Monday morning a physics project was assigned to create a simple machine to complete a task, which was to be done in groups of two by the end of the week.
AJ scanned the room, dread falling upon him as he was reminded once again of how much distance he had on everyone around him, and how awkward his isolation became in situations like these. The rest of them grouped instantly with their friends, it was easy for them, and as usual he was left alone. He preferred it this way. He could easily get it all done on his own. He didn’t need anyone else.


There was an even number in the class, so one girl was left ungrouped. AJ recognized her instantly—the girl who lived next door to him, whose name he didn’t know. He’d catch her watching his house from her bedroom window some nights. He watched her too, but when their eyes met she wouldn’t look away, which made him wonder if she was only daydreaming, not actually aware that anyone was staring back at her. Or was she simply bold enough not to break eye contact?
AJ always kept his bedroom dark so no one could see in, but even so, the possibility that this girl was curious made the hair the back of his neck stand up. Had their house not been disguised well enough to fit in with the plain suburban houses of Alburg? Was it the fact that they strived so much to stay hidden that made them so conspicuous?


He didn’t want to work with her. It was too risky. But she was already in front of him, and—


“Hi, I’m Arianna.”


AJ grabbed her hand and shook it before saying anything, he was peering into her vacant hazel eyes, and obsessing over the possibility that she knew something she shouldn’t.


Arianna drew back her hand and pushed a shock of chestnut hair behind her ear before taking a seat next to AJ.


“What’s your name?” she asked.


“Arnold.”


“Arnold?”


“Or AJ. Either one.”


“You live next door to me,” she said. “Right?”


“I don’t know,” AJ replied quickly.


“I know where you live.”


AJ looked suddenly up at her, and she laughed.


“Don’t worry. I’m not a stalker or anything. I’ve seen you on your way to the bus stop. So that’s convenient. It should be easy to get this done if you’re only a door down from me.”


“Your house,” AJ said.


“What?”


“Your house. We should work on the project there.”


Arianna started to speak, but the bell cut through her voice. She stood up and closed the book, never taking her eyes off AJ.


“That’s fine,” Arianna said. “You can come by after school if you want. My parents don’t get home until late.”


AJ nodded and shot out of his chair, clumsily swinging his backpack over his shoulder. Then he followed the shuffling students from the classroom, and felt Arianna’s eyes peering into the back of his head as he left.

You can come by after school if you want.


What did that mean? After school the same day? Or some other day? Would Arianna be home? Would it seem too eager for AJ to go there as soon as the bus dropped him off?


He didn’t go. Instead he watched her window from the comfort of his bedroom, waiting for her to appear, and if she meant today, she could simply come by and ask him to come over. If not, she’d settle on her bed with her laptop like usual until nighttime, when she’d leave the room for an hour or so, and then return in her pajamas with her schoolbooks and study.


But she never appeared. He knew it would happen. She had friends. She would forget all about the project, all about him. She’d just leave him to work on it himself. Just like the rest of them. Like the rest of them, who forced him to do their work for them, and treated him like a piece of stiff gum under their shoe to be chipped at and scraped away until it fell off. Why had he hoped she was different? She was no different.


AJ reached under his mattress and closed his hand around the cold barrel of his father’s old handgun, unwinding in the familiar sick comfort that it brought to his blood.


Sudden shouting echoed in the house, followed by an earsplitting crash that seemed to press pause on the world, like expensive glassware had been thrown into hardwood flooring.


AJ had let go of the gun and rushed to the top of the stairs just in time to hear Margaret down below, suppressing sobs as she slammed the basement door.


He had hit her again. Now any sort of communication between them was over for the day. Margaret would ask AJ to deliver food to his dad so she wouldn’t have to look at his face until morning, by which time any trace of the row that had happened the night before would have somehow magically vanished.


AJ hurried down the steps and was out the front door before Margaret could gather herself to request anything of him.


And then he was on Arianna’s front porch, so relieved to be away from obligation toward his father that he felt no nervousness when he rang the doorbell.
The door swung open in a matter of seconds, but it wasn’t Arianna that’d opened it.
Nadine. Nadine Walden. Though he’d never spoken to her before, the name popped instantly into AJ’s head as soon as he saw her. Who didn’t know that name? She was the princess of Alburg High, but she looked different now, wound down, her straight blonde hair wedged sloppily into a ponytail. She appeared a little worn out without all that make-up caked perfectly in every crevice of her face. What was she doing here?
Nadine stared AJ down with a mix of curiosity and revulsion. Neither had anything to say, so the pair regarded each other in awkward silence until Arianna came into view in the doorway behind Nadine.
“Oh, hey,” she said. “I was wondering if you were coming. Come in.”
“What?” Nadine grunted, standing firm in front of the threshold, as if establishing herself as some sort of unbending barrier of entry.
“I told you he might be coming. For the physics project.”
“You didn’t say it was him!”
“Come in, AJ, why are you just standing out there?”
AJ stumbled gawkily into the house, sliding past Nadine, who refused to stand aside.
“This is my cousin, Nadine. I’m sure you’ve seen her before.”
AJ caught a scathing edge in Arianna’s tone that Nadine seemed to happily ignore.
Arianna led the way to a small drawing room at the end of the entry hall. The floor plan of her house was the same as AJ’s, but everything was different. He was actually in a home now, a normal, lived-in home, where the likelihood of cops kicking the door in at any given moment didn’t exist. A burden left his body as he sank into the plush leather couch, an unyielding and omnipresent load he was used to carrying in his own house. There was light here. Real, normal, electric light that filled the entire room. This is how it always should have been.


Arianna was sitting on the carpet, pulling books and pens out of her bag. Nadine sat stiffly on a couch diagonal from AJ, still watching him as if he were a circus freak.


“All right,” Arianna said, flipping back the pages of a white spiral notebook. “What should we build?”


“How about something to make your cousin stop staring at me?”


AJ was surprised at the words as they left his mouth. It wasn’t like him to crack jokes in front of total strangers. Was it? He wasn’t used to being in the company of girls his own age.


Arianna smiled, but Nadine’s frown deepened.


“Your clothes are too big for you,” Nadine scoffed. “They look weird.”
“They’re my dad’s. My parents are both dead. I like keeping their possessions close by because it makes me feel like parts of them are still with me. That’s why I wear his clothes and keep my mom’s Polaroid in my backpack.”
Nadine whitened and looked desperately at Arianna as if she’d be able to offer an appropriate response for her to use.
“But I met your mom. My mom and I did,” Arianna said.
AJ was taken aback. “What?”
“The day after your family moved in we brought a cherry pie to your house to welcome your family to the neighborhood. A woman answered the door—”
“That was Margaret. She’s my maid.”
Arianna’s eyes widened. “You have a maid?”
“Well, she was my maid before my parents died.” AJ directed a rehearsed glance at Nadine, who was staring uncomfortably at the floor. “Now she’s my guardian.”
“Oh. Well that would be cool if—” Arianna stopped herself, then buried her face in her physics book. “I think we should do a lever. That’d be the easiest, don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” AJ agreed. “That’d be the easiest.”

Margaret didn’t have breakfast ready for AJ the next morning. When he reached the first floor the kitchen was empty and the house was quiet. Then the basement stairs creaked against slow and gentle footsteps as someone walked up.


Margaret entered the kitchen silently. If AJ hadn’t been staring at the doorway he wouldn’t have known she’d come in. Her wrinkly, bronze skin was paler than usual, her graying hair was let down and redness had swollen around her eyes.


“Your father wants to speak with you,” she muttered as a fresh tear slid down
her face.


“I can’t. I have school.”


Before AJ could reach the door, Margaret’s hand flew quickly in front of his chest.


“No,” she said. “It’s important.”


AJ looked at her, and saw something waver in her dark eyes that he’d never seen on her before, like a jumble of pity and fear. She’d never looked at him like that.


“What is it, Margaret?”


Margaret looked away. “He has to tell you. Just go.”


When AJ reached the cellar, Arnold was crying. He had never seen his father cry before. The sight was strangely unsettling, like seeing a wild animal in pain.


AJ stood in the doorway, watching tears disintegrate into his father’s unkempt beard. AJ could hardy see his face, his shaggy dark hair hung like vines of ivy in front of it. A half empty bottle of whiskey stood on the quilt between his father’s legs.


“Close the door,” Arnold groaned.


AJ froze with fear as the possibility that his father might be in the middle of an abusive rampage crossed his mind.


“Close it.”


He obeyed this time, leaving the heavy door slightly ajar just in case he’d need to get away.


“I don’t know how to tell you this,” Arnold said. “I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t want to do it. It’s the biggest mistake of my life, you must know that.”


AJ wasn’t sure what Arnold meant. Surely the first prospect that came to his mind was too ghastly to have been true. He watched his father in silence, waiting for him to continue. Arnold pushed his hair from in front of his eyes and looked up miserably into AJ’s. Both were waiting for the other to speak.


“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” AJ finally said.


“I have anger management problems, and a drinking problem, and—” Arnold sniffled and hastily mopped his eyes with the back of one quivering hand. “It’s my brain. There’s something wrong with it. I was just so angry. I lost it. And I regretted it right away but I couldn’t do anything about it, it was too late. It was just too late.”


“I—I don’t—”


“She was already gone when the ambulances got there. I’m a horrible man, I’ve done horrible things, and I should’ve stayed in that hellhole because I know it’s what I deserved, I should have died there. I deserve that.”


Arnold took a great swig of whiskey. AJ stepped backward toward the door. Weight had begun to press down on his shoulders.
“I don’t know what you mean.”


“I’m guilty!” Arnold blurted. “I’m guilty. I’m so guilty.”


AJ’s chest was rising into his throat, this wasn’t real, and his father was innocent, always innocent…


“She cheated on me,” Arnold moaned, as if the acknowledgment would serve as rationale. “And I wasn’t what she wanted anymore, I was old, just an old rich man, a perfect money launderer, and she wanted to leave me. Take you and the money with her. But I loved her, no one else could have her…”


AJ’s stomach twisted with nausea. Blood throbbed inside his head as if it would explode out of his ears. A lump had formed in his throat, cutting off his airways. Arnold was still speaking, still weeping, but AJ couldn’t take anymore.
He burst out of the room and up the creaky basement stairs and vaguely felt Margaret’s hands try to grab him but he shook her off because the bus would be here soon and he’d have to get on it and go to school, like normal.
The world faded in and out of focus. AJ’s legs were moving, but he was still standing in front of his father, being beaten like never before, and with words this time, words that punctured the most tender ingredient of his being, words that were determined to drive him into a state of blissful oblivion in which the idea of parents didn’t exist and the most difficult facet of life was figuring out what simple machine to build.
School floated by in a daze, and Arianna was saying something to him in the hallway, asking questions, and AJ was only able to register the words ‘nut job’, which her cousin had garbled from right beside her. His hand formed into a fist and rammed into Nadine’s jaw before he knew what he was doing, as if his arm had been forced upward by a puppeteer, and Arianna was screaming, kneeling over her, and AJ’s legs carried him down the long dark hallway, and all their hypercritical eyes blurred in and out of sight like mirages around him every step of the way.
When he got home, there was a pair of invisible hands wrapped around his throat, choking him. He still felt the imprint of his father’s force around his neck. Was this how he’d done it to her? Had Arnold choked her like he so frequently choked him, and not let up in time? What method had he found suitable to murder his three-year-old son’s mother? Perhaps he’d done it with the very gun AJ kept under his mattress. Perhaps, for AJ, blowing his own brains out with the same gun was the noblest way to die.
He walked upstairs and slid the gun out from under his mattress. The trembling weapon felt heavier in his hands than it ever had. The freedom to so easily escape was a bittersweet blessing.
A note would not be necessary. His mother had never gotten a chance to write one before she died, and he should not grant himself that privilege either.
AJ truncated his thoughts by pulling the trigger, but nothing happened. The gun was empty. And then suddenly he saw sense, as if that chance failure was a device put in place by the universe to give him a chance to reconsider. The gun fell out of his shaky fingers and clunked on the floor. Water filled his eyes as visions of the near future rinsed his mind, the future, when be able to do anything he wanted, and be anything he wanted, and put this all behind him and reinvent himself in his own image. What was happening now wasn’t forever.
AJ fell into a state of complete lethargy, just moving vicariously through the routine of a normal teenager, pretending he wasn’t harboring a murderer in his basement.
He went down to the kitchen for a snack, and discovered on the counter two notes, one addressed to Margaret, and the other to him.
He curiously unfolded the paper, and skimmed through the slipshod scrawl.

AJ,

I’ve chosen not to burden you or Margaret with my presence any longer. By the time you are reading this, I’ll have already called the police and killed myself. Margaret will have my will. I’m sincerely sorry from the bottom of my heart, if I still have one, and I want you to know that though I have lived with agonizing guilt ever since that day, the only way I could ever truly pay respect to her is by giving up my own life. I feel like it should have ended with hers all those years ago. I pray to God you will not become the monster I was. I love you, and wish you and Margaret the best.

Love,

Dad

AJ read the note through twice. Although he’d felt all day like he never wanted to speak to, see, or hear about his father again, holding the last bit of him in his hands still brought a sting to his chest, and a sudden compulsion to see his face one last time.
In the back of AJ’s numb mind, he registered police sirens blaring in the distance.
Down the street, ambulances were rolling a stretcher into a white van, a bleeding man concealed beneath it by sheets of pure white. Another man sat crying and shaking next to a minivan with a smashed bumper, while cops with tiny notepads scribbled down his relay of how a strange man had deliberately run out in front of his car.
Underneath the house, Arnold ’s candles still stood, burning in glistening pools of hot wax. His crossword puzzles remained unfinished, but the Rubik’s cube he so frequently manipulated was now a solid color on each side.
AJ went inside and locked the cellar door. Then he kicked one candle over, creating a domino effect that caused each candle in the circle to collapse onto the next, creating a ring of vicious fire that engulfed Arnold ’s quilts, bottles, and puzzles in one sweltering breath.
AJ leaned against the door with his eyes closed; feeling peace in the boiling room even as heavy smoke filled his lungs. His father’s possessions and all memory of them were burning now, and afterward they’d be gone forever and the man he hadn’t known would officially cease to exist.


“AJ!” Margaret called from the other side of the door. “AJ, are you in there?”


AJ caught a glimpse of the pages of Arnold ’s puzzle book crumpling slowly into black ash within the shimmering orange light and felt a sense of passionate catharsis, as if an unwanted part of him was burning along with it.


“AJ! AJ!” Margaret screamed, frantically shaking the doorknob. “AJ!”

The fire was crackling now, growing larger, everything was disintegrating into beautiful piles of black.

The cellar door flew off its hinges, launching AJ into the floor. White gas exploded inside the room. Margaret grabbed AJ’s baggy shirt with her free hand and threw him out of the room, then fearlessly extinguished the flames.

AJ crawled up the basement stairs and to his room, all the while coughing smoke out of his lungs as the sound of the fire extinguisher gradually faded away behind him. Arnold’s gun was still on the floor. AJ kicked it under his bed, and when he looked up, caught sight of Nadine and Arianna through her bedroom window. Nadine was crying, as Arianna dabbed her face with a white cloth.

The fire extinguisher had stopped, and Margaret’s tormented sobbing swallowed all other sound in the house like a Goliath thundercloud.

There was nothing AJ could say or do to comfort her. He knew her relationship with his father was more than what either of them cared to admit, and now it was officially over, nothing left of it but the note that remained still and quiet on the kitchen counter.
AJ left home and paced the open gap between his and Arianna’s house.
The minutes it took for her to answer the door after AJ rang the bell felt like years. To AJ’s surprise, Arianna’s expression was remarkably blank. For some reason, he’d expected her to be crying just like everyone else.

“Hi,” AJ said.

“Hi,” Arianna said.

“How’s Nadine?”

“She’s fine. It’s just a bruise.”

“I came to tell her I’m sorry. I, um, hope she’ll forgive me. And if you don’t want to work with me on the project anymore I understand.”

Arianna stepped over the threshold and shut the door behind her, closing the distance between them until they stood a mere foot apart. “Why’d you hit her?”

The question was harder for AJ to verbalize than it should have been.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess because I was just having a bad day and what she called me just sort of . . . set me off.”

“You scared me,” Arianna said. “I mean, Nadine deserved that, but I didn’t know if it was about her, or if you were just psychotic.”

“Maybe it was a little bit of both.”

Arianna smiled, and the world seemed to brighten for a short few seconds, because AJ had almost forgotten a feeling other than pain still existed.

“You’re really funny, AJ.”

AJ was floored instantly by the compliment. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had given him one, the last time he was permitted to feel good about himself.
“And of course I still want to work on the project with you,” Arianna went on. “You’re the smartest guy in class, I’d be useless without you.”

AJ could hear his heart speed up, and all of a sudden he felt a lot at once. Strong, independent from fear, quiet in the midst of chaos, validity, alignment with himself and the world, and a new peace and belonging that he hadn’t known before as if Arianna’s front porch was the place he was meant to be. He didn’t know what this feeling was. It was new, but he liked it. It felt good, and he felt free. Free to allow himself to mean something, and to thrive as a man with his own identity.
I’d be useless without you.
And somewhere, in a place deep inside that AJ had always refused to examine, he knew he’d be as good as useless without her too.