Rachel Caine: Glass Houses

Fine, she thought, and snapped her phone shut, then open again to dial a cab.

Seven sixteen Lot Street. Gone with the Wind meets The Munsters. Right.

Maybe they’d at least feel sorry enough for her to put her up for one lousy night.

The cabbie—she figured he was just about the only cabdriver in Morganville, which apart from the campus at TPU on the edge of town had only about ten thousand people in it—took an hour to show up. Claire hadn’t been in a car in six weeks, since her parents had driven her into town. She hadn’t been much beyond a block of the campus, either, and then just to buy used books for class.

“You meeting someone?” the cabbie asked. She was staring out the window at the storefronts: used-clothing shops, used-book shops, computer stores, stores that sold nothing but wooden Greek letters. All catering to the college.

“No,” she said. “Why?”

The cabbie shrugged. “Usually you kids are meeting up with friends. If you’re looking for a good time—”

She shivered. “I’m not. I’m—yes, I’m meeting some people. If you could hurry, please…?”

He grunted and took a right turn, and the cab went from Collegetown to Creepytown in one block flat. She couldn’t define how it happened exactly—the buildings were pretty much the same, but they looked dim and old, and the few people moving on the streets had their heads down and were walking fast. Even when people were walking in twos or threes, they weren’t chatting. When the cab passed, people looked up, then down again, as if they’d been looking for another kind of car.

A little girl was walking with her hand in her mother’s, and as the cab stopped for a light, the girl waved, just a little. Claire waved back.

The girl’s mother looked up, alarmed, and hustled her kid away into the black mouth of a store that sold used electronics. Wow, Claire thought. Do I look that scary? Maybe she did. Or maybe Morganville was just ultracareful of its kids.

Funny, now that she thought about it, there was something missing in this town. Signs. She’d seen them all her life stapled to telephone poles…advertisements for lost dogs, missing kids or adults.

Nothing here. Nothing.

“Lot Street,” the cabbie announced, and squealed to a stop. “Ten fifty.”

For a five-minute ride? Claire thought, amazed, but she paid up. She thought about shooting him the finger as he drove away, but he looked kind of dangerous, and besides, she really wasn’t the kind of girl who did that sort of thing. Usually. It was a bad day, though.

She hoisted her backpack again, hit a bruise on her shoulder, and nearly dropped the weight on her foot. Tears stung at her eyes. All of a sudden she felt tired and shaky again, scared…. At least on campus she’d kind of been on relatively familiar ground, but out here in town it was like being a stranger, all over again.

Morganville was brown. Burned brown by the sun, beaten down by wind and weather. Hot summer was starting to give way to hot autumn, and the leaves on the trees—what trees there were—looked gray-edged and dry, and they rattled like paper in the wind. West Lot Street was near what passed for the downtown district in town, probably an old residential neighborhood. Nothing special about the homes that she could see…ranch houses, most of them with peeling, faded paint.

She counted house numbers, and realized she was standing in front of 716. She turned and looked behind her, and gasped, because whoever the guy had been on the phone, he’d been dead-on right in his description. Seven sixteen looked like a movie set, something straight out of the Civil War. Big graying columns. A wide front porch. Two stories of windows.

The place was huge. Well, not huge —but bigger than Claire had imagined. Like, big enough to be a frat house, and probably perfectly suited to it. She could just imagine Greek letters over the door.

It looked deserted, but to be fair every house on the block looked deserted. Late afternoon, nobody home from work yet. A few cars glittered in the white-hot sunshine, finish softened by a layer of dirt. No cars in front of 716, though.

This was such a bad idea, she thought, and there were those tears again, bubbling up along with panic. What was she going to do? Walk up to the door and beg to be a roommate? How lame-ass was that? They’d think she was pathetic at best, a head case at worst. No, it had been a dumb idea to even blow the money on cab fare.

It was hot, and she was tired and she hurt and she had homework due, and no place to sleep, and all of a sudden, it was just too much.

Claire dropped her backpack, buried her bruised face in both hands, and just started sobbing like a baby. Crybaby freak, she imagined Monica saying, but that just made her sob harder, and all of a sudden the idea of going home, going home to Mom and Dad and the room she knew they’d kept open for her, seemed better, better than anything out here in the scary, crazy world….

“Hey,” a girl’s voice said, and someone touched her on the elbow. “Hey, are you okay?”

Claire yelped and jumped, landed hard on her strained ankle, and nearly toppled over. The girl who’d scared her reached out and grabbed her arm to steady her, looking genuinely scared herself. “I’m sorry! God, I’m such a klutz. Look, are you okay?”

The girl wasn’t Monica, or Jen, or Gina, or anybody else she’d seen around the campus at TPU; this girl was way Goth. Not in a bad way—she didn’t have the sulky I’m-so-not-cool-I’m-cool attitude of most of the Goths Claire had known in school—but the dyed-black, shag-cut hair, the pale makeup, the heavy eyeliner and mascara, the red-and-black-striped tights and clunky black shoes and black pleated miniskirt…very definitely a fan of the dark side.

“My name’s Eve,” the girl said, and smiled. It was a sweet, funny kind of smile, something that invited Claire to share in a private joke. “Yeah, my parents really named me that, go figure. It’s like they knew how I’d turn out.” Her smile faded, and she took a good look at Claire’s face. “Wow. Jeez, nice black eye. Who hit you?”

“Nobody.” Claire said it instantly, without even thinking why, although she knew in her bones that Goth Eve was in no way bestest friends with preppy Monica. “I had an accident.”

“Yeah,” Eve agreed softly. “I used to have those kinds of accidents, falling into fists and stuff. Like I said, I’m a klutz. You okay? You need a doctor or something? I can drive you if you want.”

She gestured to the street next to them, and Claire realized that while she’d been sobbing her eyes out, an ancient beater of a black Cadillac—complete with tail fins—had been docked at the curb. There was a cheery-looking skull dangling from the rearview mirror, and Claire had no doubt that the back bumper would be plastered with stickers for emo bands nobody had ever heard of.

She liked Eve already. “No,” she said, and swiped at her eyes angrily with the back of her hand. “I, uh—look, I’m sorry. It’s been a really awful day. I was coming to ask about the room, but—”

“Right, the room!” Eve snapped her fingers, as if she’d forgotten all about it, and jumped up and down two or three times in excitement. “Great! I’m just home for break—I work over at Common Grounds, you know, the coffee shop? — and Michael won’t be up for a while yet, but you can come in and see the house if you want. I don’t know if Shane’s around, but—”

“I don’t know if I should—”

“You should. You totally should.” Eve rolled her eyes. “You wouldn’t believe the losers we see trying to get in the door. I mean, seriously. Freaks. You’re the first normal one I’ve seen so far. Michael would kick my ass if I let you get away without at least trying a sales pitch.”