“Maybe he didn’t do either,” I said. “Walk or run.”
She burst out laughing. “Well, he didn’t fly!”
I realized then how much more I liked her when she laughed. I never got to see anyone laugh any more, only hear it, and not very often, only when I was lucky. After three days this was the first time she’d laughed, too, but it didn’t seem likely to happen again any time soon. I remembered school, and how it could be bad enough at the start of the year, and she was getting here toward the end of a school year, and that couldn’t have been easy.
So I told her maybe she wouldn’t have to go to the new school if she didn’t want to, that I had a governess who came most days and, if Roni wanted, she could listen at the window. The idea met with instant disdain — not because it was a bad idea, just that the offer was meaningless.
“What’s she going to teach you that I don’t already know?”
I began to wish the spring away…that summer would hurry up and arrive, so the schools would lock their doors and I wouldn’t have to wait for late afternoons. While the waiting didn’t get any easier, at least as spring went on the days got longer, with more light filling the space between the houses. Even though we could lean in the windows and talk to each other any time of the night, it was better when I could see her, because otherwise she wouldn’t seem as real. She’d tell me what they trying to teach her at school, and I’d tell her what the governess was trying to teach me, and there didn’t ever seem to be much in common, and eventually I realized something was missing.
“What about art class?” I asked. “Don’t you ever go to art?”
“Of course not. It’s middle school.”
The way she said this made it sound horrible.
“Don’t you miss it? Art class?”
“I guess. I don’t know.” She sounded as if nobody had ever told her that she could miss it.
“Could you do me a favor anyway? Could you bring back some paper for me? And pencils or something?” Crayons or colored markers seemed too much to ask for at this stage, but if this first part went well, I could get to those later.
“What kind of kid doesn’t have paper and pencils of his own? Everybody has those.” Roni appeared not to believe me, and who could blame her. “You say you have a governess. How do you do your lessons, then? How do you do your math problems?”
“I do them in front of her. I just don’t get to keep the paper and pencils. They make her take everything away when she leaves.”
Roni realized I was serious, and froze for a moment with her mouth half open and one eye half shut. No one would ever make up a thing like this. “Why?” she said, as if she’d never heard of anything so ridiculous.
“Because I draw.”
“Only you and a billion other grade school lower life-forms. So?”
I shut my eyes for a moment and sighed, and when I opened them, I think maybe, just for an instant, she saw someone else she’d never realized lived here.
“Are you going to help me or not?”
“I never said I wouldn’t, did I?” She blinked a few times, startled. “I’ve already got all the pencils I can ever use in this lifetime. You can have a couple of those.” She briefly disappeared from the window. “Knock yourself out.”
She took aim and sent them flipping end-over-end, across the space and through my window. Two bright yellow pencils lying on the rug, with no one to take them away. At first I didn’t dare touch them. I just wanted to look at them.
“Are you okay?” she called. “I didn’t sink one in your eye, did I?”
I turned back around and remembered to thank her. Saying thank you is very important, especially when you’re a prisoner.
“I’ve got a notebook here you can have, too. Just let me rip a few pages out first.”
It was tempting. But no.
“I’d rather have blank paper. Totally blank.” I’d waited this long. I could wait another day. “I hate lines.”
“And speaking of lines, did you ever hear the one about beggars and choosers? That’s a good one.”
“I still hate lines.”
She nodded, getting it. “They really don’t let you have paper and writing utensils of your own. They really don’t.”
I shook my head no.
“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. I 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 ever know. If they found this, I’d never have a window again, just walls.
“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. Liar…I might’ve expected that. Might’ve even hoped for it. The longer the silence, the more I wished she’d just make fun of me. My fingers hung onto the windowsill the way bird claws hold branches.
“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 wanted it to happen, sometimes nothing did. Otherwise, the park would’ve been full of T-Rexes and a brontosaurus herd. Which had made me think I was limited to working with what was there already, not making something out of nothing.