Housebreaking by Dan Pope

Author:Dan Pope
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Emily Martin-Murray

The first day of school, 2007

WHEN HER PARENTS announced their plan to move to the suburbs outside Hartford, Emily couldn’t believe it. Move? They were kidding, right? Move from her own house, where she and Daniel had grown up, the place she loved the most? How could they do this to her—and right before her senior year, to make it worse? The feeling of disbelief would remain with her for weeks afterward. She’d never even heard of the town—Wintonbury—or the public school she was forced to attend, Wall High School. A fitting name, Wall: The place was like a prison, with its high, pseudomodern concrete walls and thin horizontal windows.

On her first day of school she got sick twice due to nerves—once before leaving home, then again halfway through morning assembly. She sat in the back row of the auditorium, terrified that the principal might ask her to stand and introduce herself. The new girl. She slipped out of her seat and went directly to the bathroom, barely reaching the stall before letting it out. At the sink a blonde painting her lips with gloss turned and said, “Can you close the door when you do that, please?” At lunch period, this same blonde pointed at Emily and mouthed something to her companions, who all turned to gawk. Emily ate quickly, alone, then fled the building.

She wandered toward the rear courtyard, hearing music from a boom box. A group of boys were standing around a giant metal sculpture that looked like an anchor. She considered going over to bum a cigarette. But the bell rang, and the boys came loping back toward the building. One of them approached her and whistled between his teeth. “Yo, what up?” he said.

She was wearing her tightest jeans and a fitted tee, her hair straightened—not her style, generally, but for the first day she figured she should try to fit in, to get a sense of the scene. He was tall and incredibly hot, with dreads to his shoulders. He looked Hispanic, at least in part. He had a tattoo of a snake crawling out from under his collar. “B-Ray,” he said. She stared up at him and raised an eyebrow. In her nervousness she somehow didn’t understand that this was his name, that he was introducing himself, so finally she just blinked and looked away.

“You deaf, new girl?”

“You rude?”

“So what’s your name?”

“You just said it. New girl.”

He laughed. “That’s easy to remember. That’s what I’m gonna call you.”

Classes were ridiculous. Her Spanish teacher talked about his supposedly favorite novel, Love and Death in the Time of Cholera, and no one even bothered to correct him. In American history, the teacher mispronounced the word Hessians. This same teacher called her by name and asked her to read from her paper, apparently due that day, about her summer reading assignment.

“I can’t,” said Emily, her voice filling the hushed classroom.

“And why not?”

“I didn’t get the assignment.”

The teacher shook her head. “Everyone got the assignment.”

Emily couldn’t stop her voice from shaking.

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