DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Halloween Part 1

Francesca and Margret used to stay up late at night to spy on the neighbors’ daughter hanging out with her boyfriend and his friends hanging out in her front yard.  The sisters shared a large bedroom on the second floor of the family’s two flat, a house that was smack in the middle of the block, hidden like a gem in a small upper-middle class neighborhood.  On either side of the room there were window boxes, where the girls liked to sit and read.  During the summer Francesca would climb into her window box and stare out the window all night.  She’d sit, her elbow resting on the window pain, listening to the hum of cicadas and the calling of birds she was never able to identify because she knew so little about them.  Despite this fact she kept a pair of binoculars at the end of the mahogany bench, a plank of wood that was branded with brown streaks and circles.  Francesca sat staring out the window, in a peaceful trance, one that she often obtained on summer nights like these.  It seemed that something possessed her concentration, like something held her hand in the back of her mind, allowing her to stare straight ahead while not seeing anything at all.  During nights like these, at these distinct moments when she was able to find such a peace that only lived in the presence of all that is able to be seen only by one’s self, she would wake up to find herself staring at something bright, like the pool of light at the bottom of a streetlight, or something dark, like the shadows of the bushes across the street, shaking with life in the wind. 

 

Francesca and Margret were very close.  Francesca called Margret Maggie and Margret called Francesca Fran, although their parents called them by their full names.  Francesca liked sports, especially basketball, because she liked being a part of a team, although she was quite the show-off, as her grammar school’s team point guard.  Lifting up her hand to call a play gave her a high that she couldn’t find anywhere else but on the court.  Her MVP trophy sat on top of the sisters’ bookcase, shimmering and shining under the ceiling fan lights.  Margret was more of a scholastic person.  She always made the honor roll and was the editor of her junior high’s newspaper, The Union.  Margret came up with the name for the paper.  She got the idea the year that St. Victoria’s grammar school and St. Martha’s junior high fused together into one school.  Although the sisters were very different, they were the best of friends.  Often they would it up at night talking, playing board games, or just listening to music together, while the rays of light from their ceiling fan would skip over them with each rotation.  The sense of seniority would leave them as they toppled their ways up the stairs to the second floor after dinner, and the reality of the magic of adolescence met them with their Family Guy poster that was plastered on the front of their bedroom door.

 

                It was eleven thirty at night.  Fran was lying on asleep her bed, with her hands tucked under her head, her feet curled up into a fetal position, and her earphones lying loose over her pillow.  Maggie glanced back to her sister, wondering if she should wake her up and make her sit by her in the window box so that they could spy on what was going on outside together.  On nights like these they got a high from spying on their neighbors, only because by doing it they could imagine what it would be like to be just as grown up.  Maggie thought to herself how her parents would never let her or her sister do anything like Christine, the girl who lived next door, did when she loitered on the front yard with her friends.  Last Monday she had watched through the window as Christine and two boys of a tall stature and low voices sat in the middle of the yard and conversed for three hours.  She peaked through the blinds, squinting her eyes to see their every move and hear their every word through the cracked open window.  Christine’s tone of voice was high and childish as she laughed.  Christine’s back was facing Maggie’s window.  The boy to her left with brown hair and glasses sat so that his glance slightly faced the window, but was at enough of an angle so that he wouldn’t notice Maggie.  The same went for the boy with curly blonde hair and the brown jacket.  Maggie wondered if they could actually see the crack of the blinds in her window.  She wondered if they saw her blue eyes, whether they cared or not.  She thought to herself that maybe the very thing that drove their motivation for their conversation and leisure was the fact that they knew she was watching them.  Maybe, she thought, I should climb out the window and join them, offer them some of the oatmeal cookies that mom left by my bed.  She glanced to the window on the eastern wall of the bedroom and watched as the cable that hung from the roof swung with the wind.  Sometimes, on really windy days, when she would take a break from doing her homework at her desk facing that window, she would watch as the cable swung like a pendulum.  When it would swing out of her sight, she would count the seconds until she saw it again, until it would whip in the wind in the opposite direction.  The cycle would repeat until she forced herself to concentrate on her algebra.  Every so often she would picture herself lifting open her window and grabbing a hold of the cord, and climbing down from her bedroom on it, like she was sliding down a fire pole.  The idea of escaping this way always fascinated her, even though she really wasn’t escaping from anything.  Anything physical, or real, anyway.  But to be able to find her own way out, she imagined, would be the greatest adventure. 

 

                Maggie felt the breeze blow through her window.  The silence filled her bedroom, as she imagined it did outside.  She traced the pattern of waves on the bench of the window seat.  The question What would wind look like if I could see it had her attention for the few seconds before Christine’s voice brought her back to the real world. 

 

                “My parents said that if it happens again I’ll have to find a job when I get to college next year to pay for my dorm,” Christine said.  “So we can’t come to my house this Halloween.  The broken windows cost my parents a fortune, and my Dad had to paint over the garage door in black to get rid of the  graffiti.”

 

                “I told Bill and them that we couldn’t come here this year.  They said we could meet at the forest preserve at the other side of the highway, so that we could do whatever we want and not get in trouble,” said the boy with brown hair.

 

“Define nothing,” said the boy with blonde hair.

 

“Nothing,” Christine said, gathering her hair at the nape of neck, “Means whatever we want.”

 

The silence mixed with the wind until the boy with brown hair looked back and forth to Christine and his friend.

 

“I think we should go trick or treating instead,” he said, with the sound of hope and intent in his tone of voice.  “We could get some good bank on the west side of the neighborhood.  Screw Bill and them.  We’ll probably just get in trouble again anyways.”

Maggie drew herself away from the window and leaned back onto the wall.  Being twelve was the worst.  She sat in her limbo of safety and security versus her overprotected state for a long time.  Something told her that things would get better for her, more meaningful, more exciting.  The Family Guy poster that her best friend Becky had bought her for her last birthday just wasn’t doing it for her anymore.  The sound of Christine and her friends’ voices faded out until the only sound she noticed was the train passing every fifteen minutes on the other side of the house, and the only thing that caught her attention were the head and tail lights of the passing cars.

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.