Lovely banner on the side by @beckton :)
Four: Neighbors.
“Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.”
-Milan Kundera
I have three neighbors: the people in apartment on the left, the people in the apartment on the right, and the people in the apartment across the hall. I guess if you're looking at the big picture, I actually have somewhere around thirty neighbors, because that's about how many apartments are on the fourth floor. But I only count those three, because I see them everyday and sometimes they actually acknowledge my existence.
To the left is Mr. Marion, an old man with a stoop whose wife died of cancer ten years ago. He's reserved and gruff, and he's also the postman for our neighborhood. It's weird to think that postmen have homes and hopes and cares and lives, because I always just thought that they climbed into a mailbox at night and curled up among the unsent letters.
To the right is the Lainey residence: a mom, a dad, and a girl named Margeaux. Margeaux is a year older than us, so she's graduated, but she still lives at home because she's going to photography school in the city. She's very pretty in a dramatic way, since she's mixed with about fifty different races and that makes her look like an exotic princess. I used to have a really big crush on her, and she would smile at me whenever we crossed on the way to our apartments, but then my sister told me something very terrible about Margeaux's reputation and now I just see her and feel kind of sad.
But it's my neighbors across the hall that are most important: Mr. and Mrs. Reagan. They're a really young couple, and they're true hippies; they both wear their hair long and have peace tattoos and talk about their protest movements on the way down the elevator. They are nice, though, if a little weird, and they're very much in love. You can tell because they're always smiling at each other, laughing together, and they constantly looked like they're in this special little world that only they know.
On Wednesday the fourth of December, my aunt dropped me off at the apartment building after school, while she went to get groceries. I took the stairs up, because Carson and his friends had been particularly brutal that day and constant movement helped me to stop thinking about it. Mr. and Mrs. Reagan (or Martin and Suzy, as they insist I call them) were taking the stairs too, except they were above me and I was so busy being bothered that I didn't see them there, paused on the third floor landing as they organized the bags in their arms.
Honestly, I think I might be the only person in the world who can be more clumsy than you; I crashed right into the pair of them. There was a crash and a shriek, and when I turned there were garlands and lights and wrapping paper all strewn across the floor, the product of an afternoon of decoration shopping and one awkward boy who just always has to wreck things for everyone.
“I'm so sorry,” I mumbled, hooking my thumbs nervously into the straps of my backpack. But Martin and Suzy just smiled, and told me that it's okay because I just added some spice to their afternoon and thank you for that.
They're odd people. I was just glad they weren't mad.
I hurried up the stairs again after my offer to help them clean up was denied, because I didn't want to cause even more trouble. But I paused before rounding the corner and glanced over my shoulder to make sure the Reagans were okay.
They were better than okay, I'd say. They were smiling at each other—smiling, smiling, always smiling—and Martin looped a garland around Suzy's shoulders to pull her close, close, closer. Her arms snaked around his neck, and she was looking at him like he was the best thing that ever happened to her, and he was grinning down at her like she was absolutely perfect.
I turned around when they kissed, because kisses are private things for two happy people and not bumbling guys named Sam. But as I trudged up to my apartment, I was thinking, I couldn't stop thinking: I want someone to smile at me like that. I want to have someone whom I can smile at like that.
And then your face, inexplicably, flashed into my mind. Or maybe it was explicable, because I'd been seeing it in there a lot lately. I saw you smiling at me, a smile that I'd never really seen but could imagine forming so easily on your lips—
At the door to my apartment, I decided: I was going to talk to you. The next time I saw you, there would be no excuses. I wasn't going to blow it again, because maybe I'd run out of chances after that, and then where would I be?
And if things worked out like the stupid, fantastical little dream in my head, we'd end up like Suzy and Martin one day. But we wouldn't have the tattoos and the picket signs and most definitely not the long hair, because you're the only one of us who could actually pull it off.
I'd have to actually talk to you first, though, and that was a step. A leap, actually. But I was determined and convinced and for once, confident. I was going to do this.
No excuses.
