Prologue
Emmett
Past
Emmett Hill had just turned ten years old a week before everything changed.
He wasn't a happy kid by any means. But the life that he had was the only life that he knew. And even though he often dreamed of the better life he'd glimpse on the right side of town, it seemed like a fairy tale to him. Something he knew would never happen, something to tuck away in his dreams. Life outside the dirty, mean streets of east Vancouver was all a movie, a film, a play on a stage. He was stuck behind the scenes.
But, like most kids, he was resilient. And being stuck was a way of life. Every day was exactly the same, which made all the hardships that much easier to take.
He'd wake up in the mornings in the tiny one-bedroom apartment he shared with his mother and she'd bring him breakfast in bed, delivered with thin and shaky hands. Usually it was just sugary cereal with water instead of milk, but sugary cereal was like having candy in the morning so he didn't care.
Then he'd get ready for school. His closet was full of clothes that were either too big or too small, clothes that had the names of other kids written into the collar, but at least he had variety. His school kept an eye on him and were always the first to give him, and other kids in slightly-too-big shoes, clothing that was donated. His mother was always looking for clean clothes for him too, when she wasn't trying to get her medicine.
His mother would usually walk him the ten blocks over to his school, though sometimes it was his mother's friend, Jimmy, and Emmett always likened that walk to being in a teleporter or a bridge through time. He read books all the time and one of his favorites was A Wrinkle in Time and sometimes he thought the way to school passed through a tesseract. They would leave the depravity of Hastings and Main and the other streets where lawlessness ruled and hope was squashed, and travel through Chinatown, where the vendors were always up bright and early, putting their colorful displays out, the air filled with the smell of hot meat and spices. Then Chinatown would give way to small row houses where Emmett assumed rich people lived, people who could afford an actual house and had tiny slices of a yard, the grass usually waist-high, rusted toys out front.
Of course, these weren't rich people houses at all but anything other than Emmett's apartment (where there were always a few people sleeping in the hall outside his door, some who used the stairwell as a toilet), seemed like it belonged to royalty.
Once at school, his mom would go off to her job as a waitress at a local diner, and he would disappear into the building to learn and play with his friends. Putting on plays during recess–where he was always the hero–was one of his favorite things to do. At some point during the day, usually just after lunch where he scarfed down his usual granola bar, one of the teachers would pull him aside. They'd ask him how he was today, how his mother was, if there had been any problems. Then they'd give him a piece of fruit, sometimes a sandwich (once, his teacher Mrs. Marsden, brought him a Happy Meal from McDonalds down the street–he never forgot that day).
He never really knew why the teachers doted on him but they'd often call him handsome and smart and tell him he had a bright future, so he thought maybe he was just special. He liked feeling special.
Then school would end and he'd always be a bit sad. Everything was so bright and cheery and fun and even learning the crappy subjects like math didn't seem so bad.
But his mother, or Jimmy, would be around the corner waiting. Neither of them liked to go right up to the school to get him and when he asked why he got two different answers. Jimmy said "it would look bad, they don't know I'm your friend," and his mother said, "there are too many people." She said this as if she didn't like crowds when their whole life was so darn crowded with people always in their apartment, on the street, everywhere.
But they were their kind of people.
The junkies. The addicts. The thieves. The homeless, the hopeless.
Those were the people who surrounded them every day.
And Emmett wasn't an idiot. Even though he grew up in that crappy apartment and saw the same scenes day in and day out, he eventually realized that the medicine his mother took, that everyone else took, was heroin and other drugs.
But even so, even as his mother stopped going to her job, even as she was flopped out on the couch more and more, even as the people who came over got dirtier, scarier, he figured everything in his life would be okay in the end.
Until it wasn't.
One day his mother didn't show up after school. He walked around the corner to the same old grey mailbox that she'd wait for him at, but she wasn't there. Jimmy wasn't either.
Since he was now ten years old, he figured he'd wait for a bit and then walk home, alone. Ever since his birthday when he hit the double digits, he felt a little bit older, a little bit wiser. After an hour, he adjusted the straps on his well-worn backpack, the heavy science textbook weighing it down, and took off for home.