A particularly joyful scream, muffled by the glass window, found its way inside. The little girl couldn’t stand it anymore. She glanced down the hallway. It was free and clear of teachers, so she drew her knees into her chest, planted her saddles shoes on her straight-backed chair, and rose to her full height. Her fingertips found the windowsill, but the view was far beyond her reach, even if she hopped up and down on her tiptoes. She squeezed her eyes shut, concentrating, until she felt herself rising up. Her polished shoes left the chair. She grinned, satisfied, as her chin cleared the windowsill. She hovered there, resting her arms on the marble ledge, and watched the other students gambol about in the schoolyard.
The door to the headmistress’s office opened. The little girl had spent so much time in this hallway that the creak of those brass hinges was as familiar to her as her own voice. She dropped from the window, wincing when the thud of her shoes against the wooden chair echoed down the long hallway. As she clambered into a seated position, her hands folded neatly in the lap of her plaid skirt, the headmistress’s secretary emerged from the office. She, too, was familiar to the fourth grader. Though strict and cold toward other students, the thin young woman often took pity on this little girl. For good reason.
“Kennedy? We’re ready for you now.”
Kennedy’s blood ran cold. She tried to tug the sleeves of her wool sweater down to cover her frigid fingers, but she had outgrown the garment a month before. No one had bothered to buy her a new one. As the secretary held the door open for Kennedy, the older woman looked down at her. Kennedy knew that look, the one with the furrowed brow, the worried eyes, and the pursed lips. This wasn’t good, and Kennedy shivered as another chill washed over her.
The secretary patted Kennedy’s bony shoulder. “It’ll be okay, dear.”
Kennedy said nothing. She often had nothing to say in situations like these. She straightened her shoulders as she stumbled into the headmistress’s office. The room itself was overbearing. A magnificent marble desk dominated most of the floor, complete with the Saint Anne’s seal pressed into the front with gold filigree as though it merited the same notoriety as that of the president’s. The ceiling was higher here than in any other part of the school, including the chapel. The room soared on forever, making the students who frequented it feel impossibly small. Then again, this was probably the original intention. The headmistress herself lounged in the great leather chair behind the marble desk. Her brass nameplate read Headmistress Kathleen Queller. She was a bear of a woman, not overweight but broad in every way and a straight line from head to toe. To other children, her boxy unflappable presence was off-putting, but Kennedy was different.
Because for all the room’s overwhelming elegance and all the headmistress’s subtle intimidation, there was nothing that frightened Kennedy more than the lissome woman sitting in the lesser chair opposite the marble desk. She was tall and lean—so much so that the muscled lines of her calves were visible through her stockings—with flowing blonde hair and sharp green eyes. It was not her rigid posture or unequivocal beauty that stunned Kennedy, but the woman’s mere presence. They were not meant to coexist—this statuesque being and the disreputable child—and yet the universe played a cruel joke once again to place such opposing forces in the same room together.
Though the woman turned to tip her chin in the child’s general direction, lifting a moisturized manicured hand to rest over the back of the chair, her penetrating gaze did not settle directly on Kennedy. She looked through the little girl rather than at her, a habit that made Kennedy all the more uncomfortable. Kennedy swallowed hard as the secretary led her to the other open chair, but before she could settle against the cold leather, the woman spoke in a high, clear tone.
“Again, Kennedy?”
The secretary slipped out of the room, as though she sensed the oncoming storm and knew there was no escape. She gave Kennedy one lingering apologetic look and excused herself, leaving the little girl to confront her fate alone.
“I knew better this time around,” the woman went on, surveying Kennedy’s short sleeves with an explicit air of condescension, “than to buy you a new uniform. Why bother when I knew you wouldn’t make it to the end of the semester?”
If Kennedy’s heart could sink lower, it did. She had tried. Really, she had. Saint Anne’s was severe, but it was across state lines from the house Kennedy had grown up in. The house that never felt like a home. The house where this woman resided.
“Do you know how long it takes to get here?” the woman asked of Kennedy. “Four hours. Four hours in the backseat of a stuffy car with an incompetent driver because your headmistress required a face-to-face meeting with one of your legal guardians. Again. What do you have to say for yourself?”
Kennedy remained silent. So many times had they practiced this script that Kennedy had refined her role in their egregious real-life play. It was easier to stay quiet, she learned. To shrink into the background. To disappear in the depths of the leather chair far too big for her in an attempt to escape those acidic green eyes boring into her. When it became obvious that neither Kennedy nor the woman planned on breaking the icy silence, the headmistress cleared her throat.
“Mrs. McGrath, I’m afraid we have no other options to consider,” Headmistress Queller said. “If it was just a matter of poor behavior, we would have notified you and addressed the situation ourselves, as we have in the past. Unfortunately, we cannot condone acts such as these when they put our other students in immediate danger. Your daughter—”
“Stepdaughter,” the woman corrected.
The headmistress bowed her head. “My apologies. Your stepdaughter continues to challenge our students and staff. Her expulsion was imminent from day one. Forgive me for not recognizing that earlier.”
“I could’ve told you that,” the woman snapped. “But I was rather hoping the most expensive prep school in the Northeast might actually have an effect on her considering how much we pay for her to attend.”
“Again, Mrs. McGrath. I apologize. Saint Anne’s reputation precedes us, but we cannot excuse a student for setting a dormitory on fire.”
Kennedy nervously threaded her fingers through her hair, pulling it out of its unforgiving braid in thick clumps. The woman smacked her hand.
“Stop that,” she ordered. “As if you aren’t slovenly enough already. What’s your excuse this time, Kennedy? How did you manage to burn down an entire wing of the school?”
She had rehearsed her next line over and over. It never satisfied, no matter what situation she applied it to. In every instance of misbehavior, Kennedy found herself unlucky. When she was five, she melted the sole of a teacher’s shoe to the floor, rooting him in place. A year later, burn marks appeared on a bullying little boy that had called Kennedy a freak. Just last week, Saint Anne’s cook scolded Kennedy for slipping into the kitchen and turning the stove on to high heat, charring the food, but Kennedy had never set foot in the kitchen.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Kennedy mumbled.
She braced herself for the blast, but there was no explosion of anger from the woman beside her. Her rage manifested in a slow seethe instead, boiling within her, and though from another’s perspective, she might have appeared calm and collected, Kennedy knew better. Beyond the walls of Saint Anne’s, she was in for a world of trouble.
“It wasn’t your fault,” the woman repeated dangerously.
“Mrs. McGrath,” Headmistress Queller interrupted. “Far be it from me to suggest how you raise your children, but I think Kennedy would benefit from a different type of institution. Say, one with a mental health ward.”
“Thank you, Headmistress,” the woman said. She rose from her seat like a wisp of smoke. “I’ll take your advice into account.” She angled a finger in Kennedy’s direction. “You. Let’s go. Now.”
Kennedy didn’t dare to dawdle. She slid off her chair and hurried past the woman, but Mrs. McGrath seized Kennedy by the back of her neck to stop her from running off. Her
long fingers were cold, and her sharp polished nails dug into the skin of Kennedy’s neck. As she guided the girl out of the office, she leaned down and hissed a chilling sentence into Kennedy’s ear.
“I’m not done with you.”
“Goodbye, Kennedy,” Headmistress Queller called through the open door. “Good luck, Mrs. McGrath.” As the dichotomous pair disappeared, the headmistress breathed a sigh of relief, slumped in her chair, and added in an undertone, “And good riddance to the both of you.”
Twenty-Two Years Later
This. Could not. Be happening.
I stared close-mouthed at my manager. His words went in one ear and out the other. I’d heard the spiel before. Multiple times. Countless times. I’d lost track of how many times I’d been on this side of this specific conversation. Nothing ever changed, but with every new job, I harbored hope that this one, maybe this one, might stick.
All I did was make copies.
That was it. That was my title. Professional copy-maker. Boy, oh boy. Wasn’t I gem of an employee? Wasn’t I a stunning contribution to society? This company would crumble without me, an indispensable cog in the machine.
Or not.
I walked out of my manager’s office before his lips could mouth the word “fired.” It wasn’t worth it. There was no point in pretending to be polite. I abandoned any patience long ago, and I wouldn’t waste my time listening to another higher-up blathering on about things that, to my knowledge but apparently no one else’s, were beyond my control. The copy machine exploded. So what? No one could prove that it was my fault. I just happened to be the only one in the room at that time. The security footage just happened to show me fiddling with the machine and evacuating the room mere seconds before it burst into flame and showered the entire mail shelf with melted plastic. That didn’t mean anything.
I replaced the paper. I didn’t plant a bomb.
Nevertheless, I had no explanation as to why the copy machine spontaneously morphed into an incendiary device. By now, I should have been used to my unstoppable string of bad luck. It was something I’d been dealing with since I was born. Set a dorm room on fire? Expelled. Blow up a copy machine? Fired. I had no idea why poor karma followed me wherever I went, but at this point, I was beyond sick of the inconvenience. There were things you couldn’t do when bad luck dogged you like a slow-burning plague. Like finish college or hold a full-time job or live in an apartment complex that wasn’t home to a motley collection of meth addicts. Every relationship was strained. Every moment was sabotaged. I was wearing thin, as if someone used a sharp stick to poke holes in the fabric of my life. There were only so many times I could pick myself off the ground. I kept wondering when my breaking point was going to sneak up and smack me in the face.
The day wasn’t through with me yet. I walked back to my current apartment complex—my most recent attempt at owning a vehicle ended in a fiery inferno two weeks after I’d purchased the hunk of junk—to discover my meager assortment of belongings in the landing outside my doorway. Pasted to the door was an eviction notice.
“Nooooo,” I moaned, peeling the notice off. The block red letters taunted me. I banged my forehead against the rough wall of the corridor, wishing for someone to come along and put me out of my misery. The door opposite mine swung open, and I stifled a groan as my neighbor emerged. This was not what I had in mind.
“Ken, Ken, Ken,” said a coarse but chipper chav accent.
I held up a finger. “Not now, Chad.”
Chad, regrettably, was not the best of listeners. In the month that I’d lived there, he had hit on me fifty-three times. I counted. I kept a tally on a whiteboard in my kitchen. A whiteboard that now leaned against the complex wall, displaying “Chad the Lad Disappointment Count” in thick black marker for all to see.
“Oi, gorgeous, what chu doin’ with all ya stuff in the hallway?”
I shoved the eviction notice in his face. He studied it for longer than it should’ve taken to read the two short words, squinting at the red letters before handing it back to me.
“Unlucky, love. Unlucky. Chu know what makes me feel better in times like these?”
I grit my teeth. “What, Chad?”
“A little love, love.”
He gyrated his hips in my direction.
I hoisted the whiteboard up from the ground, uncapped the magnetic marker, and added another tally mark to the Disappointment Count, all while staring Chad down with an apathetic glare. He didn’t get the hint.
“All the times you’ve thought about me in bed, eh?”
“Oh, God.”
I dropped the whiteboard and stormed off toward the complex’s office. I banged on the door, and when no one answered, shouldered it open. The property manager, Max, sat with his feet propped up on his desk. He was in his fifties, crusty and leathery, with a poorly groomed beard and a wrinkled department store shirt that I was sure he’d retrieved from the donation bins at the front of the complex. A haze of smoke surrounded his head. As the door whacked against the wall, he shot up, coughing, and flicked a cigarette butt out of the open window.
“Damn, Kennedy. Give a guy a warning.”
I threw the crumpled eviction notice onto his messy desk. “What the hell is this?”
“That,” he said, leaning forward to examine his own handwriting on the form, “is an eviction notice. You can tell because it says ‘eviction notice’ in big, red letters at the top.”
I planted my hands on Max’s desk, trying to look as big as possible. It wasn’t hard. I was at the tall end of the feminine spectrum. At five feet and ten inches, I towered over Max. Additionally, when you were so inclined to avoid other people, you had to find other ways to entertain yourself. Me? I worked out. Push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, planks, squats, lunges, and whatever else I could manage without access to a gym. I ran miles a day. It kept me sane. As long as I could run, I could pretend that my problems were behind me. It paid off. There was a reason I could live in such crappy areas without being harassed, and it sure wasn’t because of my winning smile. My head of lengthy blazing red hair and piercing ice-blue eyes helped too. I knew I looked intense, and I played to my strengths.
“Why am I being evicted?” I demanded. “I paid my rent, Max.”
“It’s not about your rent, Ken.”
I shoved his feet off his desk with one hand. His old boots thumped to the floor. “Then what’s it about?”
Max ogled my biceps, which strained against the short ringed sleeves of my ex-company’s collared polo shirt. I clenched my hand into a fist, watching Max’s eyes bulge out of their sockets. Honestly, I’d only ever punched anyone for self-defense purposes, but Max didn’t need to know that.
“We held a surprise inspection,” he blurted out. “Your neighbors were complaining about a burning smell coming from your apartment. The place is covered in scorch marks, Ken.”
I froze. Max had me there. There was no denying the damage I’d managed to inflict in such a short amount of time. It wasn’t my fault. For some reason, things burned around me. It was always some bizarre accident too. During my first week in this apartment, my flat iron sparked and melted off a corner of the cheap countertop in the bathroom. Days later, I tried to light a stick of incense to stave off the previous tenant’s lingering odor of poor hygiene habits and stale cigarette smoke only to drop the match and ignite the tan carpet. I wasn’t too concerned about that incident, considering I was pretty sure the carpet had been white at some point. Then last week, in a feeble attempt to make grilled cheese without a working stove—the one in my unit was a lost cause—I fumbled the iron and sent it tumbling to the ground, where it settled hot side down on the linoleum.
“So you’ll evict me because of a few accidents, but the idiots cooking drugs a few doors down are okay to live here unencumbered,” I rambled.
“No one’s cooking drugs.”
“I’m not leaving.”
Max heaved a sigh, pulled another cigarette from the drawer of his desk, an
d lit it with a resigned puff. “Listen, Ken. I’m not a monster, okay? If I had a choice, I’d let you stay.”
“Then why won’t you?”
“Because you make the other residents uncomfortable,” Max answered around the cigarette. He gestured out the window to the dismal state of the apartment complex. “Which is saying something.”
“Tell them to shove it!”
“I would, but to be perfectly frank, you make me uncomfortable too.”
I crossed my arms. “There’s no way this is legal.”
“I’m afraid it is, sweetheart. You violated the terms of your lease.”
“How?”
“We don’t take vandalism lightly.”
“Vandalism! I didn’t—”
“Kennedy,” Max interrupted, holding up his hands to stop me from talking. The cigarette jiggled between his nicotine-stained fingers. “If you don’t leave, I’ll have to call the cops. Please don’t make me do that. I don’t want to do that to you. Just get your things and go.”
“Do I at least get my deposit back?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
I glared at Max long enough to make him fidget and look away from me. Then I left the office, slamming the door so hard that it ricocheted off of the frame and wobbled open again. I prowled across the parking lot to the apartment that no longer belonged to me. One month. That was the longest I lasted at any complex. Once the full moon rose and set, it was time for me to find another refrigerator box to live in, but as I grew more notorious in the surrounding area, the challenge increased tenfold.
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