When everything seemed clean enough, I stepped off into the dark, holding my shoes in my hands.
Chapter
Five
Now, I know you think I’m crazy.
Maybe like a sicko.
Up to now I don’t really know what you thought about me. I suspect you thought I was just some sort of lame, ordinary kid, and I won’t argue with you there, because my whole life, to tell you the truth, hasn’t given me much to work with to keep me from seeming lame and ordinary. I don’t mean I think I’m lame and ordinary, but the point is, I can see how people around me do—I mean people in the neighborhood—because I just go to public school and I don’t, like, have a car or even know how to drive because my school doesn’t offer Driver’s Ed, and I must admit I never did sports much or won, like, debates or anything. So I can actually understand why other people might think that about me, and I know lots of them do, but really it’s just because they don’t take any interest in me because I can’t show them a car or trophies or prizes or scholarships, and they never tried to get to know me at all.
But now I go and sneak into my ex-girlfriend’s house, and I realize that based on what I’ve already told you about myself, and because of the opinions you’ve probably already formed about me—which by the way I don’t blame you for, because like I said, I’d probably be the first person to understand your opinions about me, even if they just boiled down to my being lame and ordinary—I think you must be thinking, Why the hell did you go into her house?
Are you weird? Are you a stalker?
I stood in the dark asking myself just those same questions, because to tell you the truth, I’d sort of confused myself by doing it—I mean by actually having the nerve to go in. I mean, I’d never done anything like it before, not even remotely like it. I’d never spied on anybody or followed anybody around, or crank-called anybody, even.
What I told you I had done a lot of was hiding, and that’s actually the opposite of being a stalker, if you get what I mean. I mean, a stalker is really trying to pursue people, but a hider wants to stay as far away from them as possible.
So I want you to know that I think it was wrong to go in.
Really wrong.
I mean, I’m actually actively against such sorts of behavior, because they remind me of this nut I know named Paul Stewart, this real psycho nut who I used to talk to sometimes after lunch. He had this huge thing for this girl named Bethany Cooper or Cowper or something like that, and he went around taking pictures of her while she wasn’t looking. I mean really sneaky pictures, and I know he actually did it, because he showed me the pictures to prove it, even pictures he took of her when he followed her to the beach, like, a hundred and fifty miles away just for the purpose of spying and came away with these very sexy pictures of her wearing this filmy thing over her bikini like some Sports Illustrated model. And even though she was not my type, because I don’t actually go for tall blondes and prefer shorter beautiful brown-haired girls like Laura, I will say this Bethany girl was incredibly beautiful in that sort of very popular Sports Illustrated way.
But this nut Paul didn’t stop there. After he went and took all those pictures and did things with them on the Internet that I don’t even want to talk about, because I can’t have some weirdo reading this get any vile ideas, he finally got the nerve to get her phone number from some goofy friend of hers, some careless, goofy friend, and one night he starts texting her, and she must have thought he was charming, because they got a little talk going. She was in her house upstairs on the second floor evidently walking around her room or watching TV in her undies up there, and when she finally asked where he was, he said, “I’m out on your roof! Will you let me in?”
He was right outside her frickin’ window!
It made the papers, that did, and Bethany was so freaked she got her mom to put out a restraining order on psycho Paul, which just for the record I’ll say I totally see the purpose and necessity of, and I’ll add that I no longer wanted to talk to him after lunch or anytime else, and I mean ever, because it is not my habit to associate with loony psychos.
But here I go and find Laura’s window open, her basement transom hopper window, at what must have been at least midnight and was probably more like one o’clock in the morning, and without even thinking about it and giving it any clear thought at all I just climb right in, like it’s something I’m really good at and maybe do every day.
I’m telling you, I didn’t know what to make of myself.
And the weird thing is, once I was in there and standing in the dark, I didn’t know why I’d come in.
The even weirder thing was that I felt there was a reason.
I just couldn’t tell what it was.
Of course I wanted to get back together with Laura. I’m sure you’ve already guessed that. But I didn’t see how sneaking into her house would help. If anything, I knew it would just destroy whatever chance I might ever possibly have with her, because if she found me in her basement, she’d probably despise me and never speak to me again for her whole life.
My best bet was just to climb back out the window.
But this
