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Heres chap 16! I'll be reading this after I'm done studying history... Blech! xp

NOTICE BEFORE READING! Sorry about the potentially offensive sexual comments. Trying to write from a guy's point of view, yes?

Anyway:

16

I could go into a lot of poetic descriptions of teenagerdom, but the truth was that it was just the same as the year before. I was in the eighth grade now, and that was all that was really different; more work, different subjects, new teachers.

That, and hormones. I think I must have gotten them over the summer, or perhaps I always had it, like the way you’re born with the tuberculosis virus-thing, and it can strike at any time. But suddenly I found that every girl that passed me had to be given a thorough inspection, one that would have made me blush just a month before. Suddenly all the girls had breasts; suddenly I knew what they were, and like all stupid boys, assumed that they were God’s gift to men. I was not at the stage that some other boys were, however; I did not yet have dirty thoughts every time I saw a girl, and I would by no means ever do more than watch them. I thought they were graceful, slender, pretty; I knew what qualified as good-looking for a guy, but now I was discovering the standards for girls as well. There was just some subtle quality in a girl that made her beautiful, something I couldn’t define.

I discovered what this quality was when I got a little older; it was the girl’s personality. I become surer the older I get that a person’s outlook and basic qualities show on their face, intangible yet there, like light in clear water. The most delicate-featured girl could be forever marred by sneers and snide whispers; and simultaneously, the girl with the eyes too far apart, the nose squashed and crooked, could have the brightest, happiest smile in the world. Aside from Kahmè’s.

Kahmè was the rare exception to the hormones rule. I’ll admit that I did give her the scrutinizing look now and then, but she was different. I already knew her, I couldn’t decide if she was pretty or not, and trying to was just awkward. So I didn’t. She was just Kahmè.

One thing that should be mentioned is that though I looked at girls, none of them looked at me. There was a good reason for that, and it was simply that: I was not attractive in the least. Too skinny, too scrawny, too sickly and pale, too huge-eyed, too quiet, too strange. I couldn’t see any redeemable qualities in myself, (who could after living with my dad for so long?), and that in itself was enough to make sure that no one saw any in me, either. Oh, well. It didn’t upset me then and it sure as hell doesn’t now.

All in all, girls started to make more sense. I understood now why they (or the majority, meaning everyone but Kahmè and the tomboys and lesbians) were so dainty, so careful, so clean and meticulous. They were trained from birth to be graceful and polite and delicate and neat so that they would grow into things like those pretty doe-eyed girls in my eighth grade class.

The funny thing was that though I vowed never to be like those boys who saw every girl as a pornography model with clothes on (though I have to admit, some of the clothes didn’t help matters much), and who passed dirty and disturbingly sexual comments to girls that either blushed, got offended, or were flattered, it must be said that most teenagers are very dirty indeed. Some hide it better than others, but in reality, all of them think on the same path, all of them want to experience all that can be experienced, and all of them want to feel loved, if only in a shallow way, touches and kisses and sex. And as Atticus Finch rightly put it in To Kill a Mockingbird, never has there been a man who has not looked upon a woman with desire.

Just something to keep in mind.



There was only one dramatic change in procedure this year, one deviation from the norm. Insignificant, really, but chain reactions happen in weird ways.

The way it usually happened in Skyland and Zephyr Cove with all the rowdy, unruly kids was that the Halloween spirit built all October, kids started making their costumes on the first and shoved them in a safe corner of their closets and gangs, cliques, and teams joined together early to plan their personal haunting strategies and candy routes. Naturally the former included wrapping houses (in toilet paper, oddly enough; one would think they’d find something more interesting, or at least not such plain toilet paper—perhaps glow-in-the-dark), egging, scaring little kids, gambling candy, demanding chocolate fees for the “haunted house” on the corner, daring each other to go alone into the broken-down building that every kid in town avoided walking past without bright sunshine and a friend, the modern-day Zephyr Cove Radley House.

A select type and group of middle-school child made up this group, but since everyone was just like everyone else in my town that type and group, specifically, made up about half the kids the two towns had put together. It was a lot of mischief-makers, and there was not quite as much mischief to be done. So one bright genius, to fix the problem of overloading terrorism, created Trickster Night.

Trickster Night was the Saturday night before Halloween. It could be a day before or a week before, it didn’t matter to any of the participating kids; for them, it was Halloween’s twin holiday, all the fun of mischief and madness and moonlit exploits without missing out on the candy and benefits thereof. Everything they wanted to do on Halloween that didn’t involve trick-or-treating or little kids (or both), be it drawing rude words backwards on windshields with car paint or an all-out egg war in the baseball field, was done on Trickster Night. They had twelve hours to wreak havoc in one way, then on Halloween they could wreak different havoc or the same all over again, without feeling that their solemn duty to demolish everything in sight with eggs, shaving cream, toilet paper, and dart guns was interfering with their duty to stuff their faces with a pound of candy on the same night.

For them, it was a nice system. For me…well, it didn’t matter much to me. The only thing I was concerned about was Kahmè getting in the middle of all that, if someone tried to destroy our house. To fix that, I tried asking Dad if she could come over that evening (and stay until about ten o’clock, when the majority of the mischief-makers would be in bed), but was rewarded with a lecture and a hard punch to the mouth, as he was annoyed that I was so girly that I’d rather bake cookies than participate in the most deviously boyish holiday of the year. He didn’t mention that I wasn’t allowed to participate anyway, but he was right about the cookie thing, so I didn’t press the subject—my mouth was sore enough.

So Kahmè had to be content with sleeping in the garage, armed with a stick, a plastic air rifle I’d found in the attic that shot hard little plastic pellets up to fifty feet, and sheer Indian madness. I was worried about her, but she said she’d be fine, our house was too boring to try and mutilate anyway.

As it happened, she was wrong. When my dad went to get the paper on Sunday morning (usually I got it, but on Trickster Night no one respectable went out drinking, so he got up earlier than me), he discovered with considerable outrage that our front door had been ruined by shaving cream and egg had crusted over our windows. There were also a few limp, pathetic strands of toilet paper curving around our tree, with the rest of the roll halfheartedly abandoned nearby. Our lawn was scuffed up and untidy from little boys and drunken teenagers running through it all night.

Dad immediately marched up to my room and dragged me out of bed. I blinked sleepily, wincing as his sharp words stabbed through my seven-in-the-morning haze. I didn’t understand half of what he was saying, but I did understand that our house had been Trickster’d, and apparently it was all my fault. How, I still don’t have a clue.

He set me to work, told me if I had the free time to run around with the neighborhood kids and destroy private property, then I shouldn’t have the privilege of free time anymore. He wanted to see the house cleaned and lunch and dinner made as well as the sparkling front yard and windows by noon. Come to think of it, he added, our entire house looked like s**t, (this was naturally my fault as well), and I was going to have to fix that too or see if I got anything from HIM anymore. I assumed that that meant he wasn’t feeding me until it was done.

This was so blatantly unfair that I objected, and anyway, what was wrong with the house and how was I supposed to fix it? He, for answer, banged my head against the outside of a back window, showing me the chipped paint and the dirty glass. Then he showed me the leaf-filled gutters, the overgrown lawn, the unclipped bushes. We didn’t have a yardman, Dad only did this stuff when he felt like it, so it all did look a bit messy.

I still couldn’t believe my luck, and I asked him how I was going to reach the gutters and the topmost windows. He gestured to the ladder in the garage and slapped me for being stupid. I swallowed. I loathed that ladder with my entire being.

He left me alone with the order to get to work, but without an explanation as to how to do all of that. Soap scum, carpet stains, rust, no problem; but lawn-mowing?

I went to the front yard first and did all I knew how to do, removing the toilet paper and scrubbing the windows clean. I tried scrubbing the door, too, but it turns out that shaving cream ruins paint; the door would have to be painted again. I reported this to Dad, who shouted that what did he just tell me to do? There was paint in the garage.

I had never painted anything in my life.

I sighed and traipsed to the garage to get it over with, and upon entering was attacked by Kahmè’s air gun. Three pellets hit me hard on the side of my head, stinging the skin.

“Back off! I’ve got fifty trillion more where that came from!” Kahmè cried.

“What the hell, Kahmè?” I moaned in return, turning on the light. She let the gun fall when she saw it was me.

“Oh, hi, Evan,” she said cheerfully. “What’s up?”

“Gotta paint the whole f—ing house, that’s what,” I said sourly. That wasn’t true—thank God, our house was brick—but it was the simplest way of putting it. I selected a can of paint and opened it—black. Another was brown, another blue, another white—I’d need that for the windowsills, so I put it aside. Finally I found creamy red, almost the same shade as our door. Kahmè watched with interest.

“What’re you painting with that?”

“The front door. Some kids ruined it with shaving cream.”

“Shaving cream?”

“Yeah, it’s icky white stuff.” That was all I said about it—I knew she’d figure out what it was pretty soon in her life, but I didn’t know exactly for what, and preferred not to know. “It got all over the place.”

“Oooh.” She didn’t sound very sorry about it. “Can I see?”

“Sure,” I said glumly, taking the paint and an old brush and following her to the front yard. When there, I decided that it wouldn’t pay to get paint all over my pajamas, (I wore a t-shirt now, it was getting cold), so I went inside and donned an old undershirt of Dad’s that I was going to make into a rag soon. Kahmè insisted, so I got her one too, and a paintbrush, and then I set about finding out how to paint a door. Kahmè started without pondering, and I copied her—she was better at it than I was, though I didn’t think either of us was very good. The important thing was that the door was covered in paint before too long. I surveyed it with vague dread, hoping it was good enough for Dad.

Then I set about painting the windowsills carefully with white paint. The leaves were raked (there weren’t too many), the lawn was mowed, next, and the bushes trimmed with the hedge clipper that was bigger than I was, and the driveway was swept. I liked to do a good job of things, if I had to do them. Kahmè was enormous help; neither of us had much experience, but between us we had enough to get the job somewhat done. And when I finally had to haul the stupid ladder out, she helped me lug it to the front.

I didn’t hate that ladder in particular, or even all ladders in general. I hated heights. I was scared to death of them, I couldn’t stand being more than five feet off the ground. I don’t know if it was because I’d “fallen down the stairs” so much, or had literally fallen (or had been pushed) down the stairs a few times, or if it was because I spent so much time on the floor and looking down, or if it was because I was short for my age. All I knew was, I was petrified of heights. I didn’t like the ground to be so far away from me, and I knew how much it would hurt if I fell off of whatever it was. In this case, a ladder.

It was a simple prop-up affair, which made me even more nervous. It could slip any second. I could plummet to my death at the slightest breeze. Nothing was stopping it from tipping backwards except gravity, and fragile gravity at that. I made Kahmè stand at the bottom, holding the ladder steady for all she was worth. She agreed too cheerily; I was unnerved. I brought the paint can with me, set it carefully on the windowsill, and very cautiously, without looking down, I painted the one window that showed from the front, an attractive peaked affair whose attractiveness was lost on me.

Kahmè scared me by trying to make conversation, by shaking the ladder a little with her shifting and mini-dancing, and when she suddenly said, “Ooooh, oh wow, look at that!” and turned her body so sharply that the ladder wobbled.

“Kahmè would you PLEASE just hold the GODDAMN LADDER!” I screamed, hanging on for dear life. Kahmè looked away from the butterfly or whatever it was and stared up at me, concerned. I didn’t explain, but I think she knew. She didn’t fidget again.

I climbed very, very slowly down the ladder when I was done, then scrambled across the yard and covered my eyes with my hands. Never again…I didn’t care if Dad hit me, I wasn’t ever going up there again….

Kahmè skipped over and gave me a quiet little hug; I accepted it with gratitude and pulled myself together. There were things to be done.

I had to take a minute work up the nerve to climb the stupid ladder again; I decided it would be best to get it all over with. I didn’t want to give up; I wanted Dad to see that I had tried, I wanted to show him that I wasn’t worthless. I had resigned to the fact that I was going to get beaten by the end of the day, because no one could do all of this AND clean the house AND cook dinner all in the daylight hours, but I had to at least try.

I moved the ladder to the driveway-side of the house and climbed cautiously up, this time forced to hold the paint can in one hand as I worked. This prevented me from clinging to dear life to…to, well, anything, which frightened me more than I can say. I didn’t look down; I tried not to look anywhere at all. Eventually, the side windows were done.

Dad chose that moment to appear. I suspected that he had been watching me all day, moving around to different windows so he could see that I was doing my job right. When I descended the ladder again, he was watching from the gate.

“Lunch,” he reminded me. I heard the disgust barely disguised in his voice, but he couldn’t do anything with Kahmè there. “You’d better go home,” he said casually to her, and she nodded and ran off down the street. Then he turned away and inspected the windows. I kept my distance until he beckoned me over with one finger, unable to shout.

“Idiot,” he hissed at me, and I flinched. He pointed to the four window panes set into the front door. “You got paint on the goddamn glass! Don’t you know to put tape down first? Useless little b***h,” he muttered, scratching at the dried paint with a fingernail. I paled.

“Will it come off?” I inquired in just as soft a voice. We had to put on a show for the neighbors whenever these things happened outside.

“With a razor blade.” At that volume, his voice would have sounded almost civil, had he not glared at me with utmost contempt, as if I was the biggest dumbass the world had ever seen. “Get over here.”

I followed him, stomach sinking, to the garage, whereupon he immediately punched me, hard, and cursed for a minute straight before digging around in his toolbox and opening a small box, producing a little rectangular blade. He shoved it into my palm so hard that he cut my skin. I tried to hide the blood from him.

“I want all of it done, Evan,” he threatened me. “All of it, or it’ll be the new f—ing millennium when you eat again.”

Food wasn’t that big of a deal to me, but it would be harder to work on an empty stomach. I sighed when he wasn’t around to hear anymore and ventured into the house to wash my hands and start lunch. My palm wouldn’t stop bleeding, so I rolled enchiladas one-handed—it was easy and fast—and stuck them in the oven with some difficulty. I poked my head cautiously into the living room.

“Dad, when the oven goes off, the enchiladas are ready, okay? You have to take them out or they’ll burn. There’s rice and queso on the stove.”

He ignored me.

“Okay, Dad?”

He shifted his eyes from the TV to me, sneering some acidic remark about something I didn’t catch. It sounded like he was peeved that I had ordered him around.

“It’s your lunch,” I muttered in reply, too loudly—the remark earned me a handful of spear-like ice cubes pelted at my head. It only hurt for a moment, the real punishment was cleaning them up with one hand. I wrapped my hand in toilet paper, followed by a few rounds of masking tape, and went back to work.

I was definitely not going up on the damn ladder at the moment, already queasy from the blood getting everywhere. I decided I’d save the back windows for last. It took me all afternoon to scrape the paint carefully off of the bottom-floor windows (would Dad notice the top ones?) and then mow the back lawn (damn playhouse), clip the bushes back, and finally work up the nerve to ascend the ladder about halfway and pull leaves from the gutter, dumping them into a trash bag. Then I was forced to start painting the upstairs windows, as I had almost run out of chores, and wanted to finish the outside ones before dark.

I carefully, carefully climbed the ladder, very carefully painted the windowsill. Kahmè encouraged me from below, coaxing me with an ice cream since I was doing such a good job. I didn’t care so much about ice cream as getting the f—down from there. It preoccupied me so much, in fact, that I accidently, coincidentally, mistakenly….

…looked down.

The ground was almost thirty feet away. My God. Look at how small Kahmè was. Look at how far down the grass was. Look at how high up I was. Look at how far down…look….

I hastily grabbed at the ladder before I could topple off. The paint can and brush tumbled to the ground—luckily, it was one of those nifty twist-and-pour kinds. I sank onto a rung and clutched at the side of the ladder, whimpering in fear.

“Evan, you okay?” Kahmè called up to me.

I moaned, saying so quietly that she couldn’t possibly have heard, “Too high, too high, get me down, Daddy, get me down….”

“Evan!” Kahmè called again, then swore in Chinese and drifted in a half-circle, looking around for something to help. “It’s okay, Evan,” she finally tried to coax me. “Just come down. It’ll be okay.”

I shook my head. No one was moving me for anything. I was a snapping turtle—you’d have to make me let go, or kill me. “No!” I moaned to her continuing pleas. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no—”

It went on like this for about five minutes, while Kahmè tried to calm me down—she couldn’t come get me because I went into hysterics when she let go of the ladder. I was almost soothed into trying to return to solid earth when the door opened and Dad took a good look at the situation from the porch.

I swallowed and refrained from watching—it was too far down. Dad’s voice drifted up to me through the ringing in my ears, and I knew from his tone that the whole situation amused him.

“Why are you always here?” he said to Kahmè, then without waiting for an answer told her, “Go home.”

She swayed reluctantly back and forth, loath to leave, but Dad gave her a Look and she had no choice but to go. I felt panic eating away at me as I watched her disappear, heard Dad approach.

“Dinner,” he said casually. No one but me could understand the secret menace that lurked behind the simple word. “What’s the matter?”

“Daddy,” I begged pathetically, burying my head in my arms, “Daddy, get me down, get me down….”

“Get yourself down,” he snapped, his casual attitude fading. “What’s your problem?”

“Too high,” I moaned. “It’s too high, please Daddy, get me down….”

I don’t know what I expected him to do, honestly. It’s not like I could have possibly hoped in my wildest daydreams that he actually would. But phobias are beyond reasoning, and I was about to faint, or throw up, from vertigo.

Dad stared at me, I didn’t know what look was on his face but I could feel his eyes, and then he crossed over and put his hand on the ladder. He waited for a long time, contemplating….

And then with a swift, sudden jerk, he rocked the ladder from side to side. I whimpered; he did it again, and I shrieked. He stopped then. Neighbors.

But he was laughing.

“Get down here and do your chores,” he said.

By then, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to move. I clung to the ladder and tried to control my shaking.

“I said get down here, Evan.” A hint of danger, the amusement gone. I’d have to, or something bad would happen to me…but I couldn’t.

“Evan!”

Something made the ladder shudder again, and I moaned, sure that Dad was coming to get me himself—and confused as to whether or not that was good or bad—but when two arms wrapped around me, they were too small and gentle to hurt me.

“C’mon, Evan,” Kahmè whispered, rubbing my back encouragingly. “It’s okay.”

“Dad told you to go home,” I said, afraid for her; no one disobeyed Dad.

“It’s okay. I’ve gotta help you down first.”

“Thank you,” I murmured, and let her lead me carefully down the ladder. She leapt off before long and reached up to help me; I kept my eyes down, avoiding Dad’s gaze as he stood there and watched us.

“Thank you for holding the ladder, sir,” Kahmè said politely to Dad, flashing him a winning smile. He wasn’t moved.

“Thought I told you to go home.”

“I’m going, sir,” she assured him, giving me a swift good-bye hug. “Goodnight!”

No one answered her. She trotted away, throwing me a meaningful glance as she did. I looked away. When everything was quiet, I turned my eyes to Dad’s feet, waiting for him to hit me.

He didn’t. He did something worse. “You,” he told me contemptuously, “are the most pathetic excuse for a human being that has ever walked the earth.”

He turned and went back inside. I stayed there a moment, fighting back tears, and then drifted after him.

That night went exactly as I had thought it would. As I made dinner, Dad asked me if I had gotten all of my chores done. I said yes I had, the whole house was freshly painted and the yards were neat and clean. What about the inside of the house? he asked, and my heart sank. No, I hadn’t. But hadn’t he told me to? Yes, he had. And what made me think I could disobey him? I’m sorry, Dad, really, I said. I’ll start right now.

But he was angry. He couldn’t be stopped. In his mind, or at least in his words, he thought I had been goofing off when I should have been cleaning the house. He didn’t understand, or care, that just yardwork had taken me the entire day. But I didn’t say anything, I didn’t move, and he grew tired of hitting me. He sent me off to do it, warning me that I wouldn’t eat or sleep until it was done.

So I did. I was exhausted, and I had school the next day, but I had to do what I was told. I started at 8; when I finally reported to Dad, watching the news, that I was done, and took his crap about something I had missed, it was past one in the morning. I stumbled into bed the minute he let me, all my breath rushing out of me in a sob or a sigh, and decided that now was the best time to finally let myself cry.

So I did.

After a little while I’d quieted down, and soon I became aware of a soft tapping noise. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap…. It stopped and started randomly, but continued on and on. At first I was confused, but when I couldn’t locate the source of the noise the little tapping sound started to frighten me. There was just some small thing that always bothered me; the incessant clicking of a pen, the tapping of a pencil, the smacking of gum, the ticking of a clock. I hated tapping; it drove me insane.

I became convinced when the noise didn’t stop that it was all in my head, some demon come to torture me. I burrowed myself in my blanket, stared blindly into the darkness, crying, waiting for it to stop.

A flash of car lights lit up my room, briefly, through the thin curtain; and as my eyes flicked to the window, I saw for one instant the outline of a hand outside. Tap tap tap tap tap….

s**t.

I waited, my eyes adjusting to the darkness. Pretty soon I could see the hand, darkness upon darkness, and the silhouette of a hand. It moved, it tapped, it slapped a palm against the glass. Then it started tinkering with the windowsill, little metallic sounds filling the silent bedroom.

I waited, shivering, as the window slid open. Tears were still streaming down my face; I couldn’t make them stop. It was fine; the demons, the shadows that haunted my nightmares, were coming to get me, and it didn’t matter what I did now. My heart was racing, but my mind was thinking, get it over with…go on, kill me…I can’t face tomorrow, there’s no point in living, kill me now and make it fast….

A head popped around the curtain, and a familiar stream of Japanese, Chinese, German, and Mongolian curses made me jump. “Evan,” Kahmè hissed, “you awake? Evan!”

She stumbled around, and I lost sight of her in the gloom of my bedroom. Then the lamp flicked on and blinded me, and Kahmè bounced onto my bed. I was frozen; when she tugged the blanket from my limp hands and uncovered my head, I merely lay there and continued crying.

“What’s wrong, Evan?” she murmured, her hand hovering lightly over me, unsure what to do.

I struggled for a moment before I could speak. “Wh-…what the…what the hell are you doing in here?”

She settled herself beneath a corner of my blanket, hugging me awkwardly. “Was worried about you,” she told me, “and…well…you okay?”

Stupid question, really. Why did people always ask that? I blinked, still disoriented, and regrouped enough to shove her off me and sit up. “No, Kahmè! You can’t just…you…. How did you even get up here?”

“Ladder,” she said innocently, hurt by my reaction. “You left it by the window.”

“My window was open?” I paled.

“No, silly, had to use my knife. What’s wrong?” she asked again.

“You can’t just break into people’s houses!” I said hysterically. “You…it’s against the law! It’s…it’s….”

I flushed suddenly as the truth hit me, enlightened by my new—and as a result, very strong—hormones. There was a girl laying in my bed at two in the morning. F—.

“Go away!” was my way of fixing this problem. “Just get out!”

“Wha?” She stared wide-eyed at me, injured. “But I just…I just wanted to help…. Evan?”

She’d noticed in the lamplight that I was still crying. I shook my head and covered my face, letting everything overwhelm me. None of this was fair…why was everything happening at once?

Kahmè sat up too and rubbed my shoulder, worried. “Evan? What’s the matter?”

I searched around for the words, spitting out the first thing that came to mind. “It’s just…acrophobia… and….” I could go no further than that without signing my own death contract.

“Wha?” she said again. I looked away, wiping my nose on my blanket.

“I’m scared of heights,” I admitted in a small voice.

“Oh, you are?” To her, the events of that afternoon now made sense. But she didn’t understand. “Why?”

“I’m scared of everything,” I sighed, turning away and laying down again.

She flopped down with an exaggerated sigh, snuggling back under the blanket. “Why?” Her tone was softer now. I sighed again.

“Shoes,” I told her. She grumbled and kicked her moccasins onto the floor.

“Why?” she asked me again.

“I don’t know….”

We lay in silence for a while. It occurred to me that this evening, she had been watching everything. Had she seen Dad’s callous cruelty, how he had tormented me, how he talked to me? What if she had? What would she do? Maybe that was the reason for….

“Evan?” she said sleepily.

“Yeah?” I was already making up stories.

“Ummm,” she murmured, “can I stay in here?”

I stiffened. “What?”

“Can I sleep here tonight?” she clarified.

“No!” Was she crazy? “No, no, no, no, NO!”

“Why not?” she whined.

“No,” I repeated, paling at the thought. Dad might come in here for something, probably as furious as usual, and if he saw her here…God, he’d kill me, he’d kill both of us…. “You can’t, you’re not allowed, we’ll get in trouble, God, Kahmè….”

“But Evan,” she protested pitifully, “Evan, it’s so cold outside….”

“No it isn’t,” I muttered. “It’s just October.”

“It wasn’t ever this cold in Arizona,” she moaned. “It’s warm in here though,” she amended, snuggling further beneath the covers. “And what if it rains, Evan? It’s even colder! And, and…it’s scary….”

I felt a pang of guilt; my vow to be nicer to her had died long ago. It was unfair to make her sleep alone every night, by herself…she was just a kid, really, she didn’t deserve that…. “I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. “But you can’t sleep in here….” I paused, shivering; it was kind of cold. “Can you close the window?”

She hopped up and closed it, locking it tight. Then she paused. “Hey, Evan…if I hid under the bed….”

“No,” I objected, but couldn’t help thinking about it. “No,” I said again, but I wasn’t so sure. The sad little look on her face was hard to immunize against. “Well….”

“I promise I’ll stay under there,” she promised excitedly, sensing my weakness. “I won’t move ever an’ I’ll be gone real early, honest, I swear I will, Evan!”

“I dunno,” I said doubtfully. “Can’t he…won’t you stick out?”

“Nope!” she said happily, and promptly dived out of sight to demonstrate. I got up and looked all around the bed; I could only see her from the front, just the bottoms of her feet.

“How do you usually sleep?” I inquired.

She showed me, curling into a half-ball. In doing so, she disappeared.

“Do you move around a lot?”

“Roll over, maybe.”

“Try it.”

She rolled over; I still saw nothing. She rolled over again, and I saw her hair flick out from the side of the bed.

“Okay, keep to the far side and I think you’ll be okay. You’ll have to cover yourself up, though, just in case.”

“You mean I can stay?” Her beaming face appeared from beneath my bed.

“I guess so,” I sighed.

“Yay!” She jumped up, hit her head, shook it off, and dived onto me.

“Keep your voice down,” I hissed. She backed off, subdued.

“Sorry.”

“There’re some rules if you want to stay in here, okay?”

She sighed and nodded; with me there were always rules. I had to be careful.

“You cannot, you absolutely cannot make noise during the night. And you can’t leave my room. There’s my bathroom if you need it, you can get a drink from the faucet, but no sneaking downstairs or anything, no running around, just be really still and quiet, okay?” She nodded. “The last thing you want to do is wake my dad up.” I made a face. “If you want, you can go in and out of the window, but don’t leave it open, and don’t make any noise. I’d really rather you didn’t, actually, but you can. And if anyone comes, if you hear anything weird at all, get under the bed and stay there. Okay?”

She nodded again. Then she grinned. “This’s gonna be so much fun, Evan!”

“No it won’t be,” I told her sternly. “I have school tomorrow.”

“Oh.” She sighed and flopped onto the floor. “But why’re you up so late then? Your light always goes off way ‘fore now.”

“I had to clean,” I muttered, climbing back into bed. She wriggled beneath it; I dropped the comforter to the floor, and she grabbed it and wrapped herself in the warm material. I bent down and arranged it so that it looked like it had merely fallen off during the night. “Goodnight,” I told her, turning off the light. I wished I could leave it on, but I got yelled at when discovered a while back.

Kahmè settled for a minute, and then was still. I could hear her small breaths, nasally like a baby’s, beneath me; it was a strangely comforting sound. I stretched out beneath my blankets and closed my eyes, wondering how all of this would turn out.

Silence, but for breathing. Kahmè rolled over again.

“Evan?” she whispered. “You still awake?”

“Yeah?”

She was quiet for a minute. “Evan…I don’t understand….”

“What?”

“Umm…it’s….” she thought for a minute. “Evan, is…is your….”

Something in my chest tensed painfully, waiting.

“Your dad, he…I don’t know if that’s how…but….”

She HAD noticed. She was asking me if that’s how dads usually acted. She was asking me if he was mean to me all the time. She was asking way too many of the wrong questions.

“What?” I said again.

She was silent. Then: “Never mind, Evan…’night….”

“’Night.”

I understood what she felt. She was suspicious—suspicious, but confused. She had yet to put all the little pieces together. I swore mentally as I realized that she had more than enough proof…I wasn’t careful enough with her. If she pressed further, I might have to ask her to leave me alone for good, and that was quite honestly the very last thing in the world I wanted.

Yet I had no right to send her away, anyway. It was my fault that she was living in my backyard, in the cold, with little warm clothes to wear and no food to eat and no protection and no parents and no school and with winter coming all too soon. She lived a simple life, but with simplicity comes longing, comes suffering. And it was my fault—she had to do that because she picked the worst person possible to befriend.

And yet selfish as I was, I didn’t regret it. I knew that someone else would have been best for her, but what I didn’t know was where I would be without her; she was the best part of my life. She was my best friend….

No, I decided. No matter how suspicious she got, I wouldn’t make her go away. I’d deny her at every turn, she’d never make me admit it, and even if she told someone anyway, who’d believe her? All that would happen would be some policeman or social worker coming to investigate, and Dad would defeat them as usual, and I’d pay for it. Having Kahmè around was worth all of that. So what was the problem?

In retrospect, that was one of the stupidest things I have ever said, even to myself. It was like ignoring the suspicious music in a horror movie; it was like saying “What could go wrong?” before doing something retarded. Because if there’s one thing I should have always kept in mind during that time, something I would learn painfully just a few days after, and for years after that, it was to never, never, never, never, NEVER underestimate Thomas Moor.

How tense o.o and foreboding this is turning out to be... I have a feeling its about to start getting worse for Evan... Kahme is the best thing that ever happened to evan and if he gets rid of her.... I don't even want to think of him getting rid of her...



I don't get it.... lol your the one who wrote it lol and I doubt I could write as good as you do. razz

Yup, bad things are a'coming, as soon as I write them. Or finish writing them. I can't write worth s**t in NYC. But home now.

I hope everything works out ok ... sad

Thanks. All I want is my XP and MSWord 2003....like my old computer, which doesn't have a mouse anymore and I have to use the keypad as one.

Vista sucks. grr.

If anyone has any advice at all that means I don't have to use the stupid mechanized Microsoft tool, please let me know. I need a new product key. Can I borrow someone's?

can't hurt

I. Hate. Vista.