This is just a little short story I've been tinkering with. I haven't finished it yet, but I've got more written than this. Inspired by an ex (current?) friend's neighbor (yes, this person kind of existed).

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The living can haunt like the dead. The figure from the past, their life since then unknown to us, can curl up in the corners of our mind and take up residence. We’ll live our lives and see the world in their colors.

*

My neighbor was once a boy.

The first time I met her, when I first moved in, she was standing in her driveway with a little ruby lollipop in her mouth. Her lips formed a blurry pinkish circle; I could tell she was only slightly older than me, in the curves of her face and the shape of her body.

My parents were running the show with my brothers and I was just a listless girl, so they didn’t mind as I wandered away from the truck and the shouting of “This way! Pick that up - carefully!”.

I was afraid to approach her at first. At the time I had no clue about her physical origins, but there was still an obvious peculiarity about her. Her eyeshadow was neon green and painted on to make her eyes seem to tilt like a cat’s. Her skirt was so short I wondered how she bent over without flashing her undergarments. Later, it would become obvious she didn’t care about things like that.

I knew my brothers were eying her. But she was only watching me. I felt so plain between my world and hers. My new house was a little teacup suburban special, big, with a sunroom and plants growing up one side. Her house behind her was small and pale yellow, the porch falling off it and into the dried mud of the driveway. And yet somehow, with her standing in front of it, it seemed far more interesting than mine.

I walked over and introduced myself.

“Lacey Devereaux.” She repeated my name slowly, her thick pink lips moving carefully over the little syllables. Her upper lip was like a bow. I felt embarrassed for my big dumb name and all of its letters. She waved the shiny wet lollipop at me. “I’m Sheryl Hulme. But they know me as Sherry.”

Who were they? Already I was intrigued. Who was this girl, with her black jacket with big golden buttons and red hair that fell like copper sheets? There was no car in the driveway behind her. Her house seemed empty.

I told her where I was from. She gave my gawking brothers and the movers a disapproving glance and dug one hand into her jacket pocket, taking out a crumpled piece of paper.

“Do you scare easy, Lace?” she asked casually, tearing off a strip of paper and fishing out a pen from the same pocket. On the cap of the pen was a fuzz of pink wisps and a jiggly little pig.

“No.” I answered. It was a bizarre question, a harebrained thing to say, but coming out of her mouth it seemed friendly enough, somehow sensible.

“Then here’s my number. Call me when you have free time and I’ll show you around town. Promise.” She scribbled her number down, the print looping and artful, not blocky and childish like mine would have been.

I took the strip of paper. My brothers would laugh like dogs and want this. But this was something that was just mine, in this new, unknown place.

Sherry made a wink, giving me a flash of neon green-for-GO eyeshadow, and then shuffled up her broken porch and inside.

*

The next day at dinner, everyone still sweat-plastered from unpacking, my dad made a comment about her.

“The neighbor girl seems nice, Lacey.”

My mom shot him a look over the butter plate, like he was ludicrously far from a truth they had discussed and agreed upon.

One of my brothers made a catcall.

“Boys!” my mom yelped.

“But it was him!” another brother cried. Silverware clattered.

I stared out the window, at the new pattern of branches against the sky I had to get used to for all the dinners to come.

Dull. Dull. I was young and ready to devour the world in pieces. Years of the same thing, and now I wanted to take a risk and jump from my haven into the musty tangle of verdure and fruit and landscape below.

You live, you learn. Or…

Sometimes you live, perhaps sometimes you learn.

*

Sherry had a car, but we walked through town. She pointed out buildings; her fingernails were all tipped in sunshine yellow, smooth as tulip petals.

We stopped at a small pastry shop with tables outside. She brushed off a chair and plopped herself down, her legs sprawled all unladylike.

“I’ve mastered the art of destruction.” she told me. “Every time you tear off a piece of yourself, you discover something new. You know yourself better each time; you feel a sense of wholeness. Find a new word for your definition. This is me.”

“But what happens when you tear yourself down to the last piece? When you’re so torn up you have nothing more to ask?”

She looked at me with eyes brimming with excitement - an excitement that should have frightened me but instead made my chest fill with breath and my skin feel new and washed cleaned by the sun.

“I guess I’ll find out.” she said through bowed lips that barely moved.

*

We went inside her house after that. It was full of gaudy furniture, wind chimes of every geometric shape, knick-knacks of every figure imaginable: and books. Hundreds of books in majestic leaning towers.

“This is my Aunt Lory.” Sherry said, standing at the foot of a hideously bright floral couch. Sunk into the cushions was a thin, old-ish woman with leathery skin and pink blooming rouge on her cheeks. She was unconscious, deep in sleep, a bottle of brandy tipped over on the glass coffee table.

“She takes care of me.” Sherry slipped a carton of cigarettes deftly out of her aunt’s front jean pocket, dancing around the floral couch like it was her altar and this was salvation, salvation!

“Is she the only other person here?” It seemed a surprisingly free place. Neglected, because no one cared enough. I wasn’t sure whether this was a good or a bad thing. Left out in the sun, plants grow up toward it wildly. And then get hacked down by a lawnmower.

“Just me and my Aunty.” she answered cheerily, as if she was fond of her Aunt, of the house. People could love wrecked things. It was shockingly easy to love wrecked things.

She took me up to her bedroom. I was bemused to see there actually was a second story to the house. It seemed so compact from the outside. Her room itself was compact, but nevertheless it contained everything. I could never tell you what color the walls were: every inch was plastered with magazine photos and paintings and concert fliers and cards. Colors and people danced all over, with hearts and stars and jagged letters, their sneakers up in the air, their skin all peachy pure, showing for the camera. Musicians screamed, motionless and glossy with their gaping mouths.

“They’re people I used to want to be.” she explained. “But I became myself anyway.”

Her floor was covered in so much clothing; I felt I had tumbled into a laundry machine. She had a gray Plasticine sculpture of a mermaid flipping languidly over a rock and many little shells. There was a lamp that glimmered every color. In one corner sat a tank, a thick smell coming from it, and a bearded dragon sat on a branch inside, its head cocked at an angle.

Sherry lifted up the mesh cover and stuck a pencil inside the tank. She dipped the eraser in a little bowl of water that was shaped like a kidney and fished out a crunchy looking cricket.

“Suicidal crickets.” she said, her smile tilted haphazardly, her body posed like the magazine people on the wall.

She painted my toenails aquamarine. I sat on her bed, which was draped in zebra pattern, and held my knees to my chest. She never smeared the polish.

“So, you want to be friends?” Sherry asked amiably enough.

“Sure.” I really, really did.

“You know, I’m out of here in the Fall.” she pointed out. I shrugged as she added, “I’m off to the stars.”

I told her about my family. About my zip-locked life. She capped the cool, cool blue nail polish, licking a splotch of it off her fingers.

“The others will love you.” Her eyebrows, copper wires, raised above her peach face. “Love you.”

*

That Friday night, Sherry took me to a party several streets over. It was at a cul-de-sac and all of the houses seemed to be in on the fun.

She knew everybody. Everybody was introduced to me, clusters of faces and pools of features, all grinning and glassy eyed. I wished ruefully that I had worn that shirt that pulled my breasts up and hugged them together. I pined during the silences when no one was paying attention.

Despite knowing every individual, there were two who flanked Sherry and eyed me most critically. Their names were Ana and Bo. Bo was a young man who I could tell ate girls up and that they laughed and screamed all the way. He had elegantly angular hair and a sloping pixie face with stubble on his chin. Beside him, Ana was a doe-eyed chubby girl decked all in black. She chain smoked and treated me like a child. She had a wicked voice like a jazz singer.

We all sat on the porch together, lights all around, people in their packs all over the shared lawns behind the houses. The sky was an encapsulating purple and there was a pool, people splashing around, shrieking and giggling, some gleaming and naked with little plastic cups of orange liquid. Someone, somewhere, had a guitar and plucked it all night long. It smelled like alcohol and smoke and slippery sweat. I had never felt so aware of my body.

Ana was the first to pour me a shot. She held it eye level to me and I stared at bits of things that swirled around in the liquid.

“Ana,” Bo chided, his voice low and melodic. “Sherry said to go easy on her.”

“Oh, puh-lease.” Ana hissed back.

I felt embarrassed that Sherry had said such a thing. Blood came into my cheeks and I took the shot from her.

“I’m fine.” I said, my tone matter-of-fact and sharp, condescending. I was a bit proud of how sure I sounded.

The shot burned my chest and throat, bringing more color into my face. I felt my throat and veins constrict. A small scratchy cough escaped me. Ana laughed harshly and lit up another cigarette, blowing blue smoke all across the porch. Bo frowned.

With her eyes on me constantly I showed her. I drank three more cups of bright pink mixes that tasted sugary sweet. I went looking for Sherry and found the man with the guitar instead.

*

His body was so warm next to mine and he seemed so happy to have company, his silky eyes bright as he peered over me and over me, drinking in my presence and my sweaty tangy smell like all the pink alcohol I had consumed.

I wasn’t myself, I was flushed with colors I usually wasn’t filled with, and the conversation was an out-of-body experience, with the “What’s your name?”, “Where are you from?”, “New, eh?”, “How old are you?” and the “Can I get you another drink?”

This drink was sour and purple, grape Hawaiian Punch.

Everything was smoky and dark, orbs of lantern overhead, the slightest pinch of cold in the dead of night. His face was too close and my heart thrummed in my throat, hummed a manic song, but he kissed me anyway and I inhaled the pungent scent of closeness, of body and body and the medium that moves the bodies together on nights like this.

There was no measurement of time. Eventually someone ripped me away from him and I felt my back hit hard ground. Immediately I felt cold, horribly, inhumanly cold and I scrambled for warmth and shelter, amongst arms or blankets, or both-

Sherry dragged me to her car and threw me into the backseat. I yelled out in protest, but my voice suddenly brought needles into my skull and I realized my stomach felt like a fish tank.

The car moved for a short while, and I lay sprawled across the back, my shirt twisted around me and my eyes peering up blearily through the window, through the sky, through the fabric of reality.

When the car stopped, Sherry remained in the front seat, motionless, her hands in her lap. After a few minutes I sat up. We were parked in her driveway.

“You seemed to have fun.” Sherry turned around, her eyes tired, her face trained to handle the tired. “That guy was sure cu-uu-te!”

“I’ve never done that before.” I murmured. My tongue felt heavy in my mouth. I could still taste him and pink bubbles and bitter mixes. I could feel dried saliva around my lips.

“I know. It’s why I got you away before you did anything horrendously regrettable.” Her eyes were wide, her stiff eyelashes fanning out, inked in black. “He wasn’t that cute.”

I felt sick and foreign. I scratched at my face, trying to scrape away the ick.

“Where were you?” I asked, slightly upset she had left me alone for such a long period of time.

She sighed, and in her sigh was sadness and longing, painted dreams and then a dramatic actress toss of the hair to dismiss all of it. I suddenly imagined her watching old black and white movies, with the girls in their gray skin and black lipstick.

“I was losing time in wooing and pursuing.” she said lyrically, her alto voice a liquid. “Pursuing him. The guy I must have.”

I couldn’t think of what a guy she wanted would look like. Apollo, Adonis, Orpheus, came to mind.

“Of course, he’s refusing to be interested. I’ve never destroyed myself more than over men. But he can’t refuse me for long. I know what he needs.” She cupped one of her breasts, small and curved, and arched her back dramatically.

I recalled how it had felt to have the guitarist’s hands on mine. I felt a chill climb the vertebrae in my spine. I wanted to think of something else quickly.

“How come he’s being difficult?” I asked. “What’s his problem? What’s the big deal?”

“The big deal.” She laughed loudly, a strange noise. “Oh, but you don’t know!”

“No, I don’t.” I leaned into the front seat, cradling my hands on the seat cushions. “Tell me.”

She stared ahead for a while, saying nothing. I noticed how glossy her eyes were, but she didn’t seem drunk at all. Perhaps it wasn’t alcohol.

“Okay. How about a story? A happy little tale? Lace, you’ll handle it fine.” Sherry turned herself around to face me full on. I noticed, up close, her eyeliner smeared over her high cheekbones. And her skin was really, truly porcelain pale.