Poison Shy

ISBN: 1770410759

Author: Madden, Stacey

Condition: New

Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Poison ShyA NovelBy Stacey MaddenECW PRESSCopyright 2012 Stacey MaddenAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-77041-075-6CHAPTER 1My worst fear? Insanity. All the different kinds of crazy.Paranoid, psychotic, deranged.Homicidal.It's not so much being insane that scares me as the prolonged descent, degree by fractured degree, into the cavern of madness. Not the oblivious haze of the landing place but the horror of the journey. The creeping awareness of your own mental disintegration.My name is Brandon Galloway. I don't have a middle name. I grew up in a place called Frayne, a blue-collar nowheresville in southwestern Ontario. Aside from being an open sanctuary for addicts, drunks, and aging prostitutes, it's also a college town - home to Frayne University, which the students devotedly refer to as F.U.A vine-wrapped, yellow-stone behemoth that looks like a giant birdhouse with tentacles, F.U. is a place for students with average grades and parents who can't afford to send them elsewhere. Some say it's the pride of the town, a symbol of respectability. I say it's a red herring: nothing but a small-town sham.When the university was founded in 1964, it split Frayne into two halves: right and wrong. The red-brick and white-picket-fence homes on the residential east side comfort the teachers, aldermen, and small business owners, while the rubbled tenements of the west shelter the steel worker and janitor types, along with the unemployed, the forgotten, and the ignored. The dividing line is a long bustling road called Dormant Street, the aptly named downtown core, where the students lie oblivious to the simmering poverty of the west and the taken-for-granted entitlement of the east, until life sees fit to kick or hoist them in either direction. Or until they leave town, like I did.These days, whenever someone learns I'm a Fraynian by birth, I can almost hear their thoughts. They wonder if I was involved in the kidnapping of Melanie Blaxley or the murder of Darcy Sands. It was the only time my hometown made the national news.I tell them I wasn't involved. But I was.I didn't have the happiest childhood, but I was an adaptable kid. Mostly I was invisible, hovering in the background of my parents' smash-up derby marriage, a mere afterthought in their battle of emotional attrition.My father worked as an electrical technician. He moved in and out of our home more times than I can remember. He was the kind of man who could fuck a waitress at a motel in the afternoon, then snore in my mother's bed at night with an undisturbed conscience. On his forty-first birthday he suffered a heart attack in a strip club bathroom and died. He wasn't living with us at the time.My mother started showing signs of schizophrenia in her mid-twenties, and was finally diagnosed after Dad's death. His philandering didn't help. My mother was prone to bouts of violent jealousy. Somehow I always knew she was crazy, even before I knew what crazy was, though it didn't affect my love for her. It's common to love and fear something at the same time. Religious fanaticism is a prime example of this phenomenon, and my mother was one of those, too - a fanatic, that is. Schizophrenics cling to religion because they believe everything on earth is out to get them, and in many ways they're right. The world is hostile and everything in it clashes. My mother and father were about as suitable for each other as a nun and a gangster. It often made me question the legitimacy of my existence.At school I sat at the back of the classroom, blending into the coat rack with an ashen complexion and earth-tone clothing. I was the student the teachers always had trouble remembering, a receiver of mediocre but unworrying grades. I once achieved a 72% in a class I'd stopped attending months before the end of term. "A valiant effort" was what the teacher wrote on my report card.I wasn't picked on because the bullies didn't know who I was. I w