Troubled kids and silent neighbours

“It’s mine” The yelling and the thumping stop and he turns around and fixates me with a stupefied look, only just realizing that I was in that room too. 

“It’s mine, I mean it,” I say again, not sure if it was him who needed more persuasion, or me. “I didn’t mean to cause any trouble”.

His jaw clenches, as if he’s disappointed that it was me who brought the pot, and not his son. His left temple is twitching and the look in his eye sends shivers down my back. It evinces violence and for the first time, I feel lucky to be a girl. From everything that I gathered about him after years of friendship with Dennis, he was an egotistic brute, but it is exactly his idea of toxic masculinity that would stop him from pushing me, a girl, into the wall. Had he possessed any moral compass, Dennis’s left hand wouldn’t be shivering right now. 

“You do know that marijuana is strictly prohibited in this country and I could take you down to the police station right now? That I could have you expelled from high school? Have you working in a shoe factory or as a janitor for the rest of your life?”

Jesus, way to escalate things! And yes, his inflated sense of self most likely came from being a policeman in a country where you’re a good citizen based on whether you manage to raise your kid to become an engineer or a doctor. 

“Yes, sir”

“Do you do drugs?”

“No, sir”

“Let me look at your eyes. Open ‘em!”

He grabs my chin and pushes my head upward. His fingers smell like tobacco and like the cheap, worn-out leather that some old cars still have on their steering wheel. 

“Dad, please - ” 

“Don’t you dare open that mouth!” he turned around to Dennis, right arm still hurting my face, and yelled so loudly, we both trembled with surprise.

 Now I knew that his neighbors, at least those who lived on the same floor, were aware of his parenting style. They all knew him as the laudable member of the community who often took the word in administration meetings and councils to further the tenants’ rights. So their silence in front of the occasional screaming and crying and thumping coming from within his walls was nothing more than their approval of his ways, their shared belief that a child needs strong guidance, that sometimes guidance can come at the cost of a bruised arm, that it will all be worth it and the child will be grateful when he’ll have his own money and a job. Especially if that job is of a doctor or engineer. 

He stares at my pupils for at least 10 seconds and then lets go of me. 

I try to catch Denis’s eye but he doesn’t lift his gaze from the ground.

“Do you want to go to prison, young lady?” Again he asks so loudly, I need a few seconds to truly comprehend his words. 

“Answer my question. Do you want to go to prison?”

“No, sir” 

“Good. I deal with kids like you every day, you know”

That’s a lie. I’m 16 in a 20,000 inhabitants town that everybody leaves when they turn 18, so he probably sees more drugs in movies than in teenagers’ pockets. 

He lights himself a cigarette and finally starts talking in a normal tone. 

“I always let them easy the first time. Most of them, anyway. Because you’re friends with my son, I won’t question you on where you have it from”

Denis’s shoulders loosen up a little. 

“But keep in mind, you’re on my list”

He turns around, grabs the rolling paper and the plastic lid the weed was in, and fits them in his fist. 

“I’ll keep these. You are no longer welcome in this house”

My stomach aches as if it just shrunk to the size of a bullet. 

“Now go before I change my mind” he barks. 

I grab my coat from the hanger and seek for Denis’s eyes one last time. His face was sallow and that’s when I realized that I barely made anything better, that his dad’s appetite for discipline was not fulfilled by bawling at me two times and sending me home.

The second the door of the apartment closes, I start running and don’t stop until I’m out of the building. Once in the street, tears start coming down my face. The gray sky is making the bleak communist buildings blend in with the horizon, creating the sensation that they have no end and no beginning, that no matter how fast I tried to run, they would still be around me, with their crooked balconies and their silent neighbors. 

I wondered if he was going to call my mom and tell her about the whole thing. If he did, it would be better for me to confess first, to be in control of the story and earn my mom’s sympathy before Denis’s dad portrays me as a delinquent in her ear. But something tells me he views himself so highly, he thinks his little intervention was enough to “put me back on track”. 

My mom was not that much different from Dennis’s dad though. They grew up during the same times after all. Actually, what I meant is: they were utterly different, but their parenting styles weren’t. Denis’s dad was a narrow-minded barbarian with a hero complex, that praised himself for having principles and life experiences. My mom was just a single parent who didn’t even want kids in the first place. 

*** 

I haven’t spoken to Dennis in six years. 

After that night, he started avoiding me at school, taking a different route home than the one we used to walk together. I’m sure his dad had forbidden him to spend time with me, but I still found it hard to believe that could be the only reason he left things like that. He could have texted me or left me a note in my pencil case when I was outside the classroom. In fact, he had hidden many things from his dad in the past, such as parties or bad grades that he later managed to fix by charming our teachers. After all, you don’t grow up in a household like his without learning how to lie and conceal. 

Six years ago, he was my only friend. His cutting me off without a word wrecked me. Not only had I lost the one person I could talk to, but I didn’t even know why. When you are used to being around someone that is supposed to be loving but is instead cruel and unpredictable, you learn to blame yourself a lot. So I cried myself to sleep for two months on an end, wondering why he suddenly decided to walk home from school with the two girls standing at the front-row desk.

Shortly after that, I started hating romantic fiction. My mom strongly disapproved of contemporary books, or books that she labeled as “easy” or for “dumb teenagers”; maybe she did have a superiority complex after all. So I would read fantasy and romance long after she had gone to bed, and often using my phone’s flashlight; I would wake up exhausted for school the next day, often dozing off during whatever classes we had between 8 and 10 am, but none of that mattered.

 However, once Dennis deemed me as no longer worthy of his company, as I saw things back then, I stopped reading romance. Because in any book I’d read, instead of having to see him every day, looking the other way whenever I sought for his eyes, he would have trusted me, would have felt drawn to me now that we had an intimate bond, now that “I knew his darkness and he knew mine”. 

Three years of therapy, of soul-searching, of being vulnerable with people, of being emotionally available for others, of having my stomach twist at the remembrance of things I would have rather forgotten, three years of work with myself have led me to believe he was ashamed, and I would have reminded him of that shame every day. Of course, they have also helped me realize that I’m a good person, that people’s strong negative reactions are about them, not me, and that I never truly hated romantic novels. 

Six years ago, he was my only friend. So when I saw a Facebook post saying that his dad had just died, I got on a plane from London that same night. 

Two days later, I am carrying a stunning bouquet through the gates of the church the funeral is taking place. There are about fifty people in the church’s yard, all dressed in black according to custom and holding lit candles. 

I have no idea how he will react when he will see me here, four years since graduation, and thus four years since we last saw each other. All I have in mind is the old saying my grandma once told me: “You become an adult the day you have to see your parent die”. No one should be alone on a day like that. 

I leave the bouquet on the designated table. In the middle of all those flowers, surrounded by candles, there’s a portrait of Dennis’s dad, and his policeman uniform lays folded in front of it. His eyes are dark but tenacious. There’s something sacred about paying your respects to the dead, because, despite everything, I can’t gather any resentment towards this man, but rather find his photo very charismatic.  

I hear hurried steps coming my way. Two strong arms capture me in a tight hug. 

“I’m so glad you’re here” 

Tears come to my eyes. 

“I am very sorry for your loss. I meant to call, but I just - ”

He puts an arm around my shoulder. He looks pale and tired, his cheekbones rougher, but overall unchanged. 

“Come, let’s get you to meet my mom”

*** 

Hours later, we’re smoking a joint on the top of a hill that borders our town to the north. It used to be a popular destination for teens to hang out as soon as they got their driver’s licenses. Now I hear they prefer some new coffee shops and pubs in the town center. 

 Dennis went to business school. He took a gap year when his dad fell sick but ended up using half of it to travel with his ex-girlfriend because his dad didn’t want him around. Laura and he broke up two months ago. 

“I think it’s very ironic, you know, you and I smoking pot here on the night of his funeral”

What was once a major event in my life is now a distant memory, but still manages to make my cheeks burn. 

“In a way, yeah” I shrug. 

“He didn’t buy it, that night. That you were the one who brought it in”

“What? Really?”

“Come on, Lisa, you’ve always looked like an inoffensive fairy or something”

“Oh, so you think fairies are so chill and jolly all the time for no particular reason”

He laughs. 

“He called me a coward, you know, for letting you take the blame like that” 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make things worse for you”

“Don’t be. The old man was an idiot, but he was right on this one; I shouldn’t have let you take it upon yourself to keep me out of trouble”

“You were scared. We both were”

He nods. 

“We were sixteen for God’s sake!”

“Sixteen!” he cried almost in disbelief. 

We both start laughing. The pot is probably starting to kick in, and images of my teenage years start sprinting through my head. 

“That couldn’t have been easy on you either, explaining to your mom that you suddenly have a drug problem”

“That’s exactly how she would have seen it, I think - that I’m with one foot into dropping out of school or getting pregnant or -” 

“Or starting an armed robbery gang” 

I laugh again, my mouth a little too eager to remain open. 

“Yeah, exactly. No need for a discussion, for an opportunity for me to speak like an actual person when she could just freak out and engage in unlimited self-pity. ”

“Sounds like a blast.” He scoffs. “And yet - ”

“And yet, your dad never called. I wondered why, back then, but now that you told me he never believed I did it, it all makes sense.”

“I was never sure that he wouldn’t just do it out of pure evil.”

 “Well, I’m glad he didn’t. And…I’m sorry…that you had to go through ..whatever the consequences of that night were”

“Don’t be. If he hadn’t shouted in my ear “Coward” and other, less cultivated words until I stopped hearing his abhorrent bark because the buzzing in my ears got louder than his yelling, I would have probably become a darn engineer ”

“You? You do remember I used to tutor you in maths, don’t you?”

“Even more so”

We laugh again, this time less loudly, but in a more relaxed way. The sun is setting, leaving rusty trails across the sky. The lights of the town are starting to show, faintly at first, but gaining intensity as the world grows darker. From up here, you could see the red and blue lights of the town council, the high school’s building, the general hospital, the river that parts the settlement in two, and of course, those stark, smoky remnants of the socialist era. 

High on the feeling of seeing my hometown through a new set of eyes, I lay my head on Dennis’s shoulder. He puts his hand around my waist and tucks me in the warmth of his chest, and we just stay there, not quite in the past, but not quite in the future either.