Page 4 of We Are All Villains Here

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They say that crows remember faces.

For better or worse, the entire crow community will remember a face and what it represents. Good. Bad. But do they remember mediocracy?

Billie wonders that sometimes. That, if crows have such fantastical memories, does it extend to the ordinary people who pass them by on the street—those types of people almost certainly made to be forgotten?

Crows were therethatnight, hidden in the darkness of the dim sky, lining the road, and on telephone wires above.

Did they see?

Do they remember?

Do these crows know that Billie is a murderer?

~~~

3

SEVEN YEARS&one monthLATER.

JUNE 1998

With a population of just 6,891, the frosty town of Dosserport comes in two: Quaint and lonely. How it feels really depends on which end you hail from.

Are you one of the wasps who live in the old manors and country homes up on Rich Hill? Or one ofthemin Southside, down past the old rusty railroad, either in the trailer parks or the decaying cabins?

Just as the ambience is split, the townsfolk are, too. It’s a town divided. And there are only two spots in Dosserport where the divide blurs: The shore on the old harbor and the old sun-bleached memorial spearing out from the center of town.

Winter has its icy grip on the town for most of the year. It’s a running joke around here that there are only two seasons, not four. Spring and fall? Those months are just extensions of winter. But then summer comes… and the town changes.

It comes to life.

The warmth of summer creeps over the frost and melts away the ice on the roads; it becomes home to uncontrollable camp-parties that rage on for days and nights down on the harbor’s shore.

All those descendants and inheritors of the fishing moguls that built this town, return. They come back for the summer, escape their bustling city lives.

So, the wealthy and the poor exist in the town together for one season out of a year—and the divide returns.

Over time in town, the bandstand took on the role of the town’s heart. So it’s there that the line between the poor and the wealthy is blurred most of all.

This particular sunny June day, the bandstand’s white-painted benches creak under the extra weight of summer-towners (those who come back to Dosserport only in the on-season, and the moment the first leaf turns brown they fly away back to the cities).

Billie hates to think of that day, the inevitable day when the summer-towners leave. It’s not just because the town loses all that cheer and buzz when they go (or the money they bring into the bars in tips and whatnot), it’s thathegoes to.

Elliot Preston.

Billie used to call him El, when they were young and she had trouble sounding out his name.El. He hates that.

Most people call him Preston.

He’s one of the wasps who leaves for the big city every year.

Like always, Billie stays behind.

It’s the way it’s always been and should be. Billie’s a ‘stick’, so they’re called. Down the wrong end of town. Trailer trash.

Buthim…?

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