TommyFlynnW: Have you been to the new club over on Locust? I hear it’s hoppin.
AccidentalC99: The only club I know about is Big O. I haven’t been there yet.
TommyFlynnW: Big O?
AccidentalC99: Yeah my neighbor told me about it.
TommyFlynnW: So you live east of main?
My skin begins to crawl, and I pause before answering.
AccidentalC99: Yes. Is that a rpbolem?
“Dammit!” I hit enter too soon, and my typo goes through. I quickly type it out again, but by the time I do, I get an error message.
You can no longer send messages to TommyFlynnW!
“Wait! What?”
He blocked me.
That fucker blocked me!
I have never been blocked from anything in my life. I’ve always considered myself a nice, non-confrontational kind of person and though I wasn’t good at making friends, I simply didn’t make enemies of anyone. In my high school, I had been the loner who didn’t belong to any cliques, but I had never been shunned or bullied. Though it meant I was often lonely, I never felt like I was missing anything and had never been treated cruelly by classmates. I’ve never been unfriended on social media or even blocked into a parking space!
“What the actual fuck?” I scream at the phone.
I quickly cover my mouth. Aunt Ginny didn’t approve of swearing unless you were directly connected to the Navy. Then I remember where I am and why, and I can’t stop the tears from flowing. I let it happen for the first time in months. I sit and cry and cry and cry until I’ve practically dehydrated myself, and the tissue box is half empty.
With labored breaths, I drag myself to the kitchen for some water, drink it down, and then blow my nose loudly. I trudge to the bathroom to wash my face and stare at my reflection in the bathroom mirror.
“I’m not going to let some motherfucking Westsider make me feel bad!” I yell at the reflective glass, no longer caring about my language. “That fucking fucker can just go fuck himself!”
I end up laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. I also have to admit that there just might be something to the east-side, west-side thing though I can’t fathom what it might be.
Maybe Jessie isn’t paranoid after all.
Chapter 3—First Date
A combination of anger and curiosity drive me, and I spend the whole evening on the dating app. I notice almost immediately that many of the profiles with Cascade Hills as their location have either a W or an E at the end of their user names.
I get messages from a few other men, all of whom ask which side of town I live on within the first few messages. Those with a W in their names stop talking to me or block me right away. All thoughts of Jessie being paranoid leave me.
“It’s like a whole town full of Hatfields and McCoys!”
Tossing my phone to the side, I pull out my laptop and start doing a little research on the town of Cascade Falls, Ohio. I look up the words “feud” and “dispute” and “vendetta” but find nothing to explain everyone’s behavior.
Digging a bit more, the only thing I find of note about the town is an obituary for Carlo Orso, who apparently passed away suddenly a few weeks ago. Jessie had mentioned the Orso family once or twice before, calling them philanthropists and going on about them as if they were the royal family of Cascade Falls. With no other real direction, I start researching the family.
The first thing I notice is that Cascade Falls—a town of roughly twenty thousand people—has two newspapers. Two honest-to-goodness, actually printed-on-paper newspapers that come out once a week. I can only shake my head when I see the newspapers are called Cascade Falls West and Cascade Falls East.
“You have got to be kidding me.”
In the Cascade Falls West articles, there is exactly one reference to the Orso family, and that is the same obituary I had already found. In the Cascade Falls East newspaper, the Orso family appears in every edition, often more than once, and usually front-page articles. All the write-ups have a similar theme.
“Orso family dedicates new park!”
“Orso family opens new restaurant!”
“Don’t mind the smell! Dying maples saved by Orso family generosity!”
Grainy, black and white pictures accompany the articles, but the scanned images are of such poor quality, I can’t really see the faces of the Orso family members. I’m intrigued by the article about saving trees and give it a closer look. Apparently, there had been a problem with the pH balance in the local maple forest, and the Orso family had paid for a very expensive sulfur treatment to fix the overly alkaline soil and thus saved the maple industry in the area.
“Okay, now I am impressed.”
I try to zoom in on the grainy picture below the headline. I can identify a woman and two men standing near a grove of trees, but that’s about it. Their features are simply too blurred, which I find really odd. Even a phone camera takes a better picture than those shown in the article. When I investigate further, I find that all the other pictures on the website are of much better quality.
“What’s the deal? These guys don’t like having their picture taken?”
None of it makes any sense, so I set the laptop aside and look back at my phone. Additional notifications from the dating app await, and I’m tempted to ignore them. I’m not getting anywhere, and there has to be a more suitable way to meet people in the area. I would be much better off if I just went out on my own.
But I can’t help it. I read the messages.
The first one is from an extremely attractive young man. I feel a lump in
