Brian Freeman: In the Dark aka The Watcher

I stared at her on the bed. She wore a V-necked white T-shirt and cutoffs with a thick black belt. She was much prettier than I was. She had the curves and the boobs and the big Farrah hair. Jonny told me last week that my face was much more interesting than Laura’s, because it wasn’t symmetrical and perfect like hers was. He thought that was a compliment. I told him he needed to do better.

My own hair is so dark it’s almost black, and I keep it straight as an arrow, with a perfect part down the middle. I have a sharply angled nose, like a little shark’s fin jutting off my face. My irises are so large and dark that they crowd out the whites of my eyes. I have two little peaches for breasts.

Hey, I knew who the guys went for. It was Laura, not me. Maybe that’s why Laura was much less comfortable with guys than me. She kept her distance. She rarely went out on dates. During the winter, she went to the movies with Peter Stanhope a few times, but she broke it off when he wanted to get into her jeans. As far as I knew, Laura was still a virgin. Not that she would tell me that kind of thing.

“You haven’t been around much lately,” I said. For more than a week, Laura had been disappearing after school. Coming in late or staying out all night. Acting quiet and brittle. Twice I heard her crying in her room.

“So?”

“So are you okay?”

Laura shrugged. I didn’t really expect her to tell me anything. We didn’t confide our secrets in each other. Even so, I wasn’t going to let it go. She could pretend all she wanted, but I knew something was wrong. You had to look for little things with Laura. When our mother died, the only hint about what was going on inside her head was when I found a ceramic statue of Jesus, in pieces, underneath her window.

I looked for a clue. Something different. It didn’t take me long to realize that she had flipped a photograph facedown on her nightstand. When I saw that she was still tugging at her finger, I noticed something else, too. No silver ring on her index finger, just a pale white band of skin. Laura saw where my eyes had gone, and she sat on her hands to cover them up. I knew there was no point in asking her about it, so I went another way.

“Who have you been hanging out with?” I asked.

Another shrug. “I’ve been over at Finn’s a lot.”

“You and your lost causes,” I told her.

That was the wrong thing to say. Her eyes flashed at me with annoyance. Even so, I was right. Laura had a weakness for people who were damaged. She always believed she could find a way to lift them up. It was one of her best qualities, but Laura was too naive, too trusting. I must have gotten the cynical genes, because I don’t think people ever really change.

Finn was a good example. He lived across the bridge in Superior with his older sister, Rikke Mathisen, who was Laura’s favorite teacher at our high school. I knew Finn only because Laura brought him around now and then. He was an addict. Always into drugs. Creepy eyes staring at you when he thought you weren’t looking. Miss Mathisen knew Laura was a soft touch, and she thought Laura could help Finn battle his demons. So Laura spent hours over there. I thought it was a mistake, but you couldn’t tell her anything.

I opened my mouth to push Laura again about what was wrong, but she cut me off with a question of her own. Out of the blue.

“So have you slept with Jon yet?” she asked.

I made sure her bedroom door was closed, so my father couldn’t hear. “No.”

“But you’re gonna, right?”

“Yeah, over the summer, I think. He knows I want to. But I told him I didn’t want to have sex until we were so close it felt like we were having sex already.”

“I like that.”

“Plus, I have to start taking the pill.”

“You could use condoms,” she said.

It was the strangest conversation she and I had ever had, because it was such a normal sister-sister kind of thing. We just didn’t talk like that. But I knew what she was doing. She had changed the subject from her to me.

“I don’t want to,” I said. “If I’m going to have sex, I want to really feel it, you know?”

Laura laughed. “No, I don’t know.”

“Are you on the pill?”

“Don’t need it.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say next. “I’ve got a job for the summer.”

“Yeah? Doing what?”

“Waitressing at that new place by the bridge. Grandma’s.”

“Good for you.”

“They need people. I can get you in there if you’re thinking of sticking around.”

That was as close as I had come to asking flat out if Laura was planning to leave home after she graduated next month. For months she had told Dad she was going away as soon as school was out. Travel. Work. See the world. Now I wasn’t so sure. No ring.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do yet,” Laura said.

I got out of the beanbag. “I’m going for a run,” I said.

“Have fun.”

I decided to stick my nose a little further into her business. “Listen, I really think you should tell someone about that note. Whoever this creep is, he sounds dangerous.”

Laura slid open her nightstand drawer and looked inside. The letter was on top. I saw the lipstick through the thin paper. “He’s just some freak,” she said. “I’m going to throw them out.”

She took the note and tore it over and over until the pieces were the size of confetti. Then she sprinkled them into her wastebasket.

I felt uneasy. “Them? Are there more?”

“Yeah.” Laura shrugged.

“How many?”

“I don’t know. Ten maybe.”

“Ten? When did this start?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“Do you still have them?”

She nodded.

“I want to see them,” I told her.

Laura sighed theatrically, as if I were making a big deal over nothing, and dug inside the drawer. She came out with a small stack of papers tied together with a rubber band. She pulled them apart and spilled them onto the blanket.

I couldn’t believe what I saw.

Some were written in lipstick like the other one. All of the messages were obscene and violent.

I’m going to fuck you.

Keep your door locked.

Are you going to be alone tonight, whore?

There were photographs, too. Whoever had done this had cut them out of porno magazines. I saw black-and-white shots of men with huge penises and women servicing them with their mouths. More messages were scrawled on the photos.

You’ll suck mine, too.

Is your ass still a virgin?

“Are you crazy?” I nearly screamed at her. “You have to go to the police with this.”

“I don’t want to make things worse. School will be done soon, and he’ll stop.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Come on, he hasn’t done anything. He’s just trying to creep me out. He’s like some peeping tom trying to get under my skin. Well, I won’t let him.”

“Do you have any idea who’s doing this?” I asked again.

“No. I talked to a few guys, you know, to see if they’d heard anything. I thought maybe he’d be bragging about it to his buddies. But nobody knew who it was, or if they did, they wouldn’t tell me.”

“Did you tell Dad?”

“Are you kidding? He’d flip. And don’t you dare breathe a word, little sister. Somehow it would wind up as my fault.”

While I watched, Laura began tearing up all of the notes and photographs. I wanted to stop her. I told her I thought she was making a big mistake, but Laura shredded and ripped and tore until she had a small mountain of remnants that she slid off her bed into the garbage.

“So much for that,” she said.