students ascended the steps into the auditorium. The classroom was encased in cement blocks, painted pee yellow, with no air circulating through. The plastic chairs matched the beige linoleum. Whoever decorated the university’s classrooms was clearly color-blind.

  The lack of air and the buzz of student chatter made my head pound, so I took the first available seat, even if it was at the very front of the class. Cassie shook her head at my teacher’s-pet choice of seating and made me scoot over so she could sit next to me. There was an old guy at the front of the class, leaning cross-legged against the desk. This was the professor. I had seen his picture hanging in the philosophy department. Then there was another guy swaying in front of him and holding a clipboard, hands slightly shaking. Picture-day gelled hair, abused Nike runners, Green Lantern T-shirt. Definitely a grad student.

  “Sophia Jane Ackermen,” stuttered out the superhero T-shirt guy while students were still filtering in.

  The professor had his grad student do the roll call, the cattle call, while he chopsticked his way through something that looked like tofu but smelled like rotten fish. I instantly regretted my choice of a seat in one of the front rows.

  I bent my head, pretending to be digging in my bag for a pen and willing the gag reflex to get under control. The attempt was frustrated when my bionic fingers kept getting caught in the spirals of my notebook. I had injured them after I had managed to pry myself from Spider’s minions and punch Spider in his ugly face. Now my fingers were stuck in wedges that looked like metal banana peels, and it made everything I did clumsy. Clumsier.

  Cassie was observing this struggle to surface a pen.

  “How exactly did you break your fingers?”

  “They’re not broken.”

  “Eugena Cassidy Goldblath,” the grad student called out.

  Cassie rolled her eyes at him. “Yep,” she answered, then turned back to me. “I suppose the splint is just a fashion statement?”

  I sighed. The grad student wasn’t even halfway through the alphabet. It would have been an extremely uncomfortable few minutes if I didn’t give her at least some sort of response.

  “One of the fingers was broken. But it’s probably fine now. I haven’t had it checked in a while.” This reminded me that I needed to drop into the school’s medical clinic for a follow-up and get the stupid thing off my hand.

  “Cameron James Hillard,” the grad student called out.

  My blood pressure dropped to the pee-colored floor.

  I had heard wrong. Just like I was seeing Ca
meron everywhere, I was hearing his name.

  “Cameron. James. Hillard,” he called out again, practically spelling it out.

  I hadn’t imagined it. I shot up from my seat and turned around to face the rest of the class.

  “Do you go by Cameron or James?” Green Lantern asked me.

  I heard a few students chuckle.

  “Emily, what on earth are you doing?” I heard Cassie hiss. She was tugging at my T-shirt.

  I looked, waiting for him to speak up, to stand. I searched from row to row, searching for the face that I would be able to recognize in a stadium in the middle of a rock concert.

  The room was spinning. Blurred faces I didn’t know.

  I finally gazed down at Cassie, who looked horrified.

  “Emily?” she asked.

  My mouth was covered with one hand.

  I stepped over Cassie, tripping over her legs. I used her shoulder to push myself out into the aisle and kept running, slamming my body into the push bar of the double doors. Just as the doors drew to a close, I threw up. Right in front of the doors to the classroom.

  ****

  I sat on the floor of the girls’ second-floor washroom, holding my head in my hands.

  He would have been in the same class, I thought to myself.

  Cameron had once admitted to me that he would check up on me after Bill died. But to what extent, I hadn’t known. There was so much I hadn’t known.

  He would have been in the same room as me.

  Would I have ever even noticed him if Meatball hadn’t introduced us?

  He would have been in the same breathing space as me.

  Last year, in my first year at Callister University, ancient philosophy had been held in the same oversized auditorium. And there had been a whole shelf dedicated to ancient philosophers in Cameron’s study, with books that had clearly been read before. Had Cameron been in that class with me?

  Had he been enrolled in any of my other classes just so that he could “check” on me?

  I could have had more time with Cameron, but I was too blind, too self-absorbed to notice anyone.

  I realized how very little I knew about his secret life.

  Professors did roll calls at the beginning of every semester to see who had made it out of summer break alive. Cameron hadn’t.

  And no one but me cared that he wasn’t coming back.

  When my mind and stomach had cleared, I went down to the front desk. Someone would have to clean up the mess I had left in front of the auditorium. Hopefully before class finished and students started slipping and sliding out the door.

  There was another student in front of me, talking to a clerk who was hiding behind bulletproof glass, typing on her desktop. Why did everything always have to be bulletproof? We were in the philosophy department. They of all people should be able to talk the crazies away from their guns.

  When my turn came up, the lady behind the desk never looked away from her screen.

  “Student ID card,” she commanded, cupping her hand like a catcher’s mitt up to the half-moon hole at the bottom of the glass. We were all just another student number.

  A thought occurred to me as she entered my number into the system. But while the plan was still forming in my head, the administrator waited for my student problem.

  She was actually forced to look up at me, her eyes bugging out. “Can I help you?”

  “One of my,” I hesitated, “classmates, forgot his,” I stammered again, “book at my house,” this was the most drawn-out sentence ever, “and I wanted to give it back to him, but I don’t have his address so …”

  “So, you need me to look him up in the system and give you his address?” she finished for me, a sweet smile on her face.

  “Right,” I said, taking a small jump forward as I said this.

  She pushed my student card back through the hole and rested her hands on her lap.

  “I’m sure you can understand, Miss—” she glimpsed at her screen and turned back to me, “Miss Sheppard, the university has a policy of not sharing the personal information of its students. Perhaps you could simply tell the boy that you like him instead of lurking around his house?”

  I pasted a smile on my face and took my student card back.

  I wished I would have put a little more thought and conviction into my plan. I expected that the primrose behind the glass would be putting a note on my file, in red letters and twenty-point Times New Roman font: stalker.

  I spun on my heels and yelled over my shoulder, “You might want to send someone with a mop to Auditorium B. One of the students made a real mess in front of the doors.”

  ****

  From the row of chairs that were in the hall screwed into the wall, I watched the janitor come and go. He had kept his headphones on and had the floor mopped up in less than two minutes. He must have been through the puke drill multiple times during frosh week.

  When the ethics class finally finished, Cassie was one of the first ones out the doors.

  “Did the peanut butter bagel you ate this morning come back to haunt you?” she asked me as she approached.

  Peanut butter was Meatball’s favorite. So I ate it every morning … I used to eat it every morning. Just the thought of it …

  Cassie handed me my bag. “I was going to go look for you, but unlike some people, I didn’t want to make a scene.”

  I kept my eyes trained on the doors and got up as soon as I saw Jeremy walking through.

  “Be right back,” I told Cassie as I had already started sprinting.

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be waiting. For you. Right here,” she shouted, sarcasm heavy.

  Jeremy was my plan B. Hopefully plan B was a better plan.

  “Jeremy,” I called out as I ran up to him and stopped, blocking his escape. “How are you?”

  “Hi,” Jeremy said carefully. “I’m fine.”

  He had been walking out with another guy, and I had interrupted their conversation. His friend slapped Jeremy’s back and bowed out.

  We stood for a moment, while students herded out the doors, sidestepping me.

  “That was quite an exit you made earlier,” he said, clearly happy with my misery. “I could hear you upchuck from the back row.”

  I cleared my throat. “So, you had … a good summer?”

  I remembered why I tended to avoid conversations generally and with ex-boyfriends. Wholeheartedly awkward.

  “Better than yours, I guess,” he said, bitterness coloring his tone. “Your ears seem to be back to normal.”

  I wrinkled my nose, trying to grasp Jeremy’s meaning. Then it hit me, again. That gash in my heart that would never heal, intent on torturing me. Once upon a time, Cameron and Rocco had played a joke on Jeremy, telling him that I was in the hospital with some unknown disease so that he would stop calling me. Memories that would never be anything more.

  Jeremy had no idea how much his comment had wounded me. I took a breath and regrouped.

  “Yeah, sorry about that. I lost my phone for a couple days. Someone answered my calls as a joke.”

  “Whatever. It wasn’t important. I just wanted to tell you about the computer thing so you wouldn’t have to show up at work for nothing.”

  “What computer thing?”

  “The computer program. At the library.” When a blank look came over my face, he arched his eyebrows. “The program. That the library was using. To catalogue the book scans.” Still nothing from me, even if he was spelling it out. So he continued. “It got hacked, and the library lost all the data we had inputted. We all lost our jobs when the library decided to abandon the electronic library project and bring the books back. Where have you been?”

  Jeremy’s father was a professor in the political science department. When we had been dating, he had used his connections to get me a job in the library archives.

  I thought I had lost this job because I hadn’t showed up. Turned out the job didn’t even exist anymore.

  My plan had b
een to ask for help getting my job back so that I could find a way to get into the system. But it was pretty hard to get my job back when the job didn’t even exist anymore.

  Plan B was sucking already.

  “I need a job,” I blurted.

  “Good for you. What does this have to do with me?”

  “Jeremy,” I said slowly, almost pleading, “I wouldn’t ask unless I was desperate. I’m broke. I’m going to get kicked out of my house if I don’t come up with rent soon.”

  He sighed. “I suppose I could get you in where I work. At the campus store. Selling sweatshirts and bumper stickers. Think you could handle that?”

  I could, but that wasn’t what I had in mind.

  “How about working front desk in one of the departments?”

  “Yeah, that’s not going to happen. They only hire grad students to do that stuff.”

  Cassie had come to my side, apparently tired of waiting patiently for me. Jeremy eyed her for a second. Maybe, by the grace of whoever ruled the Graceland, he wouldn’t remember her or how mean she and the rest of my roommates had been to him when we’d dated.

  “Please, Jeremy,” I full-out begged.

  “Yeah, I’m late for my next class. I really can’t help you.”

  Jeremy left Cassie and me standing in front of the classroom doors, where the floor was still moist from the janitor’s mop.

  Seemingly, he had remembered her and still hated my guts. Plan B was a bust.

  When Cassie and I stepped outside, she grabbed me by the shoulders. “He’s not the one who did that to your face and your hand, is he?”

  I shook my head and gave her her hands back.

  I should have taken Jeremy up on his offer for a job in the campus store when he had offered it. Now I had no money coming in and no way of finding out more about Cameron. Not a great day.

  ****

  The next morning, I ran out before anyone else could accost me outside my bedroom. I needed to get to the clinic, get the splint off my fingers, and get the attention off me. My day started off with waiting. Waiting to get checked in. Waiting in the big waiting room while I waited to get invited past the receptionist into a smaller waiting room. They called that last waiting room a consult room, where patients got to wait for the doctor. It took a couple hours, but I finally made it to the consult room. It was either the same room or identical to the room I had been in when I had come in with my broken fingers a few weeks ago. They had obviously cleaned out the trash bin after I had thrown up in it. But the room was mostly unchanged. There were the quintessential germ-infested Reader’s Digests lying around. A few scattered boxes of free samples for students and faculty. None of the good stuff, though. Mostly just sunscreen and dental sticks that no one ever uses.