She sighed and glanced over at me. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
I shrugged. The feeling was easy, but the words wouldn’t come.
She looked at me a long time. Then she touched my cheek. “Good night, ugly.”
She flopped headfirst through the window, landing on the bed with her feet sticking out over the sill. Her slippers were grimy from the shingles and I almost reached out and tweaked her ankle, but I didn’t.
Below me, the neighborhood was sleepy and still. I leaned on my elbows and looked down into the street.
Gentry was two different things, and at night, I could always see that second thing better. The town was its green suburban lawns, sure, but it was also its secrets. The kind of place where people double-checked the locks at night or pulled their kids closer in the grocery store. They hung horseshoes over their front doors and put up bells instead of wind chimes. They wore crosses made from stainless steel instead of gold because gold couldn’t protect them from people like me.
Maybe the brave ones buried quartz and agate in their gardens or left a saucer of milk out for luck—a little backyard offering for whatever might be waiting in the shadows. If someone called them on it, they’d shrug or laugh, but they didn’t stop doing it because hey, we lived in a place where people kept their porch lights on and didn’t smile at strangers. Because when they set out a few pretty rocks with their marigolds, early snow never took the branches off their trees and their yards looked nicer than other people’s. Because mostly, more than anything, night was about shadows and missing kids, and we lived in the kind of place where no one ever talked about it.
After a long time, I climbed back into my room and got into bed. I left the window open so I could breathe. The house wasn’t bad, but still, it was hard to sleep with the air smelling like screws and brackets and nails.
When the breeze came in, I shivered and crawled deeper under the covers. Crickets were shrieking out in the yard, and the trees creaked against each other. Down by the road, in the tall stands of grass, there were mice rustling, night birds chirping away like spinning gears.
I put my pillow over my head to shut out the sound. The noises from the yard were muffled, and I wondered if this was what things sounded like to Roswell. To anyone who wasn’t me. He could walk into class and not get distracted by the rustle of paper or the ventilation system. I had to remember not to flinch when someone closed a door or dropped a book, in case the sound hadn’t been loud enough to startle anyone else.
