The Window

by Amelia Brunskill

  THE NEXT DAY, I SAT on the bleachers with a book perched in front of me, doing my best impression of reading. I wasn’t, though. Nor, for once, was I focused on Mr. Matthews, who sat a few rows down from me, waiting for the basketball team to finish doing laps. I wasn’t even thinking about the graffiti, Anna, or Mrs. Hayes.

  Instead, I was watching Nick run.

  Watching how the thin layer of sweat on his arms and neck made him look like he was made of liquid glass, and thinking about how, depending on the light, his eyes ranged from the color of root beer to the color of bark after a rain.

  These were unusual thoughts for me.

  Highly unusual.

  Still, I wasn’t sure I wanted anything to happen between us. Anything physical. I honestly didn’t know if I wanted him to touch me at all. At the same time, I was…curious about touching him. His arm, his shoulder, the knob of bone on his wrist. Something. To touch him and not immediately move away.

  The bleachers began to vibrate under the weight of someone’s footsteps. I turned to see Sarah banging her way up toward me. She sank down beside me, giving me a funny sideways grin.

  “So who is it?” she asked as she flipped her head over to put her hair into that perfect ponytail of hers. She could do it almost in a single motion, but when I tried to replicate it once it did not end well.

  “Who’s what?”

  She flipped her head right-side up again, ponytail complete. “Who are you staring at?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, making a production of closing my book. “I’ve been reading.”

  “Ha. I’m pretty sure reading involves you actually looking at the pages, not just having the thing propped in front of you while you drool over someone.”

  My fingers moved toward my mouth.

  “Figurative drooling,” she said. “Not literal. Oh God, you are so busted.”

  At that moment, Nick turned onto the stretch of track closest to where I was sitting. He looked up and waved. Without even thinking, I waved back.

  I expected that exchange to elicit further teasing from Sarah. Instead, she looked thoughtful. “Oh,” she said. “I was just teasing. I didn’t know you and Nick were actually a thing.”

  “We’re not. We’re just friends.”

  She raised one of her eyebrows. “Friends?”

  “Friends. Really.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Good.”

  “Okay.” I paused and mulled it over. “Wait, why is that good?”

  “I don’t know,” she said awkwardly. “It’s just, you hear stuff sometimes.”

  “About Nick?”

  “Not specifically. But he’s on the basketball team. And I’ve heard…” She shook her head. “I don’t know. I go to games sometimes, and they’re kind of vicious. Plus, they party pretty hard. Doesn’t seem like your scene.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Nick’s not like that, though.”

  “You sure about that?”

  I thought of Nick, of how he’d shaken his head when Charlie offered him the flask at Anna’s funeral. Thought of his smile. Thought of his face when he talked about Anna.

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “All right.” She looked at me closely, closely enough that I started to blush. “You’re starting to fall for him, aren’t you?” It was as gentle as anything I’d ever heard from her.

  “It doesn’t feel like falling,” I said slowly.

  “What does it feel like?”

  I watched Nick slow down to a jog as the basketball coach began to usher everyone off the track. “It feels more like I’m starting to wake up.”

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I lay on my stomach in the grass and stared at Nick as he idly picked at a small batch of flowers by his side, rolling one of the buds around between his fingers. I wondered what I’d do if he let it go and moved closer, if he reached toward me. Would I remain still? Or would that familiar feeling of panic rise in my chest, leading me to flinch and move away? I wondered if it even had occurred to him to try, or if I was only his weekend running partner, the awkward twin of the girl he’d liked—someone too messed up to seriously consider.

  “It’s just a flower, Jess.”

  I started. “What?”

  “You’re looking at this”—he lightly tapped the flower with his index finger—“like it’s a Magic Eight Ball about to reveal your future. What are you thinking about?”

  Whether you want to touch me, I thought. How it might feel if you did.

  “Nothing, really. It’s just been a weird week,” I said. And I thought back to sitting in Mrs. Hayes’s office, hearing her talk about my finding a path. Thought about how strange, how uncomfortable it had felt. “I used to be able to coast along without people paying too much attention, or at least I didn’t notice if they did. And now it’s like there’s a spotlight on me and there’s no rest from it. It’s like they’re waiting for me to fall apart.” I shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe that doesn’t make sense.”

  Nick made an odd sound.

  “What?”

  He waved his hand. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh.”

  I was annoyed that my opening up had amused him. “Why is that funny to you?”

  “It’s not funny. Really, it’s not. It’s just that I think you’re forgetting who you’re talking to. Because I’m literally the only black guy in the whole school. I’ve had a spotlight on me from the day we moved here. People watch me like a hawk, and most of them don’t even know they’re doing it. So believe me, I totally get it.” He sighed. “I mean, before I got here, I was this really mellow person. My cousins used to call me Yoda because I didn’t get all worked up about things. And I liked that about myself, I did. But here it’s like this constant buzz of disapproval, where all my movements are second-guessed. Like when I take one sip of a beer, I’m an alcoholic, but when I pass, I’m a straight-edge asshole. It’s like sandpaper on my nerves. I worry people will just keep working away at me until all the good parts are gone.”

  “They can’t do that,” I said. “People can’t change who you are.”

  He shook his head. “You’re wrong about that,” he said. “How people treat you can absolutely change who you are. And around here, half the people act like they’re scared of me, like I’m a time bomb waiting to go off, and the other half are trying to light the damn fuse. I worry one day someone will shoulder-check me in the hall or whisper something as I go by and I’ll lose it. And it’ll just confirm everything they thought all along.”

  I wanted to believe I wasn’t part of the “they” he referred to. Wanted to feel confident that I was different, that I’d always seen him as more than the color of his skin, that I hadn’t let that define him for me. But I wasn’t sure that was true, that I’d really treated him, thought about him, like everyone else.

  I pushed that tangle of thoughts down, unwilling to pull apart the threads.

  “You have friends on the basketball team, though, right?”

  He flicked the flower away.

  “I’m friends with Brian, and Charlie mostly tolerates me by proxy, but that’s about it. The minute the game is over, the rest of them are all gone. Sometimes they leave in a big pack and I just head on home.” His mouth stretched in a half smile. “Once, I asked one of them about it, and he said they assumed I had other plans. Who knows—maybe they really thought that. Maybe they think I get flown out by helicopter every evening to some big city where I go clubbing with my twenty best black friends.”

  While it was utterly beside the point, I was temporarily distracted by the thought of him dancing underneath flashing lights, moving to a deep bass that reverberated through the floor.

  He shook his head again. “Half the time I don’t even turn my phone on—I get sick of seeing pictures of parties I didn’t even know were happening, or the great time everyon
e else had at the few I actually hear about.” Then he laughed, dry and bitter. “The one thing I do get is the ball during games. When I got to this place I wasn’t even all that great at basketball, but everyone was so sure the black guy was going to be amazing that I got more court time than anyone else. Now I’m one of the best players on the team.”

  Then he rolled onto his back, done with this line of conversation.

  I leaned back on my forearms and stared at the sky, which was streaked with clouds.

  Once upon a time, I’d studied clouds, learned the names of all the different types. The only one I could bring to mind now was “nimbus” and I had no idea what those looked like or what weather conditions they signified.

  I thought about clouds and rain.

  I thought about time.

  About Nick. About Anna.

  About whether things would be different between Nick and me if I could turn back time and be the one who’d gone up to him when he’d been upset, be the one who’d held his hand. Except, if I could turn back time, then I’d have kept Anna from leaving that night and I’d be with her now instead of lying here with Nick in the grass.

  Time only moves in one direction, though, so I just kept looking up at the sky and watching the unnamed clouds go by.

  We were more discreet after that. More secretive.

  Still, there were times when I wanted to tell you so much it was like pressure on a bruise, growing ever darker and more sensitive to the touch. I wanted to try to explain it to you.

  But I didn’t think there was a way to make you—you, who could barely stand to be near anyone other than me—understand how it felt to be touched like that. Make you understand how I thought feeling like that must mean I was falling in love.

  THE DOORBELL RANG SOON AFTER I got back to the house after my run, catching me while I was getting ready to shower. My parents were out grocery shopping, according to the note they’d left on the table, so I pulled my sweatpants back on, tossed on a clean shirt, and headed downstairs to answer the door. The doorbell rang again right as I opened the door to reveal a police officer standing on our porch, his finger still on the bell.

  It was the same one who’d come to our house before, except this time he was holding a medium-sized cardboard box. When he saw me, he took a half step back and tightened his grip on it.

  “Hello. Are your parents home?” he asked.

  “No, they’re out.”

  “Oh.” He looked down at the box and then up at me. “I’m here to give this to them.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s her things, your sister’s things,” he said. He flushed, his pink skin turning a deep shade of salmon. “They should have been returned earlier but they got misfiled.”

  I wondered if misfiled was simply a polite term for their having gotten left in some random room or shoved under someone’s desk, slowly getting buried beneath a layer of papers and miscellaneous office supplies.

  “Fine,” I said. “I can take it.” I reached for the box.

  He seemed unclear as to whether this was an acceptable option and continued to hold the box close to his body.

  “Give it to me,” I said.

  He didn’t so much hand it over as reluctantly allow me to free it from his grasp. I gave him a few extra seconds in case there was something he needed to add. He said nothing, just continued standing there with an uncertain look on his face. I gave him a small wave, for politeness’s sake, and then closed the door.

  I took the box up to my room. I sat on my bed and held the box tight to my chest. I thought about Anna, about how wrong I’d been about what we were to each other, about how little she’d wanted me to know about her life.

  I wondered if I had any right to look at what was inside.

  I sat for a long time before I opened it. I felt guilty, like a thief, as I took out each item and laid it on my bed.

  First, her phone, the screen smashed. I tried turning it on. Nothing. I put it aside.

  After her phone came her shoes, tights, dress, cardigan, underwear, and hair clip. Everything she had been wearing that night, neatly folded. The idea of a policeman, or even policewoman, touching her socks, her underwear, made my stomach clench. It was difficult to accept how after her death nothing had been private anymore.

  I ran my hands over her cardigan. I remembered her wearing it after she first got it, just months earlier, how I’d been envious of how warm it looked. In my arms, it was heavy and soft, but when I raised it to my face it didn’t smell like Anna; it smelled like detergent. Not even the detergent we used. They must have washed it. I didn’t want to think about why they’d have done that.

  I left the cardigan draped over my lap as I unfolded the dress. It was a deep, dark purple—eggplant, I guess it would be called. Toward the bottom edge a button was missing, only a scrap of thread left behind. I searched the box to see if it had fallen off inside, but it wasn’t there. It must have fallen off that night. When she fell.

  I laid the dress on my bed and then I went outside, to the back of our house, to the stretch of grass beneath Anna’s window. I got down on my knees and searched the grass, the dirt and stones beneath it, looking for the white button, for that glint of pearl, planning to sew it back onto the dress. I wanted to make one small thing of hers whole again, the way it should be.

  I couldn’t find it, not even after I expanded the area I searched, trying to account for its being moved around under layers of snow and ice. I kept searching, though, until I heard my parents’ car coming up the drive. Only then did I dive back into the house and run upstairs to the bathroom, where I scrubbed my hands so they wouldn’t question me about the layer of dirt under my nails.

  And before I went downstairs for dinner, I refolded the dress and cardigan and tucked them back in the box. I was about to add her phone as well, but I hesitated. I ultimately set it aside, and then gently slid the box, with the rest of Anna’s things, under my bed, out of sight.

  I didn’t want anyone else touching her things. They’d been touched too much already.

  USUALLY WHEN I SAT DOWN on the bus, I got a nod from Sarah and not much more. Sarah was not exactly a morning person. But the very moment I sat down the next day, Sarah whipped off her headphones and treated me to a long rant about driver’s ed. It seemed she’d been storing up all her feelings and frustrations about it, and I was, apparently, the lucky recipient. I waited it out as best I could.

  “Are you done now?” I asked, after she’d finally paused for longer than a brief second to draw another breath.

  “For the moment,” she said. “But if I fail the test, there’ll be a whole other round, I promise you. And if the instructor tells me again that it’s ‘cute’ how nervous I am, then you’ll need to bring me a cake with a saw in it while I’m in jail.”

  “Noted,” I said. “Anyway, I wanted to ask—do you really have a ‘phone guy’?”

  “Yep. Phone girl, actually.” Then she paused and considered. “Or maybe as a feminist I should say phone woman?”

  “Is she good?”

  “Yeah. I used to take it to the place where I bought it, but they’d usually try to get me to buy a new one rather than repairing it—somehow none of the stuff I do is ever covered under warranty. Mona’s managed to keep it limping along for years.”

  “Mona? Mona Addle is your phone woman?”

  “Yep.”

  “How did that happen?”

  Sarah raised her eyebrows at me. “You see, I’m not one hundred percent sure whether you’re surprised because you don’t think she’s capable of fixing people’s phones, or because you don’t understand what a girl like Mona would have to do with the humble likes of me.”

  I considered these two choices. Honestly, I was a bit surprised by both.

  Sarah laughed. “Wow, you need to work on your poker face. Mona is a se
cret nerd. It’s not even like it’s a real secret—it’s just, between all the curls and the cheerleading, people manage to forget about all her science fair trophies and think that maybe she just wandered into AP Bio by mistake or something.”

  “What’s in it for her?”

  “The two of us used to be friends. Then she got popular in middle school and dropped me,” Sarah said. “Later she felt bad and tried to reconnect, but I was over it. Now I just reach out when I need some troubleshooting, and she helps me. I think it makes her feel good—like she’s doing community service.”

  “Do you think she might look at something for me?”

  Sarah shrugged. “Maybe. Honestly, though, she gets a bit grumpy when I bring her small stuff, so if it’s something pretty basic you might want to first search the interwebs for an answer yourself. What she likes best is when I bring her the hard stuff.”

  “Mine’s pretty hard. I don’t think she’ll even be able to do anything with it.”

  Sarah smiled. “Say it exactly like that. That will drive her crazy. I’ll ask her about my phone too while we’re at it—it’s still not back to its old self.” Then she paused. “Oh, and this really wouldn’t be like you anyway, but just a word to the wise—do not bring up Brian with her.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because they broke up last spring. It’s still a super-touchy subject. And I say this as someone who teases her about a lot—do not bring up Brian. I made that mistake already, and she’ll assume I’m behind it if it happens again.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  And I meant it. But I couldn’t help thinking back to Mona rushing past him during the lockdown drill, and to that day on the roof. Couldn’t help wondering what exactly had happened between the two of them.

  Or maybe it’s not fair to say I didn’t tell you because I was afraid you wouldn’t understand.

  Maybe it was more that I was afraid that if I talked about it, I’d find how little there was to say, the words crumbling in my mouth. How impossible it was to explain why I couldn’t stop.