She climbed the steps. With no banister, she’d have to be careful at night. She set the box down in the middle of the unfinished wood floor and began to take stock.
Bzzt.
It was a message from Tessa. The text read: Gone but not forgotten. Quinn in our hearts 4eva. Under the message, there was an attachment, but her phone was taking forever trying to download it, the blue progress circle only a quarter filled.
The cat-piss smell in the living room was one thing, but Dad better hurry and get the Wi-Fi sorted.
There was a BANG downstairs, and Quinn rushed to listen at the top stair.
“Dad! You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah . . . ,” he yelled back, sound carrying disconcertingly well through the empty house. “But we’re going to need a new screen for the door.”
Quinn forced a sigh, then a deep breath, pulse still quick. Glenn Maybrook was wrecking the house already, but at least he hadn’t killed himself. She wasn’t a complete orphan, not yet.
Outside, the sun was rising higher. Quinn pulled open the blinds on the window overlooking Marshall Lane. The effect was immediate, the room warmed with the sunlight.
She turned to get the box she’d brought up and whacked her head on the sloped ceiling as she did.
Fucking pitched ceilings.
Quinn muttered something awful, rubbing her skull and realizing she would need to crawl on her knees if she wanted to touch the north or south walls of her new bedroom.
Below the angle of the ceiling to one side was a vintage metal bedframe and a mattress that looked like it belonged in a movie about the Civil War. There was also a simple desk pushed against the wall under the window that faced Marshall Lane. The red luster of the wood was enough to let Quinn know the desk was real furniture, not cheap particleboard.
The house’s former owner was also the town’s former doctor. Glenn Maybrook had taken over his practice on Main Street. Quinn didn’t realize that Dad had bought the house partially furnished, if that’s what you could call the furniture in the attic, and she suspected neither did he. But whatever. She wasn’t going to touch that mattress with her bare skin, but having a few things already here would make life easier. No trips to IKEA, if there even were IKEAs in the Midwest. No late nights trying to put together bedframes with just an Allen wrench and twenty-seven-step Swedish-language instructions. But no veggie meatballs or lingonberry sauce, either, so it was a give and take.
Quinn checked her phone. The attachment had finally downloaded. Tessa had sent a short loop of her and Jace each emptying a carton of apple juice into the cafeteria’s garbage can. They were pouring one out for Quinn. The text on-screen paraphrased Boyz II Men, something about the end of the road. Quinn smiled, remembering the three of them driving around Philly, singing at the top of their lungs.
She watched the video a few more times, then felt her vision blur. It wasn’t the memory of cruising South Street that made Quinn’s heart hurt, but the fact that she’d be receiving fewer and fewer texts like this over the coming weeks.
It sucked, but the friends were bound to drift apart. She loved Tessa and Jace, but their joke felt too true; soon enough, Quinn would be dead to them.
Quinn sent back a quick lol and allowed her phone to autocorrect to the leaning-sideways-crying-laughing emoji. No. She couldn’t spend the day texting with her old friends. There was work to be done. She needed to get busy starting over.
She put down her phone on the desk and glanced out the window.
Dad was on the front lawn, talking to a kid who looked about her age. He had short dirty-blond hair and was wearing jeans and a plaid button-down shirt that made him look like a lumberjack. Hanging off his shoulder was a camo-colored backpack that appeared mostly held together by safety pins.
Backpack. He’s going to school.
Oh shit! Dad’s meeting him first.
The boy extended a hand, her father shaking it, and laughing at . . . Well, whatever Glenn Maybrook was laughing at, Quinn couldn’t quite tell.
Dad pointed at a box and Quinn could see the boy’s lips ask: “You need some help?”
But her dad waved away the boy’s offer, then said something that—in hindsight—must have been “Don’t worry, my daughter and I can handle it.” Glenn Maybrook half turned and pointed up to the window, and Quinn locked eyes with her new classmate.
Glenn Maybrook waved, goofy as ever, as the boy nodded a restrained hello up to her. Quinn didn’t return the greetings; she just took a big step back into the attic and wished that she could disappear entirely into the gloom. She stood, not breathing, out of their line of sight and counted to thirty. When she dared return to the window, the boy had stopped looking up. He was walking away down their street, backpack hitched to both shoulders.
A moment later, there was the sound of her dad fighting with the broken screen door. “That was the neighbor!” he yelled up. “Don’t worry, I didn’t embarrass you!”
“Not your call to make,” Quinn yelled back from the corner of her empty room.
The floorboards creaked as she crossed the attic room. Everything in this house seemed to creak. And all the creaks meant there would be no hiding from her dad. No staying up late and pacing, picking at her homework until dawn. Which sucked, because that was her process.
Moving to the window at the opposite end of her bedroom, the one facing the backyard, she despaired. There were no blinds, no drapes. But then again: there were also no neighbors facing the back of the house.
The back lawn was uneven and overgrown, with spots of dead grass and a birdbath tilted at such an angle that it probably wasn’t bathing many birds.
The lawn wasn’t the totality of the view, though.
Their property abutted a cornfield. Miles and acres of the crop. Which shouldn’t have surprised Quinn. She’d seen the house on Google Maps. The whole town was encircled by corn.
Quinn looked to the horizon as the cornstalks swayed with the breeze. The corn itself could have been waving hello, or it could have been breathing. Missouri itself a sleeping giant under their new home. Enormous, indifferent. The thought could have been comforting or she could let the idea freak her out, that she was living on the back of a monster named Missouri. It was all a matter of how she chose to look at it. Perspective.
Quinn peered out into the distance. The corn wasn’t all she could see. Out in the fields, breaking the horizon, looming above all like a warning, was a large, dilapidated warehouse and factory. Even small on the horizon, she guessed the structure was five stories tall, not including the chimney stack tilting out the back. The factory’s roof was sagging like an animal with a broken back.
On the side of the building was what looked like a mural. There were plenty of murals in Philadelphia, a whole municipal department dedicated to them, and maybe this would be a nice reminder of home. The mural needed a wash, though; it had been blackened and sooted-over by whatever calamity had ruined the building in the first place.
She took out her phone, unlocked to the camera, and used the digital zoom to get a closer look.
There, painted on the side of the factory, was a clown.
An old-timey clown with a porkpie hat and red, bulbous nose. The clown had faded greasepaint stubble on his chin, and his once ruby-red nose was pocked with blisters from where the paint had bubbled. His painted white face had long gone gray. But his eyes had been more or less untouched by the flames, and something in the way they’d been painted made it seem like the clown was staring straight into her window, straight at Quinn.