November First
The police ran the license plate number and it came back clean. The neighbor called them when she saw the black sedan in the street in front of her house. Tonight I learned that her name is Kathleen. She lives next to me, she has a son who rides a red scooter around the cul-de-sac and a big floppy dog the color of hazelnuts. There’s a small greenhouse east of her kitchen window with a glass wall that slopes down into the earth, and maybe she was in the greenhouse watering her toad lilies when she saw the black sedan and called the police who ran the license plate number that came back clean. I scratch at the edge of my desk with the tip of my mechanical pencil, leaving .5-mm wide indentations in the oaky wood.
If someone were plotting a high-tier, worthy-of-time-in-solitary crime they would not use a car with an inculpating license plate. The ones who go around egging front doors or the stealing sprinkler heads won’t think about it. But this guy knows what he’s doing. Waited until the father goes off to Ohio with his leather briefcase and the mother’s visiting cousins in Hackensack. Empty garage. Clean license plate. The driver was a well-prepared serial murderer, and his black sedan is in the street outside my house.
The paper skulls that hang over my desk have acquired ironic smiles. They looked nice for Halloween but now I want to run them through my father’s paper shredder but they were a gift so I let them smirk. I crumple up my physics homework and bounce my heels against the floor until my dog starts barking at invisible intruders. Maybe not invisible. Because the police left and they’re looking for the driver, who is probably a drunk who forgot where he parked but could very likely be a serial murderer. He could be lurking in my pantry, poised and ready for whenever I go looking for pretzels. He could be picking apart the walls, brick by brick, like a big game of Jenga, so that when I open the door in the morning the skeleton of my house will come down and bury me. Maybe he’ll make a human-sized rabbit trap to hang over my bed. I get up to double-check the window locks, covered in cream-colored paint that makes me nauseous.
I leave every light on until the moment I am sitting on my bed, tucking up my feet so they don’t dangle down by the dark underneath. The black sedan is still sitting in the street. The lights in the greenhouse are out. I go through another nighttime round. Walk downstairs to check that the alarm is on. Walk back upstairs, pivot at the top step, and check one more time because maybe it said ‘Alarm off’ and I just forgot. All of the cords unplugged so they will not cause a fire. I empty my backpack onto the floor and repack it. And I recheck the flimsy girlish useless window locks. I leave the lights on as I lie face-up with my hands folded and close my eyes, but the light shines through my lids. An origami-paper house, easily unfoldable.
The police said the license plate number came back clean.
