Cartwheel by Jennifer Dubois Page A

unserious.
    “Hi,” said Lily in Spanish. “I’m Lily. I’m staying next door with the Carrizos, and I’m supposed to invite you over for dinner.”
    “Are you?” The boy answered in English. It was flat, American English, not the vaguely British kind that most people who learned English as a second language seemed to sport (as if it weren’t enough to speak a second language fluently, you had to speak the classier version, too). “Well, go ahead then.”
    “You’re invited for dinner,” said Lily dumbly.
    “What a delightful surprise.”
    Those eyes! You got annoyed at him just for having them. Lily knew that it was technically her turn to speak again. “I didn’t know anyone lived here,” she said.
    “Well, someone does. After a fashion.”
    In addition to being beautiful, the boy’s eyes were extremely, outlandishly tired. Lily was not sure she’d ever seen a young person look as exhausted as this boy; everything he said seemed all the more impressive because he appeared to be on the verge of narcolepsy or coma. Lily wanted to be rude to him, a little, just to wake him up. “How old are you?” she demanded.
    “One never asks a lady her age. How old are you?”
    “Twenty. You live here by yourself?”
    He mimed looking around. “It would seem so.”
    “How long have you lived here?”
    “Excuse me, how long have
you
lived here?”
    “You speak English very well.”
    “Yours is tolerable.”
    Suddenly, Lily felt exhausted, too; you couldn’t talk to someone who wanted to win every single piece of dialogue. Maybe that’s why he looked that way; the horrendous drain of being the funniest person in the room, in every room, in this enormous horrifying house. “Seven o’clock, tomorrow,” she said. “If you want.”

CHAPTER FOUR
January
    The house next door had been dark like Sebastien’s until the Carrizos moved in. They came in March, during his second year alone, though he tried never to think about those years in term of years. When the Carrizos came, the evenings got brighter, and Sebastien sat watching their yellow kitchen lights and the soft blinkered hysteria of their television; the house was ablaze, like a forest fire on a hill. People don’t think about how much you can see through a window at night in a house that’s very well lit—this was not why Sebastien kept his so dark, though it was certainly an auxiliary benefit. He tried not to stare at the Carrizos’ house once they moved in. But it was impossible sometimes not to gaze a little longingly at all that light.
    Sometimes he imagined that they could see him, too. This fantasy kept him busy and decent, dressed, up at reasonable hours, engaged in activities that were arguably fruitful. He had employed a similar strategy toward his parents, back when they were recently dead and he was first learning how to live this way. He’d imagined that they were watchinghim—stern, censorious, though not entirely without sympathy for his plight—and this had saved him, he was sure, to the extent that he could be said to have been saved at all. He realized he was inventing gods for himself—false gods, at that—but he also knew he was not above it. Though he hoped to take the secret to his grave, he really was a pragmatist at heart. And it could be argued that pretend-believing in the occasional surveillance of the neighbors—the indubitably literal neighbors, with their gleaming car and their showy appliances and their honorable recycling habits—was marginally healthier than pretend-believing in the constant surveillance of ghosts. At any rate, it seemed to have some of the same salutary effects. In the backyard, Sebastien grew flowers, effeminate hobby though it was. On the Internet, he watched his investments go up and down; he followed every twitch and flutter of the New York Stock Exchange, and London, and Tokyo; he was a compulsive reader of the news. It was not impossible, after all, to still be witness to the world. He