Those boys downstairs thought he couldn’t hear them call him “Zodiac.” He heard them say “Ope, there goes Zodiac” whenever he walked by their apartment on the way in or out. At first he didn’t know what that meant. Grandfather Sunshine used to rail against newspaper horoscopes, but taught his Sacred Zodiac and gave each of them on the farm their true horoscopes. Did the boys downstairs know about that? They couldn’t; it was a secret that nobody outside the farm knew about. Grandfather Sunshine always said that if the outside world knew about his powers, they would kill him.
It was a coworker at the plant nursery who explained it to him. “I hate to tell you,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “But you kind of look like a serial killer.” And then she had to explain what a serial killer was, and why he looked like one.
Esau had put on weight since he left the farm, but he was still painfully thin. His teeth were crooked and stained. He still wore the big, thick glasses he’d had since he was thirteen. He knew they weren’t the right prescription; he’d learned that when he started working at the nursery and found out that other people could read a sign that was ten feet away. Glasses were supposed to let you do that. But until he had enough money saved up to go to the eye doctor, they were the best he could get. So far he’d spent every dollar he could spare on getting vaccinated.
The clothes Esau wore had come from the free clothing bin at the shelter where he’d spent his first few weeks of freedom. They weren’t made for someone as tall as him, and five or six inches of ankle showed below each pant leg. He wasn’t used to wearing shoes, and the only ones he could tolerate were actually bedroom slippers.
Even though he couldn’t go to the eye doctor yet, Esau was having the best time of his life. He had insomnia and nightmares, but he spent his days caring for plants with kind, funny people, and his evenings and early mornings walking around Kellswater drinking coffee (!). He still hadn’t gotten up the nerve to try beer.
People had told him Kellswater wasn’t really a big city. Maybe that explained why it was so different from the evil Big City that Grandfather Sunshine had always talked about. Or maybe, Esau thought with his heart racing and his fists clenched, Grandfather Sunshine was just full of s-h-i-t! He still waited for a few seconds after thinking it, half-expecting to drop dead. He didn’t.
One chilly morning in early spring, just over a year after his escape, Esau stepped out of the front door in the morning to find a parcel with his name on it waiting on the porch.
“Zodiac…” came a faint voice from inside. It was one of the boys in the downstairs apartment. He wasn’t actually talking to Esau, just amusing himself. Esau had learned by now to ignore it.
The package could not be ignored. It had his name on it: not Esau Sagan, the name he’d decided to use after watching Cosmos on VHS at the shelter, but Esau Little-Light Sunshine.
The sound that came out of his mouth could maybe have been described as a scream.
The front door opened behind him and Esau felt a hand on his shoulder. He couldn’t turn to see who it was; his eyes were glued to the horrible package at his feet.
“You OK, Zodi—shit—man, are you OK?”
“What’s going on? Is he OK?”
It was both of the boys from the ground-floor apartment. Esau finally looked around and met their eyes, but he couldn’t speak. He just pointed at the package.
“Oh,” said the one who’d come out first. “Is that you? What’s in it?”
Esau shook his head; he didn’t know. The package was small, the size of a book. The downstairs neighbors descended on it and ripped it open right there on the porch.
It was a stack of photocopied documents, folded stapled into makeshift pamphlets. The front page of the one on top had a grainy black-and-white photo of Grandfather Sunshine, looking skyward and smiling. Esau started to shake.
“What’s it say?” one of the neighbors asked the other.
“Who cares?” said the other one. “This looks stupid. Fuck it.” And he kicked the stack of pamphlets off the porch, scattering them into a puddle on the sidewalk. “Come on, Zodiac. Let’s go get some coffee.”