When No One Is Watching

by Alyssa Cole

  Neighborhood Things is scrawled in Mrs. Perkins’s handwriting on a white label in the corner of the folder.

  I undo the stiff string wrapped tightly around the tab and gently tug out the paper at the top. It’s a reproduction of a pamphlet that was probably made on an old crank-style copy machine, given how yellowed with age it is.

  Newes from America. 1638. By John Underhill.

  I shall according to my abilitie begin with a Relation of our warre-like proceedings, and will inter-weave the speciall places fit for New Plantations, with their description, as I shall find occasion in the following discourse, but I shall according to my promise begin with a true relation of the new England warres against the Block-Ilanders, and that insolent and barbarous Nation, called the Pequeats, whom by the sword of the Lord, and a few feeble instruments, souldiers not accustomed to warre, were drove out of their Countrey, and slaine by the sword, to the number of fifteene hundred soules in the space of two moneths and lesse: so as their Countrey is fully subdued and fallen into the hands of the English: And to the end that Gods name might have the glory, and his people see his power, and magnifie his honour for his great goodnesse I have indevoured according to my weake ability, to set forth the full relation of the Warre from the first rise to the end of the victory . . .

  It takes a bit to make out the wacky spelling, but this seems to be a straight-up Check out how many indigenous people we killed and stole land from brag, like an old-school version of a terrifying online confession. I start to put it away, but a second underlined phrase catches my eye.

  The truth is, I want time to set forth the excellencie of the whole Countrey.

  Underhill—it strikes me that this is probably the man Underhill Avenue, a street I’d meandered down countless times in my life, is named after—goes on to list all the attributes of the lands from New England down to New Jersey. The good soil, the perfect places for docking English ships, the beautiful land that isn’t appreciated by its inhabitants, though sometimes as he rambles on about how move-in ready it is, he speaks as if it isn’t inhabited at all.

  Goose bumps spread in a wave down my arm and I quickly tuck the booklet back into the accordion folder and place it on my lap. This isn’t the kind of thing I’ll be talking about on the tour, but every bit of history is useful in some way.

  I try to imagine how Gifford Place must have looked to the people who lived here back then. Big-ass trees and thick underbrush. Darkness unbroken by streetlights. And in that darkness, the sudden arrival of men who’d decided the land was theirs . . .

  . . . slaine by the sword, to the number of fifteene hundred soules in the space of two moneths and lesse . . .

  “Hey.”

  I jolt, shaken from my thoughts that had been segueing into a dream because I’m so damn tired.

  When I look over, Ponytail Lululemon’s man is standing in the doorway, his hair messy, short beard trimmed neatly, and blue eyes bright with a particular kind of curiosity.

  “Hi.” I imbue my voice with every ounce of don’t even fucking think about it I can muster.

  He sits down on the old plastic-covered couch across from me, seemingly not picking up what I’m putting down because he smiles at me. He’s kind of odd-looking, with several prominent features instead of one or two, but it works for him. “Ugly-fine” is what Drea might call him.

  “We meet again,” he says.

  “We’ve never actually met before. You’re a strange white man who wandered into my friend’s house.” I tap the folder in my lap. “Given what I’m reading about your people, maybe you’re here to claim it as your own.”

  He shrugs. “The only thing I’m trying to claim is unemployment, and I’m barely managing that.”

  I press my lips together to avoid giving him the satisfaction of my smile.

  “Let’s officially meet now,” he says anyway, then holds out his hand and leans forward, stretching his arm and body long so I don’t have to move from my seat if I choose to meet his hand. “I’m Theo. I live across the street from you. I haven’t been very neighborly, and I’m looking to change that.”

  I reluctantly reach out to give his fingertips a quick shake, but he closes his hand over mine, holding on for a bit longer than is necessary. I almost let him, because the attention-starved part of me has the nerve to enjoy it, but then I pull my hand away.

  No more panning in Fuckboy Creek, and most definitely no climbing Cheating White Guy Hill.

  “Is your delightful wife coming? Or is she busy threatening to call the cops on other innocent Black people?”

  “We’re not married. It’s—complicated.” He leans back into the couch and runs his hand over his beard. When he speaks again, there’s wry humor mixed with frustration in his voice. “Kim isn’t coming. I do want to apologize about what happened in the store yesterday. She’s not . . . not usually like that. Things have been weird since we moved here, I guess.”

  “Mm-hmm” is all I say in response. I’m not his therapist and don’t care about his relationship.

  “Maybe I can make it up to you somehow?” His eyes brighten. “Do you like coffee? There’s a new place a few blocks down.”

  I stare at him, trying to discern if this dude is really trying to shoot his shot while discussing his wild-ass significant other who already tried to call the police on me.

  “Neighborly coffee,” he adds, leaning forward in a way that’s somehow nonthreatening even though it brings him closer to me. “Nothing more. When we did that tour you—”

  “Um, hi.” I look up to find Drea glancing speculatively between me and Theo. Her hair is slicked back into a puff ponytail, and she’s changed from her work clothes into a T-shirt and shorts.

  “Theo, this is my best friend and housemate, Drea. Drea, this is Theo from across the street. He lives in the Payne house.” Because I’m mean and want to deflect, I add, “His girlfriend is the one who threatened me at the store yesterday.”

  “Oh. Oh.” She perches on the arm of my chair and fixes her gaze on Theo. Drea is all of five feet tall and currently wearing a purple T-shirt with a unicorn on it, but her death stare is terrifying—it was why no one had fucked with me from grades five through twelve.

  “Hello, Brad,” she says. “Wonderful to meet you.”

  “Oh, it’s Theo.” His flirtatiousness is gone and his body is tense, as if Drea herself has a unicorn horn and might gore him.

  Good.

  Drea claps her hands together, then drops them between her knees as she leans forward. “You do know this is the planning meeting for the annual block party and not the Police Benevolent Association fundraiser, right?”

  “Drea.” I laugh. “Be nice.”

  “Fine.” She gives Theo an evil look. “But tell your girl that if anything happens to my Sydney, or one of my neighbors, because she wants to call 911 for no reason? Then we’re gonna have a problem. She don’t want no problems with me.”

  She leans back and spreads her arms, and when she speaks again, her voice is light and chipper. “Welcome to the neighborhood!”

  Theo swallows. “Thanks.”

  The room has started to fill with other neighbors: Asia Martin and her son Len, who’s a foot taller than me now, somehow, even though he was at my shoulder when I moved away. Jenn and Jen, who brought homemade dog treats for Count and homemade hummus for us humans. Tiffany, LaTasha, and Amber, the head of the neighborhood’s teen dance troupe. Ashley and Jamel Jones, without their son, Preston, who’s probably at one of his fifty-leven college-prep extracurriculars. Ms. Candace, who’s stepped up to help with the organizing since Mrs. Perkins passed away. Their chatter fills the den as they pour soda into plastic cups and grab handfuls of chips; even with so many people here, there are noticeable gaps where so many of the old familiar faces used to be.

  Theo ends up perched awkwardly on the edge of the couch next to Len, whose back is to Theo because his focus is on the three girls demonstrating dance moves for Jenn and Jen. Theo looks nervous, o
ut of place, but trying to be cool. It was how I felt living in Seattle and never quite fitting in at all of Marcus’s work functions and sports events and happy hours. I eventually stopped trying.

  “Hot damn, ho, here we go again,” Drea mutters, breaking the unfortunate direction of my thoughts.

  I whip my head up to find her looking down at me, judgment a divot etched between her brows. “What?” I ask innocently.

  “What?” she mimics in annoyance, then leans over and whispers in my ear, her voice sharp and singsong. “Why are you staring at Theodore like you’ve spotted fool’s gold, yet again?”

  I raise a brow. “Do you propose I just ignore the strange white man at our gathering? Have you read a newspaper lately? This is surveillance. I’m trying to make sure I don’t need to take his ass out.”

  She stares at me.

  I hold up my index and middle fingers and covertly gesture from my eyes to Theo’s general direction. “Sur. Veil. Lance.”

  She just looks at me, a glimmer of frustration in her eyes, then she shakes her head. “You have theeeeee worst taste. The worst. Though . . .” She glances over at him. “He does look a little spicy, with them thick-ass eyebrows. He at least puts paprika on his chicken, I’m guessing. Maybe even some Lawry’s.”

  “Drea! If you don’t stop—”

  “Stop what? Predicting your dumbass behavior based on a lifetime of observation?” She says it jokingly, but she’s right—she’s always been there to warn me when I was about to slip up, and to catch me when I ignored her and inevitably fell. When my nightmares weren’t about the devil at my elbow, they featured Drea walking away from me and my neediness—like Marcus had.

  She touches my shoulder lightly. “You’re lucky I love you.”

  “I am.” I lean into her a bit, letting myself rest against the familiar warmth of a side that has propped me up countless times over the years, through failures and bad decisions, marriage, divorce, and . . . everything since I came back to Brooklyn. Drea would do anything for me—like, that’s a fact and not a supposition.

  My lips turn up at the corners and I sigh, comfort sliding over me like a weighted blanket. The beginning of a bangin’ nap, this one not marred by weird half dreams of colonial destruction, starts to pull me under.

  Drea nudges me with her elbow, jostling me away from the edge of sleep. “I talked to work bae in the contracts department about the VerenTech stuff you were complaining about.”

  “You didn’t have to ask,” I say grumpily. “I didn’t tell you about the rejected information request so you could do the work for me.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Well, I did. And it’s too late to tell him never mind, because then he’s gonna be mad at me since he’s already going out of his way for me since there’s all this extra security around this project.”

  That was the thing with Drea: a simple question can turn into her going ten blocks out of her way to get something you didn’t ask for, or, in this case, having her coworker do possibly illegal searches for info that’ll probably be useless to me.

  I feel the urge to snap at her, but catch myself before stepping on that particular Lego of regret. Drea . . . has really been there for me. Really fucking been there, and held me down when anyone else would’ve let me go to pieces. I’ve been asking a lot of her while being too empty to give back, and yet here I am about to cop an attitude because she’s being too helpful.

  “Thank you, Drea Bond,” I say, reminding myself how lucky I am. I know what it feels like to not have the kind of support Drea excels at, and I never want to feel that way again.

  She strikes a pose with a finger gun and winks at me. “I got you.”

  “I’m calling this meeting to order,” Ms. Candace says loudly, her voice cutting through the noise to silence everyone. “Now, we have a week until the block party. Almost everything is set, but . . .” She looks around and shakes her head in annoyance. “At least four people on my list aren’t here.”

  “Maybe the mole people got them!” Tiffany says in a creepy, raspy voice that imitates an announcer on a kids’ Halloween special.

  “I heard they been snatching people up all summer! The news is ignoring it, though.” LaTasha shakes her head.

  “Are you serious?” Jen asks, eyes wide. “I thought the neighborhood was supposed to be safe.”

  “They’re joking, honey,” Jenn says with a smitten roll of her eyes.

  “See, that’s why they don’t talk about it,” LaTasha says, sounding just like her mom, who she probably heard this story from. “Nisha’s aunt went missing and somebody said they saw her get pulled through a subway grate.”

  Amber looks between her two friends skeptically. “I don’t believe that story because—deadass?—who walks on subway grates? Even if there aren’t mole people, you can’t be walking on no subway grate.”

  She’s right. Nobody with an ounce of common sense is trying to fall through a weak subway grate, a busted manhole, or a janky metal cellar door outside a bodega.

  “Where is Kavaughn at?” Ms. Candace calls out. “He volunteered to help Sydney with the last of the research for her tour that she snuck onto the agenda at the last minute. Did the mole people get him, too?”

  The room doesn’t go quiet again, but voices lower as people look around, searching for Kavaughn’s familiar Mets cap.

  “Oh.” Len snaps his fingers. “I think maybe he went to visit his family in North Carolina? Since his summer session ended. He goes down there for a few days every summer, and it’s so country they don’t even have internet!”

  “No internet?” Tiffany, LaTasha, and Amber cry out in horror, turning to look at him.

  Len freezes, unprepared to be the center of attention of the three girls he’s been trying to work up the nerve to talk to. Theo nudges him—quickly, encouragingly—pushing Len into action. The boy throws his hands up, grins. “I’m saying! ‘Can you hear me now?’ ‘No, bruh, get Fios!’”

  Tiffany, LaTasha, and Amber burst out laughing and Len’s posture slackens in relief. I, on the other hand, am shit out of luck.

  “So my assistant just up and left? Cool.” Maybe this is a sign I should just give up on this idea, even if it would feel like disappointing Mommy.

  “I can help,” Len says. His gaze flicks over to the girls to make sure they’re listening, then back to me. “I’m taking AP classes at LIU and working at the YMCA camp, though, so I’m pretty busy.”

  The girls start whispering and his chest puffs out a bit.

  Then Theo raises that big hand of his and says, “I can help, too.”

  “Don’t you have better things to do?” I ask.

  “Absolutely not.” He runs a hand through his hair with that look of practiced innocence white men use when they’re on some bullshit. “Unemployed, remember? And no AP classes, either. Tests aren’t my strong point. What do you need help with?”

  “I’m planning a historical tour of the neighborhood,” I say. Theo was there when Zephyr told me to make my own, and I feel like I’m revealing some dirty secret, but his expression doesn’t change. “I want to do a demo run during the block party.”

  “Because she’ll have a captive audience,” Mr. Perkins calls out, and everyone laughs.

  I ignore him. “I need help with some historical research and with the tour overview.”

  Theo’s eyes brighten. “I’m good at research. And I wanted to explore the neighborhood and get to know my—our neighbors. I could do that and help you at the same time.”

  And just like that everyone but Drea is looking at me like if I don’t say yes I’ll be kicking a dog in the ribs. The worst part? I don’t think any of them even realize it.

  “I have a camera,” he adds.

  “Everyone has a camera, man,” Len says, joking because he apparently likes Theo enough to do that now. “It’s called a cell phone?”

  Amber laughs, and Len’s chest puffs up even more.

  “And I bet your tour will be way better than the brownst
one one. If I can help with that . . .” He shrugs. “That’d be cool.”

  “Sydney, you’re the one who put this on the schedule last minute,” Ms. Candace says in her no-nonsense tone that reminds me she spent years managing a bank. “You need help. Our neighbor has offered to help. What exactly is the problem?”

  I cross my arms over my chest and glance at Theo.

  “I was gonna pay Kavaughn, but I’m not paying you,” I say. “If you really want to help, you can think of this work as reparations.”

  There. A little twitch at the corner of his eye. But when he opens his mouth all he says is “Great. Just let me know when and where.”

  The meeting moves on and I tune it out, glancing at Theo as he interacts with these people I’ve known all my life. I have no idea why this man is so invested in helping me, or is suddenly all up in the neighborhood Kool-Aid, but I guess I’m about to find out.

  Gifford Place OurHood post by Josie Ulnar:

  This evening when I was walking home from work, I noticed a group of men in hoodies riding their bikes slowly up and down the street. I’m not sure if they were casing houses or if it’s part of the gang initiations that apparently happen at this time of year, but I did call it in to the police.

  Ashley Jones: That was my son Preston, who is 17, babysitting his cousins, who are 8 and 11 years old and thus only allowed to ride their bikes from corner to corner on this street, WHERE THEY LIVE. (-__-)

  Josie Ulnar: I was just being vigilant. Crime has been on the rise and it’s something we all need to keep an eye out for.

  Kim DeVries: I’m with Josie. There have already been several break-ins over the last few weeks and gangs plan robberies for three-day weekends, when people are away and no one is really paying attention.

  Ashley Jones: www.nyccrime.gov/crimerates Crime in our neighborhood is at the lowest it’s been in decades, but go off sis.

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