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“Do you? I wanted to ask—”

“Blue eyes like violets,” she’d continued. “Those are purple, but you get it.”

“Right.” I hadn’t noticed that he had purple/blue eyes, but in fairness, his head was far above mine. I had never been called “tall” myself.

Mrs. McGlothen had suddenly leaned forward and peered into my face. “Yours are brown, but you’ve got a little hazel in there. They’re not too terrible,” she’d consoled.

“Thank you.”

“He’s also employed,” she had told me. “Something to do with water. He travels for his job but I don’t get the feeling that he’s the type to step out on you when he’s away.”

“That’s great.” She clearly wasn’t going to say anything bad about him so I went for easier information. “What’s his name?”

Oliver Marchand. He was tall, he had a job doing some water thing for which he traveled (but in her opinion, he wouldn’t cheat), and beyond that? She didn’t seem to know a lot. She hadn’t mentioned anything about him bothering other tenants or picking fights with Jasper the Great, the magician who had formerly lived in my apartment.

I had planned to ask Mrs. McGlothen more about Jasper, too—not because I was afraid that he’d died in my bedroom, but because I was curious. I had looked him up and had found a few references to his appearances at venues around the city, but that had been decades ago. I didn’t get to him, though, because after she had talked about Oliver Marchand’s good looks and steady employment, she had started to quiz me. She wanted to know about my past, my job, and my love life, among multiple other topics. After that, I had wanted to return to my own space where I was the only person and I could be solitary. Alone.

I wanted the same thing now, after being insulted by the record store owner. I was totally aware that I couldn’t sing! My speaking voice was fine, in my opinion, but when it was raised in song? Yes, it did lose a little something. Or maybe, it gained a little something, but it was something unpleasant.

It didn’t really matter what the music was, anyway. It only mattered that Oliver Marchand on the second floor was obviously playing it on purpose to annoy me. It was also obvious that he was a silly baby who couldn’t be bothered to respond to the note I’d slipped under his front door, which had only been mildly passive aggressive.

As of yesterday, I had a real desk. It was one I had ordered and had come in pieces which I had been able to assemble with only a few left over. It rocked a lot and it didn’t feel extremely sturdy if I put weight on it—like, it could probably hold my laptop, but I wasn’t willing to test it out with anything else, not even an extra cup of coffee or my lunchtime bowl of ramen. Or my dinnertime bowl of ramen. The chair that I’d also ordered and put together had seemed to be holding up but when I’d stood on it to put a nail in the wall, it had made a scary, cracking sound and I’d climbed down fast. My book hadn’t worked well as a hammer, either, so I didn’t hang the whiteboard where I planned to make my lists of things to do.

Now I sat in that chair at my desk, very carefully. I listened but I didn’t hear any ominous creaks from my new furniture and no music from the apartment above, either. But then I did hear a knock on my door. There was a little peephole in it that was exactly five feet above the floor, which made it easy for someone who rose only slightly above that height to see through. I had to cast my eye up, though, because the person in the hallway outside was taller. And suddenly, I got nervous. My note had only been slightly passive aggressive, but if he had taken it badly…and he was also the one trying to torment me with music…

I opened the door. “Yes?” I asked.

Oliver Marchand held up a piece of paper and I could see my poorly written scrawl on it. Since I hadn’t been to kindergarten to learn about forming letters correctly, it was easily recognizable in its ugliness. “This is from you.”

He hadn’t needed to be a forensic handwriting expert to determine that. I had signed it and put my apartment number beneath my name. “Yes,” I answered. “Are you—”

“This is the second or third time you’ve brought up my music and I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Really,” I said. I made the sarcasm crystal clear in my tone and I punctuated it by crossing my arms over my chest and raising my eyebrows. “Really!”

“Yes, really. I’m not playing loud music in my apartment. I’m not sure what you’re hearing but it’s not from me.”

“Really!”

He left without another word, turning and striding toward the stairwell. No, we weren’t done!

“Hold on there,” I said. He didn’t, so I followed as he climbed. “I hear it all the time! You’re constantly playing the same song and it’s very annoying. The least you could do is switch it up…hey, I’m speaking to you!”

He did pause to hold open the door for the second floor, and then I followed him toward his apartment. “Miss, I’m not sure what you’re hearing, but it isn’t me. I don’t play the same song over and over. I rarely listen to music without earbuds, anyway. I don’t have speakers and with the construction techniques used in this building, I would be very surprised if you could pick up on anything at all from other units. The only time I noticed something happening in the apartment above mine was when they dropped their aquarium and flooded the third floor with baby alligators.”

“Alligators? In an apartment building?”

He stopped messing with his lock and turned to look at me. “It was incredible. The former occupants…”

For a moment, I had thought that we were going to have a conversation, but he shook his head. “That doesn’t matter and I’m not playing any song. Goodbye.”

He had gotten his key to work and he walked inside. As he did, I saw a rolling suitcase in the entryway and on a table near the door, I spotted a pile of mail. I was no forensic expert myself, but it was easy to draw the conclusion that he’d just returned from one of the work trips that Mrs. McGlothen had told me about, the ones on which he wouldn’t have been unfaithful. It didn’t make any sense, because I had definitely been hearing that song…

“Please move.”

I realized that I had put one foot inside his apartment. I also realized that if he hadn’t been playing the music, then I sounded like an absolute lunatic and now I appeared to be trying to enter his home.

I withdrew my foot. “Sorry,” I said. “But I—”