are living over there again,” about the school-bus-yellow home on the opposite side of the street from ours. The one with the story to tell, the kind of story no one ever talks about but everybody knows. It isn’t the first time squatters have lived over there before. All sorts of vermin have inhabited the place at one time or another. The occasional drifter has been known to move into that house and live there for a while, scot-free. They usually leave on their own without any need to call the cops or anything, but it’s unsettling nonetheless, knowing there’s some bum in a vacant house right across the street from yours.
In the backyard hangs an abandoned tire swing from a fated oak tree, forgotten along with the home. Curtains hang from the window still, dated gossamer curtains, which were once white. They’re yellowish now and sheared at odd angles as if someone took a pair of scissors to their ends. Instead, it’s likely the mice eating their way through the lace. The concrete crumbles from around the house like cookie crumbs, breaking off in bits and littering the lawn. There are posted signs, which no one pays attention to, anyway: No Trespassing and Not Approved for Occupancy. They’re black signs with a bright orange font. Hard to miss. And yet people do. They ignore the signs and go right in.
A bum is living over there or maybe... No. I shake my head. That’s not it. I said it already. I don’t believe in ghosts.
But that’s just me. The rest of the people in town, they do.
Every single town in all of America has its own haunted house.
Ours just so happens to be right across the street from mine.
I never knew the family that lived inside that home. All it’s ever referred to anymore is that house. It’s been empty for years, since before I was born. I guess I never cared enough to ask who used to live there. In my mind, they’re long gone, leaving behind trace memories of a once-happy family and a derelict home. The only inhabitant people speak of is the dead Genevieve, though she is only ever referred to as her, or sometimes the even less humane it. There are claims that people see her, the ghost, moving throughout the home, her soul trapped inside for all of eternity.
But I know better than to believe those things. It’s just a bunch of malarkey. There’s no such thing as ghosts.
“Fucking squatters,” says Pops one last time as he rises from the table and stumbles to the fridge for another bottle of beer. He puts the cap on the countertop; he wanders into the family room to resume watching the football game. He leaves his dirty plate behind for me to clean, his napkin lobbed to the floor for me to retrieve.
I don’t have to wait too long to be put to the test again.
As I stand in the kitchen, in my hand the phone rings. Esther’s phone. I jump. This time it’s not a blocked call, but a local 773 number. The caller has an easygoing voice, upbeat, maybe the same age as me, though it’s hard to tell through the phone because of course I can’t see the woman on the other end of the line. She asks if this is Esther, and this time I assert proudly, “It is.”
It’s fun, masquerading around as Esther. I hold Esther in the highest regard. If there was one person in the world I’d like to be, it’s Esther. She’s beautiful and intelligent and kind. She’s dauntless and spunky sometimes, and a good roommate to boot.
But all those thoughts fall quickly by the wayside when the caller on the other end of the line announces, “I was inquiring about your ad in the Reader.”
“What ad?” I ask, forgetting for a fleeting moment that I am supposed to be Esther. She’s trying to sell some things, I figure, maybe cleaning out the crap in that storage facility. Who needs an old lava lamp, anyway? They’re way passé.
But when the woman on the other end of the line declares, “The ad for the roommate,” my mouth drops. I’m all but stunned speechless. “Have you already found someone else?” she asks, and a tremendous amount of time passes before I find the ability to speak.
A thousand thoughts run amuck in my mind, but at the very core of them is one question that comes to me again and again: Why? Why did Esther place an ad in the Reader, why is she looking for a new roommate, why does she want to do away with me? I’m hurt. My feelings are hurt like I’ve been stabbed in the back with Romeo’s dagger. I get it that I’m a slob and I pay a measly forty-five percent of the rent rather than the afore-agreed-to fifty, that I don’t always have the cash to cover my share of the utilities or that I leave lights on and forget to turn off the sink water. But still, Esther, I snap silently in my head, wondering suddenly who is the lousier roommate: Esther or me. How could you do this to me? Where did she possibly think I would go if she kicked me out? Back home to suburban America to live with my mother and father and Madison the dweeb? No way. Esther could have pointed out my deficiencies for me; we could have had a conversation about it. She could have given me some warning before deciding to kick me out. Some time to find a new apartment, a new roommate. My heart sinks. I thought Esther was my friend, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe Esther was just my roommate all along.
“It’s okay if you did. I mean, it’s not a big deal,” says the caller, but I clear my throat and swallow the overwhelming sense of betrayal and say to her, “No. I didn’t. I’m so glad you called,” and it’s then that I make arrangements to meet the young lady who’s about to be my replacement, who’s to take over my spot at the kitchen table, my place on the rose-colored sofa, the one who will soon inhabit my room, and become best friends with my best friend while I get tossed like leftover food.
I think of myself, all alone in the big city, without Esther. I can’t afford the rent in a city apartment on my own if my life depends on it. Eleven hundred dollars a month this unit costs, which in Chicago is quite the steal. Esther has lived in this apartment for years, the reason it was cheaper than all its other walk-up counterparts in the neighborhood: rent control. If I walked into Mrs. Budny’s office today and told her I wanted my own apartment, identical to the one I share with Esther, she’d charge me sixteen hundred bucks a month and I don’t have anything in the realm of that kind of money.
I agree to meet with my replacement after work tomorrow at a small coffee shop on Clark. We say our goodbyes and I pull up the Reader online, and sure enough, there it is, the ad. Female in need of roommate to share 2BDR Andersonville apartment. Great locale. Call Esther, and there she leaves her cell phone number beside a photograph of our walk-up from the outside, the autumn leaves tumbling from the trees as if she’d taken that photo yesterday or maybe just the day before.
Why, Esther? I silently beg. Why?
I rise early, well before the sun, and head out into the cold morning air for the long haul to town to retrieve Ingrid’s groceries for her as promised. The air is nippy today, making it hard to breathe. It burns my lungs, freezes my hands and ears as I close and lock the door behind myself, shutting a dozing Pops inside. In my hand I carry bills to discard in the mailbox outside. I used last week’s paycheck to cover them, the gas bill coming with a Final Notice that we’d soon be without heat. Its arrival a week ago yesterday prompted a scolding of Pops about how he’d better get his shit together and find a job.
I’m glad to see he took it to heart.
As I make my way to the mailbox, I eyeball that old, abandoned home across the street, searching for potential squatters or other signs of life. It’s an ugly sight, it is, one of the few scars on our otherwise tolerable street. There are vacant houses, properties foreclosed on, new homes stymied in the midst of construction, plywood and two-by-fours and other building supplies still taking up residence on the weedy lawns. It’s a sign of the times, the housing crisis of our generation that other generations will read about in history textbooks to come. I’m kind of stoked about it in some weird way, knowing these abandoned, beaten-up, unloved homes are making history as we speak.