By now we have a rhythm. We speak in light flickers when the lights in other rooms have gone dim. Sometimes I flash my lights. More often, it’s him flashing his. Sometimes, though, his window is dark, his blinds are down, and all I can see is a nose poking through. He is watching, waiting. Other times he has hoisted the blinds way up and his room is lit in a theatrical spotlight. But tonight there’s something new. The bottom half of his window is covered up. There’s a large white sheet of paper pressed against the glass. And there is writing on it—big loopy letters and a tilted question mark with a hollowed-out dot. What is your name?
Four words. Words. He has words. Now there is language, not just muted signals. And a public acknowledgment of what we’ve been doing, that it hasn’t been something acted out in a semiconscious dream state or something we can each pretend the other has misconstrued. Now there is no denying what we’ve been doing. It’s been written out and made official: What is your name?
Something about his handwriting frightens me. It slants to the right and seems urgent. The bellies of his As are perversely elongated. The W is disproportionately large—a result of overeagerness, poor spatial judgment. And that tilted question mark with the emptied-out dot—that’s just silly. What is your name? What is your name? What does he want? What is it he needs from me? I feel drenched in ectoplasm or some kind of clear viscous glue that insects shoot out to trap a mate.
I want to pull down my curtains, but they’re billowy and large and really not meant for practical purposes, rather to frame the window in scallops. Pulling them down is like bringing a sailboat to shore—you really have to know what you’re doing, and there are a ton of ropes involved. But if I manage to pull down the curtains, it’s worse. I can’t acknowledge that I’ve seen his poster. He can’t know that I am a person who reads and feels things and reacts. We are only the outlines of bodies and the skin-colored approximations of faces. We are dollhouse characters for each other; that’s what we were supposed to be. I thought we had agreed this wasn’t actually happening. What is your name? When did such a simple question become so hard to answer?
For three days I crawl on the floor to hide from the boy and his sign. I do my homework cross-legged on the carpet under a dimly lit halogen lamp. I will not respond. I have to respond. I could write my name. I could ask for his name. I could tell him to meet me in the alleyway, but I would never do that. But I could.
When my mother walks into my room, she turns up the light to full blast. “Why is it so dark in here?” Another question I can’t answer. I point to the window. To the sign. She moves closer to it and squints her eyes, reading each word aloud. What. Is. Your. Name.
It doesn’t register with her at first. The last time she had seen the boy was the first time we had both seen him, months ago. Then her whole posture changes. Her chest puffs out; her hands on her hips triangulate at the elbow so her body takes up more space. When she looks at me, her brow furrowed, I want to be see-through. “This is still going on?” she says.
It’s not clear to either of us if she’s angry with me as she hoists the scalloped curtains down and clack, clack, clacks out of my room.
A call is made in the kitchen with the door closed.
“Hi . . . favor . . . daughter . . . going on.”
I am a disgusting person with disgusting thoughts.
A few hours later, she’s back in my room holding a poster-sized sheet of blue cardboard paper. Written across it in black marker and traced over a second time: You have been reported to the police. She tapes it to my window, and in the morning when the light comes through, all I can see are her big black backward letters and the vague outline of windows that all look the same.
At breakfast, she tells me what else she has done. A friend of hers—a former cop who was a bouncer at one of the teen dances she used to organize—is taking care of it. When it’s dark again and the boy’s apartment is drenched in yellow light, I watch from the bathroom window. There is a man sitting with his parents at the kitchen table. Then he is gone and the boy’s parents are in his bedroom. His mother points to the window. His father raises a fist and pushes the boy so hard he lands on the bed and bounces. Although he’s bigger than both his parents, he looks shrunken when he gets back up, his head hanging low, his arms slack at his side. His mother walks to the window and closes his blinds. Then the boy, with his head still hung, disappears.