The Neighbors (3 page)

A few minutes past eight in the morning, Harlow Ward watched a beat-up white pickup peel away from the curb next door. She smiled, shifting her weight from one red pump to another. With
the truck out of view, she turned her attention to the pristine living room behind her, smoothed the full skirt of her dress, and regarded her husband with a bright smile.

“We have a new neighbor,” she announced. “I’ll make cookies.”

Other than the Walmart across town, there wasn’t much in the way of big retail in Creekside, so that was where Andrew went. Staring down a seemingly endless aisle of cleaning products, he knew exactly what he was looking for. He’d been going to the store for his mom since before he could drive. Grocery shopping came naturally, and buying cleaning supplies was even easier. His philosophy: buy the cleaner that had the brightest color, the one that looked like it would instantly kill you if you threw your head back and chugged. He was naturally drawn to the purples and blues, deciding on something called Kaboom, not because of anything on the label, but because of its name. He imagined Mickey’s bathroom exploding beneath a violet mushroom cloud, giving him just enough time to bolt out of the house and tuck-and-roll onto the patchy front lawn. Or maybe it would cut through soap scum like a knife cuts through butter and leave Drew pleasantly surprised, like the smiling women on TV.
It’s so easy!

After tossing a few more household cleaners into his cart, including some Scrubbing Bubbles—because his inner child couldn’t pass up cartoon-endorsed cleaners—he wheeled his way to the grocery section and considered his options. Anything requiring refrigeration meant he’d have to venture into the kitchen, and he was willing to bet that it was as nasty as the bathroom. So instead of getting his usual orange juice, he got a box of Capri Suns instead; and instead of getting cereal that required milk, he settled on some unrefrigerated pudding cups. If he
wanted
real
food he’d have to go out for now, which was fine by him. The dining area at Casa de Mickey needed to be excavated from beneath its scrim of dust before it could be used in relative safety.

Dropping fifty-six bucks of his three hundred at the register, he drove back to his new home to scrub the toilet. There was something fundamentally wrong with taking a dump in a can that was dirtier than the inside of your own ass.

He parked along the curb and gathered his blue Walmart bags, dreading the task that awaited him inside. He paused midstride and turned his head toward that pristine house with the white picket fence. Drew bet their toilets sparkled the way clean things sparkled in Saturday morning cartoons. He bet the inside of that house smelled like cookies and fresh-cut grass, because those were the best smells in the world. His mom used to bake chocolate-chip cookies every weekend, a whole sheet just for him. That was before his dad disappeared. After Rick left, the only cookies they had came out of a bag. Drew wasn’t sure, but he doubted the oven had been used since he was nine years old.

Inside the fairy-tale house, something shifted. He saw it for only a fraction of a second, but he was sure it was there. Someone had been watching him from behind the window curtains, staring at him while he stared right back, his arms weighed down by pudding and juice. Something crawled just beneath the surface of his skin, but he turned away. He was the one standing slack-jawed in the middle of the street, probably looking like a lunatic freshly moved out of the psycho ward and into the crappiest house in town.

In the driveway, Mickey’s TransAm dripped oil onto the concrete. Drew had tried to give the guy the benefit of the doubt the night before, but after getting an eyeful of the bathroom, he was feeling a lot less chipper and a lot more judgmental. Mickey had always loved video games, so the idea of him being the type of guy to sleep all day and play MMORPGs all night wouldn’t have
surprised him. But the more time he spent inside that house, the more Andrew pictured Mick screaming into a headset, starting cyber-fights with kids half his age, smashing beer cans against his forehead like a modern-day Cro-Magnon.

These thoughts barraged his brain while he scrubbed grime out of the corners of the tub, scoured so hard that even Joan Crawford would have been impressed. He imagined Mickey stumbling into the bathroom, heady with sleep, his white hair wild like a blizzard, a wire hanger held tight in his grasp.
You think this is clean?
Wearing canary yellow gloves that reached halfway up his arms, Drew exhaled a laugh, inhaled chemical fumes, and was overtaken by a choking fit as he continued to scrub.

R
ed Ward looked good for his age; his wife, on the other hand, looked phenomenal. They were in their late fifties, but time had treated them well. Red was a fan of golf, and occasional yard work kept him in shape. Harlow had suggested he buy one of those fancy self-propelled mowers, but Red insisted on his old-fashioned reel mower. He claimed that he liked the workout, the way the exposed blades glinted in the sun and hissed against the grass. But Harlow knew better; Red endured the Kansas sun to keep out of her way.

Harlow had a svelte hourglass figure that girls half her age would have killed for. Unlike her husband, she hated nothing more than being caught out in the heat. She wore floppy-brimmed hats and enormous round-lensed sunglasses while pruning her roses in monogrammed gardening gloves. She’d have passed for Jackie O had it not been for that head of soft curls that rivaled those of Marilyn Monroe.

Although Harlow never did like that little tart. She had been ten when JFK ate a bullet in Dallas, remembering her mother’s exact words the second the news hit the airwaves: “He was playing with the devil,” Bridget Beaumont declared. “It’s the only
reason God would take a man like that out of this world. It’s the only reason God ever takes
anyone
out.”

Harlow was convinced that her mother had been right: JFK had been a sinner. He had asked for it.

She let the curtain slip from her fingers before turning from the window and glancing at her husband. Red sat in an over-stuffed leather recliner, his feet wrapped in a pair of slippers despite the Kansas heat.

“I like him,” she said. “That truck is an eyesore, but he seems like a nice young man.”

Red looked up from his newspaper, turned the page with a rustle.

Harlow turned back to the window, pushed the curtain aside again with a manicured nail, and watched the house next door, waiting for it to speak to her. And it did. Within seconds, the front door swung open and Andrew appeared, trudging across that corpse of a lawn to the trash can beside the driveway. He flung a trash bag into the container—those sunflower yellow gloves flashing in the sun—before marching back inside. As soon as he was out of sight, Harlow tapped a nail against the curve of her bottom lip.

“I should invite him over,” she said, shifting her weight from one heeled shoe to another. “He’d like a home-cooked meal.”

They all liked a home-cooked meal. Because it was true what they said: the quickest way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, and Andrew looked hungry.

It was well after four o’clock when Mickey finally set foot out of his bedroom.

Drew had spent the entire morning scrubbing the bathroom as best he could, and thanks to his wealth of supplies, it very likely hadn’t been as clean as it was in years. Sorting through
boxes in his room, he paused, held his breath, and listened to Mick track down the hall. A door shut, followed by the distinct sound of Mickey taking a leak. When the door opened, he prepared himself for Mick’s arrival, sure that his old friend would fill the space of his bedroom door.
Holy shit,
he’d say, wide-eyed like a kid on Christmas.
You have no idea how awesome that is—how awesome
you
are. That bathroom was disgusting. A wreck. I can’t believe I ever let it get so bad.
That’s when Drew would offer him a ghost of a smile and lie: it was nothing, no problem, no big deal.

But Mickey didn’t appear.

His heavy footfalls made a beeline for the living room instead.

When he heard the front door slam and the engine of the black TransAm roar to life, Drew scrambled around the boxes that filled his room and peered out the window. Mick peeled out onto the street, then slammed the muscle car into first and flew up the road.

“You’re welcome!” Drew yelled against the glass. When the sound of his words dissipated, the silence of the house felt heavy, oppressive.

He shoved himself away from his window and veered into the hall. He wasn’t sure why he did it, why he stopped in front of Mickey’s door, or why his hand naturally drifted toward the knob. But curiosity got the best of him. He wanted to piece together just what kind of a person Mickey had become. Drew pushed the door open just enough to stick his head inside.

The walls were covered in posters that boasted zombie-esque band members looking like they’d just dug themselves out of their own graves, with names like Mechanical Death and Post-War Suicide. There was a desk in the corner piled high with papers and cracked CD cases. A box of incense lay amid a pile of ash. A cheap acrylic lighter and a torn paper cup filled with change sat on an upturned milk crate beside the bed. Mickey’s
floor was invisible to the naked eye; clearly, he was untrained in the fine art of closet-keeping. The only thing that looked half-organized was a makeshift shelf Mick had constructed by screwing a two-by-four into the wall. An army of medieval-looking action figures were lined up there, still in their boxes, next to an impressive water bong that presided over the room. A twelve-gauge shotgun hung proudly over the shelf. Home defense. You never could be too careful.

Closing Mickey’s door, Drew let his gaze pause on the door across the hall from his own. This one, he assumed, led to a third bedroom. But after trying the knob, he realized it wasn’t the same kind as the others. It was the outdoor kind, lockable from both the outside as well as in.

A nagging seed of misgiving sprouted within his mind. Mickey was a bit weird, and he was severely lacking in the housekeeping department, but who put a lock like that on an interior door? It was like a big red button marked
Do Not Push
.

A moment ago Drew hadn’t cared what was behind door number three, yet suddenly he had to know. He rattled the knob—locked—then gave the door a shove with his shoulder, but it didn’t budge. He shot a glance down the hall, two thoughts simultaneously bumping against each other: first, that the key to the third hallway door was almost certainly somewhere on Mickey’s desk; second, that Drew had forgotten to buy a replacement lightbulb for the burned-out one in the hallway.

He found himself staring into Mickey’s room again, peering at the desk in the corner, carefully considering whether breaching the perimeter of Mick’s bedroom was justified, or whether it just made him a nosy asshole.

Mickey’s engine rumbled past the front window, and Drew froze. He had the urge to bolt back to his room, to pretend he’d never left his little space—as though standing in the hallway were some sort of crime. He pulled Mick’s door closed and cleared his throat, trying to act casual as he started toward the living room.
Then Mickey filled the front doorway, and Drew immediately felt guilty—cradling a bag of McDonald’s in one arm like a baby, Mickey offered his new roommate a crooked grin.

“Hey,” he said, “thanks for cleaning the bathroom, man. It looks great. I really don’t know how it got that bad.”

Drew blinked.

“I got burgers,” Mickey said. “Figured you’d want to eat.”

“Um, yeah...totally.”

“Cool,” Mickey said, stepping across the living room and sinking into the couch. “You still game?”

A smile crept into the corners of Drew’s mouth. As the two started into a round of Madden NFL he started to relax. This was the same Mickey Fitch whom Andrew had idolized in the past. Butterflies sprang to life inside his stomach when Mickey muttered a familiar battle cry: “Game on.”

And suddenly, blissfully, Andrew was a kid again.