Page 3 of Finders Keepers

The last time I lived in this room, I knew it was temporary.

I had plans—so many plans—to get out of Catoctin, to do big things, to succeed.

Now I basically have to start over again, and I do not currently have the wherewithal to figure out how to go about doing that.

It’s possible I will still be here when I’m fifty, sleeping alone in this loud, too-small bed.

That thought, however melodramatic, makes my pulse race and my stomach drop.

No way can I let that happen. I quickly add, “You can leave the boxes in the trunk. No point in hauling them in just to have to haul them back out in a few days.”

Dad gives a short hum of acknowledgment and a murmured goodbye as he leaves my room, almost certainly heading back to his basement workshop to fiddle with some rotary telephone or Swiss cuckoo clock he’s repairing for someone or bought at a yard sale to fix up and resell.

I’m left alone, in my childhood bedroom, trying to determine whether it would be more depressing to settle in and unpack or to live out of my suitcase in a state of denial for however long I’ll be here.

Deciding that is a tomorrow-morning problem, I turn on a lamp and throw myself onto the bed.

This place is basically a Teenage Nina Museum.

I’ve been back to my parents’ house since moving away for college, have spent nights here with the debate tournament medals hanging from the doorknob and my collection of burnt CDs stacked precariously beside the massive old purple boom box.

But during those brief visits they felt like someone else’s belongings—artifacts of the person I was before I grew up and left it all behind.

What used to act as a reminder of how far I’d come now feels like a taunt. Not so far after all.

This blows.

I pull out my phone and check my email, my chest aching with the desperate hope that something good might be there.

A surprise job offer, or maybe even an uncharacteristically self-aware and sincere apology from Cole (if I’m going to dream, might as well dream big).

Of course my inbox is actually filled with increasingly desperate-sounding political fundraising emails and promotional messages from the fancy multi-tool store I purchased my dad’s Christmas present from last year.

I’m about to close the app when I hear a quiet thump from the other side of the wall.

My thumb freezes, hovering over my phone screen.

My pulse pounds in my fingertips as I wait in absolute stillness to see if I can pick up any other sounds.

A few seconds later, there’s a louder thump and the whine of a door.

Quentin.

I sit up, tossing my phone onto the bed as an intense urge hits.

I don’t actually want to do it. In fact, a distinct sense of nausea that comes with a particularly severe wave of anxiety takes hold of my stomach as soon as it occurs to me.

Yet I still find myself sliding down onto the floor, sitting beneath the room’s only window.

It’s a reflex, like when the doctor taps at your knee with the little hammer.

It’s as impossible to resist this as it is that involuntary kick.

Embarrassingly, it was such an ingrained habit I even resorted to it a handful of times after Quentin moved away.

Not that anyone answered then. No one will probably answer now.

I breathe deeply—in for four, out for six—and my therapist’s voice returns.

Best, worst, most likely outcomes , she prompts.

Okay, best: Quentin isn’t there at all. In fact, he never existed.

He was just a particularly vivid imaginary friend that I grew out of.

Worst: He’s there, and he wants to talk, but only about how much I suck and/or cryptocurrency.

Most likely: He’s there, and cordial, but we quickly find we don’t have much in common these days and this conversation winds up acting as a sort of unsatisfying closure.

Oof. Honestly, I think you could shuffle all of those outcomes around and they’d still fit whatever heading they wound up under.

Living my life never knowing what would’ve happened if I’d tried, though…that doesn’t feel like a legitimate option. Not when I already have so little left to lose. And even unsatisfying closure would be something . More than it feels like I got from Cole and Malbyrne College.

So. I guess I’m going to talk to the Moon.

The sash is a good twenty-five years old, and it sticks at first, then opens with a banshee-like scream that will probably cause someone to post to the neighborhood Facebook group with speculations that a murder has occurred somewhere on West Dill.

I poke my head out of the screenless opening (it’s absolutely amazing I never fell out of here as a child).

A string of globe lights my parents zigzagged across the concrete patio illuminates our long, narrow backyard.

The other side of the tall dividing fence is darker, but I make out an Adirondack chair and an uncoiled hose—signs of life.

The humidity that lingered when I got here two hours ago is dissipating, and the cooler, early evening breeze reminds me that summer is only just arriving.

A distant car alarm and the sound of kids playing basketball in the alley behind our detached garages are the only evidence that there’s still a world beyond my view.

It’s…soothing, but irritatingly so. Familiar in a way that I want to both embrace and shove away.

Kind of like my mom’s exuberant fawning.

I tilt my head back and look up to the sky where my supposed quarry is swaddled in a wispy cloud, glowing almost eerily.

“This is stupid,” I grumble to myself. Even if Quentin happens to be in his old bedroom right now, surely he’s simply going about whatever business he has in there.

He isn’t kneeling in front of his own window, waiting to chat like the old days.

But I still take a deep breath and send my words out into the blue-black dark.

“Um…Hey, Moon. Been a while, huh?”

The silence that follows feels pitiful. I don’t actually expect a response. I’m not sure I even want one. So why does my heart feel like its beats have been put on hold as I wait?

Then it practically trips in its attempt to catch up again as soon as a familiar-yet-not voice breaks the silence. “Aw haw haw, indeed it has, mon amie.”

I reach up and slam the window shut, barely moving my head out of the way in time.

“Oh my god,” I whisper. It’s him. After all this time.

There’s absolutely no denying it now; even my expert-level ability to delude myself is no match for that offensively bad French accent.

Quentin Bell is once again next door, talking to me from his old bedroom window, only a foot away from my own, thanks to the duplex’s Rorschach inkblot layout.

My breathing is too shallow, the earlier nausea intensifying. I try to make my exhales a few seconds longer than my inhales even though I don’t have the presence of mind to actually count, willing my nervous system to chill the hell out.

Full-blown panic attack averted, I stare at the closed window. Why did I do that? I hoist it open again, wincing at both the ear-piercing screech and the humiliating likelihood that Quentin realizes exactly how flustered I was to hear his voice.

His words are predictably teasing. “You close your window, but you cannot hide from zee Moon. Zee Moon remains in zee sky, whether you are open to receiving its wisdom or not.”

This is painful. Actually, physically painful, because the floor is hard and my stomach hurts, but also emotionally.

Nearly two decades of silence, and now we’re jumping right back in, resuming our childhood games like nothing ever happened.

Like the hurt he left me carrying only exists in my imagination.

At the same time, there’s something comforting in it.

Like maybe, as long as we’re both willing to pretend, time doesn’t really exist. We won’t need to face what transpired or what’s to come.

We can simply drift along in this liminal, goofy space, somewhere between childhood and adulthood.

Somewhere I don’t need to have everything figured out yet.

“I suppose you’re right,” I say. “And since you’re here regardless, I might as well tell you about the weird thing that happened to me earlier.”

“Aw haw, I do love a good story. Oui, go on.”

“I arrived at my parents’ house this evening, and I noticed this guy standing outside on the porch next door. He looked vaguely like someone I used to know, but I told myself that it couldn’t be. No way Quentin Bell grew up to be such a…what’s the right word?”

“Dreamboat? Hunk?”

“Hobbit.”

Laughter floats from his open window into mine, as if the idea of anyone finding him unattractive is the best joke he’s heard in a while.

Collecting all of Quentin’s various laughs was a pastime I thought I gave up many years ago, and yet I find myself turning the pages of a dusty, long-forgotten mental catalog until I land on the entry for this particular, achingly familiar one, listed under When he found out I spread a rumor that he was the grandson of the founder of Taco Bell.

“Aw haw, mon amie, perhaps you saw this man in a bad light. The sun can be harsh and unflattering. I, on the other hand, with my soft, forgiving glow…”