When No One Is Watching

by Alyssa Cole

  Chapter 4

  Theo

  VOLUNTEERING TO HELP SYDNEY WAS A DUMB MOVE—I’M supposed to be blending in enough that people will think I’m nice. Normal. Not being the center of attention. But something about my neighbor leads to ill-advised decisions.

  Before this evening, she was “the woman from the tour” and then “the woman I watch from my window.” My run-ins with her had either been abrupt and awkward, or from a detached distance, like watching a character in a Sims video game go about her business. Now she feels . . . real, I guess. All of the neighbors I spoke to do.

  I hadn’t thought of them as real people. Even when I’d chatted with Mr. Perkins, even when I’d watched from my window or observed people during my walks, I hadn’t really been seeing them. It’s a startling realization, but to be fair, I’ve spent most of my life having to quickly categorize people as either threat or . . . something else. That doesn’t leave much room for having to think about their past or their feelings, or whatever.

  Now I want to know more. And Sydney—I might want more than that.

  Hold your horses, buddy.

  Volunteering for her project is just a way to kill time until the ax over my head drops or miraculously disappears. While Sydney makes for a nice fantasy, my reality is being stuck in a co-owned house with a woman who barely acknowledges my existence, let alone our relationship.

  I intend on going right up to my cramped attic studio and looking up some history stuff so Sydney doesn’t realize I know nothing about history, before heading out again. Kim has been staying out later and later anyway—which probably means exactly what I think it means, so I’ve been spending my nights out and about—but I hear music floating through the closed windows of the living room as I jog up the front steps.

  The low, sorrowful notes sound like one of Kim’s classical music albums, which I call her “cultured entertaining soundtrack” since she usually listens to Taylor Swift when she’s alone; she must have guests.

  Anxiety punches me in the belly as I imagine her parents behind that door, the rich, judgmental pieces of work who’d made it clear from the beginning that I wasn’t good enough, but they’d tolerate me temporarily because what Kim wanted, Kim got.

  One Easter dinner at their place in the Hamptons, they’d told the story of how Kim had always begged for a new bunny every Easter and they’d obliged her, to the point that they’d started to run out of bunny names. When I’d attempted a joke about them recycling the same rabbit and renaming it every year, the table had fallen silent and her father had laughed in that tone someone uses when you’ve mispronounced your entrée at a French restaurant.

  “You don’t keep replaceable playthings for longer than necessary,” he’d explained, and there’d been contempt in his eyes that had seemed disproportionate to a discussion about Easter rabbits. At the time, I thought he was making a sly jab at Kim’s affection for me, but now I think maybe he’d really been disgusted that I’d been gauche enough to suggest they couldn’t simply buy what they wanted, dispose of it when they were tired of it, and get a new one when the mood struck again.

  Deep male laughter sounds through the door to the first-floor apartment, followed by Kim’s flirtatious giggle.

  Maybe it isn’t her parents. Maybe it’s the asshole who sat across from me at brunch almost exactly a year ago, talking to me about his 401(k) like he hadn’t fucked Kim in the hot tub just hours earlier.

  If David had been smug or had seemed like he was needling me, that would have given me something to really hitch my rage trailer to. But no. He’d been bland and boring before, and he’d been bland and boring after, and apparently that was what Kim preferred over me. And instead of leaving, I’d stayed and tried to make things good again, like it was another challenge and I’d win some kind of prize.

  I really was my mother’s child.

  The music suddenly grows louder as I stand on the bottom step, indecisive, and I turn to see Kim standing in the open doorway and looking at me like she’s glad to see me. The invisible anxiety fist gets in a few more jabs somewhere around my chest region. Or maybe it’s just heartburn from the chips and salsa I shoveled into my mouth while standing around after the block-party planning meeting had finished because I didn’t want to go back to my sweltering attic room.

  “Theo?”

  Kim says my name how she used to. Before we moved. Before she detached so hard she took a chunk of my flesh with her. Before almost exactly a year ago when she’d walked up to the brunch table where I’d listened to David drone on, sporting a low-cut top that nonchalantly displayed a hickey that I hadn’t given her, like we were in some kind of teen drama.

  “What’s up?” I try to sound cool, but it comes out sounding surprised, which is a completely honest reaction for once.

  “Want to come have a nightcap with us?” she asks politely, inclining her head toward the noise in her living room.

  “Who’s ‘us’?” I steel myself to just walk up the stairs if she says David’s name, which seems in the realm of possibility, given the last few months.

  “The neighbors from across the street. Terry and Josie. Remember, they had us over to try some of Terry’s craft beer right after we moved in?” She pulls the door open and I see the neighbors who live on the other side of Sydney smiling at me expectantly like we’re old buddies about to catch up. Terry’s beer had tasted like piss, and both their dog and their son had bitten me, so of course I remember our visit.

  “Sure,” I say, trying to muster if not enthusiasm then hospitality. I should be happy Kim seems to be trying. “I’ll have a quick drink.”

  “Quick? You have something else to do?” Kim’s nose wrinkles a bit, but she holds on to her smile and ushers me in.

  “Hey,” I say as I walk in and take a seat on the weird angular couch Kim bought last month. The room smells like fancy cheese, so like ass, mixed with the tart scent of wine.

  “Theo. Buddy!” Terry reaches over the coffee table littered with the remains of their appetizers and gives my hand a hard squeeze. He’s sporting an expensive Rolex on his wrist, and I imagine how he’d react if I slammed it down onto the edge of this ugly but sturdy coffee table.

  “Long time no see,” Josie says, then holds up the bottle of white wine in her hand. It’s so huge it looks kind of like a novelty, but I’m sure it’s expensive and delicious. “Want some?”

  Kim slides onto the couch beside me. “Dad brought it back from his trip to France,” she explains, casually placing a hand on my knee. A little shiver passes through me at the familiar press of her fingers. It feels more intimate than if she’d called me in here to fuck.

  “Come on, look at this guy!” Terry’s words are a bit blurry around the edges, but he seems like a guy who comes home every night and hits the wet bar before taking off his jacket, so he’s possibly more than a little drunk. His face is wide, and, right now, the center third of it is flushed red and mottled like he got hit with the problem-drinker stick. “Wine? What does he look like? He’s going to have some bourbon, right?”

  “I—”

  Terry thumps his chest. “Bourbon. Man’s drink! Thatta boy.”

  Terry is maybe ten years older than me, tops, but he’s clearly taken on the role of pushy drunk uncle at this gathering. I decide to roll with it. I take the glass from him as he hands it across the table, and feel the weight of three gazes settle on me as the smoky heat of the first sip warms my throat and chest.

  “So, how was it?” Kim asks, squeezing my leg.

  “How was what?”

  “The meeting,” Josie says, leaning in conspiratorially. “About the block party.”

  “Oh. It was fine.” I take another sip and run my tongue over my teeth.

  “That’s it? Fine?” Kim asks, squeezing my leg a bit harder. “What’d they talk about?”

  Part of me wonders if she knows I spoke to, and maybe flirted a bit with, Sydney. If she knows I volunteered to help with the tour instead of busting down doors
looking for a job opportunity that’s not going to happen.

  I use my free hand to gently pry her clawlike grip off me. “It was a party-planning meeting. The most exciting thing was when these two women started trash-talking each other’s macaroni and cheese.”

  I shrug and take another sip, but Josie’s gaze narrows. “They didn’t talk about anything else?”

  There’s something odd in how her gaze has gone from diffused friendliness to sharpened interrogation, despite the same pasted-on smile. I gulp the rest of my drink and plonk the glass onto the coffee table. “How about you just ask me what it is you want to know? Clearly I’m missing something, and I don’t have time to play guessing games.”

  Kim’s breath brushes against my ear just before she whispers, “Don’t be rude.”

  “Aren’t you unemployed?” Terry asks pointedly as he leans over to pour me more bourbon. “I’d say you have plenty of time.”

  All three of them laugh, that rich-fuck giggle, and I turn to Kim with both brows raised.

  “What’s up with this?” I grit out.

  “Don’t be upset, we’re all friends here,” Josie says. “We saw the party-planning post on OurHood and our private group decided to have a meeting of our own.”

  “There are private groups in OurHood?” I ask.

  Josie gives me a look and continues. “We started wondering what exactly they were getting up to. We need to know whether there’s anything to worry about. Safety-wise.”

  “You think a bunch of people sitting around planning activities to enrich their neighbors’ lives is a safety threat.” I laugh a little but no one else does. I know I probably have a somewhat different view of safety than these three, given my background, but this is so comical I need to know more. “Are you actually worried that our totally harmless neighbors are plotting against you?”

  “They’re not totally harmless,” Kim says. “One of them tried to attack me at the corner store. You saw that. I don’t know what she would’ve done if you hadn’t stepped in.”

  She squeezes my arm.

  I don’t say anything.

  “Come on, buddy,” Terry says. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed how they look at us. Felt it. Like we’re the ones who don’t belong here.”

  “If you were in our private group, you’d see that some of the other emerging neighborhoods around us have been dealing with . . . unpleasantness.” Josie presses her lips together and lets the word settle, as if unpleasantness is the worst thing ever.

  Terry makes a weird sound in his throat. “There have been package robberies from doorsteps. Expensive items. Two homes that were featured on Boomtown were broken into and had jewelry stolen, family heirlooms that had been passed down for generations.”

  “And?” I hold his gaze. “People get robbed all the time. This is Brooklyn.”

  “A couple was mugged five blocks over by some thugs last week, too,” Josie continues. “A couple like you two. Like Terry and me. They were told that it was ‘reparations.’”

  Sydney had said something similar to me, but we’d laughed afterward because it was a joke.

  “Well, I’m sure that wasn’t funny for the people being robbed, but it clearly wasn’t a mission statement.”

  I wait for them to acknowledge how ridiculous this is, but no one does.

  Terry shakes his head. “There have been a lot of issues popping up since the VerenTech deal was floated for this neighborhood. Troublemakers having meetings, planning things, trying to make sure the deal doesn’t go through by any means necessary, as they say. Now that it’s been approved, we’re worried about . . . escalations, especially because Josie works there.”

  Kim rests her hand on my leg again, and the weight feels cloying now. “They see the VerenTech deal, and us, as a way of, I don’t know, taking what’s theirs or something. So we thought—”

  “Wait. Wait, wait. You guys are serious?” I look around the room and see that they are. “Christ, Kim. It was literally a bunch of neighbors hanging out and planning something fun for everyone, and you’re acting like it’s leading up to Harpers Ferry.” I place my glass on the table and stand up. “All three of you might consider deleting the OurHood app because it’s clearly making you paranoid. This is—”

  “This is what?” Terry’s voice is low and angry, following the typical drunk-bastard cycle. “Ridiculous? You think because you went to one meeting with those people that you’re down now?”

  “You keep saying ‘them’ and ‘those people’ when you mean our neighbors who were just now nefariously choosing time slots for who was going to oversee the bouncy castle,” I say slowly. “So, yes. It is ridiculous.”

  Terry smirks at me, a mean and familiar curve of his mouth upward, and I realize he doesn’t mean “our neighbors.” He’s thinking something much worse. “Calm down, Theo. We’re just looking out for you. Kim told us you’ve been having problems and we thought maybe—”

  “You told them we’ve been having problems?” I ask Kim.

  “I told them you’ve been having problems,” she clarifies. “I have a job and pull my weight around the house.”

  I haven’t missed any mortgage payments, thanks to the gigs I’ve picked up here and there over the last few months, but I wonder what she’s told these people.

  “VerenTech will be hiring soon, and—” Jodie says.

  “We’re just trying to help,” Terry cuts in. “We have to look out for each other. We’re just trying to foster good neighborly relations because we need to depend on each other. To know we have each other’s backs.”

  I look down at Kim and think of the day she came home upset. “There’s just so few of us.”

  “When you’re depressed and jobless, it’s easy to fall in with the wrong kind of people—” Josie adds, but they’re all talking to my back now because I’m heading out the living room door.

  I consider going upstairs, but the thought of being boxed in by Kim and those weirdo neighbors makes me pivot out the front door. I’m agitated and annoyed and I really shouldn’t be, because everything they said was ridiculous. Still, while they’d been worried I was attending some kind of anarchists’ meeting, they’d been having their own kaffeeklatsch about what a loser I was.

  I stand outside on the stoop for a minute; it’s dark out already, but still hot and humid. Kids are heading home in groups of two, three, and four. The whir of bike wheels and flash of spoke reflectors speed by. Sydney’s house is dark—she’s probably still at Mr. Perkins’s place with her friend who lives upstairs from her.

  I do what I always do when I’m frustrated: I walk. For blocks and blocks, I wander down streets with names I can’t pronounce, with housing styles ranging from squat two-story colonials, to grand brownstones with all the bells and whistles, to old prewar tenements with dozens of apartments, to housing projects. Lots of new construction, too, in the same bland “modern” style. I’d worked on a few sites for condos like these—and after dating Kim, had been friends with people who could afford to live in them. These were the kind of people who called people trailer trash in one sentence and complained about leaks and thin walls in the next—the same problems that’d plagued the trailers I grew up in. My mom now lives in a beautiful trailer that beats most of these condos, and it didn’t cost half a million bucks, either.

  I’m always hyperaware of my surroundings, but tonight I’m on edge, tuned in to how people in the neighborhoods I walk through look at me. A group of dudes my age, all Black, sitting on their stoop, nudge each other, and one of them laughs like jicama going over a grater. A couple of streets down, an older woman eyes me cautiously and gives me a wide berth, as if she can tell there’s something dangerous about me, though she nods a greeting when our gazes meet. As I pass another group, boys and girls in their late teens all sitting on a park bench in one of those green spaces that pop up randomly around here, one of the boys calls out, “Have a good night, bro, have a good night.” I can’t tell if he’s buzzed and feeling overly
friendly or making fun of me. Maybe both.

  I reply with “You too, man,” and keep walking, trying to shake the weird feeling I’ve had since I left the house. I’d been in a good mood for once after leaving Mr. Perkins’s, like I could be part of this neighborhood and create some snapshots for my own personal photo album, but Kim, Terry, and Josie have gotten into my head so I’m walking around paranoid and jumpy.

  I have to wonder if this is what Kim feels like all the time. Constantly suspicious and thinking that everyone is out to get her for no reason. I do have reason, but none of the people I’ve passed are a source of worry for me.

  I decide to make my way toward the bar a few blocks down from our house, where they sometimes have jazz on Monday nights, across from one of the pawnshops I’ve been to a few times. When I arrive, it’s quiet outside, so I head in and take a seat. It’s darker than I remember, a polished and cleaned version of the dive bars I used to frequent, and instead of jazz, an old Radiohead album is playing. Each stool is occupied by a white dude with a beard. They all turn and look at me as the door slams shut behind me.

  The bartender saunters over to the end of the bar, a cute short girl who I recognize as the college kid who rents from Mr. Perkins.

  “Hey, neighbor,” she says, batting her lashes at me. She seems to be going for the smoky-eyed manic pixie dream girl look tonight, and personality, too, judging from how she leans invitingly over the bar. “What can I get you? Beer? Bourbon?”

  “I actually came for jazz,” I say. “But I think maybe I have the wrong bar?”

  There’s something about the way this place seems manufactured, like a hipster Hard Rock Cafe, that makes my skin itch. Even the customers fit a mold: every guy at the bar is dressed in the same variation of graphic tee and dark denim, slouched over a beer or phone with the same curve of his back. It’s weird.

  “Oh, that was the last place,” she says. “They closed down a couple weeks ago.”

  “That sucks.”

  She quirks a brow. “Does it? We don’t have to go all the way to Fort Greene to find a chill place now.”