Excerpt:

It had been awhile since she called her mom. Three weeks, at least. A few minutes into the overdue conversation, after giving an update on her own life she asked, "So, has anything exciting happened lately?" Usually, her mom said no. It was something of a ritual between them, a confirmation that she had done the right thing by going off to college and later living in the city. Some years before, when she had joked she was going to move back and resume life in her old bedroom, free of rent and bills, her mother, in a moment of uncharacteristic solemnity, had said, "There's nothing here for you."

But, on this particular Sunday, when she asked if anything exciting had happened lately, her mother paused as if trying to remember something.
"Well, there was an accident. A man was killed on the train tracks."
"How?" The daughter asked with a slight thrill.
"The papers said it was an accident, but it sounded like suicide to me." Her mother harrumphed, as if she knew that someone were trying to get one over on her. The sort of cynical but righteous harrumph, the daughter realized, peculiar to a lifetime study of Sue Grafton novels and Law & Order reruns. "Apparently he was just lying there. He wasn't strung out on drugs or drunk or anything. Just lying there, waiting, with his head on the tracks. The papers, of course, didn't mention that. But I heard from Sally Jenkins--you remember Sally right? She used to work with me at the store, oh five or six years ago. She was still in high school then. A few years younger than you?"
"Um." The daughter murmured.
"Well, anyway, Sally is an EMT now and I ran into her last week at the pharmacy and she told me--now she wasn't there herself. But, she heard, of course, when she went in the next day--So Sally said it was a big mess. The train ran right over his head. There was stuff all over the place, like a smashed pumpkin. That's what the EMTs working that night said: Like a smashed pumpkin. Can you imagine? Nothing left to identify him with but fingerprints."
"Who was it? Do I know him?"
"I doubt it. I don't even know him. Just some older guy. Hold on and I'll check."
She could hear her mother laying the phone down on the kitchen counter and then a faint rustling of paper. On her end, in the city, she looked out the window at a busy stoop sale across the street. A few moments later her mother picked up the phone again.
"Let's see." She heard more crinkling as her mother smoothed the pages of a newspaper, murmuring the lede of the story to herself.
"Ah! Clive Roberts. That's his name. Whoever he is."
"Clive Roberts" The daughter repeated, working over each syllable in her mouth like smoothly tumbled beach stones. "Clive. Roberts."
"It says he was 56." Her mother continued, pausing as she skimmed for more details. "Divorced with one kid. A daughter, I doubt you know her. She's thirty-something, lives in Minneapolis. Would have graduated when you were in elementary school. It says Clive Roberts worked for the government, a paper-pusher." Her mother said 'paper-pusher' derisively, like it was something to be ashamed of.
"Clive Roberts." The daughter repeated.
Some minutes later, while her mother was gossiping about the young couple who had recently moved in down the street, the daughter burst out: "Clive! Yes! I remember."

She had been fifteen years old when she met Clive, though she was well-acquainted with him before they ever spoke a single word to each other. She had been spying on him for some time. Of course, it hadn't been Clive she was interested in, at first. No, it was that girl with the beautiful ass. Melissa Burns, her rival of sorts, though Melissa had never realized it. It was while tailing Melissa that she met Clive. A real stalker, Clive was. He had been slavishly following Melissa for god knows how long. Not that Clive would ever give a straight answer on that account. Or any account, for that matter. But really, it had all started with Taylor, for her anyway. See, in the fall of her fifteenth year, she had noticed that Taylor was following Melissa around as well.

Time has obscured some of the details. Twelve years can do that. Dates are hazy, words misremembered, emotions dulled, nuances long forgotten. So, she can't say for certain when she first saw Taylor. It seems that he just appeared one day, in a cacophony of hard polyurethane wheels grinding over the pocked asphalt of her street. Nor does it matter when she first saw him as his appearances had a timeless quality, being both brief and never deviating from the same simple set of motions. Most afternoons, around four-thirty, he glided past on his skateboard. He always dressed in black, lanky and somewhat stooped thanks to untreated scoliosis. The lenses of his thick-rimmed glasses glinted in the low autumnal sun, one long leg swinging in a smooth arc of ruined dark denim as he pushed the board up the slight incline of her street. And always, he was looking around, head turning from side to side. It was this last gesture that piqued her curiosity, as she stood by her bedroom window peering through the slats of her cream-colored vinyl blinds in a haze of nag champa incense and pot smoke.