My Old Crush, My Neighbor Nextdoor

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Adam tucked his head deeper into his red hoodie, his hand curling around the hilt of the knife buried within the sweatshirt’s through and through pocket. It was easy to blend in the middle of the night, swirling from shadow to shadow, avoiding the anemic yellow street lights of the dark, dingy street, but that didn’t mean this was a safe neighborhood. Not by any means.This was the forgotten part of town. Every building had bars on the windows, the roads were pockmarked with potholes, which became oil-slicked pools each time it rained. The prevalence of gun stores, bail bondsmen, and lawyers sat in stark contrast to Adam’s neighborhood on the other side of the tracks. But he wasn’t trying to ‘slum it’ with the poor. These were Adam’s people. He’d spent the first six years of his life in a dilapidated trailer behind the mini-mart.Police cars prowled the streets, sometimes shining their flashlights out the window to harass a cluster of people until they dispersed. But they never notice...