Delusion Road (5 page)

Smiling, Richardson clapped his hands, and others in the room joined him. “That was terrific, Bailey. And welcome to Brookdale, Raven.”

“Thanks,” Raven smiled. Turning to her partner, she continued, “Now I have the pleasure of introducing Bailey Holloway …”

Willa allowed her mind to drift. There wasn’t much about Bailey that she didn’t already know. Celia called her trailer trash, but that was harsh. It wasn’t Bailey’s fault that she and
her younger sister and brother all had different fathers, none of whom had stayed around long. Her mother, Francine, worked in the hospital laundry, and Britney once joked how fitting it was that the woman spent her days cleaning sheets: “She’s a total mattress, right?” Willa figured Bailey would spend her whole life in Brookdale like her mother, and Celia had narrowed that forecast further, predicting that, like her mother, Bailey wouldn’t graduate before getting knocked up. She and Britney were even taking bets on the month it would happen.

As Raven continued speaking, Willa grinned again at learning the new guy’s father worked for her dad. That little revelation had taken the wind out of his sails. He’d been a complete asshole up to that point, but he’d pulled his horns in once he found out who she was.

She looked down at the notes she’d made and wondered what she was going to say about him when it was their turn. He hadn’t given her much to go on. One sibling, a younger brother. Both lived with their father. No mention of the mother, although Willa sensed she wasn’t in the picture. Divorced, probably. No surprise there if the dad had to come clear across the country to get a job. Probably as big a loser as his son. Celia once claimed that loser DNA ran in families, and she offered Bailey, Greg, and Russell as proof. Willa had laughed like she always did when the girls said stuff like that, but she’d still felt a twinge of guilt. Bailey wasn’t what you’d call a friend, but she’d always been nice to Willa—and to Celia and Britney, too, for that matter—and she didn’t think Russell and Greg had ever done anything to offend them. But she never reminded them of that, just smiled or chuckled, whatever
the moment called for. Her friends had always been quick to pick up on people’s flaws, and their comments had entertained Willa for years.

Lately, though, their remarks had seemed darker somehow, more cutting than comical, and a couple of times in the past few months Willa had wondered what they said about
her
when she wasn’t around. But both times she’d brushed that thought aside, embarrassed by her disloyalty. Celia and Britney were her best friends.

Willa looked down at the notes she’d written about the new guy and felt a little sheepish about the assumptions she’d made concerning his family. But he’d been so irritating, frustrating her at every turn. Which was why, once she’d finished recording the little information he’d shared, she hadn’t waited for him to ask her questions and began telling him things about herself. He’d just sat there, though, writing down almost nothing, so she’d begun talking about the trip she and her family had taken to Italy just to fill up the time. But his bored expression never changed.

Clapping roused her from her reverie, and she watched as Bailey and Raven sat down. “Who’d like to go next?” asked Richardson.

Willa had no desire to prolong the agony. “We will,” she offered, getting up and walking to the front of the room. She was conscious that hers were the only footsteps she heard, and she turned to see Keegan still in his seat. Embarrassed, she waited along with everyone else as he slowly swung his long legs into the aisle, got up, and came to the front.

“Which of you is going first?” asked Richardson.

Willa opened her mouth to speak, but before she could say a word, Keegan began.

“This is Willa Jaffrey.”

Willa turned, surprised by his sudden eagerness to share. And interested to hear what he had to say.

“I guess most of you here know all about her,” Keegan continued. “For those of you who don’t, what you see is pretty much what you get.”

C
hrist!
If Griff read one more posting about how cool Sonia Martinez’s new car was (if you could even
call
a Nissan Micra a car), he didn’t think he’d be able to keep from putting his fist through his laptop’s display. Why Sonia was Talia’s friend in the first place was beyond him. For one thing, Talia was a hell of a lot smarter—Griff had hacked their school records and found Sonia could barely maintain a C average while Talia consistently pulled off As. For another, their attitudes about guys were worlds apart—Sonia was forever riding the Loser Town Express while Talia still hadn’t started dating again. There was something about her loyalty to a person she hadn’t seen in months that touched a chord in Griff. If only his mother had had some of that loyalty, perhaps things might have turned out differently for her. For both of them.

Griff looked once more at the selfie Sonia had posted that morning of her standing in front of her car, which looked more like a snot-bubble than a vehicle, then closed his laptop in disgust. If he spent another mind-numbing moment on Facebook he might lose the will to live, so he opted to head over to Garfield Park to clear his head. Of course, that meant getting the evil eye from his super on his way out of the building. Griff was pretty sure the
pint-sized prick didn’t like him, hadn’t liked him from the day he’d moved in. At first he thought it was because he towered over the runt, making him physically uncomfortable just by standing next to him. But Griff knew now that it was more than his size putting the guy off. He could tell by the way he studied Griff when he thought Griff’s attention was elsewhere, like when he was getting his mail from his box in the lobby and the super was polishing the floor. Or when Griff was waiting on the sidewalk for a cab and the super was Windexing the glass in the entry. He could always feel the guy’s eyes on him, like he was trying to peer inside Griff’s head, trying to work out his story.

On the lease he’d signed, Griff had put down his employer as Southside Developers, a construction company owned by Morozov. Griff guessed the super was surprised by the hours he appeared to work—or, more to the point,
not
work. For a guy in construction, Griff spent a lot of time in his apartment. More than once during the middle of the day, he’d walked under the lobby’s surveillance camera and imagined the super on the other end of that electronic feed recording the date and time in a notebook. Paranoid? Probably, but in Griff’s line of work, paranoia wasn’t a bad thing.

Stretching, Griff got up and walked to the sliding door leading to his balcony and stepped outside. As usual, that christly wind off Lake Michigan pummelled him, making his shirt flap like a flag. Ads for apartments in his building always played up their water views, but that wasn’t what had drawn him to rent there—it was the five-minute walk to the CTA’s Green Line, which made it easy getting to Garfield Park, where he often spent his days when he wasn’t in the middle of a job for Morozov.
Sometimes he went early in the morning and returned home late in the afternoon to imitate a workday routine, although that obviously hadn’t convinced the super. Mostly, though, he went because he loved the place. Located on the West Side, Garfield Park was 184 acres of some of the most beautiful flower gardens in the Midwest.

Griff’s fondness for flowers certainly hadn’t come from his mother—her interest in plants had been limited to those she could smoke. Nor had it come from the many “uncles” who’d drifted into and out of their lives. Griff had found his way to flowers via Clovis Lafayette, a retired hardware salesman originally from Louisiana who owned an Airstream a few lanes over from the leaky double-wide his mother rented in Camelot Trailer Park out on Sweet Home Cutoff.

When Griff was in ninth grade, he’d been suspended for bullying and fighting so many times that, by spring, the school’s administration recommended he stay home for the rest of the year. Griff’s mother had been livid, screaming at him that no good-for-nothing asshole son of hers was going to freeload off her all day, and she made him go door-to-door asking neighbours if they had any chores they wanted help with. He and his mom had been living in their trailer on Lancelot Way for only a few weeks, having been evicted from their last place in Little Rock (his mother always seemed genuinely surprised when landlords expected to be paid their rent on time), and during those weeks Griff hadn’t done more than nod to their neighbours. Most of them were a lot older than his mother and, judging from the condition of their trailers, no better off than Marsha and Griff Barnett.

Clovis Lafayette, however, seemed the exception. Yeah, he was
old, but his lot on Guinevere Lane was way nicer than most of the others in Camelot. Clovis was forever washing the dust off the exterior of his aging Land Yacht, and he’d covered almost every available square inch of his property with flowers. And not just your standard petunias and impatiens; Clovis’s flowers looked like the kinds Griff had seen in the pages of the old
National Geographic
s he’d flipped through while he sat in his school’s detention room.

During his trek through Camelot half-heartedly looking for work, Griff wasn’t surprised to come up empty-handed. People who lived hand-to-mouth on disability and welfare cheques didn’t have a lot of extra cash for hiring help, but Clovis Lafayette had once again been the exception. He’d just had several bags of fertilizer and potting soil delivered to him from a garden centre in Little Rock, and Clovis said he’d pay Griff ten bucks to lug the bags to where he needed them and then spread the stuff around. That ended up being the first of many such jobs Griff did for Clovis that spring and, in the process, Griff learned a lot about flowers. Later, when he fell in with Morozov, he’d come to realize how much of that learning applied to his current line of work. For one thing, offing targets was a lot like thinning out plants that had outlived their usefulness or posed problems for those that remained. Like the guy he’d been hunting for months now.

A vigorous gust carrying dirt from the street below scoured Griff’s face, and he held up a hand to deflect it. He’d always hated getting dirt in his eyes, even more so after his last moments with Clovis Lafayette. For weeks after Griff buried him in the woods behind the dumpster on Roundtable Road, he couldn’t shake from his memory the sight of Clovis’s open eyes filling up with soil.

C
arrying a tray with a carton of milk, two apples, and a serving of something labelled pasta but resembling afterbirth, Keegan scanned the tables looking for the nearest empty seat to park his butt. Before today, he’d never minded his above-average height but, towering over a lot of the people around him now, he felt like there was a neon sign over his head flashing Loser.

“Keegan!”

He turned toward a hand waving at him from the far side of the cafeteria and saw Raven sitting with Bailey Something and two guys, all four looking in his direction. Relief washed over him and he wove his way toward the group. Raven slid sideways to make room for him on the bench attached to a long table that was one of twenty others in the large, noisy space. Setting down his tray, he awkwardly folded his long legs into the narrow opening between the bench and the table.

“You remember Bailey and Greg from English class,” said Raven when he was settled.

Keegan nodded. He’d felt sorry for Greg when he got up to introduce Wynn d’Entremont. Standing beside a guy who could model for Abercrombie & Fitch only emphasized Greg’s skinny build and acne-riddled face, which probably explained
why he’d hurried through a list of d’Entremont’s many awards and accomplishments.

“This is Russell,” Raven continued, gesturing toward a short, round guy on the opposite side of the table who occupied far more than his share of the bench seat. He wore a sweatshirt with lettering on it that Keegan assumed was a school motto until he read it:
My cereal bowl comes with a lifeguard.
“Russell,” said Raven, “meet Keegan.”

“Hey, Keegan,” said Russell. “I see you got the pasta. Brave guy.”

Checking out their trays, Keegan could see that none of them had chosen that dish. “Bad?” he asked.

“It’s not so much the taste as the consistency,” said Greg. “It’s like tapioca with an attitude.”

“I don’t think it ever digests,” added Bailey. “It’ll kinda sit at the bottom of your stomach for the next day or so and then reappear in pretty much the same form it is now.”

“I have my suspicions,” offered Russell, “that the janitors use it as crack fill whenever some Neanderthal decides to put his fist through a wall.”

“That happen much?” asked Keegan.

“Depends on how often they serve the pasta,” Russell replied.

Keegan laughed and pushed the offending plate away, taking a bite of one of his apples and enjoying the normalcy of the moment before turning to Raven and Bailey. “Hey, great introductions,” he said. “Tough first act to follow.”

“Thanks,” said Raven. “I’m glad Richardson had us do them. It was a great way to get to know people on the first day.” She flashed a smile at Bailey, who returned it warmly.

“That’s really something about your brother’s carving,” Keegan said to Raven. “And Bailey, that stuff about the writing contest was impressive.”

Bailey’s face turned pink. “Raven’s the first person I told about it. She asked so many great questions it just slipped out.”

“Writing contest?” asked Russell.

“Yeah,” said Greg, and there was no mistaking the enthusiasm in his voice, “she placed second in this year’s Atlantic Writing Competition.”

“Jeez, Bailey, that’s great!” exclaimed Russell.

The pink in her face deepening, Bailey waved away the compliment. “It was just the poetry category, and I don’t imagine too many people entered.”

“
Nuh
-uh,” said Greg, shaking his head and tapping his phone in his shirt pocket. “The minute Raven told us, I checked it out online. There were nearly three hundred entries, Bailey. Coming in second is pretty terrific.” Keegan could see Greg’s face redden in splotches, his acne emphasizing his own embarrassment, and he wondered if Bailey knew the guy was crushing on her.