Bad Boy Next Door: A Small Town College Bad Boy Romance

by Hunter Rose

  Both perspectives are valid and intriguing, and we are planning on exploring them as we get to know the city we will call home throughout our college years. Of course, I already feel like a piece of me has always been here. I’ve studied the history of the city for as long as I can remember, and many of the ghost legends are as familiar as the story of the mansion back home. It’s thrilling to know I’ll get to visit those spots and actually see the places I’ve only read about.

  “What do you have in your bag?” I ask as we turn around the corner of Idlewood and head for the large black cast iron gate at the cemetery.

  “You’ll see,” he says.

  We walk through a small parking lot and past a river to a stone building with a tiny plaque at the office. We’ve only gone a few more yards when I gasp, stunned by the sheer beauty and enormity stretched out in front of me.

  “This place is incredible,” Talon marvels.

  “Hollywood Cemetery,” I tell him. “Designed in 1847 as a garden cemetery to take advantage of the beautiful landscape and avoid the monotony and stark surroundings of city graveyards. Time of the first burial was in 1849. It’s home to the final resting places of a variety of famous names, including five presidents. There’s even a mausoleum in here with stained glass windows made by Tiffany.”

  Talon stares back at me for a few seconds.

  “That was impressive,” he says. “Nothing sexier than a woman talking a little history to me.”

  I know he’s joking, but I swallow hard anyway and focus ahead.

  “Let’s just keep going,” I say.

  The cemetery is massive and sprawling, and though it’s incredibly beautiful with its ancient trees and abundance of flowers, it quickly gets confusing. We finally have to resort to a map. It takes almost an hour for us to find our way to the first spot I want to see. When we finally get there, I pause, staring at the grave in front of us with a chill rolling along my spine and an unexpected ache in my heart.

  “It’s a dog,” Talon observes. “I’ve never heard of a dog being put on a grave.”

  “This is one of the most famous graves in Richmond,” I tell him. “It’s not a dog buried here, in case you need clarification about that. It’s actually a little girl. She died in 1862, and her name has long since worn off of the stone. But people still come to visit. You see the little toys and jewelry?” I point to a small alcove carved into the stone at the head of the grave. It’s filled with tiny trinkets brought by visitors to the cemetery.

  “But why the dog?” he asks.

  “The most popular story is that the cast-iron Newfoundland stood in front of a shop downtown. This little girl loved going shopping with her parents and would climb on the dog and pretend to ride it. She couldn’t go by the shop without giving it a hug. After she died, the war efforts came calling. All expendable metal was being gathered up to be melted down and turned into bullets for the Civil War. The little girl’s parents couldn’t stand the thought of the dog their daughter loved so much being destroyed, so the shop owner gave it to them to put on her grave so it wouldn’t be disturbed. Legend has it; the dog now protects the little girl, and at night she emerges from her grave to play with the dog. What’s interesting, though, is the legend doesn’t talk about a little girl’s ghost. Instead, people around here believe they hear the dog barking at night.”

  “It’s amazing,” Talon says. “I think that’s the perfect example of what we’re trying to say in this project. That’s history unfolding right in front of us. Still to this day, this little girl lives on because more than a hundred and fifty years ago, the needs of the war pushed someone to use this dog to mark her grave.”

  I smile at him. “Exactly.”

  He looks back at me, and I feel the impact in my chest. I forgot how blue his eyes really are. What it feels like to be this close to him. I have to turn away, to focus on the project. Everything is different now. We can’t go back.

  Christina looks up at me from her bed when Talon and I walk into the room. He hands me the stack of grave rubbings we made and sets what’s left of my box lunch on my desk.

  “So, I’ll see you Wednesday?” he asks.

  “Absolutely. I’ll type up some notes of what we saw today and do some more research for the sources. I’m hoping we can find some newspapers or letters that link to the stories.”

  “Sounds great. Have a good night.”

  He walks out and closes the door behind him. I immediately take the twine off my white box and open the lid to reach in for another piece of the strawberry cupcake inside.

  “Um,” Christina says after a few seconds.

  “Hey,” I smile. “How was your day?”

  “Not as good as yours, apparently,” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who was that? Because I know it wasn’t your boyfriend.”

  I shake my head. “No, that wasn’t Isaiah. That was Talon. We’re working on a project together for history class.”

  “Uh-huh. A project for history class. With someone who looks like that?”

  “I don’t think people’s appearances go into determining class assignments,” I say.

  “But they sure as hell can go into choosing at your project partner,” she says.

  “I wouldn’t know. I didn’t choose him.”

  “Then you’re just lucky.”

  “Actually, he chose me.” I have no idea why I had the compulsion to tell her that, but her reaction makes me smile.

  “Holy shit. Are you kidding me, girl? And you’re not going to do anything about that?”

  “No. As you pointed out, that’s not Isaiah.”

  She gives a disbelieving snort and goes back to the book she was reading. I reach for the grave rubbings and lightly touch my fingers to them. My mind drifts back to the day I held Talon’s jacket and slipped into it to feel him in it. Drawing in a quick breath, I put the rubbings aside and cross to my computer so I can start recording the day’s exploration.

  29

  Talon

  “It doesn’t look like anything is around here,” Wren says. “Are you sure we’re in the right place?” She lets out a sigh. “I sound like my mother.”

  I laugh. “You don’t sound like your mother. Actually, you might. I don’t know. But it’s alright. Yes, I know we’re in the right place. They might not be as big and showy as the cemetery you chose, but I think it’ll be a fascinating addition to our project. We want to talk about the progression of history and how there aren’t just isolated eras, right?”

  “Yes,” Wren nods. “Your assertions about people not learning and history being doomed to repeat itself aside, I want to trace how each period of the city of Richmond influenced the next, and how those influences are still seen to this day.”

  She grins, and I nod at her teasing. “Alright. I hear you. I think you’ll like this. The ghost stories surrounding it are linked to some of the stories we found at the cemetery, and there’s a lot of controversy about how it continues to impact people even now.”

  “What do you mean?” she asks.

  “I don’t want to just tell you. I want to show you,” I smile.

  I can’t argue that the area we’re driving through doesn’t look like much. It’s basically just neighborhoods and an old school along a plain-looking road. But I know what I’m looking for is nearby. It takes a few more minutes before Wren sits up a little straighter in her seat. I know she’s starting to recognize our surroundings. She looks at me, then back out the windshield.

  “Really? Are we actually going where I think we’re going?” she asks.

  Her timing is impeccable. I pull onto the side of the road next to a steep embankment going down into what looks like a ravine.

  “Yes, we are,” I tell her, bringing the car to a stop.

  Before I’ve even turned off the ignition, she excitedly takes off her seatbelt and bounds out of the car. I follow closely behind her, but she’s already on her way down the side of the hill. She starts to sli
p, and I reach out for her. Taking her arm gives her enough leverage to get her feet back under her, and she smiles at me.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  I nod and keep my hand on her arm as we continue down the hill. There’s no path or marker meant to show where we should be going. This is probably because technically we shouldn’t be here. It’s a historic spot, but not one tourists flock to. That seems like a shame. Maybe our project will change that a little. The local police may not necessarily be in favor of that idea, but that’s a bridge we can cross when we get to it.

  We get to the bottom of the hill and stand on ancient railroad tracks. The stone wall in front of us doesn’t look like much, but the outline of an arch speaks to what this used to be.

  “I read that book about this place so many times,” Wren whispers.

  “I know. That’s why I got it to read on spring break last year. I’d heard of Church Hill but didn’t know anything about it until I read the book. When we went to the cemetery and went to the Poole tomb, I remembered I’d read about it in a different book about Richmond history after reading that book.”

  “You mean the Richmond Vampire?” she asks.

  “No such thing as vampires,” I point out. “But if we’re talking in context of the ghost lore we’re writing our project about, then, yes. As the story goes, when the railroad was built, it disturbed an ancient evil contained deep within the hill. It was that evil that caused the tunnel to collapse in 1925.”

  “Because it couldn’t possibly be that the tunnel was already in disrepair and hadn’t been used for over twenty years?

  “Apparently not. That would just make too much sense. The legend is after the collapse, when rescuers were trying to pull the people from the tunnel, they found a bloody creature with jagged teeth and pieces of skin hanging from him crouched near the bodies. Some even say he was drinking the blood of one of the dead. When he was confronted, he took off running and entered Hollywood Cemetery, where he disappeared into a tomb. The official explanation is that the creature was actually an engineer who was horrifically scalded by a boiler explosion after the collapse. He would have been bloodied and his skin hanging from him. But because he was in shock, he escaped the tunnel and ran quite a distance. But he didn’t go into the tomb. He ended up in Hollywood Cemetery, but that’s because he died just a few hours later.”

  “That’s really fascinating,” she says. “And I love the connection between the two locations, but what does it have to do with local ghost lore and legends connected to the evolution of history and how it impacts society?”

  “I’m glad you asked. As we know, after the tunnel collapsed, they tried to recover the train inside.”

  “Right, but they couldn’t. There was no structural integrity.”

  “Exactly. So, they just left the train and any workers who didn’t make it out in there. They sealed it up and walked away. But the tunnel got the last word. Over the years, there have been several cave-ins directly related to the tunnel. Homes have been swallowed, and a church was destroyed when a sinkhole formed under it. The most superstitious believe the evil that spawned the original cave-in continues to punish the people of Richmond for digging into the hill by causing collapses.”

  Taking my sketch pad out of my backpack, I sit down on a large chunk of broken concrete and begin to draw the sealed portion of the tunnel. Delving into the fascinating history of the city is one of the most compelling reasons I chose to come to school here. Like Wren pointed out the day we came to campus, I could have gone anywhere. I graduated high school with a 4.0, and my SAT scores all but guaranteed me a place in whatever school I chose. But the idea of spending in the next four years at an Ivy League school like my father did, or like Isaiah kept preening about, is far from something I want to do.

  College isn’t about climbing the social ladder for me. I just want to experience something new and see where it takes me.

  Wren settles beside me. She stares into the distance, lost in her own thoughts. I shift my sketch pad into a different angle so I can add some of the detail, and something slips from between the pages. I pull it all the way out and see it’s a photograph.

  “Oh,” she says, glancing over. “You found it. I thought you already did and just hadn’t mentioned it to me.”

  “You put this in there?” I ask.

  “Mmmm-hmmm,” she nods.

  I look at it again. It takes a few seconds for me to orient myself to what I’m seeing. The picture is taken from behind a window like she was standing at it and looking out.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “It’s the view I have from my dorm room,” she explains. “It was one of the first things I saw when I moved in. It’s the first thing I see every morning, and when I look out again before I go to bed every night. I have to make a confession, though. It’s a cheat. I used my phone to take the picture back in August but decided it was a perfect one to share with you, so I printed it. I figured it made more sense to put it in your sketch pad for you to find than to mail it to you.”

  “Thank you,” I smile. “Even though it was born digital.”

  She gives a short, snorting laugh and shakes her head, looking back into the distance.

  “You’re welcome.”

  I watch her for a few seconds, then look back down at the picture before tucking it back in the book.

  Two days later, I walk up to the door of Wren’s dorm room with an envelope. She’s in class. I watched her leave. I want to leave this for her, so it’s here when she gets back. Using one of the pushpins clustered in one corner, I attach the edge of the envelope to the small corkboard stuck to the outside of her door. The envelope has her name written across it in big black letters.

  Inside is a picture of a bright gold leaf sitting on the dark green blades of grass in the median in front of my apartment. The first leaf I saw fall this year.

  30

  Wren

  “It’s going to be so much fun,” Christina insists. “You’ve really got to come with me.”

  “I just don’t think it’s a good idea. I have projects to do and tests. I really should stay home and do work,” I protest.

  “Wren, you aren’t at home. Do you know where you are? In college. And that means you should get up, put something on, and come to the party with me. I haven’t seen you go to a single party since the semester started.”

  “That’s because I don’t go to parties,” I tell her. “It’s just not my scene. And it’s really not my boyfriend’s scene.”

  “Who cares if it’s your boyfriend’s scene? You two don’t have to do everything together. It seems like all I ever see you do is study and go have dinner with Isaiah. And it doesn’t even really count as the two of you going out and having dinner because you’re just going to the dining hall. You need some more fun in your life,” she insists.

  “I’m not here to have fun. I’m here to get good grades and graduate,” I tell her.

  She makes a face at me. “That is the single most depressingly boring thing I have ever heard another human being say. I’m going to chalk it up to delirium from fun and enjoyment withdrawal.”

  “That’s not a thing,” I defend myself. “Besides, I do have fun. And I do more than study and go to the dining hall with Isaiah.”

  She looks at me with a mischievous glint in her eyes. “That’s right; you have been spending quite a bit of time with that gorgeous guy recently.”

  ”Talon?” I ask.

  She laughs. “Don’t say that like you haven’t ever noticed how sexy he is. You can’t possibly be spending as much time with him as you do and not have had a panty-melting moment at least a couple of times today.”

  Christina doesn’t know our past. As far as she’s concerned, we met in history class and that’s as far as we know each other. I’m fine with it staying that way. Whatever happened between Talon and me, it’s behind me.

  “He’s just my project partner in history class. We have a massive project we’ve been w
orking on since the beginning of the semester. That’s why we spent so much time together. Just doing our project,” I explain.

  “That’s a shame. He could make anything interesting.”

  “Don’t you have a boyfriend back home?” I ask with a laugh.

  “He and I have a don’t ask, don’t tell agreement,” she says with a wink. “Now, come on. What are you dressing up as?”

  “Don’t try to slip that in like I’m not going to notice you’re trying to drag me off to the party,” I say.

  “You’re acting like I’m asking you to take my place at the gallows. I just want you to come to a Halloween party with me. It’s Halloween! That’s like a sacred day on college campuses. You need to take a break and blow off some steam. You’ll put on something cute; we’ll go to this party, have a little fun, then I’ll let you come back and go right back into your normal, boring existence. How does that sound?”

  “Like an insult,” I joke. “I don’t even know what I would do at the party. I don’t drink. I don’t really know anybody.”

  “You know me. And I can introduce you to some other people. You don’t have to drink.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Some apartment off-campus. A friend of mine invited me.”

  “You don’t even know the person throwing the party? And how do you know we are actually invited?” I asked.

  “This is college. Not a bridal luncheon. You don’t need to wait for an engraved invitation to go to a party. You know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who’s having a party. Bam. You’re invited.”

  “And it’s fine if I don’t drink?”

  “Absolutely. I will give you a cup full of water, tell everybody it’s vodka, and they’ll think you’re hardcore when you’re not affected by it at all by the end of the night,” she offers.