Soundproof Your Life
Tags: Teenagers, Noise, Ya Fiction, Fiction, Adolescence

A short story. Previously published in One Teen Story magazine.

Photo by David van Dijk on Unsplash

By Tara Altebrando

The music at noon was way too loud, considering how few people were in the gym. In addition to the DJ, there were maybe twenty students and teachers who’d arrived early Saturday morning to set up for the school’s annual Super Dance. But the DJ said he had to be sure the music could get loud since there were going to be 500 more kids turning up when the fund-raiser officially started.

Charlie had brought his earplugs, and he put them in as he started setting up rows of soda cans and sports drinks donated from local supermarkets. Mike, his best friend, was lining up boxes and bags of snacks at a neighboring table. He shouted something at Charlie, who pointed to his ears and shouted back, “Can’t hear you.” There were trays of baked ziti and salad and more being arranged by other volunteers; an ambitious sophomore had even lined up a Nathan’s Hot Dog street vendor who was going to park at the back of the hall. It was going to be a long twelve hours of dancing but clearly, no one would starve. At the end of it, the committee was pretty sure there’d be more than $200,000 collected for Muscular Dystrophy research. Jerry’s kids.

Charlie was used to being sleep deprived. He wasn’t worried about the lateness of the night (he was on clean-up duty, too) so much as he was worried about the drama that would inevitably ensue at a twelve-hour dance marathon at school. The kicker was that he knew he’d be partially to blame. He had hooked up with Amy a few months ago and then he’d done it again and they’d become a couple. She was cute and funny; even Mike didn’t mind hanging out just the three of them. But as of last week Katie McKallister was single for the first time in a year and Charlie felt like it was time to take a shot. Because they were going to graduate in two months and then that’d be that.

Katie was there already, of course; she was chair of the Super Dance committee and had been single-handedly responsible for making most of the decorations. Charlie had watched with awe several afternoons in the previous weeks as she’d painted a mural banner of people dancing. He watched now with that same kind of amazement as her white-and-red-striped tank top dress bent with the curves of her body as she reached for a high tack to secure that banner. He felt like he’d spent most of his life in awe of Katie, going all the way back to the time she drew a totally lifelike dinosaur on the whiteboard of their 3rd grade classroom in thirty seconds flat as part of a presentation.

Amy was there, too — helping Katie with the banner after having joined the Super Dance committee at the last minute, Charlie was sure, just so she could keep an eye on him. She was wearing denim shorts and a black tank top and, of course, her mismatched Converse All Stars — one red, one black. Charlie knew it wasn’t prom or anything but he sort of wished she’d gotten more dressed up.

More sleep also would have been good. Last night had been a rough one and the sound-proofing stuff on the wall Charlie’s bedroom shared with the other unit in their duplex hadn’t really worked…yet. It was called Blue Glue and was supposed to spread and harden behind the new sheetrock over the next few weeks, dampening sound as it dried so that it could “Soundproof Your Life,” but Charlie was not optimistic. Ever since his 85-year-old neighbor, Mitzy, had come home from the hospital — let’s face it, to die — she’d been sleeping in that adjacent room and she’d wake up in the middle of the night and call out for her husband, Jeremy — who was, let’s face it, deaf — and it was Charlie she woke up instead.

Jeremy! Jer! Jer!

Sometimes for hours.

And the walls were so thin, the construction so shoddy, that when Jeremy did finally wake up and go to his wife, Charlie could hear them talking.

Every.

Single.

Word.

Like: “I wish I’d just die,” and: “You’d be better off without me,” and: “Don’t say that. I love you.”

Then there was the matter of the grandfather clock Mitzy and Jeremy had over there. All that infernal chiming. It would be easier to sleep in the middle of Super Dance, even with the music THIS LOUD, than through all that.

“Hey Charlie,” a girl shouted.

It was Katie. Katie who had this way of looking at him that made every interaction feel like a dare.

He took his earplugs out and shoved them into his pocket. “Hey yourself.”

“Gonna save a dance for me?” she asked, and Charlie thought about the plaid shirt and denim skirt she’d worn to the seventh grade ho-down, where he’d watched her do-si-do so gleefully that it made him seriously consider a future as a farmer.

“Of course.” Charlie tried hard not to notice that valley between her breasts, pushed up per usual, as he moved on to lining up small bags of popcorn and granola bars.

“I’m gonna hold you to it,” she said.

“You do that,” Charlie said, smiling.

Before walking off, she took a bag of popcorn, opened it, tossed a piece in the air and caught it in her mouth. Effortless.

It wasn’t that Katie was out of his league, exactly. They were friends. And he was popular. In a different way than Katie (cheerleader, homecoming queen), sure. He had a lot of friends — good ones, guys and girls both — culled over the years from band and drama and a few seasons of soccer. But there was the not so small matter of Amy, who’d apparently never heard of push-up bras and who probably should have just stayed a friend. He’d started to go off her since hearing of Katie’s break-up and now his distaste was spreading, solidifying.

***

All the years they’d lived next door to each other, Mitzy had been the sort of neighbor Charlie simply said hi and bye to on his way in or out, like if she was puttering in the garden out front when he came home from school. She’d always given him extra Halloween candy, sure, and had passed down, over the years, a random assortment of fairly awesome old toys that had once belonged to her son who had long since gotten married and moved halfway across the country — Charlie still had the “CHiPs” van on a high shelf — but they may as well have lived on different planets. Then, a few years ago, their orbits started to intersect more often: like she’d be locked out, asking Charlie if she could come in and use the phone, maybe have a cup of tea; or she’d leave the sprinklers in her backyard on too long and Charlie’s dad would tell him to hop the fence to turn them off. In the year leading up to this most recent bad turn that had landed Mitzy in the hospital then home, bedridden, she’d settled squarely into the category of benignly crazy neighbor. Almost every time she saw Charlie out front by the mailboxes, she’d stop and say, “Do you hear it? The boom boom music?”

At which point she would indicate the neighbors’ house on the other side. “All night, they’re up, dancing, playing that music.” She’d point to the skin under her eyes. “See these bags? I haven’t slept in weeks. Years!”

She’d grab Charlie’s arm. “You don’t hear it?”

“No, sorry,” Charlie would say, each and every time, noticing that her hair seemed to be tracking her descent into madness by becoming an increasingly unnatural shade of orange. “I’m a deep sleeper.”

So clearly, he’d jinxed himself.

One night a few months ago, the doorbell rang in the middle of the night. Again and again. Charlie woke up and heard his parents voices and then he poked his head out into the hall as his father made his way downstairs, pulling a t-shirt on as he went.

“What on earth?” his dad was muttering, then when he saw Charlie: “Expecting company?”

Charlie followed his father downstairs and spotted the beams of a flashlight on the front porch, and there was more knocking, and Charlie said, “Dad? Maybe we should call the police.”

“Grab the phone and let me just look and see.” His Dad tiptoed up to the door, peeked through one of its small, high windows. His shoulders relaxed. “It’s Mitzy.”

He opened the door and there was her orange hair — blowing wild in the wind. She held a plastic bag in one hand and a wad of bills in the other. Looking at Charlie, now standing next to his dad, she said, “I have the money you need. And some cheese.”

Charlie’s dad sent him back to bed, and then escorted Mitzy home.

“So what was that about?” Charlie asked at breakfast the next morning.

“She’s got it in her head that you’re this boy she knew when she was young.” His dad got up to refill his coffee. “His mother was sick a lot or something.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. She said you needed money because your mother was in the hospital again. You’re not working some angle here, are you?” He sounded like someone pretending to be stern.

“You think I’d try to swindle an old lady out of money?”

“Of course not.” Charlie’s dad smiled. “I mean, not really.”

And then Charlie had spent a while wishing the idea had never been mentioned. Not that he would ever swindle an old lady out of money. But if he had been the one to answer the door, and if his father hadn’t been right there…Charlie honestly wasn’t sure what he would’ve done.

***

Two and a half hours into the dance, Amy claimed she was bored and suggested they go for a walk. This was code. She wanted to go somewhere and make out; Charlie did, too — but he wanted to make out with Katie. More than that, he wanted to go home to bed.

The DJ was working his way chronologically through decades and was now deep into sixties pop, which was a pretty good decade in terms of music, in Charlie’s estimation. He thought it might be time for that dance with Katie; maybe it would wake him up some. But when he saw her slow-dancing with her friend Beatrix to “I Only Have Eyes (For You),” singing along exaggeratedly, like they were in love with each other, he didn’t have the heart to cut in. The vibe, despite the song, was all wrong.

“Let’s just hang out,” he said to Amy. “I have a feeling I’m going to want to go for a walk during the eighties.”

“Is something wrong?” Amy’s nose seemed to sharpen.

“I’m just tired.” Charlie had been woken up last night by Mitzy calling out for water, then had heard the grandfather clock next door at three am and four. He walked a few paces away from the dance floor, then leaned against a wall of folded up bleachers.

“Mitzy?” Amy knew the whole story.

“Who else?” The old lady was actually ruining his life. “Why can’t she just die already?”

“Nice, Charlie,” Amy said. “Real nice.”

Charlie just closed his eyes. He hadn’t meant it that way. Not exactly. After a few moments, he opened his eyes and they just stood there and watched the dance floor pulse as hundreds of bodies now started to Mashed Potato and Twist.

***

For a few days after that middle-of-the-night visit from Mitzy, Charlie’s parents could talk of little else. And then they heard that Jeremy needed to go into the hospital for a procedure in a few days. “She can’t be left alone,” his mom said, panic in her voice.

“I know that, and you know that.” Charlie’s dad shrugged. “But how do you tell them that?”

“I’d like to give that useless son of theirs a piece of my mind.” Charlie’s mom could really get worked up about stuff like this. “Mitzy said it’s just one night but who knows?”

Neither Charlie nor his father said anything.

“Should one of us go check on them? Ask them if someone’s going to come stay?”

From his mother’s tone Charlie knew she would rather pull her nose hairs out than do that so he’d said, “I’ll go.” Both parents looked up. “If I can have the car Saturday night.”

“Sold!” His mom packed up sandwiches and snacks.

Mitzy came to the door in a bathrobe, her hair wet.

“It’s me, Charlie,” Charlie said. “My mom packed a lunch for you and Jeremy. Is he home?”

“Lunch?” Mitzy’s eyes looked glassy. “I haven’t even had my breakfast! He’s at the doctor’s.”

“It’s for later,” Charlie said.

She opened the door and took the bag.

“Okay, well,” Charlie said. “I just wanted to bring that by. My folks were a little worried about you with Jeremy going into the hospital. Is someone coming to stay with — ”

“Did I order this food?” She turned toward the hall table, reached for her purse and pulled out a twenty. “That should do it.”

“Mitzy. It’s me. Charlie. Your neighbor.”

But she just shoved the bill into his hand and closed the door.

Did that qualify as swindling?

His parents were unimpressed with his report — he didn’t mention the money — but gave him the car keys anyway.

He’d gone on his first date with Amy that Saturday: a movie and a drive down to the park, some making out. That twenty-dollar bill was in his pocket the whole time but he made a point of not spending it.

He was not swindling.

He needed to be sure to put it to good use was all. It wasn’t like he hadn’t tried to explain. And so he’d started carrying the bill everywhere, waiting for the right opportunity to present itself.

***

The DJ had this sample of a grandfather clock he was using at the top of every hour, much to everyone’s delight except Charlie’s. Now, as the gong sounded six times, with hundreds of kids whooping and fist-pumping and celebrating the midway point of this misguided event, Charlie just felt like he was being taunted. It sounded exactly like Mitzy and Jeremy’s clock, like a church bell buried in a shallow grave.

When the 80s came, Amy, who had worked up a sweat to a Bee Gees two-for at the tail end of the 70s, said, “How about that walk now?”

Katie was dancing around with her cheer squad pals, spelling out “Safety Dance,” and so Charlie thought this was as good a time as any to take a walk. They left the gym and the noise dropped off behind them and they ended up on the football field bleachers, where they walked way up to the top row and sat, looking down on the dimly lit grass, which was scattered with resting dancers.

Amy put a hand on Charlie’s knee and squeezed. “You seem tense.” She kissed his neck, which felt okay but he just couldn’t get Katie out of his mind.

He turned his head. “Like I said, I’m just tired.”

“You’re always tired.”

“Well, it’s not exactly my fault, is it?” he snapped.

“Jeez! Calm down.”

She went to kiss him again and something about it felt desperate. He pushed her away. “You calm down.”

“Well, I might as well be dancing.” She got up and walked down the bleachers, red foot after black foot. Red after black. Charlie laid down on the bleachers and thought he’d just shut his eyes and wait a few minutes before following, though really he wouldn’t have minded nodding off and sleeping through the 80s — or the rest of the dance entirely. He didn’t recognize the song playing now but he could tell, even at this distance, that it involved too many synths.

The bleachers were too hard, too cold. He forced himself to get up.

It took him a while to find her in the sea of dancing bodies, everyone still working so hard for Jerry’s kids, and when he did, Amy and her crowd were dancing right next to Katie’s. If Amy was going to be pissy anyway, Charlie felt he had nothing to lose, so he bopped on over to Katie’s circle, where he saw Mike had also insinuated himself, and he started to dance not with Katie, exactly, but near her.

“You look like hell,” Mike shouted at him.

“Rough night last night,” Charlie shouted back. “I’m dragging.”

Mike produced a small bottle of No-Doz pills, held them out to Charlie. “Stuff works!”

“Nah,” Charlie couldn’t be sure whether he’d actually fallen asleep for a few minutes out there on the bleachers. “I’m good.”

Katie was really dancing hard now, eyes closed, head thrown back, to some techno-type song that kept asking, “How does it feel to treat me like you do?” When she opened her eyes and saw him, he raised his voice over the music: “You should save some energy for later!”

“Why, what’s later?” She shouted back.

“Nineties grunge!” He smiled. “And a dance with me!”

She sniffed near her armpits. “I already smell like teen spirit. But I plan on taking a serious break during the oughts, not to worry.”

“Hey!” Amy had worked her way over.

“Hey!” Katie said then she closed her eyes and went back to dancing.

Charlie felt he had to reposition himself for the rest of the song, so that he was facing Amy and not Katie, and he felt annoyed about it. Amy seemed annoyed, too.

***

It wasn’t just his sleep that had been affected. Everything Charlie did in his room was done with Mitzy in mind. He’d be reading or getting dressed and he’d hear a thump next door, and wonder if she’d dropped dead. He’d be daydreaming about Katie or even a little bit about Amy and he’d hear Mitzy and Jeremy, and then he’d be imagining what it would be like to grow old with someone and all of a sudden he’d be thinking about bed pans, and that wasn’t much fun.

The house never felt empty anymore.

One afternoon, when he and Mike were playing videogames, Mitzy had started knocking on the wall and calling out, “It’s the middle of the night!”

That was when Charlie realized he could not live like this.

And so he’d told his parents he had reached crisis point, and reiterated some of the more gory details of what he was dealing with at night, and his mother suggested soundproofing and his father set about doing some research. In the meantime, they purchased earplugs and Charlie started to stay up late because he dreaded trying to fall asleep while wondering about the night ahead. On bad nights, like the night when Mitzy screamed that she had to go to the bathroom but Jeremy didn’t come and Charlie suspected from her sobs that she’d peed the bed, he felt he’d confirmed that you went out the way you came in.

Helpless.

Crying.

Wet.

***

He asked Katie to dance during a song from the early oughts, when he found her taking that break she’d talked about. It was just after seven and the halls leading out of the gym were now packed with kids sitting on the floors, backs to the walls, looking sweaty and bored. Katie was one of them.

“I need to rest.” She fanned her face with her hand.

“It’s a slow-dance,” he said. “All you have to do is sway.” Though it was true all Charlie wanted to do was lie down next to her on the speckled tile floor.

“I don’t think I know this song.” She seemed surprise by the possibility.

“All the better,” Charlie said.

“Why?” She laughed.

“Because then it’ll be our song.”

“Charlie Vatter, are you a romantic?”

“So what if I am.” He shrugged.

She stood. “All these years and I never knew that about you.”

After passing through the doors back to the gym, Katie walked right to the center of the dance floor — zigzagging through the crowd — and he followed, then she turned and put a hand on Charlie’s shoulder, and held out her other hand. He slid an arm around her, landing his hand on her waist — slightly damp with sweat — then took her other hand and it felt like victory. He wanted to high-five her, the way he had sophomore year when she’d won first place in a school-wide ping-pong ball-launching contest with a device made out of Legos.

They started to sway to the song, in which a guy was singing about wanting to know what it was like on “the inside of love.” Charlie had to work hard not to turn the lyric into something sexual in his mind, just as he worked hard to resist the temptation to scan the faces around him to see who might notice that he was dancing with Katie — to see who, if anybody (other than Amy) cared.

***

After a particularly bad night about two weeks ago, during which Mitzy had called out for Jeremy for over an hour before he came, Charlie had zombied his way through school, then gone home and taken a nap, then dragged his ass down to dinner. “So,” he said. “About that soundproofing. What’s the latest?”

“I’ve settled on Blue Glue and sheetrock,” his dad said. “People swear by it.”

And so that weekend they had gone to a local lumber supplier who carried Blue Glue and they had sheetrock delivered to the house and then a neighbor who was a contractor came over with screws, and a drill, and drywall tape and the three of them got to work. It was messy and the room pretty much got trashed, with a thin layer of white dust coating everything anytime the sheetrock got cut. For two days Charlie had slept on the sofa in the living room and he’d thought, that first night, maybe that was the solution — until, you know, Mitzy died. But then after the second night his neck was all jammed up; he couldn’t move his head even a quarter turn to the left.

After the new wall was finally up and taped and sanded, it had to be primed, then painted, and the whole thing dragged on and on, especially in terms of fumes, but if it meant sleep — sweet, uninterrupted sleep — it was worth it.

When he’d moved back in to his room — a full five days post-Blue Glue application — he’d lay there listening to Mitzy’s grandfather clock chime two, then three, and wondering if the makers of Blue Glue were just perpetrating some elaborate hoax on the world.

Soundproof your life, my ass.

He heard Mitzy crying that night, and he felt like crying, too.

***

They broke up in the hall by the locker rooms between the 90s and the 2000s and, to Charlie’s surprise, it was Amy who did the breaking.

“I’m not blind,” she said. “I saw the way you were looking at her during your little dance. Like that’s ever going to happen.”

They were the only two in the hall now, the crowd having found its second wind when some awful song everybody but Charlie seemed to love had summoned them back to the dance floor, shrieking like a flock of overexcited birds.

He’d thought it would be a more drawn-out thing, with him having to explain in some unharsh way that he thought they should just go back to being friends. He was almost relieved that Amy did the breaking up, but the judgment she gave in the process changed everything. Now he felt he sort of had to make a play for Katie, if only to prove it could happen.

Mike found Charlie by the soda table. “Did I just hear that Amy dumped you?”

“Yup.” Charlie was on a mission to find some caffeine.

“How’d you let that happen?” Mike asked.

“Makes my life easier.”

Mike shook his head. “Always better to be the dumper. Always.”

“Oh, and this is a theory based on your vast experience?” Charlie finally located a Coke. “I’m already over it.”

“If you say so.” Mike took a long swig from his own soda and then swallowed and belched. “I need a hotdog. You want to come with?”

“Sure.”

Amy was talking to her sympathetic-looking friends nearby and they were all shooting daggers as Charlie followed Mike to the Nathan’s cart.

“Dude,” Mike said. “You’re a free agent with three hours of this shindig left. What’s the game plan?”

Charlie raised his eyebrows in the direction of Katie and the cheerleaders, who were in a circle doing faux surfing moves to a One Direction song.

Mike was able to fill in the details. “Katie?”

“Why not?”

Mike just shook his head as he lined his hot dog with mustard. “You, my man, are a glutton for punishment.”

Charlie watched Katie hold her nose and shimmy down to the ground. He took a bite of his hot dog and said, “I think I’ll take you up on that NoDoz now.”

***

“I swear,” his father had said, when they’d stood in the room together just two days ago as the grandfather clock in Mitzy’s house struck three. “It’s not as loud as it used to be. It’s really not.”

***

“Come on, guys,” the DJ was saying. “Look alive out there! We’re creeping up on midnight in a few minutes, which means just one hour to go!”

A few people had fallen asleep over by the bleachers but Charlie was all revved up now and started circling the dancefloor, looking for Katie. After two full trips around the perimeter of the room, he found her finishing a plate of baked ziti. He felt instantly ravenous.

“Hey you,” Katie said, when she saw him.

“Oh!” He faked surprise as he grabbed a plate. “You’re still here?”

“It does seem to be dragging on, doesn’t it?” She scooped some ziti out for him.

“I think I finally just got my second wind.” Charlie was pretty sure this was the most awake he’d felt in months. What was in that NoDoz, anyway? “So we should go out or something.” He nodded his head as he forked a piece of pasta. “I mean, not like tonight, but you know, next weekend.”

“You and me?” Her eyebrows were raised; her chewing slowed.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why not?”

He was finally doing it. It was really happening. He couldn’t seem to stop his legs from shaking and actually felt like dancing — like really cutting loose — for the first time all day.

“That’s really sweet, Charlie, but I think we’re good just like we are.” She flung her plate into the trash, kissed him on the cheek, and disappeared into the crowd.

Not a minute passed before Amy was in his face. “What was that about?”

“I’m not sure it’s any of your business.”

“We broke up like two seconds ago.”

“That’s sort of my point.”

“How did I not realize what a jerk you are?”

“I don’t know, Amy.” Charlie felt himself actually becoming more of a jerk as the conversation went on. “I guess I hide it well.”

“Well, she’ll figure it out, too.” She shook her head and walked off.

The DJ’s grandfather clock was chiming midnight now. Twelve painfully…slow…gongs, this time with the added benefit of everyone counting along in screams. Charlie, confused as to whether everyone was counting up or down, thought about Mitzy, home and in bed, likely calling out for Jeremy, with no one there to hear.

***

Clean-up was about as annoying as Charlie expected. Baked ziti smashed into the floor; pretzel wrappers shoved into crevices in the bleachers; mustard packets that had been stomped on.

“I warned you, man,” Mike said, after Charlie told him about Katie’s nonchalant rebuff.

Now Katie was counting money that had been put in the last-minute donations box. There seemed to be a lot of it and Charlie remembered Mitzy’s twenty-dollar bill. He set aside the trash bag he’d been carrying around and walked over.

“This is from my neighbor.” He pulled the money out of his pocket, then had to pick up his ear plugs, which fell out in the process.

“Awesome.” Katie put the bill on a precariously tall pile of twenties. “I think we may break the school record.”

The way she said it made Charlie suddenly annoyed. Katie seemed more concerned with breaking a record than with helping people. He watched her counting the bills, her mouth moving silently.

“She’s dying,” he said.

Katie gave him a disappointed look, like she couldn’t believe he’d had the nerve to spoil her good mood, and he was angry then — angry that she was not the love of his life, not the person he would grow old with.

He said, “My neighbor gave that twenty to me because she thought I was the delivery boy.”

“And you took it?” The red and white lines of her dress seemed to be moving on their own, making Charlie dizzy.

“She really wanted me to have it.”

Katie reached for the pile of twenties and lifted Mitzy’s up again. “You should give it back to her.”

“I’m not going to do that.”

“It just doesn’t feel right.”

Nothing felt right, that much was true. He was crashing hard. And now it was Katie who forced the bill into his palm.

***

As he pulled onto his block, Charlie was seriously considering just sleeping in the car. Because the idea of having to get out, and close the door, and walk up the front steps, and open the door…

The sight of the ambulance in front of the house woke him right up.

His parents?

No.

He saw his mother and father there among the people gathered on the sidewalk, most of them disheveled, wearing light jackets over sleepwear. Only his dad had had the wherewithal to put on proper clothes and shoes and Charlie figured that probably meant something important about his dad’s character but he wasn’t sure what. Miriam, from across the street, was in slippers and her bathrobe and didn’t seem at all self-conscious about it; she’d brought her dog along and the dog saw fit to pee on a tree by the street right as Charlie joined them.

The ambulance’s lights weren’t on. So that was probably a bad sign.

“What’s going on?” he asked his mom, whose cheeks were wet from crying .

“Oh Charlie,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re home.”

“Is she dead?”

Everyone seemed to snap to attention with disapproving looks.

“What?” Charlie said.

“Not dead,” his mom said, and Charlie would have been lying if he said he wasn’t disappointed. It wasn’t that he couldn’t hack living next to Mitzy anymore; it really wasn’t. He just thought she’d be better off gone. Because it seemed horribly unfair that she was alive and so miserable.

Why, exactly, had the ambulance been called? He was too tired to even ask.

“I’ve got to go to bed,” he said, and he went inside the house, then upstairs to his room. On the other side of the wall he could hear the muffled voices of paramedics and then Mitzy wailing, “I don’t want to go to the hospital again. I don’t want to go,” and Jeremy saying, “You have to, dear. You have to.”

If this was what it was like on the inside of love, Charlie wanted out.

The room next door went quiet, eventually, and he could hear voices on the street , the ambulance starting up, pulling away, his parents coming in, going to bed. A while later, he got up and found the twenty-dollar bill and put it under his pillow and hoped that some fairy he’d never heard of would come while he slept and take it and let him off the hook.

The clock next door chimed three times and Charlie, ears ringing from all the quiet, could not, for the life of him, fall asleep.