Free Neighborhood Watch by Cammie McGovern

within three months I was passing out regularly in lounges and dorm rooms I didn’t recognize. I put on the performance of a wild girl for seven months, dancing on coffee tables, inviting boys I’d just met back to my dorm room because its sterile plainness was a thrill— Look around, go ahead! There’s nothing to see! In March of that year, I sobered up quickly when I discovered I was pregnant and had no idea who the father was. At the time I thought of it as a humiliating wake-up call. The school doctor knew, but no one else had to, I decided. I told him I’d be fine going into Stamford alone for the procedure. I took a bus and brought a backpack full of textbooks. Afterward, I lay on the gurney and read my Japanese history book. In the years that followed, whenever I thought about those first months away from home, I felt a wash of embarrassment and, frankly, relief that I hadn’t paid a steeper price. I didn’t know, of course—it never occurred to me—that there might still be a price to pay.
    Trish’s worst year started with her suspension for a cafeteria incident that she never describes. I flip ahead in the diary to see how much more I can bear:
    Guess what! We have new neighbors across the street.
    The woman is a professor (really pretty!) and the man is a published writer. So far I’ve only talked to him. She’s not around that much. Today at the bus stop he introduced himself. He told me he wanted to talk to me about what books
    I read and what I like to do. He said he’s writing about a teenage girl and needs to do some research. I didn’t tell him I want to be a writer, too. Maybe I won’t tell him at all. I’ll just write my book and when it’s done, I’ll show him.
    She must have been fourteen by this point, the same age I was when my father checked himself into the hospital and I spent the next year wondering what our future would be like. It was a lonely, heightened period in my life, the last year when I remember everything that happened with perfect clarity. After that, small holes began opening up, things I either tried not to remember or simply couldn’t.

CHAPTER 7
    T he next morning I walk into the kitchen to find a bowl of batter and a waffle iron on the counter. “Roland,” Marianne says, shaking her head. “He usually eats downstairs but every Sunday he comes up here, makes a mess with his waffles, and goes back downstairs.”
    I try to keep the shock out of my voice. “Roland still lives here?” He made no appearance at the party yesterday, there’s no car in the driveway, no visible sign of him.
    “Oh, sure.” She waves her hand. “Where else would he be?”
    “Why didn’t he come up last night?”
    She shrugs. “Roland’s never liked my parties. He thinks people ask about his work and then don’t care about the answer. You know Roland,” she says, which makes me blush self-consciously. I wonder if she suspects that I did know him once, better than most people realized.
    I can see that Marianne doesn’t want to dwell on the subject of her husband.
    Last night, Jeremy only stayed at the party for about a half hour, but before he left, he took me aside and said that while I was here I should poke around and see what I could find. “This is the house where those meetings were, right? Where Linda Sue made her scenes?” I nodded and wondered what he thought I might find. “Maybe Marianne has a list of people who attended. It would be nice to find out who might have been there and gotten angry at Linda Sue.”
    Marianne pours us coffee and I ask her what became of the Neighborhood Watch group after I left. “I tried to keep it going, but it didn’t work. People wouldn’t even put out their signs.” She shakes her head as if this has been the whole problem: people refusing to acknowledge danger. She thinks she has a list, she says, and an hour later she miraculously produces it. A yellow sheet torn neatly from a legal pad, covered in signatures. I stare at it and