Her name was Roni, I found out a couple days later, which was short for Veronica, and by now short for Ronnie, too. She claimed that there had been a time, lasting for years, when she wanted to be a boy, and so Ronnie was how she had insisted on signing her name, writing it over and over when she was alone, just her and a pen and a piece of paper, and she didn’t have to tell me why.
But while I understood the business with the paper, I didn’t understand why she would need to in the first place. Why would she want to be a boy? I had to ask her this many times before she gave me any kind of an answer.
“You’re a boy,” she said from her window. “What have you killed?”
Bugs, I told her. And fish, because I remembered catching some once with a grandfather, and we hadn’t thrown them back, so I supposed that had to count. And a couple of birds, when I had gotten to play with the pellet rifle a friend had been given for his birthday. Those were all I could remember. Except for the other times. But it seemed like those shouldn’t count, because to really do something like that you have to mean it.
Roni seemed to be hoping for more, but before I could make up anything else, some stupid meaningless thing that wouldn’t scare her away from the window forever, she asked me another question. “Wasn’t it easier to do it because you’re a boy than it would’ve been if you weren’t?”
“I don’t know,” I told her, because I had no experience being a girl. Although, yes, I could imagine them being more squeamish about murderous activities. “I guess so. Probably.”
“Well, there you go.”
I was glad then that I wasn’t a girl, because it seemed that they talked in riddles. Then again, if I were a girl, maybe I would have understood everything she was telling me by not coming right out and saying it.
“I heard about something in school,” she said.
I nodded, and sort of remembered what that was like.
She pointed to her right, beyond the front of the houses and toward the park that our block faced. It was bright green in there now, and people were finally going there again the way they used to, little specks of color on the paths and between the trees, and every so often, when the air was just right, a laugh would carry over, and wished I knew what was so funny.
“What I heard was that back in the winter, after Thanksgiving, three different people, on three different days, were found with their heads off,” Roni said. “It wasn’t any girl who did that. She wouldn’t even think to do it.”
“She wouldn’t?” By now I was just comfortable enough with Roni to think I might be able to get away with challenging her a little. “Who says?”
“Well, she might think it. But she’d never do it.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t have the hands for it, for one thing.” She craned her neck forward, angling to see as much of the room behind me as she could. “You’ve got windows in there, don’t you, that look out the front? And you don’t go to my school and you never seem to leave. So…did you see anything?”
For a moment I was suspicious. Maybe the police had sent her, and the next-door neighbors weren’t really her aunt and uncle. Maybe she hadn’t really come to stay with them until further notice because of…well, she hadn’t actually said anything about why. But I didn’t believe this. If the police had sent her, they would have sent her with a better lie that she could actually tell. I knew that much from TV.
“If I did see something,” I said, “what would you want to know about it?”
She turned serious, thinking, as if she hadn’t planned this far. Then she knew. “Most people would want to know why there wasn’t any blood. But what I’d rather know is if the person who did it ran away, or just walked, like it was any other day.”
This was very weird to me. “What would that matter?”
Her face became a riddle then, and she knew it, and seemed to like it that way.
“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.