The Watcher

50

When my sister wakes me, it’s already late morning.

“I have to go,” she says. “I have an appointment for a massage with a ruthless physical therapist. I would cancel it, but it would be hell trying to get a new appointment and…”

I wave her on her way. Of course she should go. I can handle things.

“But I’ll call you afterward, OK?”

Even though I nod, she doesn’t budge. I thwack her with my pillow.

“Get going, then.”

“Hey, sleepyhead,” she laughs, heading for the door.

I throw the pillow after her but miss. She sticks her tongue out at me before disappearing down the stairs and, a few minutes later, out the front door. I stretch and realize that I’d slept straight through the whole night for the first time in a long time.

When I make it down to the kitchen, I see that my sister made a pot of tea. I drink a cup and eat some leftovers while I run through what the day might hold in store for me.

At regular intervals, I glance out the window. On one of those occasions, Leo is suddenly just there in the yard. He’s sitting on that blue bench in front of the rhododendron bushes, not doing anything. From what I can see, he doesn’t even have a book with him. He’s just sitting there and drawing patterns on the ground with the tips of his shoes, as if he’s waiting for someone.

A while later, I step out the door and walk over there.

“Can I have a seat?”

He nods and scoots over to make room.

“How’s it going?” I ask.

He says that things are OK and gestures toward my forehead.

“What happened to you?”

I shrug and sit down beside him. The morning sun is shining right on us, and my cheeks feel warm. A minute or maybe two pass.

“Leo,” I say then. “There are a few things I’d like to ask you about. Your mom and I talked for a long time yesterday when we got to the cabin and—”

“I was worried about her. For real! I actually was.”

His voice breaks, and I lightly brush his one knee with my hand.

“No one thinks otherwise, Leo.”

I turn my face to him, but he is still staring straight ahead.

“I want you to know that I didn’t pass on any of what you told me. Neither about her nor—”

“That stuff about the purse,” Leo interrupts heatedly, turning to face me. “That actually happened. She threw it in the water, on purpose. Maybe she thinks I was too little—that I don’t remember. But I do. And she has been acting super weird lately.”

I nod.

“OK. I have a feeling that she’s going to want to talk all that over with you when she comes home. We’ll make sure that happens, pure and simple. You shouldn’t need to go around worrying about your parents. You’re going to have your hands full being…”

I furrow my brow.

“How old are you, anyway?”

“Almost fourteen.”

“OK. You’re going to have your hands full being a hip cat.”

One corner of his mouth curls into a smile, almost unnoticeably.

“Ha! I made you smile.”

I give him a playful shove, and he shoves me back.

“No one says ‘hip cat’ anymore. No one under the age of fifty anyway.”

Then he grows serious again.

“So what exactly did you guys talk about? You and my mom.”

“Well, about you, about the benefits of having an active imagination among other things.”

Leo blushes. Then it comes out. OK, maybe he did exaggerate a little bit, make insinuations, and fictionalize certain events. Like that stuff about the book Getting Away with Murder. He’d only seen that at my place, not at home.

“I really want to understand,” I say. “How did it even occur to you to come up with something like that?”

Leo brushes his bangs off his face.

“I thought you would think it was exciting—more exciting than real life.”

“And why was that important? What does it matter what I think?”

“Well, hello! Don’t you get anything?”

We stare at each other for a few seconds. Then Leo says that he saw me even on my first day, the day my sister helped me move in. He recognized me but hardly dared to believe it was true. A real, live author on the same street, in the house right across from his!

He decided to meet me somehow and try to get to know me, but it took several weeks before he finally got up the courage to ring the doorbell. By then he’d found the interview where I described how I got my ideas and explained that my writing was often based on observations of the people around me.

Leo stops talking and gives me a knowing look.

“Do you mean…,” I begin. But I lose my train of thought and have to start over.

“Do you mean that you exaggerated and made up things about your mother because you… because you thought I would use it as material in a book?”

Leo chews on his lip.

“It seemed like it was working. Every time I said something about her, that she wasn’t doing well or was a little crazy, I noticed that you listened extra closely.”

On a visceral level, I object. That isn’t true, I want to say. But then the moments flicker through my memory, one after another. Questions I asked, hints I dug more deeply into, moments when I allowed myself to be caught up in it all. Boundaries I transgressed with respect to both Leo and his parents.

And yet I’m the one sitting here asking for explanations. My shoulders droop. The conversation should have started from a completely different end.

“Sorry,” I say. “I never meant to make you feel that way. I suppose you can say that I have my own demons. And I’ve done a lot of stupid things lately. None of that is your fault.”

Leo leans forward, propping both elbows on his knees.

“Do you understand?” I continue cautiously, eager to really get through to him. “This whole thing is entirely my responsibility. I shouldn’t have—”

Before I have a chance to finish my sentence, he tosses his head so his bangs fly to the side.

“Whatever. It’s chill.”

We sit there in silence for a bit. I think about the friend he told me about, the boy who moved a few months ago. Then I think about his situation at school. And about his feeling neglected, which I’d discovered by reading between the lines whenever his parents came up.

“Everyone needs someone to talk to,” I say, “someone who cares. And I care about you, Leo, I do—for real.”

In the bushes behind us, some magpies screech. One of them flutters away across the yard, seeming to have been thoroughly roughed up by the others.

“I want things to go well for you. No one has the right to treat you badly—no one.”

He leans back again, says that some of the ninth-grade girls actually stepped up to defend him at the start of the week. They told off a couple of boys who had tripped him in the cafeteria and made them, if not exactly apologize, at least back down. Since then things have been a little better. He hopes this will continue.

“I hope so, too,” I say. “Otherwise, you should let me know. Then maybe I’ll write some of them into my next book as victims of a particularly brutal accident.”

Leo shakes his head and laughs.

“You’re a little nuts, you know.”

Before I realize what’s going on, he gives me a quick hug. My chest feels warm, and there’s a prickling feeling in my eyes.

We sit for a while and chat before I finally get up and explain that I have to go. When Leo wonders where I’m headed, I say that I have an errand that can’t wait. A cloud has covered the sun, so I zip up my vest.

“Oh, and,” I add, “I don’t think I ever said this, but your essay was really well written and moving. I hope you get a good grade on it.”

Leo peers up at me from under his bangs.

“Oh, uh… that wasn’t a school assignment. That was… my way of getting you to read something I wrote.”

I stuff my hands into my pockets.

“OK. Well, anyway, it was a good story.”

“It wasn’t true.”

“That’s what’s great about being an author. You don’t always have to stick to the truth. It’s actually better not to.”