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“Come to my window,” she said, looking behind her, as if she worried her parents could hear her from their house. I knew the clichés and what they said about preachers’ kids.Naughty, troublemakers.Kyrie wasn’t that. She was pure and intelligent. She wanted to explore and test the boundaries set in place by her parents. She loved them but didn’t believe their word was almighty. I wondered if she felt like bending the rules and words of her almighty God.
“Maybe,” I said, grinning.
My smile faded away when I looked past Kyrie to the school’s roof.
Sorina stood there, black dress waving in the warm breeze, eyes black in the night.
I felt the color drain from me, felt the way I shivered. I didn’t warm, or feel dizzy, as I had that day in the cafeteria. I’d avoided her gaze since that day in school, but I always felt her watching, waiting for something from me. She hadn’t been to school that day, though.
“Nicholas?” Kyrie asked, a tremor of worry in her voice. I couldn’t stop her from placing her palms on my arms and giving me a small shake. I didn’t even think to brush her off. I blinked hard, looking down into her eyes.
When Kyrie turned to see where I had been staring, Sorina was gone.
* * *
After Kyrie and I left the school, I walked her home. We laughed about it—hers genuine, mine forced.You don’t have to walk me home, that’s what I was doing, she’d said.
But I insisted. I was worried for her after seeing Sorina on the roof, half tempted to convince myself I dreamed it, that my dreams and waking hours were blending together.
When the rain came, I opened my back window. My favorite thing to smell was rain on leaves. I felt like I belonged somewhere when I pretended it was nostalgia—pretended my life was different. I often wrote stories of other lives, dreamed dreams that felt like memories. When I didn’t have the nightmares, I dreamed of a cold rain, sharp grey and black angles.
A place I had never been to.
I knew it wasn’t real—that the dream wasn’t a memory—but I liked to pretend it was.
I looked out my window, closing my eyes, sniffing the air. I smelled mud, wet gravel, and the air was not cool, but humid. It wasn’t like my dreams, but it was real and new.
The slanted front porch in front of the trailer was small, no place to spend time, but we had a sliding glass door in the kitchen and a small back deck with a roof. Itching to be anywhere but my room, I tiptoed through the house as Valerie slept, opening the sliding door before pulling one of our new dining room chairs out onto the deck. My view was the woods, not wet pavement and passing cars, but it would do.
I let my eyes turn the greens trees vivid, more alive than they appeared in the dark. I let my eyes take me from my reality, but before I could begin telling myself stories in my head, I saw a light on at the house beyond the woods, through the creeping fog.
The house beyond the trees looked like it was from the 1800s. It was beautiful and dark, imposing, shrouded in the shade of the trees even in broad daylight. I often stared at it when I spent time in the cemetery. I came there to be alone, but maybe to wait. To look up and see Sorina’s slight frame on a headstone. But she hadn’t come back.
I looked up into the sky and wondered if Sorina was there, watching me from her own roof, soaked in the rain. It’s all I could see above the trees that separated our homes, and it was vacant. A black knife in the blacker night.
With Valerie fast asleep, I ran to the house. I wanted to ask her what she was doing on the roof of the school, why she’d been absent from school that day.
I wanted to ask herwhatshe was, the question always felt like a shadow in my mind, hovering.
It never disappeared.
I couldn’t shake that first day of school, the way I felt warm all over, reaching for Kyrie as if I were someone else. I didn’t want someone fucking with me, making me do things I didn’t want to. I’d left that life behind.
Her looming Tudor-style house was one of the biggest in town. I couldn’t see it now, the green of the trees was too grown this time of year, but I moved to it, pulled to where I knew it sat, looming. I ran through the rain, soaking my Converse like a kid.
The house had no driveway; instead a paved road ran through the property. I exited the trees onto the short road. Each end had a gate. No one had a gate here, and Kyrie had told me the gates were new one day when she was chatting on about the town. She seemed to know everything about everyone, and her interest in Sorina was pointed.
The sky was open above the road, and my hair soaked as I stared up at her window. Was it her window? I assumed, but I didn’t know. Not yet.
I sprinted to the porch and took the steps two at a time. There were two wicker chairs to the right of the front door. I sat in one, weighing my options, grateful for a place to dry off.
Eventually, I pulled a notebook from my back pocket and grabbed the pen that I shoved between the pages. I wrote there, kept company by the cemetery, in her chair. The rain and the slow fog seduced me.
I was halfway through a poem when I heard something in the woods. I had the strange thought that she’d meant for me to hear her, and if she’d wanted to sneak up on me, I never would have known she was there.
“What are you doing here?” Her voice was deep and strange as she stepped from the woods, her luminous skin glowed in the dim lighting. So much of her flesh was visible in her tiny black clothing. Something stirred in me, an ache in my chest.
I closed my notebook and pulled it up, waving it back and forth a bit, in answer.
