Crow's Row

iUniverse, Inc.

Chapter One

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.

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, middleclass 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...