The Boy Next Door Is My Nightmare

Holes In The Wall

Thursday at school was its usual performance. Westbridge High ran like a social ecosystem with very clear food chain food. At the top you had the athletes and the girls attached to them. Below that, the student council types who thought being organized made them important. Then everyone else, existing in varying degrees of invisibility.

I was firmly in the everyone else category. I had accepted this and even made peace with it. But what I have not made peace with was Tyler Mace.

He was waiting at my locker that morning the way bad news always arrives, right when you are not ready for it.

“Look who it is,” he said, leaning against the locker beside mine like he owned that stretch of hallway. His friend Devon stood slightly behind him, already grinning at nothing.

I spun my combination without looking at him. “Move, Tyler.”

“Relax. I just wanted to say your bag is ugly.”

“And your personality is uglier. We're even.”

Devon made a sound. Tyler's expression sharpened and I knew in that moment that was the wrong thing to say. Not because I was wrong, but because boys like Tyler Mace cannot handle being answered back in front of an audience, even an audience of one.

He reached out and knocked my books off the top of my bag. Just like that, like it was nothing. Papers everywhere. My notebook skidding across the floor. I stood there for a second, that familiar hot feeling building behind my eyes that I refused to let become tears. I crouched down to pick everything up.

“Careful,” Tyler said above me. “Don't want you falling over. A lot of weight to catch.” He walked away laughing.

I stayed crouched on the floor collecting my papers and I kept my face completely blank and I did not cry. I was already good at that by now because crying was basically a skill I have mastered.

“Here.” I look up. Chase Hendricks was crouching beside me, picking up the last two pages that slid furthest down the hallway. He landed them to me without making it a moment, not a dramatic eye contact, no speech, just handed them over and straightened up.

I stood up and said, “ I didn't need help.”

“I know,” he said and walked to his own locker three doors down. I stared at the back of his head for exactly two seconds before turning away. That was it. No conservation, but the thing is he had seen Tyler do it. Half of the class had seen Tyler do it and looked away and Chase was the only one who moved to help me.

I thought about that more than I should have for the rest of the first period.

Wednesday babysitting had become Wednesday and Thursday by the end of the week, and then somehow by the second week Karen Hendricks had added Friday to the schedule and I had stopped minding because of Micha, obviously and not for any other reason.

“Zara” Micha was lying on the living room floor with his feet in the air, in that specific way children can be comfortable. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because boys are complicated.”

He thought about this.”Chase says that about girls too.”

“Well, Chase is also complicated so that tracks.”

Micha giggled. “ What do tracks mean?”

“It means, it makes sense.”

“Oh” he rolled over onto his stomach. “Chase doesn't really talk a lot. Not like he used to.”

“What do you mean, like henuse to?”

Micah shrugged like the way kids do when they've said something they don't fully understand but know is true. “Before dad left. He used to be loud, now he's just…” He made a vague hand gesture.

I didn't push it. Six-year-olds drop grenades like that and then immediately move on, and you either detonate them or you don't. “Can we make popcorn?” Micah asked.

“Yeah. common.” We were in the kitchen when the door opened. Chase came in still in his practice jersey. His bag over one shoulder, looking like he'd had a long day and was tired of it. He dropped his bag by the stairs, saw us in the kitchen and came in without being invited.

“There is popcorn,” Micah announced.

“I can see that.” He reached over Micah's head and took a handful before it was even fully popped and I would have said something about it except Micah did it first.

“You're supposed to wait!”

“I live here.”

“So does mom and she waits!”

Chase almost smiled. He went to the fridge, came back with a water bottle and sat down at the island. I kept my eyes on the popcorn. “Hard practice?” I asked. Not because I was trying to make conversation but because the silence felt like it needed something in it.

“Coach thinks if he screams the same play at us thirty times it becomes a different information.” He drank half the water bottle. “It doesn't.”

“Does yelling back help?”

He looked at me. “I tried that freshman year.”

“And how did it go?”

“I ran suicides for forty minutes.”

“So, not great.”

“Not great,” he agreed

Micah grabbed the popcorn bowl the second it was done and ran to the living room and it was suddenly just the two of us in the kitchen with no small child as a buffer.

Chase turned the water bottle in his hands. "Tyler Mace."

I should have known he'd bring it up. "It's fine.”

“It's not.”

"Okay. It's not fine but it's also none of your business."

He looked at me with this expression that wasn't quite frustrating but was somewhere near it. "He does that a lot? The locker thing?"

I shrugged. "He did worse last month."

"What happened last month?"

"My laptop."

Chase was quiet for a second. "He knocked it?”

"Yeah, and his friend filmed it."

I didn't know why I was telling him this. I never told anyone this. My mother knew but only because she'd seen the cracked screen. I hadn't even told my best friend Priya the full version because I knew she'd make it bigger than I had the energy for.

Chase set the water bottle down. "I'll talk to him.”

"Don't."

"Zara…"

"I said don't." My voice came out steady, which surprised me. "The second you talk to him about it, it becomes a whole thing and I become the girl who ran to Chase Hendricks and that makes it twice as bad. I've dealt with Tyler since seventh grade. I know how he works.” Chase looked like he wanted to argue. He also looked like he understood he didn't have the standing to.

"Fine," he said. "But if it gets worse…"

"I'll handle it.”

"I know you will." He stood up. "You're kind of terrifying,

honestly."

I blinked. "What?"

"Yesterday. The way you talked to Micah's teacher when she got his name wrong three times." He grabbed his bag from the doorway. "She looked scared."

"She should have learned his name. It's her job."

"Yeah." And there it was, not quite a smile, but closer than anything I'd seen from him before. "Exactly."

He went upstairs. I stood in the kitchen for a second, a little off-balance in a way I couldn't fully explain.

Then Micah yelled from the living room that I was missing the best part and I went back to where I was supposed to be.

Friday night I was walking home, Karen had offered to drive but I needed the air. When I heard footsteps behind me and then Chase appeared at my side like he'd decided something and hadn't bothered to explain what. "You don't have to walk me," I said.

"I'm not walking you. I'm walking."

"In the exact same direction."

"Public street."

I let it go. We walked about half a block in silence. "Can I ask you something?" he said.

"You're going to anyway."

"Why do you let him get to you?"

I stopped walking and he stopped too, half a step later."Excuse me?"

"Tyler. In the hallway you had this look on your face like, he paused. "Like you were somewhere else. Like you'd just decided to leave your own body until it was over."

That was uncomfortably accurate and I didn't appreciate it."Most people would call that keeping your dignity," I said.

"I call it disappearing.”

"Well. Sometimes disappearing is the only option that doesn't get you in trouble."

He looked at me for a long moment. The streetlight caught the side of his face and I noticed, not for the first time and not happily, that Chase Hendricks was really unfairly put together.

"You shouldn't have to disappear," he said.

It was a simple sentence. Nothing poetic about it. But something about the way he said it was quiet and direct like it was just a fact he was stating sat somewhere in my chest and stayed there.

I started walking again. "Goodnight Chase."

He stood there for a second. "Night, Zara."

I did not look back but I heard him stand there a moment longer before his footsteps turned and went the other way, and I had absolutely no explanation for why that felt like anything at all.