The girls in my neighborhood were always prettier than I was. Their sweaters were Esprit and Benetton and were always this season’s latest style. Sometimes I would luck out and Goodwill would have one from a few years ago and I thought I was fitting in, but I was trying too hard. I was too desperate—too hungry for something that didn’t exist in my little house.

When I was still years away from my first bra, I had the bedroom facing out to the backstreet. Past our backyard, I could see the dogs without leashes rambling back and forth, there were barely any cars, and the dogs were loose and terrifying. Those dogs roamed; they explored a freedom that I did not understand.  

Why weren’t those dogs scared too?

The backstreet was the safest way to get anywhere I, as a not yet bra wearing twelve-year-old, would need to go. One block to the right was “little Missy’s house”, just next door was “big Missy” and diagonal to the back was Amy’s house. We liked her the least, but she had an in-ground pool, with a diving board and slide. A pool with a deep-end I never ventured into. Through her backyard was also the shortcut to the cemetery. 

If I didn’t use her yard, I would have to take the backstreet to little Missy’s house and then cut into the woods, a little over a half a mile on a trail and then head right for another three quarters of a mile. Time and space are different in the woods. “Woods time” stretches out ahead of you with no end in sight. Branches break and no matter how many times you turn around to check behind you, you just know someone is there, just out of your eye shot. “If girls go into the woods, they will get raped” my mother always said this, a statement of fact. She said it since I was old enough to not really know what rape was but to know it was somehow worse than death.

There is a dark fairytale, told in my family. The day my mother found out she was pregnant with me she called her baby sister to tell her the news. Her sister took a short cut through the woods to get to their mother’s house. She was raped that day. The original story was three men, as I got older it turned to one man, and now I am not sure if any of it was real or just something to keep me close, something to keep me small enough to stay in the little bedroom forever.

During long summer afternoons that stretched out in front of us only to eventually find their way back, we would go to Amy’s house. Our bathing suits were worn casually underneath our summer shorts and stained tank tops. Hoping she would let us swim before we snuck into the cemetery to watch the boys on their skateboards. The boys that smiled at my friends, their eyes passing over me as if I were a ghost.

Amy died three years ago, and though I had not seen her since I was in high school, I laid awake night after night remembering the times I used her for her pool, when I cried my room smelled like chlorine. My tears tasted like chemicals and suntan lotion. I felt my shoulders and could still feel the bridge of my nose and my shoulders freckling in the sun.

When I was in high school my parents moved out of their bedroom, and I was allowed to take theirs. It was done under the guise of allowing bra wearing Jennifer more privacy, but it was because my father could no longer climb the steep staircase, his lungs and hips already quitting on him years before he was officially sick. He moved to a little room downstairs, my mother slept in that room with him for less than a year before she moved to the unheated front room that we had always used for storing junk, and referred to as “the porch”

From the front window I could see the main street, the houses larger than mine. I could stare at the house that had once belonged to Edna and Pat, an elderly couple, I called him papa. I was petrified of their adult son, and would scream myself hoarse when he was around, one time I got sick on the floor. My mother laughed and said I must be scared of his red hair.

No one ever thought anything more than that, and even now I am not sure why I was scared of him, but as a teenager I would look at that house and feel a twisted coil of fear and longing.

By the time I was in high school the boy who lived there was a skater boy and he fell in love with “little Missy” who was now Melissa.

I lived across the street from him, and he never even knew I was right there, a ghost scared of ghosts—haunting two little bedrooms and two different streets. 

About the author:

Jennifer Anne Gordon is an award-winning author and podcast host. Her debut novel Beautiful, Frightening and Silent won the Kindle Book Award for Best Horror/Suspense for 2020, as well as the Best Horror Novel of the Year from Authors on The Air and was a finalist for American Book Fest’s Best Book Award- Horror, 2020. Her novel Pretty/Ugly won the Helicon Award for Best Horror for 2022, and the Kindle Book Award for Best Novel of the Year (Reader’s Choice). Her collection The Japanese Box: And Other Stories was an instant Amazon Bestseller and her story The Japanese Box won the Lit Nastie Award for 2023 for Best Short Story. Her personal essays have been featured on Horror Tree, Nerd Daily, Ladies of Horror Fiction, Writers After Dark, and Quail Bell Magazine, and are featured in Such a Loss, and Letting Grief Speak: Writing Portals for Life After Loss. Jennifer is the creator and co-host of the popular comedic literary podcast Vox Vomitus, as well as a co-host of House of Mystery on NBC Radio. For benevolent stalking please visit www.JenniferAnneGordon.com Instagram: @jennifergenevievegordon threads: @jennifergenevievegordon X – @jenniferannego5 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jennifer.gordon.71404

Part of our Fall/Winter 2024 Issue. New stories, poems, and essays now through December 2024.

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