“Sorry about your house,” Erika says.
I almost ask how she heard but forget that quick. Everyone knows everything around here.
I wonder if they know they’re about to be evicted?
“So, what are you getting into today?” I ask, changing the subject. “You always kick it in your driveway like a parked car?”
She pauses for a beat, her face losing all lightness. “Only on special days. Waiting for my ride up to Big Ville to visit my pops.”
“Oh! Uh, cool. Um, can I ask . . .”
“What he did? Nothing, really. Wrong place, wrong time, that’s all.”
“Right,” I say. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”
“You ain’t prying. Nothing’s a secret in the Wood. I bet you right now someone’s on the phone telling somebody Leslie’s daughter is kicking it with that new girl from Maple Street. Soon, they’ll say we go together.”
I trace my finger around my can with a shrug. “Well, you ain’t bad-looking. I’d smash.”
Erika narrows her eyes and scoffs. “Girl, don’t go lying to me. I ain’t no pity lay. Besides, you ain’t my type!”
We crack up laughing and spend the next thirty minutes lighting each other up. Kinda reminds me of hanging with Tamara. It’s the small slice of normal I needed, since she hasn’t answered her phone, despite all the emergency emojis I sent.
Plus, I can smell the weed baked in Tamara clothes like the sweetest perfume and I’m ready to bury myself in her laundry.
“You visit your dad a lot?” I ask.
“Whenever I can catch a ride. It’s like an airport up in there. Everyone coming and going.” She sighs, kicking something invisible by her foot. “Them Sterling Laws fucked us.”
“Sterling Laws?” I blanch.
“Nah, not the Sterling that got you that house. His older brother, George L. Sterling. He was the governor back in the early 2000s. He was like this holy roller, thought drugs were the devil’s works. The moment he got in office, he doubled down and passed all these crazy laws. Mandatory minimum of twenty years if caught with just an ounce of bud.”
I think of my secret garden and gulp.
“An . . . ounce of weed?” I choke. “But weed is, like, harmless.”
“Well, he convinced them white folks that weed would turn people into addicts who would rob, loot, and kill, and they all believed his dumb ass. He dedicated the entire city’s budget to ‘cleaning the streets.’ Everyone in the Wood was getting swept up. Police were riding around like an army, walking into houses, offices, restaurants, schools, hospitals with no warrants. After the first wave, they started getting greedy, planting drugs on folks . . . like my pops. Pops never smoked a day in his life, but they somehow found an ounce on him. I once read this stat that said in the two years after them Sterling Laws kicked in, the prison population grew nine hundred percent. That’s why they had to build them giant blocks you could see from a mile away.”
“Whoa.”
“With the budget gone, school and hospitals started shutting down, folks took to the streets. And that was the first match that lit up the last riots.”
I cock my head to the side, sniffing Erika again. “So . . . why would you risk smoking at all?”
“They got rid of the law about two years ago. As long as you not selling it, you good. But . . . they won’t erase all them prior sentences.”
“So everyone up in Big Ville is just . . . stuck?”
She takes a sip of her soda. “Pretty much.”
“Dude . . . that’s fucked up.”
Her lips form a straight line as she stares off into space. I can’t imagine what it’s like growing up through something like that. Your whole world flipped, seeing your family and friends corralled into prison, practically kidnapped, on bullshit charges.
“But hey, it ain’t all bad here, you know,” Erika says, brightening. “There’s this party tonight over on the east side. You should roll through. Yusef’s gonna deejay. I give him shit but he’s actually not that bad. And I think homie got a little crush on you.”
Oh no. That’s the last thing I need. Plus, won’t that be a party with girls from our school?
But . . . it would be nice to do something normal for a change.
“Um, I’m not sure,” I waffle. “Can I think about it?”
“Dude! What the hell!”
Tamara’s face finally appears on my phone screen after maybe the thousandth time.
“I’ve been calling you all day,” I shout, slamming my door closed and flopping on the bed. “Did the dozens of 911 texts not register to you?”
Tamara shrugs, seeming unfazed.
“My bad,” she says, curt and not meeting my eye. “Didn’t know if you were still playing that stupid-ass prank. It was hella annoying.”
“Prank? What prank? We had, like, a real-ass emergency here!”
Tamara finally looks at me, her eyes narrowing, as if reconsidering something. “Well, maybe it could’ve been Piper. She did have long hair.”
“‘She’? What are you talking about.”
“Someone kept FaceTiming me last night from your computer, but I couldn’t see her face. She would just sit there in the dark, breathing all hard. I kept saying ‘hello, hello’ but she wouldn’t answer. It was hella creepy.”
“Tam, are you joking? ’Cause now seriously is not the time.”
“I’m serious! She called like twenty times. I stopped answering after a while. Hang on, I took a screenshot. Check the receipts.”
Tamara sends a photo taken from her computer screen and as soon as I open it, my whole body goes numb. It’s a girl’s silhouette, sitting at my desk, on my laptop, backlit by the light in the hallway, her face hidden by shadows.
She’s too tall to be Piper. . . .
“Who IS that?” Tamara asks.
The Hag, I almost whisper back, but stop myself. Because that’s ridiculous. There’s no such thing as hags or any other craziness this town has cooked up over the years. But this must be the person who broke into our house. She was in my room, touching my things, pretending to be me . . . bile rises to my throat.
“Dude,” Tamara pushes. “What is going on?”
How do I explain? Where do I even begin without sounding . . . nuts?
“Um. Long story. Lemme . . . uh, call you back.”
Twelve
WHEN ERIKA TEXTED me the address to the party, I expected a regular house. You know, one with running water and working electricity. Normal stuff. Instead, I follow a long extension cord down the cracking driveway of an abandoned relic on the opposite side of the park.
Inside, the house is flooded with red Christmas lights and cigarette smoke. Now, it’s been almost a year since I’ve been to a party, and typically they’re pretty standard no matter where you go: bottles and kegs, red cups and chips, drunk girls, horny guys . . . and all the hard candy you could ask for: weed, cocaine, oxy . . . maybe even a little Molly.
This party is different. For starters, it’s almost impossible to miss the huge holes in the ceiling and moldy furniture pushed in the corners, dust collecting on everyone’s kicks. Next, there’s, like, a really weird mix of people. Not just kids and college kids, but there’s some real-ass adults weaved into the crowd too, as if it’s completely normal to do shots with someone’s grandpa. Yet no one seems to find any of it strange. Just like the rest of Cedarville, everyone accepts this as normal when it’s anything but.