Charlie knocked the glass from the inside. Looked sad and angry both. “I like your hair.”
Short. She combed it behind her ears with her fingers. “Shelly was wrong back at the hole… I do like you, Charlie. I’m glad you’re my neighbor.”
He clicked his Tevas together. “I like you, too.”
“Good.”
“Do you like me more than friends? More than Dave?”
“I dunno. Don’t ask me that.”
“Sorry,” Charlie said.
“S’okay. It just feels wrong to think about right now.”
“Yeah.”
“Charlie? Remember when you said you told Dave and Sam and Shelly that you liked me, when I first moved in?”
Charlie nodded. His bowl cut was just long enough that it curled up at the ends. It was girly by Brooklyn standards, but she decided that girly was okay. It’s fine for boys to be pretty.
“Why? What’s good about me?” she asked.
Charlie swung his Tevas. Looked at them, and at her bare, dirty feet, too. She wished she’d washed.
“You don’t have to say. It’s a weird question.”
“I like that you’re nice,” he said, all fast, so it was hard to understand.
“Oh,” Julia answered, because everybody’s nice.
Then he added, just as fast: “You’re funny and you notice people when they talk. You pretend you’re low-rent but you’re not. I like that you’re a good sister.”
Julia let go of the edges of the sill. Her body rocked, the fall thirty feet, and she wondered what it had felt like for Shelly, when she’d fallen. Had she snapped out of that trance, and realized what was happening? Alone down there, did she think that Julia had forgotten her?
“I was mean to him tonight. I told him he was weird and gross.”
Charlie made a sad face.
“I’m supposed to take care of him, but I was mean. I do wrong things all the time. Did you know that Shelly told me something? She said a person, not my dad, was hurting her. And I said we should go to the police. And when her mom started chasing us, that’s why we ran. We didn’t want to get caught and stopped. I made it this urgent emergency. It got her worked up. That’s why she wasn’t paying attention. That was my bad advice.”
Charlie got out of the window and stood. She thought he didn’t believe her. Or maybe he was just disgusted. He was going to close his curtains. But then he said, “Go to your back door. I’ll meet you.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” He waited across the way like a mirror image until she climbed back in and started walking, then he did, too.
She went down on tiptoe. Knew the house well enough that she didn’t need light. She got to her back door, and he was there. He didn’t usually break rules. He liked his parents too much. It made her feel special, just like that morning in Sterling Park, when he’d taken her hand.
He waved through the glass. He looked more grown than she was used to. She’d never noticed before, that he had nice skin. It wasn’t pimpled like hers, but clear.
She opened the door. Was scared to look at him, but happy to have him. Happier than she’d have been with Dave, she realized, because Dave had something hard in him. Even when you were joking around, you couldn’t really let down your guard, because he might tease in a bad way.
They walked through the kitchen. He was at her side instead of behind, and he stayed quiet. They went up together, to the only place that made sense—her bedroom. She closed the door behind them, turned on just the reading light. The bed was made because her dad had made everybody keep up their chores. She was glad for this. But she also didn’t want to sit on it, because then he would sit on it. They’d be sitting on a bed together.
She sat on her windowsill. He came next to her, peered through, to his own house. Studied the new vantage.
“I’ve wanted to know what that looked like for a long time,” he said.
“What does it look like?” she asked.
He shrugged. Smiled just slightly with lips that were more pink than red. Looked around her room, at the Billie Eilish and Ruby Bridges posters, at her pile of manga. He lingered on the floor, on her purple cotton underpants, which she hadn’t put away. She wished they were fancy days-of-the-week, like Shelly’s.
“You were going to the cops?” he asked.
Julia nodded. “She was getting hit. It was my idea, but she wanted to. We decided together.”
“Who was doing it?”