Bad Neighbor

by Molly O'Keefe

  Yay, for small victories.

  From my corner of the apartment complex there was a cracked cement path to an underground parking garage, where I’d put the rental truck I’d rented for 24 hours.

  When I gave my sister the majority of my money, including what came from selling my condo in the span of a week, I kept just enough aside to live until my next advance check.

  Abigail insisted that I do that. I would have given her everything, and she knew that.

  So she just took most.

  Which frankly was the mathematics of our relationship—I would give her everything, she only took most.

  But at the hardware store—as I piled cans of paint and brand new shower curtains and bath mats that looked like frogs into my cart—I was glad, once again, for Abigail.

  Who only took most.

  Back in my apartment, I put Izzy in the middle of the room and rolled some paint onto the walls. A pale yellow color for the living room that made the most of the sunlight and—I thought—the dark bars on the windows. My bedroom was transformed by a pale lilac color, which I spread over the ceiling too, getting rid of the tea-colored water stain. The little bit of the kitchen not covered in tile, I painted bright red. Vivid red.

  High on paint fumes, I stood back and admired my work.

  Not bad, not bad at all.

  I set up my easels, and clipped the color scheme and character sketches for the book to them. I put some shades over my bare light bulbs. Some adorable bumblebee curtains went up over my windows.

  There were a few problems. My shower head didn’t work. The exhaust fan over my stove didn’t work. The doorknob on my bedroom door kept falling out. Minor, I told myself as the little problems began to stack up. All minor.

  By my second night in the apartment—the dump started to feel like my dump. A place I could live and work, even if only for a few weeks. Months at most.

  So, relief making a giddy mess of me, I set up Izzy. To get reconnected to my life. My world.

  My desk went up first, which was basically an Ikea dining room table with screw-in legs and a chrome desktop. I set up my two monitors, my scanner, my tablet. My hard drive. Drawers and drawers of pens and paper. Watercolors.

  Happier every minute, one by one I plugged everything into my power strip. And then plugged my power strip into the wall.

  And blew out all the power.

  My entire apartment went black. A little girl in the apartment above me screamed and I figured it wasn’t just my apartment.

  Shit.

  Me and Izzy blew a fuse. Had to be.

  I found my phone and called the superintendent. Nick—who when I signed the lease said someone on the staff would be available 24/7. So, of course the call went right to voice mail.

  “Hey Nick,” I said, leaving a message. “We’ve got a power outage problem. Me and I think the apartment above me.”

  I hung up and opened my door only to find the courtyard was full of people. Everyone on my side of the square apartment building muttered about their power having gone off.

  I put a blackout on half the place.

  Great. Just great.

  Well, my dad raised me right, and I knew how to replace a fuse or flip a breaker. I just needed to find the box. And nestled into the back end of the staircase leading up to the second floor was a door with a sign on it that said: Basement. Keep Out.

  Basements were where the fuse boxes were.

  I grabbed my flashlight and keys, locked up behind me and tried the doorknob to the basement, surprised to find it turned and the heavy metal door swung open.

  The stairs leading into the basement were dark and frankly, the stuff horror movies are made of. There were cobwebs with actual spiders in them. I could hear something wet dripping down there.

  A couple of human screams and the scene would be perfect.

  The urge to go back to my apartment was a taste in the back of my throat. But my father did raise me right, and a bunch of people were out of power because of me and I couldn’t chicken out.

  I put my foot down on the first step, and it creaked and echoed.

  So did the second and the third.

  My breath was rattling in my throat.

  Behind me there was a cheer, and I glanced over my shoulder to see lights coming on in the windows again. Oh thank God, Mission Fuse Box could be aborted. But before I could turn and spring up the stairs I was blinded by a flashlight below me pointed right in my face.

  “Hey!” I muttered, turning my face aside.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Great. Grumpy, sweaty neighbor.

  “Can’t you read?” he asked. “Sign on the door says keep out.”

  My vision was still blasted from the flashlight, but I could hear him coming up the steps and I turned and ran out of there, tripping on the second step, catching myself on the first and I imagined in a split second the sight of my ass bent over and illuminated like a full moon.

  By him.

  Like I had wings on my feet, I got out of there and stepped sideways to my door. He came out behind me, wearing another sweaty tee shirt and another pair of athletic shorts. He locked the door to the basement and turned to face me.

  “Don’t go down there,” he said.

  “Why do you have a key?” I asked, flustered and angry.

  “Because I do.”

  “Can I have a key?”

  “No.”

  “Does Nick?”

  “Nick,” he said with a laugh, “doesn’t do shit like this.”

  “Well, that would have been lovely information to have before signing the lease. I have a bunch of things I need fixed in my apartment,” I said rather inanely.

  “Nick’s not a super.”

  I was realizing this now.

  “Is there stuff in the basement?”

  I turned back toward the locked basement door, but my neighbor got in my way.

  “What do you need?”

  I blinked at him.

  “What do you need fixed in your apartment?”

  “Nothing, really. I mean not anything big or whatever—”

  “Do you have things you need done or not?” he snapped like I was wasting his time.

  “My shower head, my bedroom door, and the fan over my stove. None of them work.”

  “I’ll take a look.”

  “What?” I shrieked it. I did. He looked up at me wide-eyed.

  “You need shit fixed? I can probably fix it.”

  “That’s not…your job.”

  “How do you know? Maybe it is. Let me get my tools.”

  I had a vision all of a sudden of him shirtless, with a toolbelt around his waist, standing in my bedroom, and I was speechless just long enough for him to walk to his apartment without me stopping him.

  I unlocked my door and then he was behind me, stepping into my apartment, a hot breath all along my back.

  “You work fast.”

  He was looking at all my stuff, my red kitchen and bumblebee curtains. My easels with my character sketches and color palates.

  Izzy.

  “You should open some windows or something. These paint fumes are gonna make you sick.”

  “I’m okay,” I said. Though I felt a little high.

  “I’m leaving the door open,” he said.

  That vein of conversation petered out pretty hard.

  “I didn’t thank you yesterday for helping me move my stuff in.”

  “Yeah you did.”

  “Not the second trip. You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Nope. I didn’t. What do you want me to work on first?”

  This guy made no sense. Rude but helpful. Offended, somehow, by me while at the same time being so offensive.

  “1B?” he called me by my apartment number. “What first?”

  “Stove fan.” I pointed at my stove just in case he missed it. “Right over there.” Further instructions, like he was going to get lost in my miniscule apartment that was probably t
he exact same as his miniscule apartment.

  His tool box made a heavy thump on my kitchen counter and he leaned over my stove. I gave myself a good eye-rolling.

  “I don’t even know your name,” I said.

  “I don’t know yours either.”

  “Do you want to change that?” I asked with a laugh.

  “I don’t know. 1B has a ring to it.”

  “Is that… are you joking with me?”

  “You started it.”

  He was! He was joking. Maybe grumpy neighbor wasn’t so grumpy after all. Maybe he was just socially awkward—which I totally understood. I could be socially awkward in an empty room.

  “Charlotte,” I said. “That’s my name.” I didn’t tell him my last name. Maybe I shouldn’t have told him my first name. I had no idea how this living in hiding thing worked. Was I supposed to have an alias? Set up some other kind of life? That might be fun.

  Who would I be if I wasn’t me?

  He looked over his shoulder at me, as if he was gauging whether the name fit. It did. I was a Charlotte through and through. He nodded as if agreeing, and then went back to taking my fan apart.

  “I’m Jesse,” he said. “Jesse Herrera.”

  Jesse fit him too, in a way.

  “So, you work for the apartment building?” I asked. “Like a handyman?”

  “No.”

  “You’re just being neighborly?”

  He was silent, as if answering a kind of larger existential question. And then he was silent for so long it was obvious he wasn’t going to answer.

  All right. Jesse didn’t want to talk. No big deal.

  Except the problem was, with other humans I wasn’t very good at silence. By myself I lived in total quiet, but if there was silence between me and another person I felt painfully compelled to fill it.

  “How long have you lived here?” I asked, unable to help myself.

  “A few years.”

  “Always in that apartment?”

  I felt his answering grunt indicated a yes.

  “What’s the deal with the basement?”

  He paused, his hands still on the fan he was taking out of my range hood. “There’s no deal. You just need to stay out of it.”

  “Bodies?” I joked. “Is that where the bodies are?”

  He turned to face me, his entire body coiled. Or poised. His eyes met mine and I felt my heartbeat behind my ribs. His attention was heavy. Calming, kind of. Like one of those jackets you put on dogs who are terrified of fireworks on the fourth of July. I took a deep breath and felt some of the nerves alive in my stomach settle down.

  Weird. Other people did not calm me down. As a rule, they stirred me up. And good-looking guys? They made all my dorky come out.

  “Charlotte.” His voice saying my name was one of the most intimate things I’d ever experienced. It was like I was standing there with my clothes off.

  “Wh…what?”

  “You can’t go in the basement. Pretend like it’s not even there.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s stuff down there that you don’t want to know about.”

  I didn’t want to know about any of this, frankly. I wanted my Nob Hill condo back with the coffee girl who didn’t know my name.

  “Okay,” I said. He made a sound that might have been a laugh. “What?” I asked. “You said don’t go down there and I agreed.”

  “I expected you to argue.”

  “Have I given you the impression that I argue?”

  “You’re arguing with me right now.”

  And so I was.

  “Well, I want nothing to do with the scary basement. It’s all yours.”

  He turned back to his fan and I turned back to Izzy and found my other power cord and my extension cord and started splitting my equipment up, trying to pretend like he wasn’t even in the room with me.

  It lasted five minutes.

  “Do you do this kind of thing for everyone?” I asked.

  “No. You’re special.” He was being sarcastic and that shut my mouth. I plugged in one power cord and then ran my extension cord into my bedroom and plugged it in there.

  The lights stayed on.

  Small victories.

  “That’s quite a setup,” he said when I came back to my desk.

  “Are you talking about my computer?”

  “It’s the only thing in the room.”

  It was true. I didn’t have a table. Or a chair. Or a couch. I had Izzy. And the easels.

  “Setup like that makes me wonder what the fuck you’re doing in a place like this?” he asked, the muscles in his forearm twitching and turning as he unscrewed things on the fan.

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s gotta be worth some money. Most people would sell it and do everything they could to avoid Shady Oaks.”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  He laughed. I smiled. Both of us in on the joke. Shady Oaks was pretty fucking bad.

  “I won’t be here long,” I said.

  “Funny. I said the same thing when I moved in. Most people do.”

  Well, that was sobering. I wondered how he ended up here, and all the things he’d done to try and stop himself from landing at Shady Oaks. But I wasn’t brave enough to ask. Because I wasn’t brave enough to hear the answer.

  “So?” he asked. “How did you end up here?”

  My sister fell in love with a sociopath and I had to give her all my money so she could get away from him. You know. The usual.

  “Boyfriend kicked me out,” I said instead. Because I was being the opposite of me.

  “For real?”

  “It’s so hard to believe I have a boyfriend?”

  “It’s hard to believe he’d kick you out.”

  That…whoa. That was kind of a compliment? Like a flirty compliment thing? All of a sudden I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I put them to work starting my computer. Setting everything up just the way I liked.

  “What do you do with all that stuff?” he asked, waving his screwdriver at Izzy.

  Hmmmm…truth or lie. Truth or lie.

  “Live chat porn.”

  I mean, if you’re gonna lie, you gotta really go for it, right?

  “What?”

  “You know, guys call in—”

  “Bullshit. Total bullshit.”

  “How do you know?” Perhaps it was the way I was blushing.

  “Live chat porn doesn’t have easels.”

  I sighed. “Good point.”

  “And you look like a kindergarten teacher.”

  Believe it or not, that was not the first time I’d heard that comparison.

  “Kindergarten teachers can’t do porn? It’s a kink thing.”

  “Oh, I get the kink,” he said, glancing at me sideways before returning to his work. “I just don’t think you are doing live chats.”

  See? That didn’t sound or feel like a compliment. This guy couldn’t pick a lane.

  “I’m an illustrator and designer,” I confessed. Trying to be someone else had lasted about five seconds.

  “What do you design?” he asked.

  “Well, right now I’m working on a book.”

  “You’re designing a book?”

  “Maybe you’ve heard of them.” I meant it as a joke, but as the words came out of my mouth I realized how mean they sounded. How I was judging him. Or how I had judged him and didn’t even realize it.

  Luckily he didn’t get offended. “One or two,” he said, real dry.

  “It’s a kind of a Where’s Waldo thing.”

  “The kids’ book?”

  “Yeah, but with Jane Austen. So it’s not really for kids. Unless they’re like really smart kids. Or maybe weird. I don’t know. I would have liked it as a kid, but I was a weird kid.” Rambling. This was me rambling. He was silently putting my fan back together, so I just kept talking. Filling in the silence with noise. “But I’m creating all these page layouts that are time and period appr
opriate and hiding Jane Austen in them. Right now I’m working on Hyde Park and stumped trying to pick which part of the park to use. The Serpentine Lakes? The Rose Garden? It’s an embarrassment of riches, actually.”

  There was no way he gave a shit about Jane Austen or Hyde Park. But I couldn’t stop talking.

  “I just finished the Almack’s Assembly rooms. That was kind of fun. I have all these couples making out behind ferns. I figured that had to be fairly accurate. I mean, that’s what they do in romance novels.”

  SHUT YOUR MOUTH NOW! I yelled at myself. But nope, I just kept on talking.

  “And I’ve done a garden tea party and I’m going to do Buckingham Palace and Newgate prison…”

  Suddenly, he put down a screwdriver and hit the button for my exhaust and the fan whirred to life.

  “You fixed it!” I squealed, in a weird relief to not be talking about Jane Austen anymore.

  “You don’t need to sound so surprised.” He wasn’t smiling, his mouth was a firm line. But he gave the impression of smiling, a certain lightness in his eyes maybe.

  For a second we were silent, each of us just looking at each other, and I was so busy taking him in, soaking in that hint of a smile he was giving me, that I forgot to feel self-conscious. I forgot to suck in my belly or run my hand over my hair, I just stood there and let him look at me.

  While I stared at him.

  He wasn’t just hot. He was handsome. His face chiseled, his jaw hard. His lips, even in that line, were thick and full. The kind of lips I could pinch in my fingers.

  Bite with my teeth.

  “Bedroom?” he asked, jerking his thumb toward the shadowed doorway beside my kitchen.

  I opened my mouth to say what but nothing came out.

  Was this the fruit stand fantasy coming true? Was this…possible? He said bedroom and I just led him in there and we went at it? Was that how these things worked?

  Maybe in my sister’s life. But not mine.

  But it could be. Right now. I could do it.

  Shady Oaks was pretty much a turning point in my life. If I was ever going to NOT be me, this was my moment.

  “You said something about the doorknob?” he asked, and I nearly sagged against my desk. Right. Of course. He wasn’t talking about having sex with me in my bedroom, he was talking about fixing my doorknob.

  “The doorknob falls out,” I said, my voice weird.

  He vanished into my bedroom and I imagined him in there with my rumpled bed. The dent in my pillow from my head. I imagined walking in that shadowed room and taking off my shirt. Pressing my breasts against his wide, muscled back. I imagined putting my hands around his waist and he would grab my wrist, dragging my hand down into his pants. He would swear under his breath.