Page 35 of Rogue’s Mark

We hear footsteps before we see him. Armen comes around the corner of the old burger place, pauses when he sees us, and for a moment, I think he's going to reverse course.

"Join us," Mara calls. "We don’t have cooties."

He half smiles, and my heart leaps. “Well, Mara, that’s not what they told me in sixth grade, you know.” He jumps up to sit next to me on the table and it creaks even more.

"Fancy, huh?” I say.

“Only the best for us Rotters.” He sits with his forearms on his knees and looks at the food court the same way I was looking at it earlier, as one of the ghosts of our pasts.

"You grew up in Rothwell, right?” Mara says to him.

"Yeah. East side."

"What was it like?"

Armen is quiet for a moment. "Dense," he says finally. "Old buildings, close together, everyone knowing everyone. The kind of neighborhood that had been there forever, and would be there forever. At least it seemed that way.”

"What happened to it?"

I glance at Mara. She's just asking, genuinely curious, the way she asks people about themselves. Only she doesn't know she's just opened a big, dark door.

Armen looks at the faded tiles on the floor. "You know Caldwell Street?" he says.

"Vaguely."

"The whole block, east side of Caldwell between the rail yard and the park. There were eight apartment buildings housing maybe four hundred people all together." He pauses. "A development company acquired the block. Residents got two weeks’ notice. Two fucking weeks. Demo equipment arrived on a Tuesday and by Friday, it was rubble."

The food court is dead quiet.

"My God,” Mara says.

"Yeah. My family was in the same building for thirty years. Third floor. Woman on the second floor grew tomatoes on the fire escape every summer. Man downstairs played chess on the front steps every Sunday morning without fail." He stops. "After the demo, nobody ever built anything. They just cleared it and left the empty lot."

"Did anyone fight it?" Mara asks.

Armen looks at her. "No. Nobody had anything left to fight with."

I watch Mara absorb that, and the way she connects to other peoples’ stories. Her mother telling her to pull away from me. Everyone choosing the easier path.

“That's why you built this place," she says.

Armen looks around the food court, or rather, what’s left of it.

“Nowhere else to go," he says.

We sit on the plastic table, the three of us, in a place that used to feed people, in a building that used to be something else, in a city that's still trying to figure out what it is now.

21

VI

Armen jumps down from the table, saying something about checking in with Sting, and Mara wanders off to find Kade. She doesn't say that, but she doesn't need to.

I stay in the food court on the plastic table, arms wrapped around my knees.

It's quiet in here. Just me and the faded tiles and the napkin dispenser.

I think about the smoothie Mara and I used to split when we had six dollars and too much time. Fourteen years old, sitting in this exact food court, arguing about boys and homework and whose turn it was to pay. Neither of us could have imagined ending up back here like this, Mara finding herself in a dead mall she used to visit as a kid, me finding something that feels more like home than anything I've had in years.