On
the night of my fourteenth birthday, brushing my teeth before bed, I heard a
tapping on the window. I looked at my shirtless reflection in the mirror and
then at the window behind me, and I saw Michael’s face pressed against the
glass, grinning.
“Hey,”
he said, his voice muffled by the insulated window panes. “Open up.”
I
tried to ignore him, but he kept tapping, and I bet he was cold; he never wore
anything but underwear. Eventually, I went to the window and slid the sash up.
He came through effortlessly, dropping down onto the floor and standing up
quickly.
“Took
you long enough,” he said quietly. Through the open window I could hear the
roar of the freeway in the distance, and I looked at him in the quiet bathroom.
It had been a long time since I’d last seen him. The last time had been right
after Mom told me he wasn’t real, and she still would have told me that.
“How
old are you now?” I asked him.
“How
old are you?” He asked me in return, dew dripping down his bare chest.
“I asked you first.”
He
shrugged and smiled again, and I remember all the times we had run around town
at night in our underwear, breaking store windows and heaving soda bottles at
parked cars, alarms piercing the quiet and announcing our departure as we
scurried half-naked into the shadows between buildings.
“Do
you believe I’m real yet?” He wanted to know, and he waited for my answer.
Maybe
I did. Maybe I didn’t know. The only thing I actually knew, I realized as we
both stood there in our underwear, was that I had missed him. Years had passed.
We had both gotten taller, filling out, growing hair in all the places we were
supposed to around this age.
Finally,
I opened my mouth to speak. “No,” I told him, and that one simple word struck
him so that his smile faded completely, leaving only the face of a boy I knew
years ago, now grown old beneath a teenaged face. He came over to where I was
and looked in the mirror with me, and we were visions of youthful manhood
reflected side by side. We could have been brothers.
He
looked over at me, his hair still wet from the night air outside. “Maybe I
don’t believe you’re real,” he said to me, and he looked in the mirror again.
“I
am,” I told him. His reflected eyes grew colder, and there were the beginnings
of tears in them. He blinked them away and sniffed.
“So
am I,” he said finally.
“Mom
says you aren’t.”
Without
warning, he punched the mirror, his fist sailing into the glass hard and
sending mirror shards everywhere, slamming the toothpaste and deodorant and
rubbing alcohol beyond it into the wall.
He
looked at me, and my heart was pounding in my chest. “Fine,” he said, and he
went back out the window, leaving a trail of red drops across the tile floor in
his wake. I stood there breathing hard after he left, my chest heaving, and I
heard Mom running up the stairs. She burst into the room, looked at the smashed
mirror, looked at me, and her eyes went wide.
“What
on earth happened in here?” She asked.
I
looked down at my right hand, bleeding on the tile floor with a shard of
silvery glass stuck in it. The trail of red now led from the sink to where I
stood, rather than to the window. “I don’t know,” I told her.
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Remember to watch for Anthology Volume One when it hits online stores in ebook and print formats in March 2014.
