“Forget it.”
Maybe all the years spent listening to my parents fighting had anesthetized me to clipped and angry speech, but the slimy slithery feeling in my gut was dissipating.
“At least let me—”
“I said forget it.” His anger was fading as quickly as my unease, but I preferred his initial hostility to the defeat that hung heavily from his limbs as he started walking back to his door. “Don’t bust any more of my windows, yeah?”
“Wait.”
He paused and looked at me over his shoulder.
It hadn’t been long enough yet. I knew from experience that if he went back inside, she’d more than likely be waiting for him. Whenever Dad had tried to walk back too soon after a fight, Mom got her second wind. With Neighbor Guy’s mom, I didn’t want him to find out what her second wind might entail.
I was betting it would hurt a lot more than a thrown lamp.
“Don’t go back in yet.” I swallowed. “I mean, I’ll go inside. You can stay.” I swung my legs off the edge of the roof and was preparing to roll onto my stomach when he stopped me.
“Hey, don’t.” He held up his hands as he approached the wall dividing our yards and tripped the motion lights on the side of my house. “Just stop, okay?”
I stopped. The shifting clouds had kept most of his features in shadow, but in the harsh, unforgiving floodlight, I got my first good look.
The cement block wall was close to six feet high, and he could have rested his chin on it. He was also older than I’d initially thought, though his age was hard to pinpoint since he looked several days overdue for a shave. But more than anything, I noticed the reddened outline of an open palm on his cheek.
Seeing the mark on his face made the fighting more real than the moving shadows and sounds had earlier. His mom had hit him…a lot. I didn’t care how old he was; that wasn’t okay. Especially since it was obvious to me within a minute of talking to him that he wasn’t going to hurt anyone. He was visibly distressed by the thought of me, a complete stranger and admitted vandal, jumping off a one-story roof.
It’s not okay.
I mentally shook that thought away when I realized that the shadows that had abandoned him were no longer surrounding me either. And his eyes were trailing just as freely over me, my too-small old gym shorts and faded Jim’s Auto Shop tee, up to the tangled mass of dark blond hair piled on my head.
I tried to imagine the view from his perspective and hit the brakes when the picture of a vagrant twelve-year-old formed in my mind. A feeling of inadequacy wrapped around me like a sweaty hug and I almost jumped down just to get away from it. And him.
“What are you doing up there anyway?”
I doubted he could see the dark sleeping bag I kept up there, so he couldn’t guess that I slept on my roof more nights than I slept under it. More important, he didn’t need to. “I like to look at the stars sometimes.”
He looked at the sky and then back at me. “Stars? Seriously?”
I didn’t bother looking up. There weren’t any stars that night. The sky would have looked blank if not for the moon, although even that was in the process of being swallowed up by clouds.
“I said sometimes.”
“And the other times?”
“I just like to get out of my house. It’s quiet up here.”
He smiled. “You mean usually.” It wasn’t a big smile. More of a quirk of his lips on one side, a brief flash of teeth. It was the weak smile more than his words that brought me right back to feeling awful for him.
I bit the inside of my cheek and tugged at the hem of my shorts, trying to cover more of my legs. Then I sat on my hands to keep from pulling my stupid bun down.
His eyes flicked down to track the movement of my legs. He took a step back, then half turned before facing me again. “You can’t go around jumping off roofs, okay? You’ll break your leg or something.”
I bristled at his words and let them fuel an equally flippant response. “As opposed to my hand?”
I couldn’t actually see his injured hand with him standing that close to the wall, but I saw his shoulder lift and assumed he was flexing it. The muscle in his cheek—the one that was still red from being slapped—twitched. I immediately felt responsible. Not just for a thoughtless comment, but for reminding him of what I’d witnessed.
As easily as if I’d called them, the snakes slithered back inside.
Neighbor Guy nodded, to himself or to me, I didn’t know, and left without another word. He didn’t go back inside, which relieved me to no end. Instead I stood and watched as he walked around the side of his house and got into a navy Jeep parked in his driveway. With an urgency that rocked his vehicle, he backed out and hit the brakes hard before he turned and drove off, a grinding noise echoing behind him.
