A New Friend?

Claudia and her mother and father lived in an old house, in a normal neighborhood, on a nondescript street, Meadowburne Lane to be exact, in a small midwestern town so ordinary that most people driving through immediately forget the name of it before they have passed the town limit sign on the way out. At least, that’s the way it had been on Meadowburne Lane before the accident. Since then, life on the lane has occasionally become a little less mundane.

Claudia and her mother both remember the night of the accident well. They remember it, but they don’t talk about it. The accident is only one of several things Claudia and her mother don’t talk about.

Claudia and her mother live in the upstairs rooms of the old house now. An elderly couple live in the downstairs rooms of the old house, on the ground floor. Claudia and her mother refer to the elderly couple as grandma and grandpa, even though they are no relation. Grandma and grandpa are meant to be affectionate and otherwise innocent names for the elderly couple. Claudia borrows books from the elderly couple, or steals them, depending on your perspective. Claudia always returns them, so she considers it borrowing. Claudia’s mother has no idea her daughter sneaks into the elderly couple’s rooms in the wee hours of the night to take or return books, so she has no opinion on whether this is stealing or not.

Claudia spends most of her time reading the books she borrows / steals from the elderly couple. When she isn’t reading, Claudia stares out the attic window at the vacant house across the street. The vacant house across the street is soon to be the occupied house across the street. This has happened before, but the house across the street has never stayed occupied for long, always reverting to being the vacant house across the street.

Claudia and her mother talk about the house across the street when it is occupied. They never talk about the house across the street when it is vacant. Claudia is excited because the house across the street being occupied means a new family will be coming to Meadowburne Lane, with the possibility of a new child on the lane, the possibility of a new friend.

If the new family has a child near Claudia’s age and she becomes friends with Claudia, Claudia hopes that maybe this friend and her family won’t flee in terror in the middle of the night, never to be seen on the lane ever again.

All morning, moving company men have been carrying nondescript boxes out of the moving van and into the house across the street. The new family has not arrived on Meadowburne Lane yet, only their belongings. Claudia watches from her attic window, anxiously looking for signs of a child in the items removed from the moving van. So far Claudia has only seen nondescript boxes.

The sun moves over the top of the house where Claudia lives, shining in her attic window now. Claudia knows that she should stay out of the sun because sunshine makes her many scars hurt. Claudia can feel her skin tighten in reaction to the sunshine, can feel the ache start to grow up her arms and across her face.

A shiny red SUV slows as it approaches down Meadowburne Lane. The SUV pulls into the driveway of the house across the street. The new family is here!

 Claudia forgets about how the sun makes the many scars on her skin hurt. She can’t see through the dark tinted windows of the SUV as it stops. A man gets out of the driver’s side of the SUV, a woman gets out of the passenger side. The man opens the back door on his side. Claudia’s excitement peaks! A dog lumbers out of the open door. Claudia sags in disappointment. Claudia does not want a dog as a new friend.

The man and the woman across the street smile and talk and look at their new house. Claudia can see their lips moving and smiling. She cannot hear what they are saying. Claudia is losing interest in what now looks like it will become nothing more than the new couple across the street with the lumbering dog, not even ‘new’ after a few months.

The still new for now couple across the street stands in front of their SUV, their backs to Claudia. The shiny red SUV is less shiny than it was just a moment ago, the new couple turning rather drab and ordinary as Claudia steps back out of the harmful sunshine into the cool shadows of her attic room. Before Claudia can return to her reading of stolen / borrowed books, the woman half of the new couple across the street turns around. Claudia can see the woman’s lips move but cannot hear what she says as she says something in the direction of the SUV.

The rear door on the woman’s side of the SUV pops open slightly. A small hand pushes the rear door open slowly.

Claudia steps back into the sunshine at her attic window, her palms pressed flat against the window. It has been ages since the skin on the palms of Claudia’s hands have been exposed directly to sunlight. The tender flesh on Claudia’s palms burns like she has placed her hands on a hot grill. Claudia does not notice.

Feet have appeared in the now open rear door of the SUV. The feet are small and the feet are wearing gleaming white tennis shoes.

Hips wearing jean shorts appear, followed by a body in a t-shirt, a shoulder, and finally a head with a face.

A girl! A little girl! But not so little, a girl of maybe ten to twelve, nicely matching Claudia’s apparent age. The girl turns her face as the man and the woman did, to look at their house, which will now become the house across the street where the new family with the little girl lives on Meadowburne Lane.

But no, the girl is not looking around like the man and the woman looked around. The girl has found the sunshine with her face and she has stopped. Is the girl basking in the sun’s glow and warmth?

The woman comes back for the girl and takes her by the elbow. The lumbering dog comes up to the girl and she reaches down for the handle strapped to the dog’s back. The man, woman, girl and dog walk up the driveway and up the sidewalk and disappear into the house across the street.

The dog, no longer lumbering, guided the girl up the walk as the family walked into the house.

Claudia guesses that the little girl is blind.

Claudia and her mother don’t talk about the house across the street when it is vacant because it brings up only unpleasant memories.

Claudia and her mother do talk about the house across the street when it is occupied in the hopes of not creating more unpleasant memories. Claudia and her mother have a talk about the new family in the house across the street late that afternoon.

Claudia forgets everything she talks about with her mother late that afternoon as soon as they are finished talking. Claudia sneaks unseen into the little blind girl’s bedroom across the street to hide in a closet, to wait for the little blind girl to come to her room to go to bed. Claudia is very good at sneaking unseen.

Claudia worries while she waits. The part that comes next is the part that Claudia fears. The part that is coming soon is where Claudia’s other potential new friends got scared and ran away with their families, never to be seen again on the lane.

 Claudia starts to think about Billy, but tries not to remember. Billy was a silly boy (yes, Silly Billy. Ha, ha), but he was too silly and too easily scared.

Claudia starts to remember Valerie, the little girl before this new little girl, but tries not to think about her. Valerie was a serious little girl, (Serious Valerie. That’s not funny at all), but she got so scared and ran away with her whole family anyway, just like Silly Billy.

Claudia knows she is hard to look at, maybe even scary to look at. Valerie and Billy did not give Claudia a chance. When they got scared, Claudia tried to be very angry with Billy and Valerie so that she would get her way and they would stay. Claudia learned about being angry to get your way from watching her father, who frequently got angry and always got his way. At least, until the night of the accident.

Claudia wonders if maybe the little blind girl won’t be scared because she cannot see Claudia.

The little blind girl comes into her room, without her blind girl guide dog. The little blind girl’s mother yells goodnight to Charlotte as Charlotte closes the bedroom door.

Charlotte takes off her jean shorts and t-shirt, then she gets dressed for bed, then gets into bed, but she doesn’t lie down. Charlotte asks quietly if there is someone there in the room with her.

Claudia says, as unscary as she can, to not be afraid. Please, please, do not be afraid. Claudia says that she is a friend.

Claudia says again to not be afraid, my name is Claudia, and please, please, please, don’t be afraid, I live across the street, I don’t have any friends and I am so lonely sometimes, everyone is always afraid of me when they see me, but you can’t see, so please, please, please, don’t be afraid of me. I want to be your friend.

Charlotte asks, why are people afraid of you. Are you a monster?

Claudia thinks about Charlotte’s question for a moment, then answers, maybe I am.

Claudia’s father is late getting home, and the accident is just hours away.

Her father travels extensively for his business and is frequently away from home for days at a time. When he is at home, one of Claudia’s favorite pastimes is to sit with her father in his big, highbacked velvet chair in the library and take turns reading to one another. They started this particular habit back before Claudia could even read, when it was just her father reading and her listening. Her participation started with her making up stories, just pretending to read, and slowly progressed as she learned to read.

Her mother doesn’t join in with them, not that Claudia minds. It is her special time just with her father, and her mother is always too busy to participate anyway, cooking, cleaning and keeping the house in order. She is concerned though, that her father seems to be enjoying their reading times less and less recently. Rather than complimenting Claudia on how well she reads and how big she is getting, he is more likely lately to fidget and complain that she is getting too big to comfortably sit in the chair with him, and that the stories she chooses are too mature for her, or simply too filled with romance and silly feminine ideas to be proper for a young girl.

She hopes to shift that tendency tonight. Tonight, she has pulled down one of her father’s treasured books, a first edition by Dickens, and has it set reverently next to his chair, along with his pipe, filled with his special tobacco.

When her father does finally come through the door, hours after Claudia and her mother had expected him, he is in a bad mood, ranting about the imbeciles he is forced to employ and the equally incompetent fools that are supposedly running the government, though never to his liking or advantage.

Claudia’s mother says that he is ‘in a rage’ when he is like this, and she has warned Claudia to never do anything to upset him more when he is ‘in a rage’.

While her father is yelling at her mother that their dinner is cold, and why the hell is she just standing there, go warm it up, Claudia runs to the library to get the Dickens novel and her father’s pipe, sure that sitting and reading one of his favorite stories is just the remedy he needs right now to relax and to forget about all his worries.

She knows he doesn’t approve of running in the house, so she makes sure to walk as she comes back into the dining room. Her mother has retreated to the kitchen to rewarm whatever they were meant to have for dinner, and her father is pacing about, grumbling under his breath. He stops his pacing and watches as his daughter crosses the room to him, book in one hand and pipe in the other, held out to him as peace offerings, or perhaps reminders of happier times.

Her father looks down at what she is holding, then up and into her face with a startled expression. She smiles at him, but says nothing. Her gesture shouldn’t need any explanation.

 A smile starts to bloom on his face, only to evolve to a sneer. His ranting resumes, now focused on Claudia. Who told you that you could touch my books… I suppose you’ve been pawing through all my belongings… look at the mess you’ve made with my valuable tobacco… ruined and will likely have to be thrown out!

Claudia stands frozen in place, her arms still absurdly outstretched and imploring her now raging father to read with her, her smile having disappeared to be replaced by a look of confusion that is quickly dwindling to regret. She has been spared the experience of the physical side of her father’s wrath so far in her short life, so she is more disappointed than afraid.

But as she turns to retreat to the library, in the hopes of somehow undoing what she has done wrong, she sees her mother, also frozen but stiff with fear. She stands in the archway, holding a pot with oven mitts, steam rising from its contents.

From behind her, Claudia hears her father’s voice, eerily calm now, but menacing nonetheless.

“You allowed this to happen. Upstairs. Now.”

Without a word, her mother sets the dish on the table and mounts the stairs toward the bedrooms, her father following closely in her wake.

Left alone, Claudia’s disappointment rises back through confusion, but turns towards anger now. She has waited days and days for her father to return, has planned their special time together, all to be thrown aside with barely any notice. She doesn’t know exactly what her father and mother do when he is mad and they go upstairs, but she knows that her mother doesn’t like it. Still, it is time they spend together that her father could be spending with her.

Claudia looks at the book and the pipe she holds, and though she doesn’t completely understand why, she wants to break them. She goes back into the library, goes and sits in her father’s big chair, even though she isn’t allowed to without him. She doesn’t care.

A box of matches sits underneath the smoking stand. Claudia has never struck a match before, but she has seen her father do it on many occasions. She opens the Dickens novel, dumps a good pile of tobacco on the pages, and tries to light it on fire. It takes her several tries to get a match lit, and several lit matches before the book catches. As it starts to spread deeper into the pages and the tobacco finally lights, the smoke starts to get thicker. Claudia tries to lean back into the chair and escape the smoke, but it makes her cough, and her coughs send the burning bits of tobacco aloft. Some of them drift back down and land unseen on her dress and on the chair.

Still coughing, her eyes blurry with fumes, Claudia kicks out at the stand, pushing the worst of the flames away from her by a few inches, but closer toward the bookshelves. Her eyes are still burning a moment later when she first feels the heat from her burning dress. 

Her father rushes into the room after hearing his daughter’s screams, the smoking stand now a flaming torch, propped against one of the bookcases. He grabs the heavy woolen rug from the floor and uses it to smother the flames, keeping the fire from spreading further and saving the house and most of his book collection. If he had done the same for his daughter when he first rushed in, he might have saved her life.

Claudia has known for many years, that the person she calls her mother now is not really her mother anymore, but rather her ghost. Her mother killed herself a month after Claudia died. Strangely, Claudia does not know that she herself is a ghost, but believes that she is a heavily scarred little girl who just happens to never age, never needs to eat or really sleep, and who never, ever leaves Meadowburne Lane.

 Claudia remembers some of her real life, little to none of what has happened to her in the house on Meadowburne Lane over the last sixty years, except for the incidents with Billy and Valerie. Incidents and accidents are easily remembered, seared into memory with pain, disappointment and loneliness. Claudia remembers the day of the accident in perfect detail.

Claudia and Charlotte become good friends, secret friends. They create new memories over the next couple years together. These are good memories, imprinted with friendship and contentment. These are new kinds of memories for Claudia.

But Charlotte is growing older, and unfortunately, Claudia is not. Charlotte is finding new interests that don’t include her secret friend.

Charlotte is starting to remember the loneliness, and that makes her mad. And Charlotte never forgot how to strike a match.