“What about toilet paper?” She was smirking. But she wasn’t serious, although at first I thought she was, and she laughed. “Let me see what I can come up with,” she said, and seemed to take a new satisfaction in it now. Something wrong to do, a law to break, and if she was lucky she might even get to steal, and it must have been then that everything changed between us, and each of us didn’t just have a neighbor to pass the time with, but maybe the closest thing either of us could find to a friend.
She came through a couple days later, way beyond anything I believed I could hope for. I’d been thinking she would bring, at best, a few dirty sheets of unwanted paper with shoe prints on them. Instead, that evening, she popped up in her window, grinning, and when I couldn’t stand it anymore she held up an unopened package of copier paper.
“Five hundred sheets. I got it from a teacher’s supply closet,” Roni said. “Are you ever gonna owe me big time. Like maybe for the rest of eternity.”
Except then we had to deal with the problem of transferring it from her room to mine. Throwing pencils was one thing. For this, she didn’t trust her arm.
“Why can’t I just bring it over under my clothes?” she said. “What are your parents going to do, search me?”
No, I told her. She’d never get through. I never had visitors, except for the governess, and there were locks. Besides, the paper may have come from downstairs, but it belonged to the upstairs world now. It could never go downstairs again.
But I had a dart gun, the kind with the suction cup tips. And I had string. And Roni found some rope, a little thicker than twine, that she could tie to the string I shot over. And a wicker basket her aunt no longer used in the garden, whose handle she could slip the rope through. By the time it got dark, I’d used the string to pull the rope back, first one end and then the other, and we’d looped it around our bedframes, like pulleys. I tied the ends together with one of the best knots I remembered from scouting, when they still used to let me go out, and then all we had to was keep the handle from slipping along the rope and we could pull it back and forth, from room to room, all we wanted.
That’s how she sent me the paper.
It took me even longer to touch this than it did the pencils. I knew I’d be up half the night, finding the best possible hiding place for it. Nobody could know. Nobody could
“Hey,” she called over after the sky had gone dark, and she hadn’t seen any sign of me for a while. “You have to tell me why. What did you do? Draw a bunch of dirty pictures once and it fried their brains?”
I leaned on the sill for a long time. In her window, she was a silhouette, a mystery lit from behind, and if I’d been a little older then, I might have wanted to draw every single strand of hair that cut the light into ribbons. She’d done the kindest thing for me that anyone ever had, and we’d never even been in the same room, or closer than twelve feet.
“Sometimes I draw things and they come true,” I told her. Because she’d asked, and I had no one else to tell and couldn’t imagine a day when I ever would. “Sometimes I draw things and it makes them happen. Or makes them change.”
She didn’t say a word.
“You’re not going to go away now, are you? You’ll still come to the window?”
“It depends,” she said.
“On what?”
“How does it work? Do you just draw anything, and whatever happens, happens? Or do you have to want it to, first?”
“I think I have to mean for it to. Even if I don’t know that at the time.”
And even if I
“Interesting,” she said. “Listen. They tell me I’m going to have to have braces starting next year. The last thing I want is a big shiny metal mouth. If I gave you a really good look at them, do you think you could fix my teeth?”
I’ve always wondered what her dentist would have said if he’d ever gotten a chance to see her teeth again.
It wasn’t a hard thing to do, and I was able to get a closer look at her mouth than she expected, because I had a telescope, all the better to see everything on the earth and sky I was missing. Roni stood in her window and smiled a wide, crazy smile, and I let it fill the telescope’s eyepiece, and first drew her teeth the way they were, how the ones around the side tilted in and one in the front overlapped the other. Then I concentrated really hard and started changing the lines a little at a time. Twice she said it hurt, but didn’t want to stop.
After we were done, it took a while before she came back from the bathroom mirror. But she said I’d done a good job.
It wasn’t the first time I’d fixed something, and I was better at it by now than I was before, when I was smaller and my fingers didn’t move as well, and this was all new to me, and something my parents didn’t understand. All I’d done until that time was little things around the house, like switch the arms and legs on a dancing figure that spun around on top of my mother’s music box. They never suspected, not until the night they had a party, for Christmas, I think, and they marched me around to all the guests, and had me show off things I’d drawn so everyone could see what a great artist they had here.
One of the guests asked me to draw his portrait.
So I did.
Except I drew him the way I wanted him, because I didn’t like him. He was loud and his breath stank and he spit when he talked and it hurt my ears to be around him, so first I drew his ugly flapping mouth, and then I smeared it out, and his eyes, too, to stop him from looking at me the way he was starting to.
That changed the party in a hurry.
My parents figured things out, finally, and made me put him back together again, but I was scared by then, and didn’t draw as well, and it was the first time I’d tried to make anything the way it was before. A few days later, when I was eavesdropping on my parents as they argued about what to do with me, I heard them say the man was going to be having surgeries for years.
So it was good to help Roni.
But there wasn’t much else that needed changing, so the rest of the time I just drew without any other reason behind it, mostly other places I would rather be, if only I knew how to get there.
The school year ended for everyone but me, and summer got hotter. Whenever I wasn’t having lessons and Roni wasn’t somewhere else, we lived at our open windows, so our top floors got warmer, too, and we wore the windowsills smooth with our elbows.
Plus we’d never taken down the rope.
“Do you think we should?” I asked one night.
“No. Definitely not,” she said. “They never paid any attention to what’s going on over their heads before, so why would they start now?”
So we used the basket to pass stuff back and forth, like books and magazines and comics and music and other things we liked, plus things we made. I sent her drawings, some to keep, and she sent me some stories she was working on, not only to read but for me to draw pictures for them.
She admitted they were all set in the place where the songs came from.
Roni had never stopped singing after that first night. I was glad of it, and by now she didn’t seem to mind if I heard or not. I still didn’t understand the language, and she wouldn’t tell me what the words meant, but I began imagining what they must’ve been about from the sound of them. And from her stories, which I did understand. These were mostly about girls who killed trolls and ogres, or held them captive forever, or held them captive awhile
