I WAITED UNTIL THE NEXT morning. Mom and Dad had already left. I watched out my bedroom window, fully dressed, sneakers tied, Mallory’s camera strapped securely across my body. I saw Chris come out of the house and take off running down the long driveway. Fifteen minutes later, Isobel stepped out, dressed in her scrubs, balancing a purse and car keys and travel mug as she made her way to her car. As soon as she pulled out of the driveway, I was racing down the stairs.
I let the screen door slam behind me and jumped from the second step of the porch, walking as fast as I could without actually breaking into a jog. The long wet grass in the field between our houses grazed my calves, and the morning dew soaked through the canvas of my sneakers.
I made it to the ladder that led up to the wooden balcony. I tested one of the rungs to be sure it was sturdy enough.
This is so stupid.
But I pulled myself up, rung by rung.
I felt Mallory standing at the top of the balcony daring me, egging me on, challenging me to be more adventurous, braver, more like her. I made it to the top and scrambled to the platform on my hands and knees. If anyone was watching, they’d think I was, well, a lot of things:
1. graceless
2. clumsy
3. sloppy
4. psychotic
5. a solid reason to call the police
But I was done caring about what anyone thought. Because there was the door. It’s not as if I was there to spy or lurk or sneak around. I wasn’t doing anything wrong.
I’d committed the uncropped photograph to memory. I looked down at my feet planted firmly on the wooden planks. Mallory had been up here. I raised the camera and peered through the viewfinder. It wasn’t right. I backed up a step. Still not right. I backed myself up until I could take no more steps backward.
Carefully I leaned back against the railing—it was digging into my spine. I checked again. I still needed to be farther back, at a higher angle.
I placed my hands on the railing. I looked down. I shouldn’t have looked down—but I knew the second I did, that Mallory must’ve been sitting up on the railing of the balcony when she took that picture.
My hands were shaking. I took a breath and stepped up onto the lower railing. But when I pushed myself up, I found that my wrists were stronger than I’d thought they were, more capable, and I leaned over the edge, maneuvering myself in that graceless, clumsy, sloppy way.
Don’t look down.
I managed to twist around so that I was sitting on the top railing, facing the house. My heart was pounding, but I had done it. I hooked my right foot underneath the bottom railing to give myself a little more leverage. Suddenly, up high above the ground without a safety net, I felt more stable and balanced than I usually did with both feet firmly planted on solid ground. The wind blew against me and the air whistled past my ears. Careful not to move my lower body, I brought the camera to my face once more.
Yes.
This.
This was really it.
I could imagine Mallory hoisting herself up there without a second thought, as easily as she used to hop onto the countertops in the kitchen. Just a simple jump, not worrying about the very real possibility of falling over the edge.
The sun was catching the colors of the glass and reflecting them back out onto the wooden planks like beautiful little stains. But it was outside the frame. I wondered if Mallory had seen them too. I let the camera rest in my lap and looked out across the untilled field at my house. The barn. My bedroom window, and Mallory’s room next to mine. I wondered if that was originally why she’d come up here, to get this view of our house. I hadn’t found a picture of it, but that’s not to say she didn’t take one.
I turned back toward the door.
I steadied my hands and pressed down on the shutter release. It snapped. But there was another sound underneath the click and clap of the shutter, below me. A door closing. Carefully, I unhooked my feet from the lower bar and jumped down from the railing. I leaned over the edge, trying to see, but I couldn’t tell what or who was responsible.
There was movement from inside the house, a shadow behind the glass window. I darted to the side of the door and plastered my body against the wall. I clutched the straps that hung on either side of my neck, the camera like some kind of magical armor I was trying to use to make me invisible.
I heard noises from behind the door. Shuffling, like things were being moved around, drawers being opened and slammed. Chris was usually gone longer. Or maybe I had lost track of time. I closed my eyes, breathing deep, tried to calm myself.
I peeked into the window. If he’d left the room, then I might have a chance to escape. That’s the only thing I was thinking when I decided to look.
Through a thin perimeter of clear cut glass I saw Chris standing in front of the mirror. His back was to the door, but I could clearly see his face in the reflection. He leaned in and examined his arm in the mirror. His elbow and the back of his forearm were scraped and bloody. He bent down and pulled one leg of his running pants up above his knee, which was scraped up as well. He did the same to the other leg. He brought his hand in front of his face, and as he touched his palm gingerly, his face twisted in pain.
I inhaled a sharp breath just at the of sight it, like for a moment his pain was mine.
I kept watching. At first I was curious about what had happened, how he got hurt, concerned about whether or not he was actually all right.
He nudged his sneakers off and pushed them aside with his foot, one right next to the other. Pulled each sock off and placed them on top of his sneakers. It seemed so methodical. Practiced. Like he had a routine and he would not deviate. He pushed down his running pants and folded them neatly on the edge of the bed. He was wearing those boy boxer briefs. I couldn’t see anything, but I knew I should look away at this point.
He stood there, very still for a moment, with his back to me. Like he was thinking. Then, at last, in one quick movement, he pulled his T-shirt up over his head and let it fall to the floor, so haphazard in comparison to the other articles of clothing.
He was wearing something underneath, like some kind of a vest, an undershirt. At first I thought it was a brace or something. He turned away from the mirror then, away from me. As he took it off, I could see, even from the other side of the door, the red marks it left on his skin, like it was tight, very tight.
I remember thinking how strong and slender his back looked as he maneuvered out if it. I shouldn’t be watching this. I was about to duck again when he turned, his arms folded across his chest. That was when I saw that his hands were pressed deep into a flesh I knew so well. And as he reached down into the open dresser drawer to retrieve a clean shirt, I could see in profile, the gentle curve of his chest as he bunched up the shirt and wrapped it across the front of his body, holding it in place as he exited the room.
I sank down under the window, against the door. I waited. I didn’t move a muscle, didn’t make a sound. I’m not sure I was even breathing. Close by, through the open window around the corner of the house where I couldn’t see, I heard the sound of water being turned on, full force. Then it switched to that unmistakable spray of a showerhead.
• • •
I don’t know how I made it back down the ladder, and I don’t remember crossing the field to get home. But I was in my room, Roxie sitting there patiently at my feet, as I looked out my window. I wasn’t sure what I had just done, or what had even just happened, or how I could ever justify any part of me being there.
I tried to break it down logically: Chris had breasts. Chris was a girl. But he also wasn’t a girl. He was . . . Chris.
Does it matter? Should it? Does it change anything? I didn’t have answers for any of the questions that were running on a loop in my head.
The one person I would have really liked to talk with about this—really, the only person in the entire world who could help me with those answers—was Mallory.
• • •
The alarm on my phone had been going off for over an hour and I never even heard it. It took me several minutes to realize why my alarm had been going off in the first place.
I had stayed up way too late the past two nights. But as soon as my brain put all the pieces together, I jumped out of bed, rushing to get ready, looking everywhere for my Bargain Mart shirt, only to find it in a ball at the bottom of my hamper, all wrinkled and gross.
I was going to be late to work. Again.
I grabbed my bag and put Mallory’s camera inside it. Then I raced my bike down the road and into town. The whole time, I was still thinking about what I had witnessed. It had only been two days since I’d last seen Chris, but it felt as if I’d lived through ten lifetimes. It had taken me that long to come up with answers, except they weren’t very helpful.
Does it matter?
I don’t know.
Should it?
I don’t know.
Does it change anything?
I don’t know.
I locked my bike up and tried to slip through the automatic doors without being spotted. I maneuvered stealthily, ducking down empty aisles to make my way to the back room, where I silently clocked in twenty-two minutes late for my shift. I was almost home free, but as I was coming out of the double doors, my manager was coming in. We both stopped short.
“Morning,” he said, not mentioning the fact that this was the fourth time in two weeks that I’d been late. He clicked his tongue and sighed, then brought his hand to his chin, regarding my wrinkled T-shirt with disdain, before semi-sternly instructing me: “I need you to go help out over in clearance today.”
I just shrugged.
For hour after mind-numbing hour, I was at it with another punished coworker. Our conversation faded quickly, overtaken by the clicking sounds of the pricing guns and the gentle soft rock humming over the speakers, interrupted every five minutes by a prerecorded movie-trailer voice announcement of the “Daily Deals.” The recording had just finished cycling through for about the seventy-fifth time when I heard my name.
“Maia?”
When I looked up, there was Chris. The person I had not stopped thinking about for the past forty-eight hours.
“Hey,” he said, smiling as he looked down at me.
“Hi.” I stood up quickly, suddenly very aware of my dingy Bargain Mart shirt, my dirty jeans and old sneakers, my glasses and my hair. More than any of those things individually, I was concerned about the fact that I honestly couldn’t remember if I’d even bothered to look in a mirror before I ran out of my house this morning.
He squinted and turned his head. “You’re wearing glasses.”
“I usually wear contacts, but”—I inadvertently pulled the trigger on the pricing gun, and a ninety-nine-cent sticker popped out—“I was running late this morning.”
“I like ’em,” he said, nodding.
“Oh, I don’t know.” I took them off and examined them as if I’d never even seen them before. I felt the need to avoid looking directly at him, for fear my face might give me away and show all the things I was not supposed to know. “I mean, thanks.”
“I used to want glasses when I was a kid,” he offered when I said nothing to keep the conversation going. “I’m jealous. It kinda sucks to be cursed with perfect vision.”
I didn’t want this to be awkward, but I suddenly had no idea what to say to him, so I forced out a tiny laugh. It sounded fake and sat there between the two of us.
“Well, I was just here and saw you. So hi.”
“Hi,” I said yet again, and as I glanced at the items he was holding—a box of extra large bandages and a tube of Bargain Mart brand triple antibiotic cream—I blurted out the only thing I could think of: “Not another oven mitt emergency, I hope?”
He laughed.
There. Maybe it didn’t have to be weird. Maybe it was possible to fall back into that rhythm we had been cultivating. Maybe things didn’t have to change after all.
“No, I’m just clumsy,” he said, raising his arm to reveal a line of small Band-Aids leading up to his elbow, too small to cover up the extent of the scrapes.
I winced.
“It’s nothing.” He shrugged. Of course, he didn’t know that I also knew about the equally severe scrapes on his knees too. “But you would think, living with a nurse, she’d have something more in the way of first aid other than the teeniest, tiniest Band-Aids ever created.”
“Yeah, really,” was the best I could come up with. Stupid.
The silence between us hung there, waiting to be filled, but then he glanced down the aisle—at my fellow clearance aisle casualty, who was blatantly staring at us, and said, “Well, I’ll see you around, I guess.”
As he started to turn away I could almost feel Mallory nudging me again, whispering in my ear, Chickenshit, say something!
“Hey, wait.” He turned back toward me, and it took me a second to realize I was the one who had spoken. “I get off in like twenty minutes,” I continued. “I mean, if you feel like hanging out or something. And you don’t mind waiting around for a little.”
“I can wait around.”
“Okay,” I said, and accidentally pressed the pricing gun trigger again.
“Okay,” he repeated, “I’ll be outside.”
As soon as he started walking toward the front of the store, I looked over and my coworker just nodded and said, “It’s all good. Go.”
So, I abandoned my post in the clearance aisle. I zigzagged a path to the back room, grabbed my bag, and locked myself in the family restroom, where I could be alone and get myself together.
“What are you doing?” I whispered to my reflection, gripping tightly to the sides of the enamel sink.
The girl staring back at me offered no response.
I twisted my hair back into a bun and splashed my face with water. I gargled and spit, patting my face dry with scratchy brown paper towels I pulled from the dispenser. I took the camera out and set it carefully on the sink. Rummaging through my bag, I found one individually wrapped mint floating at the bottom—I must’ve picked it up from one of the two restaurants in town at some point. I tried to remember how long it might’ve been there, whether it was still good or not. But my mouth tasted gross, so I didn’t care. I tore open the wrapper and set it on my tongue anyway. I dumped everything onto the dirty floor of the bathroom, and out poured crumpled receipts and a broken pencil, a marker, nickels and pennies, a safety pin, and finally what I was searching for: my strawberry lip balm.
I picked it up with two fingers and centered myself in front of the mirror. I removed the cap and pressed the waxy tip against my upper lip, gliding it along the right side, then the left. I kneaded my lips together and stood back.
“Yes,” I whispered this time.