The fifth listing down read,
THREE ROOMMATES SEEKING FOURTH, huge old house, privacy assured, reasonable rent and utilities.
Which...okay, she wasn't sure that she could afford "reasonable" - she was more looking for "dirt cheap" - but at least it sounded less weird than the others. Three roommates. That meant three more people who'd maybe take up for her if Monica and company came sniffing around...or at least take up for the house. Hmmmmm.
She called, and got an answering machine with a mellow-sounding, young-sounding male voice.
"Hello, you've reached the Glass House. If you're looking for Michael, he sleeps days. If you're looking for Shane, good luck with that, 'cause we never know where the hell he is" - distant laughter from at least two people - "and if you're looking for Eve, you'll probably get her on her cell phone or at the shop. But hey. Leave a message. And if you're looking to audition for the room, come on by. It's 716
West Lot Street." A totally different voice, a female one lightened up by giggles like bubbles in soda, said, "Yeah, just look for the mansion." And then a third voice, male again. "Gone with the Wind meets The Munsters." More laughter, and a beep.
Claire blinked, coughed, and finally said, "Um...hi. My name is Claire? Claire Danvers? And I was, um, calling about the, um, room thing. Sorry." And hung up in a panic. Those three people sounded...normal.
But they sounded pretty close, too. And in her experience, groups of friends like that just didn't open up to include underage, undersized geeks like her. They hadn't sounded mean; they just sounded - self-confident. Something she wasn't.
She checked the rest of the listings, and felt her heart actually sink a little. Maybe an inch and a half, with a slight sideways twist. God, I'm dead. She couldn't sleep out here on a bench like some homeless loser, and she couldn't go back to the dorm; she had to do something.
Fine, she thought, and snapped her phone shut, then open again to dial a cab.
Seven sixteen Lot Street. Gone with the Wind meets The Munsters. Right.
Maybe they'd at least feel sorry enough for her to put her up for one lousy night.
The cabbie - she figured he was just about the only cabdriver in Morganville, which apart from the campus at TPU on the edge of town had only about ten thousand people in it - took an hour to show up.
Claire hadn't been in a car in six weeks, since her parents had driven her into town. She hadn't been much beyond a block of the campus, either, and then just to buy used books for class.
"You meeting someone?" the cabbie asked. She was staring out the window at the storefronts: used-clothing shops, used-book shops, computer stores, stores that sold nothing but wooden Greek letters. All catering to the college.
"No," she said. "Why?"
The cabbie shrugged. "Usually you kids are meeting up with friends. If you're looking for a good time - "
She shivered. "I'm not. I'm - yes, I'm meeting some people. If you could hurry, please...?"
He grunted and took a right turn, and the cab went from Collegetown to Creepytown in one block flat.
She couldn't define how it happened exactly - the buildings were pretty much the same, but they looked dim and old, and the few people moving on the streets had their heads down and were walking fast. Even when people were walking in twos or threes, they weren't chatting. When the cab passed, people looked up, then down again, as if they'd been looking for another kind of car.
A little girl was walking with her hand in her mother's, and as the cab stopped for a light, the girl waved, just a little. Claire waved back.
The girl's mother looked up, alarmed, and hustled her kid away into the black mouth of a store that sold used electronics. Wow, Claire thought. Do I look that scary? Maybe she did. Or maybe Morganville was just ultracareful of its kids.
Funny, now that she thought about it, there was something missing in this town. Signs. She'd seen them all her life stapled to telephone poles...advertisements for lost dogs, missing kids or adults.
Nothing here. Nothing.
"Lot Street," the cabbie announced, and squealed to a stop. "Ten fifty."
For a five-minute ride? Claire thought, amazed, but she paid up. She thought about shooting him the finger as he drove away, but he looked kind of dangerous, and besides, she really wasn't the kind of girl who did that sort of thing. Usually. It was a bad day, though.
She hoisted her backpack again, hit a bruise on her shoulder, and nearly dropped the weight on her foot.
Tears stung at her eyes. All of a sudden she felt tired and shaky again, scared.... At least on campus she'd kind of been on relatively familiar ground, but out here in town it was like being a stranger, all over again.
Morganville was brown. Burned brown by the sun, beaten down by wind and weather. Hot summer was starting to give way to hot autumn, and the leaves on the trees - what trees there were - looked gray-edged and dry, and they rattled like paper in the wind. West Lot Street was near what passed for the downtown district in town, probably an old residential neighborhood. Nothing special about the homes that she could see...ranch houses, most of them with peeling, faded paint.
She counted house numbers, and realized she was standing in front of 716. She turned and looked behind her, and gasped, because whoever the guy had been on the phone, he'd been dead-on right in his description. Seven sixteen looked like a movie set, something straight out of the Civil War. Big graying columns. A wide front porch. Two stories of windows.
The place was huge. Well, not huge - but bigger than Claire had imagined. Like, big enough to be a frat house, and probably perfectly suited to it. She could just imagine Greek letters over the door.
It looked deserted, but to be fair every house on the block looked deserted. Late afternoon, nobody home from work yet. A few cars glittered in the white-hot sunshine, finish softened by a layer of dirt. No cars in front of 716, though.
This was such a bad idea, she thought, and there were those tears again, bubbling up along with panic.
What was she going to do? Walk up to the door and beg to be a roommate? How lame-ass was that?
They'd think she was pathetic at best, a head case at worst. No, it had been a dumb idea to even blow the money on cab fare.
It was hot, and she was tired and she hurt and she had homework due, and no place to sleep, and all of a sudden, it was just too much.
Claire dropped her backpack, buried her bruised face in both hands, and just started sobbing like a baby. Crybaby freak, she imagined Monica saying, but that just made her sob harder, and all of a sudden the idea of going home, going home to Mom and Dad and the room she knew they'd kept open for her, seemed better, better than anything out here in the scary, crazy world....