Morganville (Justin Bieber)

Chapter 2

I checked the rest of the listings and felt my heart sink a little. Maybe an inch and a half, with a slight sideways twist. God I'm dead. I couldn't sleep out here on a bench like some homeless loser, and I couldn't go back to the dorms. I had to do something. I snapped my phone shut, then open again before dialling a cab. Seven sixteen, Lot Street. Maybe they'd feel sorry enough for me to let me stay.

The cabbie - I figured he was just about the only cab driver 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. I hadn't been in a car in six weeks, since my parents had driven me into town. I hadn't been much beyond the block of campus either, and just to buy books for class.

"You meeting someone?" The cabbie asks me, I was staring out of the window at the store fronts, used clothing shops, used book stores, computer stores, stores that sold nothing but wooden Greek letters. All catering to college.

"No" I replied, hastily. "Why?"

The cabbie shrugged at me. "Usually you kids are meeting up with friends. If you're looking for a good time-"

I 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 wet from college town to creepy town in one block flat. I couldn't define how it happened exactly - the buildings were pretty much the same, but they looked dim and old, and a 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 had been looking for another kind of car.

A little girl was walking with her hand in her mothers, and as the cab stopped for a lighted the girl waved, just a little. I waved back. The girls mother looked up, alarmed, and hustled her kid away into the black mouth of a store that sold electronics. Wow, do I look that scary? Maybe I did. Or maybe Morganville was ultra careful of its kids.

Funny, now that I thought about it, there was something missing in this town. Signs. I had seen them all my life, stapled to telephone poles, advertisement for lost wife, missing kids or adults. Nothing here. Nothing.

"Lot street" the cabbie announced, the car squealing to a stop. "Ten fifty"

For a five minute ride? I thought to myself, I ignored it paying up the cash. I thought about shooting him the finger as he drove away from the side walk he left me at, but he looked kind of dangerous, plus I wasn't the kind of girl to do that. Usually. It was a bad day though.

Hoisting my backpack onto my shoulder again, it hit the bruise that was there and I nearly dropped the weight onto my foot. Tears stung my eyes, I started to feel tired and shaky again. At least on campus I had a relatively familiar ground, but being here was like being a stranger all over again.

Morganville was brown, burnt down 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 grey edged and dry, and rattled like paper in the wind. West Lot Street was near what passed for the downtown district, probably an old residential neighbourhood. Nothing special about the homes that I could see, ranch houses, most of them peeling and faded paint.

I counted the house numbers, and realised I was standing right in front of 716. I turned and looked behind me, and gasped because whoever the guy had been in the phone, he had been dead on his description. Seven sixteen looked like a movie set, something straight out of the civil war. Big greying collums, a wide front porch, two stories of windows.

The place was huge, beyond my wildest dreams, well not huge, but bigger than I had imagined. Like big enough to be frat house, and probably perfectly suited for that indeed. I could just imagine the Greek letters over the door.