The New Neighbor

'My power's on and I bought steaks for dinner. How about it?'

'Well, um…' He had a lot of homework -

– You've blown off your homework for a lot less, he thought -

– and he knew being alone with her would make him a nervous wreck, even though he knew nothing would happen. Maybe he could take Dylan along -

– You want to be alone with her and you know it.

'Yeah,' he finally called to her as the mail slipped from his hand and scattered on the walk, 'I'll be over in about… an hour, or so.' He gathered the mail, then turned toward the house.

Jen peered out her bedroom window at him, her face a vague, gauzy mask behind the screen.

A fat, smoke-colored cloud glided by overhead, blocking the sunlight for a long moment.

Robby started for the front door and forced himself not to look back at the sound of Lorelle's voice.

'I'll see you then,' she called as he went inside.

* * * *

Peering down the hall from her bedroom door, Jen watched Robby come inside. With his head sagging forward and hands shoved deep into the pockets of his down jacket, he looked thoughtful and troubled, maybe even a little sad. He turned to come down the hall and Jen pulled back so he couldn't see her, then closed her door softly.

Robby's room was next to hers and she listened to him close the door, take off his jacket, then flop onto his squeaky bed with a sigh.

Jen returned to her desk and picked up her pen. She was writing a letter to Diana Strait, her best friend. Diana had moved to Seattle seven months ago and they wrote one another regularly.

Things had not been quite the same since Diana had gone. Now she spent time with the twins down the street. And she saw Diana’s friends, although somehow, they seemed to remain Diana's friends even in her absence.

Jen and Diana had become acquainted by accident one day two years ago when they'd both been put on detention together – Jen for not dressing for PE and Diana for mouthing off to a teacher – and had become friends instantly. Jen automatically became a member of the clique of half a dozen or so girls that Diana moved in, a group popular enough to raise Jen's standing in the eyes of her peers – and a group that never would have accepted her without Diana's insistence. All of the girls in Diana's clique were very studious and got good grades. Jen got fairly good grades, too, but not in the same way. For Jen, a B was a struggle, an A was an all-out war she had to fight with the books and tests. For that reason, she was unable to go out with the girls every day after school, or get together for a group date in the evening – what Diana called a 'date orgy' – with half a dozen guys. Jen was, as Diana's friends so often pointed out, no fun, but Diana was always happy to help her with her homework so Jen didn't have to stay home all the time.

She never got to know any of those girls as well as Diana, and when Diana moved, her friends allotted Jen greetings in the hall and the occasional lunch, but little more.

So Jen was left with the twins and a good deal more undisturbed time in which to do her homework. But for Jen, that homework – like making friends – was miserably hard. Sometimes she could break a sweat hunched over her books, especially if there was a test the next day. She was not lacking intelligence or study skills, but she suffered from what she had decided was some kind of phobia. Just as some people panicked or became hysterical when they saw spiders or snakes or looked down from high places, Jen froze up at an open schoolbook, a blank notebook page or the beginning of a test. She could write a letter comfortably and with no problem because she knew it didn't have to be perfect, but numbers made her gut clench with fear and the prospect of stringing words together into a coherent sentence – and spelling them correctly – when writing a paper numbed her into a cold paralysis. She fought it diligently and managed to get fair grades, but it took a couple of hours or so to do an assignment that would take up only thirty minutes for other students – a student like Robby.

Jen envied the ease with which her brother got so many A's. And he spent less time than most on his assignments, breezed through homework, never had a nervous moment before a test. He had lots of free time on his hands to give Jen a little help with her homework. But he never did. There were a lot of things he didn't do.

When her mom married George – Jen had been calling him Dad since he'd adopted her right after the marriage – Jen liked the idea of having a big brother. She looked forward to the two of them getting to know one another and growing up together, being close the way Jen always thought brothers and sisters were supposed to be. But it didn't work out that way.

Jen knew a lot of girls whose brothers were relentlessly cruel to them and she was glad Robby wasn't one of those. But she also knew girls whose brothers were their friends and confidants and she wished Robby was one of those. Unfortunately, he was somewhere in between.

Sometimes she felt like she wasn't growing up with Robby, but rather growing up next door to him. She'd been trying since they'd first met to get to know him, really know him, the way the kids at school and the teachers and neighbors never could. But she was beginning to think it was impossible.

He wasn't exactly cold, just preoccupied or – no, it was indifference. His distance did not seem intentional, it was just… Robby. Jen kept trying to bridge that distance. She'd talked about it with Tara – one of the twins – but all she said was, 'You've got a crush on him.'

'I do not!' Jen always replied.

'Sounds like it to me.'

Both Tara and her brother Dana taunted her about it, but of course it wasn't true.

Not… exactly.

Maybe she'd had a small crush on him when she was little, but she'd outgrown that. Well… mostly.

Completely, she thought, her pen poised over an unfinished sentence in Diana's letter.

Back when Jen had a little crush on him, she had managed once to get a peek at the Robby no one else ever saw. It was by accident, and she'd never forgotten it.

It was on a summer afternoon six years ago when Jen had sneaked up on Robby's bedroom window. Robby had been putting together a model at his desk facing the half-open window. She'd intended to jump up with a shout and give Robby a scare, but as she crept through the bushes and hunkered below his window, she heard his bedsprings squeaking slightly and decided to listen a moment before popping up. When she heard him breathing heavily, she knew he wasn't working on his model anymore. Instead of jumping, she peered carefully over the edge of his window and her eyes grew twice their size because -

– Robby was lying on his bed with his legs hanging over the edge, knees spread, pants bunched around his ankles, and his… his thing – at least, that was how she thought of it back than – was sticking straight up! Robby held it in his fist, running his hand up and down, up and down, faster and faster.

Jen watched, amazed, and watching something so private, so secret, stirred a strange excitement inside her. She'd never seen a boy's thing before, and she'd certainly never seen a boy doing this to his thing. She hadn't even known that boys did … whatever this was.

Robby squirmed on his bed as he continued to play with himself, and then something fascinating happened: milk squirted from his thing. At least, it had looked like milk to her then; she knew better now. Robby groaned, panted, moved his hand faster, slurping it through the white fluid. Then he calmed, slowly relaxed, and became still.

Jen couldn't stop thinking about it for weeks. Whatever it was, she became enamored of it and was terribly tempted to ask Robby about it – why he did it, how it felt, and maybe, just maybe, if she could watch up close while he did it again. She never did, of course, and now the very idea that she'd thought such a thing made her slap a hand over her eyes and groan with embarrassment.

But still, every once in a while, the memory haunted her, rose up in her mind like a ghost and danced behind