The Neighbors (2 page)

Andrew shoved aside the pang of apprehension that seized his heart. He could hear his mother slurring her words:
You need me, you know; you can’t move out. Who will take care of you?
At least here he had some freedom—at least here he could improve himself rather than try to fix someone else.

“Um, should I just put this anywhere, or...” Andrew tapped the box with his sneaker. Rubbing the back of his neck, he continued to watch his new roommate from a distance.

“Mick?”

“Sure,” Mickey said.
Put it anywhere.

Drew closed his eyes, exhaling a muted laugh. This place was a pit. A hole in the ground would have been better. He didn’t want to think about what the kitchen was like, let alone the bathroom—but this was the way these things went. First houses and first roommates were supposed to suck. This was the kind of stuff that made stories good for the telling.

He stepped away from the door, marched across the house to the window, and pulled the curtain back. A ray of early evening sun cut through the gloom, dust sparkling like diamonds in the daylight. Mickey paused his game, shielding his eyes as he peered at Drew’s silhouette.

“So,” Drew said, “you rent this place?”

Mickey was unresponsive, despite staring right at Andrew. Drew considered asking him what his problem was, but he decided to wait it out, watching Mickey squint against the sunset as if it was the first one he’d ever seen; a vampire rousing from a thousand-year sleep. After what felt like an hour of tense, contemplative silence, he watched Mick’s face lighten. His expression shifted from dejection to something that almost resembled hope. When Mickey actually
smiled
, Drew’s heart leapt out of his stomach and back into his chest.

“Yes, sir,” Mickey finally replied.

“That’s good. So you won’t be opposed to some paint.”

Mickey raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

“Um...” Drew looked around the place. “Seriously?” he echoed.

“Shit,” Mickey mumbled, “you’re not one of those germaphobes, are you?”

“You’re not one of those people who show up on the Discovery Channel, right?”

Mickey shook his head, completely confused. “You mean like a zoologist?”

Drew bit back a laugh and shook his head. “Where’s my room?” he asked.

And just like that, Drew had a new house, a new roommate, and a hell of a lot of work to do.

Creekside was but a blip on the map, yet over the years somehow Drew and Mickey had managed to lose touch. The last time they had seen one another as kids turned out to be the last time a nine-year-old Andrew had ridden his bike down the block to play Mickey’s new Final Fantasy game after yet another fight with his mom.

Drew could hear screaming from inside the house.

He skidded to a stop just shy of the Fitches’ driveway, two ambulances and a handful of cop cars blocking his way, as a pair of EMTs wheeled a sheet-covered gurney down the front steps and onto the walkway. Mick’s mother burst out of the house. She ran for them before they could load the stretcher into the back of the ambulance, her face swollen with hysterical tears. Andrew’s eyes widened as a police officer dashed across the lawn after her—just like in the movies his own mother didn’t know he watched—but Mick’s mom was a waif of a thing; she was quick, and the cop was slowed by his roundness and the pistol that hung heavy at his hip. Drew watched
Mrs. Fitch’s hands fly out in front of her, her fingers clawing the sheet covering the gurney, screaming at the ambulance workers to
get away from him, get away!
One of the EMTs tried to fend her off, but she recoiled on her own from what was underneath.

As that sheet slid away, something heavy punched Drew straight in the chest, something that toed the line between queasiness and horror: that sensation of seeing something terrible but not being able to look away. What was once a head was now little more than a wad of pulp attached to somebody’s neck. It was Mickey’s dad—a man Drew had said hi to a hundred thousand times.

Mrs. Fitch screamed again, reeling away, her hands pressed to her face. Her torment shot straight through him, forcing an involuntary gasp out of his mouth. With his bike frame between his scrawny legs and his sneakers planted firmly on the ground, he could manage only to turn his head away from the scene, dizzy with dismay. His heart palpitated within the cage of his chest. Mrs. Fitch’s cries sent chills tumbling down his spine despite the sun baking the back of his neck.

When he dared to look back, Mickey was in the open doorway of the house. His eyes were fixed on the ambulance, on the men who slammed the back doors shut, taking his dad away forever. Drew wanted to call out to him, to run over to him and ask his friend what had happened and whether Mick was going to be OK. Their eyes met from across the yard. Mickey’s blanched expression curdled Andrew’s blood.

And then Mick turned away and disappeared inside.

There were rumors about Mickey and his family after that. The neighborhood kids whispered about how Mickey’s dad had gone crazy. The ladies at the supermarket would gather in the produce department on Sunday afternoons, using words like
drunk
and
abusive
and
no surprise
. Andrew had wanted to get the story firsthand, but Mick wouldn’t talk to him. Mickey’s dad was dead, and somehow, as if by magic, their friendship had died with him.

He was surprised how much he missed his friend after Mick moved away. He’d ride his bike to the empty house nobody wanted to buy, the For Sale sign staked into the Fitches’ lawn sun-bleached and weatherworn. Drew would spend summer afternoons sitting on their wilted lawn, pulling yellow blades of grass out of the ground, spinning his bicycle tire, as though each revolution was one spin closer to Mickey showing back up.

Occasionally, he’d catch himself staring up at the ceiling when he couldn’t sleep, wondering whether Mickey was alive or dead. After each inevitable fight with his mother, he thought back to the day he watched Mick lose his dad, wanting to make contact again. He ignored the impulse, convinced that if Mick wanted to get back in touch, he’d do so himself.

But that didn’t stop him from searching for Mickey’s name on Facebook, tugging on his bottom lip as he stared at his old friend’s profile photo, which was nothing but an old Metallica record cover. He had written Mick countless messages, only to hit delete instead of send, always feeling stupid at how sentimental he sounded. He didn’t want Mick to get the wrong idea, didn’t want him to think that Drew was some whacked-out obsessive weirdo who couldn’t let the past be the past. But when Andrew reached the point where he didn’t have anywhere else to turn, Mick was always the one he’d reached out to.

And Mick was always the one who had saved him.

Drew spent most of the night unloading boxes from the back of his truck while Mick played video games, struggling with the screen door each time, trudging down a hall dark without a working light. Some help would have been nice, but he didn’t want to complain. Mick had offered him a place to crash, and that was more than enough.

His bedroom was small but sufficient. The wallpaper was a hideous floral pattern, damaged by what must have been a water leak, but if all went according to plan, it wouldn’t be long before he had those walls painted over, as well as covered in posters and corkboards and whatever else he could find. His favorite part of the room was the big window that overlooked the side yard and the perfect house next door. He could imagine living there while drifting to sleep, a house that would inevitably smell of cleanliness and home cooking.

Once the truck was empty, Drew stood in the center of his room and assessed his army of boxes. He hadn’t thought to bring any furniture after the blowup back home. With no mattress, he settled in for the night atop a pile of his own clothes, thinking about his mother, about how she was sitting in that big house on Cedar Street all alone.

His dad’s leaving hadn’t been his fault—he knew that—and that was why he resented her that much more. She made him feel guilty with how helpless she’d become, her illness twisting her into something unrecognizable, something far removed from what she used to be. It wasn’t his fault—but she wanted Andrew to be responsible.

Pushing a handful of clothes beneath his head to serve as a pillow, he promised himself that he had made the right decision. This was what he had to do to get on with his life, to get out from beneath her control. But even as he drifted to sleep, the guilt hung heavy in the back of his mind, swaying back and forth like a noose without a neck.

The sun made the insides of Andrew’s eyelids glow red. When he finally peeled his eyes open, he winced, raising a hand against the glare. As he rolled onto his side, his lower back screamed against the movement.

There was something about waking up to the cheerlessness of an empty room, the bareness of blank walls, that made him feel helpless. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. As soon as he set up his space, he’d feel better about the whole thing. He needed furniture. He needed to settle in. He needed to reestablish his relationship with Mickey. His intention of taking Mick out for a bite to eat had been pushed aside; he’d be appreciative later, after Mickey helped clean the place up.

He hadn’t labeled any of the boxes he’d packed. It took him twenty minutes to find his toothbrush and a half-used tube of Colgate. Pushing a pair of earbuds into his ears, he let Bob Marley assure him that every little thing was going to be all right. Singing along beneath his breath, he trudged down the hall toward the bathroom. He’d used it the evening before but had kept his eyes half-closed, partly out of exhaustion, but mostly because he didn’t want to see just how bad it was. But now, with the morning’s light trickling through the window above the bathtub, the filth was undeniable—so staggering that even Bob couldn’t sing his way around it.

Andrew stood in the doorway for a long while, staring at a sink covered in dried toothpaste and stray albino-like hairs. The mirror was unusable, sprayed with what looked to be toothpaste-laced backwash. There was no soap. There were no towels. The linoleum, half-covered by a dirty bath mat, was crusted in hair and grime. He pulled his headphones out of his ears and swallowed against the disgust crawling up his throat. Backing away with his toothbrush pressed to his chest like a cross in the hands of a frightened Catholic, he did an about-face and marched away.