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There was something about living in a neighborhood like this one that made a person wish for a lot of things that they knew would never actually happen. The houses were old, siding dingy and painted wood window-trim peeling. They were probably very beautiful when they were new, but now they were nothing more than crumbling monuments to the past, the outsides finally giving up their pretenses of happiness to reveal the ugliness and stress that lay within. Everything was close in this neighborhood, the houses nearly touching in some spots.

One such spot
was between number 34 of Northumberland Street and 54 of Redwood Lane, the two homes pressed so close at the back that there was hardly three feet of grass between them. What made this place more unique than the rest of the crowded houses, however, was the fact that each one had a small roof just outside a window. The two roofs were no further away than the space of a breath, and it was this notion that inspired the boy who lived in number 54 to dream.

His family was not wealthy, as was evident in their choice of living arrangements. Even when he was a child no more than five, he knew the weight of economic hardship and how it made his parents yell at each other. But when their voices got too loud to be blocked out with a closed door and a pillow, he would crawl out to the small roof to escape. He tried looking up to the stars, but found that he could never seem to make many of them out in the small space he was afforded. It was because of this that he began looking forward instead, at the roof that nearly touched his own.

This roof had a window too, and he once climbed over in his curiosity to see if there was another child he could entice out into the night so they could talk. Upon peering in though, he was met only with an empty room and peeling wallpaper, the house clearly unoccupied. But still he would venture into the night air, and still he would look with longing at the other room. By the time he was six years old, he had given up hope that another child would appear, and so he imagined one for himself.

He imagined another little boy, one who loved all the same things he did. He had brown hair, darker than his own golden blonde, and blue eyes like his mom’s. He always thought his mom’s eyes were pretty, not like his own green ones that matched his father’s. They would talk about building things with legos, trading pieces from the limited sets they each had, or about electric train sets and matchbox cars. Sometimes they even talked about what they wanted to be when they were grown-ups, indulging in games of pirates and spies and adventurers in their limited space.

As the boy passed seven and eight, eventually reaching nine, he still went out to play with the boy he had imagined. He didn’t play with the children in school, preferring the agreeable and entertaining company of his friend. They would laugh and smile, and the boy could forget about the way his parents only spoke when they shouted, or how his mom would sometimes have bruises on her face or arms.

Time went on, and the little boy wasn’t so little anymore. Nine years became thirteen, and still he went out onto the roof. Games turned to talks, and when the boy’s mother was found in her bed with an empty bottle of pills, he sought comfort in the arms of his friend, his suit stiff and uncomfortable on the day of her funeral.

Three more years passed, and at sixteen, the boy started coming out onto the roof with bruises, just like his mom used to have. He understood where they had come from now, understood why his mom had decided she didn’t want to stay there any longer. The first night, he cried tears of anger, and his friend held him against his chest, both of them lamenting on the fact that they were no longer children. That was the year the boy decided he loved his friend, the only person to ever listen to him, to spend time with him and not cast him aside for being poor or strange.

One day shortly after his eighteenth birthday though, the boy suddenly stopped coming out onto the roof. When his father was arrested for the open and shut case, the house was cleared of their belongings. The two empty rooms faced each other in silence now, no more laughter ringing out in the night.

A few months later, the fading FOR SALE sign in front of number 34 was finally removed, the key handed to a young man no older than eighteen. He entered the house to look around, his blue eyes scanning the empty rooms as he decided that it was as good a place as ever to start his new life. He entered one of the upstairs bedrooms and approached a window that seemed strangely close to the house behind it. While pushing up the dirty window pane it to get a better look outside, a rare ray of sunlight reflected off of his brown hair. He smiled as he saw the two roofs, musing over what it would have been like to grow up here with a friend he could have come out to see at night, sharing their secrets and dreams to escape the suffocating closeness of the houses.

-Paige, alumni