Children of Chicago

by Cynthia Pelayo

  It had been a long time since Lauren had seen the ghost of Marie, and now that Marie had returned to haunt her, Lauren knew the children of this city were not safe.

  It was 8:02 a.m. Their session was over, but she needed a moment to process this flash of heat, this sinking, sickening feeling. Graveyard dirt was shifting and turning, and Marie was clawing at the inside of her casket, because she wanted out.

  “I’ll be thinking of you this week. I hope your father’s funeral goes smoothly. I know he would be very proud of you,” Stephanie said as she stood up and escorted Lauren to the exit. “It may be good for you to write some of this down. If you get to a place you don’t remember, that’s fine. Just leave it and write what you do know, what you do feel, and of course what you remember. I think it will be helpful for you.”

  Lauren had been told that in the past, to sit down in a quiet place and write, to journal, to write letters to people who were no longer active in her life. Perhaps some people thought of it as a sort of exorcism, closing the book on those who have tormented you by writing it all down. She had a bin in her house full of half-started notebooks. Each time she sat down to start another journal she grew frustrated, angry and panicked. Too afraid to disturb the past and conjure evil with her words.

  She rode the elevator down and sat for some time in her car, alone there in the parking lot. The sun shone bright, and the thin layer of snow from just an hour ago was melting. Birds fluttered above, singing their warning song, another day, another murder lay ahead.

  Lauren turned on the car, but before she pressed the radio button music blared through the speakers, a whining, clanging beat erupted that then dropped into a sparkling flute. She turned the dial, but the music level would not reduce. The loud, harsh beats returned, stinging her ears and then something tapped on the glass beside her, and the music stopped. Lauren shook her head, as if telling herself she would not look.

  She knew what that music called.

  Another tap on the window, and then a pound.

  The sound of glass cracking.

  Without moving, Lauren turned her eyes to the passenger side window. Someone’s face pressed against the glass, a twisted grin spread across their mouth. Strands of dark wet dripping hair plastered against the surface. A palm faced her, pressing further and further into the cracked glass, cutting into pale, blue skin; black blood dripping down.

  Lauren slammed on the gas and pulled out of the parking lot, racing down the residential street, not turning to look until she hit a major intersection, State Street and Congress Parkway. Her heart beat wildly inside of her, she could feel her pulse racing in her neck. At the red light she looked at her cracked passenger side window. It was smudged with dirt, water, and blood.

  Lauren knew what this was. This was a warning, and a call.

  Her thoughts raced back to that night long ago. To the park, those gnarled, winding trees, a forest within a city—the feeling of the damp grass beneath her feet. The rain pelting down on her face. A long-forgotten moon above, and the man in the black suit watching over her.

  She found herself wheezing, trying to find her breath.

  She hit the gas once more, driving in the direction of the police station. Her hands trembled on the steering wheel. She had to get in touch with Jordan because maybe he did not know it, but he was in danger. If he knew something about that spray-painted name, about its meaning or its maker, he had to tell her now.

  Otherwise, it was unlikely he would live through the week.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Hey, Evie!” Daniel arrived out of breath at the bus stop, holding onto the strap of his backpack hanging from his left shoulder. “How’d you do on your paper?”

  Evie tucked a strand of dark brown hair behind her ears. Her earbuds dangled in her other hand. She wondered if it would be too rude to shove them in her ears with someone talking to her, especially given that someone was Daniel. She had been trying to avoid this meeting at the bus stop for the past few weeks.

  “Good, I guess.” She forced a smile and then wrapped the earbuds around her hand. She looked down the street searching for the bus, hoping and willing it to arrive quickly. Daniel mimicked her moves, standing behind her shoulder and looking down the street for a bus en route.

  “It’s late,” she said to herself and dug in her back pocket and pulled out her cell phone. She tapped on the black screen, waking it to her screensaver, and the glittering skyline at dusk appeared; black and silver pillars shooting into the heavens, like the towers of a magical castle. The Chicago Transit Authority bus tracking app told her the bus would be there in four minutes; four long minutes of standing outside on the corner, being forced to speak with Daniel.

  “Oh, yeah. My paper was good too,” Daniel offered. “How are your parents?”

  “Good,” she said, hoping he would not continue, but he did anyway.

  “It must be so sad to be alone all of the time. My parents still think it sucks your parents are never there. I mean, it’s like you live on your own practically.”

  Evie had known Daniel since kindergarten. They both attended the same Catholic elementary school, St. Sylvester in Palmer Square, a pocket neighborhood within the greater Logan Square community, surrounded by large homes built in the early 1900s along a green space once a popular raceway for carriage drivers. The plain park was gone, the upgrade included a running track that circled around the edges, and a playground inspired by the Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. Evie had spent a lot of time at the children’s park of Palmer Square before starting her freshman year at DePaul College Prep. Sometimes she would spend time walking the trail that linked each of the four sections of the children’s park, thinking of the Velveteen Rabbit, how he was the wisest and oldest toy in the nursery, loved so much by his little boy, and then how one day after he was no longer of use to the boy a fairy took him into the forest and made him a real rabbit. Forests in fairy tales held that strange sort of magic, and while there were no forests nearby there were the city parks, and their trees, and within these parks Evie could pretend that real magic lived.

  At the beginning of each school year when the teacher asked the class if they knew anyone Daniel was always first to raise his hand and say that he and Evie had grown up together. For years, he and his family had lived next door in a bungalow. Growing up, Evie’s dad would often give Daniel a ride to school in the morning if both his parents were busy. Daniel moved out of the neighborhood beginning of summer. Evie was not sure why, but she suspected the increase in crime in their neighborhood was a factor.

  One evening late summer, before the start of the school year there was some shouting outside of their window. Evie’s dad had gotten up from the dining room, a glass of water still in his hand. He made his way towards the large picture window. Evie’s mother warned that it was not a safe idea. Maybe it was something about her mother’s intuition that kicked on because right then they heard the blasts, one, two, three. Her father released his hold. Bits of glass and ice scattered across their hardwood floor.

  That sound of gunfire would go on to repeat itself several times throughout the summer. Each time it was as if the shots drew closer, death searching for their front steps. Her father installed a security camera at their front and back doors, followed by an alarm system in hopes of deterring people from gathering near their house. The cameras did not slow the action outside.

  It was mere days before she was to start high school that her parents decided to change where she would attend. One evening, while her father was watching the news in the living room and she was seated in the nearby dining room finishing dinner, the image on the television screen that appeared was that of the side doors to her new high school. The news anchor stood in front of a gray SUV parked on the curb. A nineteen-year-old woman had shot and killed a fifteen-year-old boy for bullying her brother, the reporter said into the camera. A teenager killing another teenager—children killing children, the reporter stressed.
/>   Evie’s dad had muted the television and turned to face her. “How do you feel about Catholic School?”

  She did not care. They were not Catholic. They were not anything. DePaul College Prep was a good school, affiliated with the nearby Chicago university of the same name. Attending Catholic School was no guarantee that she would be immune from Chicago’s violence. Still, it made her parents feel like they were doing something to protect her.

  The first day of school she ran into Daniel in the hallway. His family had moved to the safer North Center neighborhood, trading in their historic red brick bungalow whose design was plucked from a Sears & Roebuck catalogue in the 1920s by his great-grandfather, for a small, newly-constructed condo. They traded history for comfort, to be close to their jobs and Daniel to be close to his school, and for perceived safety. Yet, no part of this city was really safe from violence.

  “Evie!” He had stepped towards her, arms outstretched on that first day seeing each other again at the beginning of the school year. Evie took a step back and coughed. A cold, she warned, to avoid his hug.

  He smiled awkwardly and patted her on her back. “I’m happy to see you.”

  When he had asked if he could look at her schedule, Daniel gave a thumbs up when he saw that they shared English at the end of the school day. That would come to be a significant inconvenience as both of them rushed to the bus after class. She learned to get to the bus stop faster to avoid him, but today that did not work.

  Daniel did not mean to her as much as she meant to him. Perhaps she offered him some level of comfort, some aspect of familiarity in an unfamiliar place. To her, he was just something that always seemed to be there, like a piece of furniture.

  Now, standing next to him, four minutes seemed an eternity.

  “I wrote about comics...” He said.

  When she did not offer anything else, he clarified. “For my paper on fairy tales...”

  She looked down at the app. The bus was still no closer.

  They were stuck there waiting, and so she asked: “Comics, like, what kind of comics?”

  “I mentioned The Sandman,” he bounced on the balls of his feet. “That’s probably one of the best. The main character in it is called Dream. He’s one of the seven Endless. The other Endless are,” he rattled them off quickly: “Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, and Delirium. It gets a little complicated there but...”

  “What’s the actual story about?” She rolled her eyes.

  “How Dream,” he scratched his head “learns change is inevitable.”

  Evie looked down the street once more, searching for the bus. She tightened the earbud cord around her wrist, her flesh turning pink. She needed to get home. “Things don’t change. They repeat themselves differently.”

  Daniel again made as if he were looking for the bus, but Evie knew he was just copying her.

  “What did you write about?” he asked.

  “Fairy tales. People don’t realize there are two main elements to fairy tales, transmission and significance. Some things just keep coming up over and over again. That’s transmission. People think life changes, and it does in a way, but so much keeps repeating itself. A variation of the original thing.”

  Daniel’s face was blank.

  Evie sighed. “Think of the way these stories used to be told, ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ or ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears,’ she said. “First, these stories were shared by mouth. Maybe around a campfire told to kids at night, and then in books. Now they’re on the internet. People are still telling those same stories, but today they’re told differently. Then there’s significance, and that’s really about the meaning these stories hold for people. Sometimes what becomes important to people about fairy tales is not the actual fairy tale, but the representation of that fairy tale. Like, the Disney cartoon character Cinderella, it’s not the actual fairy tale that is important to most people, but Cinderella herself, the promise she represents that happily ever after is possible. Or, it might not be the actual stories in a book that are important to someone, but the physical book because that’s the book that was read to them by their parent. So, it’s the thing that represents the story that becomes important, sometimes.”

  Evie stopped, sure he was lost.

  “Comics are kinda like fairy tales, in a way,” he said.

  “How?”

  “Mr. Sylvan said that fairy tales sometimes have supernatural elements, and their characters go through a change. You see that in comics all the time.”

  She nodded in silence and then dug her hands in her pockets. She felt the cord of her headphones and regretted again not putting them on. Talking to people, trying to hold a conversation and fake interest was exhausting. No matter how well she knew someone, or how long she had known them, she felt uncomfortable speaking. It made her feel like she was being forced to exist outside of her skin by socializing with people. Right now, all she wanted was to be in her room, even though she was talking about her favorite subject in the world.

  “What’s your favorite fairy tale?” He asked, struggling to keep the conversation going.

  “Guess I don’t have one.” This was a lie, but Evie did not want to share something so special with anyone. Her favorite fairy tale was all hers to know and no one else. Most of her favorites came from a book her mother had given her, Grimm’s Grimmest. The cover was beautiful, a red jacket, with the word Grimm’s in gold and Grimmest in old English lowercase and in red. It was the illustrations at the beginning of each of the stories that gave a glimpse into the terror of the tale that lay within. Stories like “The Robber Bridegroom,” “The Crows,” “The Willful Child,” and “The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn How to Shudder.” These stories were not about singing fish and dancing snowmen. These stories were brutal and shocking, and something about that made them feel much more real to her, much more possible to her than “The Frog Prince.” These were tales told to children, but their warning was apparent; there were witches who lived in cabins who lured children to roast them for dinner, there were men who kept mangled corpses of their former brides in locked chambers, monsters who lurked in forests, and mothers and fathers who abandoned their children to worldly and other-worldly dangers. And like the beautiful words she had memorized from “The Juniper Tree,” my mother she killed me, my father he ate me, Evie believed something horrible lived and breathed, tucked within the pages, of the most magical of children’s tales.

  “Which did you mention in your paper?”

  “‘Snow White’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ Those aren’t my favorites though.”

  “Why?”

  She hesitated then reluctantly offered. “I like the darker ones.”

  The bus finally approached.

  “There are some pretty messed up ones,” he said to her surprise.

  “Like?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “What Mr. Sylvan said today, about the Pied Piper,” he laughed once. “That was kinda messed up if you think about it.”

  “What? About that spray paint across the doors this morning? Pay the Piper? What idiot even wastes their time coming to school early in the morning before everyone arrives to do that? I mean, it must have been someone taking Mr. Sylvan’s class, because that’s just a weird coincidence.”

  “No, I didn’t mean the spray paint, but yeah, that was dumb. I was talking about the actual story we read in class, about him, the Pied Piper. It’s messed up, isn’t it?”

  She shrugged. “It’s a story about a guy who exterminates rats.”

  “Yeah, but then he took those kids away when the town’s people didn’t pay him for exterminating the rats,” he said. “Now, that’s messed up.”

  The bus stopped in front of them. In the reflection of the glass, Evie saw her, a girl in a red jacket and blue jeans, a chunk of her neck gaping open, exposing bloodied, tangled tissue and bone. When the girl opened her mouth wide to say something, blood spurting from the wound, the bus
door slid open. Evie spun around. A boy and a girl in DePaul College Prep uniforms, dark blue Polos, her in a pleated khaki skirt above the knee, and him in khaki slacks and a black belt, rushed past them. The vision in the red jacket disappeared.

  The girl with the khaki skirt rubbed her pink and puffed eyes as she scanned her bus card. Her cheeks were streaked with tears. She lowered the hood of her jacket and ran her fingers through cropped blonde hair.

  “He probably just killed all those kids,” Daniel said from behind Evie as they boarded the bus.

  “Funny how that never registered before,” Evie said, scanning her card. “You always read how the kids followed him, but I never thought about what happened after. I guess you’re right. The insinuation is there. He killed those kids.”

  Evie looked down the aisle of the bus, packed with people standing, scrolling through their mobile devices, asleep or staring outside of the window. There were practically no empty seats left.

  “Hey,” a small voice called to her right. It was the girl with the short blonde hair. She was wiping her eyes with the palms of her hands. “You can sit here if you want?” She motioned to the empty seat beside her.

  More people boarded, pushing Daniel towards the rear of the bus where he was bunched in with other standing passengers.

  Evie took a deep breath. As she sat down, she could feel the tension release from her jaw and shoulders. She pulled out a book from her bag, opened it, and tried to focus on the words on the page. It was difficult to concentrate, but something about the black letters across the page gave her comfort. These stories had been here long before her and would continue to be here long after she was gone. The bus began to move, and she heard the girl laugh as the boy next to her leaned in and whispered something into her ear.