Chapter 1 - Delaney

1

Delaney

Eleven Years Old

In my street, there’s an old lady that lives in a yellow house. I watch her sometimes from my front stoop while I’m waiting for Mama to come home from work. Daddy doesn’t like me being alone in the house; says I’ll ‘get into things’. I hear them fighting about it sometimes, because Mama thinks it’s safer for me to be alone indoors than outside on the front stoop where ‘anything can happen,’ but I don’t mind. I get to watch the old lady.

She does a lot of gardening. Pulling out weeds and planting flowers. Bright yellow flowers — just like the paint on her house. She seems nice, the old lady. She waves to me sometimes, when she catches me watching, but I don’t wave back. Daddy says I shouldn’t talk to strangers and I guess waving is pretty much the same as talking in a way.

Mama loses her job at the salon when summer starts, so instead of waiting for her after school, she drives me around to people’s houses with her. She does hair for ladies in their living rooms and it’s fun to see the way she wraps their hair up in big curlers.

She’s real pregnant now — says my little sister is almost as big as a watermelon — so I have to help her work. I lay out sheets of plastic on the carpet to catch the hair she cuts off. She says I’m the best assistant she’s ever had.

It’s not until the end of summer when I realize I haven’t seen the old lady in a while. I start middle school and even though I have a key to the house now, I sit out on the stoop and eat the other half of my PB&J sandwich from lunch. The weeds in the old lady’s yard are taller and the flowers have started to get all brown and crunchy.

That night, I ask Mama where the old lady is and she says she doesn’t know, but that old people sometimes go away like that.

“Probably dead,” my Daddy says from in front of the TV. Mama hushes him, but he just grumbles and takes another swig from his can. “Probably the trash that did it, too.”

I frown. Trash? How can trash kill you?

Then I remember something my friend Nancy told me. Nancy had a neighbor that disappeared, just like the old lady, and when someone finally knocked on his door to check on him, they found the entire house filled with bags of trash — old newspapers and broken baby toys and things picked up from the street. A big pile of it had fallen and crushed Nancy’s neighbor to death.

A scared feeling twists around in my stomach. What if something like that happened to the old lady?

I can’t sleep. I just keep thinking about the old lady lying on the floor, buried beneath a pile of stuff. What if she’s still alive, but she can’t call out for help?

I wriggle out of bed and slip on my purple Ugg boots. It’s not cold out yet, but my regular slippers don’t have the hard bottoms like these ones do and I don’t want to cut my feet outside.

My bedroom window slides open easily and I climb out and drop onto the soft grass without making a single sound. It feels wrong to be outside so late, all by myself. Mama’s words echo in my head — anything could happen .

The streetlights have turned the night a muddy orange. Fear prickles down my spine. It feels like a warm finger beneath my shirt, skimming along my skin, and I shudder.

But I’m here. I’ve made it to the old lady’s yard. The windows are dark, but if she were lying there, under all those piles of trash, she wouldn’t be able to get up and flip the lights on anyway.

“I can do this,” I tell myself out loud. My hands curl into fists at my sides and then I’m off, darting across her yard and around the side of the house. I don’t want to knock, just in case she’s okay. If the old lady answers the door all alive and normal, she might tell Mama that I snuck out of the house. Daddy might find out.

I have to jump to see into the first window as my eyes barely make it past the sill. I jump a few more times and each time my brain captures a little bit more of the room. It’s dark and still. There are no piles of newspapers or bulging bags of garbage like Nancy said was in her neighbor’s house.

But there’s also no old lady.

I have to get inside.

I shuffle around one of the dying flower beds and head for the backyard. There’s more light here, dim and hard to see by, and as I round the corner of the house, I see that there’s a single bulb hanging over the back door.

The back door is painted black. So weird, considering the rest of the house is so bright and cheery.

I blink.

No, the door isn’t black.

It’s open.

The blackness is just the yawning emptiness where the closed door should be.

Something heavy slams down on my shoulder and clamps down hard. I’m spun around like a top and my Ugg boots skid in the dead grass.

“The fuck you think you’re doing?”

My scream freezes in my throat. My heart is squeezed so tight I think it might pop out of my chest if I even try to move.

A man. A man has his hand on my shoulder. I can’t see his face, not really. But that’s because I’m trying to figure out his shirt — it has pictures on it, blobs of dark color that don’t make sense, that seem to shift with his every breath.

Oh.

It’s his skin. He has tattoos, like Nancy’s dad. And Nancy’s dad is mean .

What if this man is as mean as Nancy’s dad? What if he’s worse?

The terrible thought loosens the scream in my throat and I let it out. Only it comes out more like a strangled squeak. I force my feet to move and my whole body lurches back. For a second, I don’t think he’s going to let me go, but then he does and I stumble back, landing on my butt in a pool of light.

The man doesn’t move, lurking in the shadow of the house. And then he steps toward me.

“Don’t,” I whimper.

He freezes. Like he just got paralyzed too.

Whatever happened, whatever I did to make him stop, I take it. I scramble to my feet, dirt catching under my nails, and then I’m off and running — not past him, but through the backyard and around the other side of the house.

I burst into the front yard and sprint across the street, not looking back until I make it to my house. Once I’m there, I dare a glance over my shoulder, just to make sure he’s not following me.

He’s not.

But he is watching.

In the old lady’s front yard, the man stands beneath the streetlight. He’s barefoot, wearing only a pair of jeans. I see his face now, without the gloom of the shadow, and my steps falter.

He’s younger than I thought. Not like Nancy’s dad at all. But that’s all I give myself time to notice before I skid around the corner of my house and haul myself back through my bedroom window.

My heart doesn’t slow down until my window is locked and I’ve dragged my comforter into my closet, closing the door behind me.