Except it wasn’t my room anymore. There were bunkbeds with superhero sheets and piles of Legos, and the walls were covered in stick-on stars that glowed in the dark. It smelled like bubblegum and clean laundry.
I backed up to the door, closed it gently, and slid down until my butt hit the old hardwood floor.
For a long minute, I just sat there, staring at the ceiling, trying to inhale enough air to fill my actual lungs. My hands were shaking.
Adam Knight was back. He’d driven a literal moving truck up to his dad’s house and was probably going to live there, on the other side of my childhood fence, for the foreseeable future.
All the carefully compartmentalized feelings—the ones I’d spent a decade packing away in the emotional equivalent of a climate-controlled storage unit—were now free to tumble out, right alongside my dignity.
And I had a stalker. So yeah, today was turning out to be a really fun day.
6
ADAM
The van lurched to a stop,bumping my knee into the steering column, and I killed the engine. I sat there for a second, hands white-knuckled on the wheel, staring at the place I’d once called home, if you could even call it that anymore. The paint on the trim had surrendered to sun and wind years ago, leaving the window frames flaking with splinters, and tufts of dry grass poked through the cracks in the concrete like the world’s saddest birthday candles. The porch railing leaned to one side, giving the place a sad look of perpetual apology. I half expected a tumbleweed to roll by to sell the effect. It looked more like the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland than my childhood home.
Maybe I’d convinced myself that, after twenty years, the house would have faded into something smaller and easier to face. Instead, it seemed to have grown around the negatives of all my old ghosts, every memory standing taller and more ragged than I remembered. All the things I’d left behind had taken root and burrowed in, stretching into something wild and unrecognizable, like a nightmare come to life.
I scanned the street for signs of life. My eyes slid, by force of habit, to the house next door, the Bliss house. It looked familiar,only brighter, as if someone had taken the time to actually care about the place. The hedges were trimmed, and wildflowers flanked the stone path to the porch. Children’s voices came from the backyard, the kind of giddy, high-pitched screaming that could mean someone had broken a bone or they were just having fun, it was hard to tell.
The engine ticked itself cool, and I braced myself with a few deep breaths before I swung open the door and slid one leg out, my work boot went down and landed on a tuft of crabgrass. The air outside hit me with an unusual cocktail of early spring heat and dryness, not exactly the mild temperatures I remembered in the city. I shut the van door with a hollow slam and made my way up the driveway, dodging a patchwork of oil stains and bottle caps that looked like they’d been there longer than I’d been gone.
The garage door was still the original, the kind that required more muscle than finesse. I shouldered into it, pulling on the warped handle until the lock popped and the bottom edge scraped up with a metallic and wooden groan. The stale air inside brought back a rush of memories, not the sentimental kind, but the heavy scent of old oil, rust, and whatever rodents had taken up residence over the years. I didn’t bother to look around. I just propped the door open and padded back down the drive, feeling that old, familiar chill of being watched from one of the side windows.
Just as I reached the curb, a high-pitched chorus erupted somewhere behind the hedge next door. I heard it first as a shriek, then as a chant, “Truck! Big truck! Big truck!”
The voices belonged to three boys who looked to be around the girls’ age and came charging out from the Bliss house. Two were identical in nearly every way—same brown hair, blue eyes, and freckles, followed by a curly-headed dark haired boy with a huge smile, all regarding the van like it was an alien ship.
One of the twins, the slightly taller of the two, took off running up the sidewalk, arms windmilling for balance. He skidded to a stop right at the property line, hesitated, and then called out again, “Truck!” as though maybe I hadn’t heard him the first time. The other two hung back, peeking over the top of the hedge. I caught myself smiling, despite my exhaustion, but the feeling vanished as quickly as it came when I remembered the work I had in front of me.
I was heading to the back of the truck when I realized I didn’t know who lived in the Bliss house anymore. I knew that Billie’s grandparents had both passed on. I’d wanted to go to the service. If I were in the States, I would have been there, but I’d been deployed at the time, and there’d been no way of getting back.
I wondered who lived there now. It was going to be strange to live next door to anyone other than Billie and her sisters. They’d been more of a family to me than my own father. I wondered where the Bliss sisters were now.
The first time I saw Billie Bliss was seared into my memory forever. I was walking up my driveway coming home from school, and Billie was sitting on the porch, she was a tiny little thing, just four years old. I just lifted my eyes, and…holy shit.
She was there. She was standing in the doorway. She was not a four-year-old. She was an adult and…fuck.
Billie Bliss was standing in the doorway, sunlight slicing across her hair like a movie spotlight. For one insane moment, I half expected to see her as a kid—scabbed knees, hair in a lopsided ponytail, grinning as she dared me to jump the fence after her. But she wasn’t four anymore or even sixteen. She was a grown woman and the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life.
The truth was, I’d tried to look her up online, several times, okay hundreds, but there were hardly any photos of her to be found. Her sisters posted the occasional group shot, but Billiewas always half-turned away or ducking out of the frame. It was like she’d mastered the art of being present without ever really being seen. And yet, from this distance, I could see her more clearly than ever.
Her chestnut hair was longer, wavy and wild, and I’d swear even from fifty yards away I could see the gold flecks in her gorgeous emerald green eyes, it looked like she’d swallowed the sun, and it radiated out of her. Her full lips were naturally the shade of ruby red but gave the illusion that she’d sucked on cherries. Her jaw was set just the way I remembered, a line of stubbornness and maybe a little anger.
She was a woman, but I could still see my friend. The girl I’d spent all night talking to on a walkie-talkie. The girl I’d go worm and ladybug hunting with. The girl I’d told my deepest fears and insecurities to.
I thought there was a chance I’d run into her. More than that, I’d planned on going to see her once I got settled, once I got the girls settled, once I figured out how to apologize for the night of my father’s wedding, for leaving without saying goodbye, for not replying to her texts or calls or writing during basic, for the years of silence that followed.
But I hadn’t had the time to figure any of that out before she was gone. She turned and vanished inside, leaving behind nothing but the memory of her shadow and the regret of what could have been.
My heart sank. I hadn’t prepared for any of this. I hadn’t prepared to see her again like this, to feel like every mistake I’d ever made playing out in slow motion on the lawn.
Not wanting to dwell on it, I continued making my way into the garage, only to be stopped when I heard my name.
“Adam Knight!” A familiar voice called out from across the street, sharp as a garden trowel and about as forgiving.
I turned just in time to see the formidable Mrs. Edith Cable, track-suited in a blinding shade of lime green, hobbling across the street with the determined shuffle of someone who had long ago declared war on mortality and was, by all evidence, winning.
