“Kensington! Come downstairs! Your sandwich is ready!”

We’ve been in the suburbs—no, the country!—for less than six hours, and already my mom has morphed into some form of June Cleaver. I half expect to walk down the steps and see her in one of those poufy A-line dresses with a pretty bow cinched about her waist. 

She’s been walking on eggshells with me ever since we handed over the keys to our old home. I didn’t want to move here. Nothing about this move is about me though. And that’s why my mom is playing up the nice. Not that she isn’t normally nice. Normally, she isn’t really there at all. Mom’s the head nurse practitioner at a major hospital in Chicago. Dad’s a conductor and a music professor in Milwaukee. He was just promoted to the head of the department. So we moved here…to the middle. Woodstock—exactly halfway between the two. “An ideal and convenient location,” everyone said. 

Convenient. 

Far.

Lonely.

My two best girlfriends are starting their first day of senior year at Bryce Academy today. My old school. In the city. I wanted to stay. Mom didn’t like me taking the train on my own, though. So I’ll have to live vicariously through the pictures and texts they send. This morning’s was a shot of Gaby frowning by my old locker. Morgan tried to get her face in the shot too, but all I caught was her ear. She was terrible at taking selfies. I miss them. But there’s some strange comfort in visual proof that they miss me too.

It’s hot here in the summer—hotter than in the city. There are more bugs, and the grass is itchy. It’s green everywhere, and I’m not really used to that either. The houses all seem…old. Everyone has a front porch, and driveways that stretch into these enormous garages that sometimes aren’t even attached to the houses at all. That’s going to suck when it snows. 

“Kensington!” Mom yells again, her voice less bubbly than before. The edge in her tone makes my lip tick up into a faint smile; I prefer her being real. 

“I’m coming!” I yell, sending a quick heart image message to my two friends, then shoving my phone into my back pocket. I pause at the stairs to look out over the vast emptiness that is my new home. Our things are trickling in, but everything seems swallowed up by this house. It’s not like the brownstone we lived in just south of Wrigley. Everything there was tight, and cramped, but it all had its place. Everything was at home. I was at home. 

And now I’m here. 

“Put the piano in the dining room…yes…about there. Perfect. Thank you,” my mom says, quickly removing the sheets and pads from my piano. I think she thinks unveiling it quickly will somehow make me happy, like she’s just pulled a bouquet or chocolates out of a hat.

“Where are we supposed to eat?” I ask, looking at my piano as it sits squarely under the dated, brass chandelier of our new dining room—like the world’s cheapest spotlight. I had a practice room before, in our old house. Nothing fancy, just a door that I could close anytime I wanted. 

I miss that door.

“We have a breakfast bar in the kitchen. It’s fine. It looks nice there, doesn’t it?” she asks without really asking. She walks back to the kitchen, her half-eaten sandwich dangling from her hand. 

I think my piano looks stupid there. I think it looks stupid anywhere but in its home back in Chicago. But this isn’t really about what I think, so I keep my mouth shut and follow my mom’s footsteps into the kitchen where a ham sandwich sits alone on a gigantic white plate. The wastefulness amuses me, and I lift my sandwich, brush away the single crumb, and put the perfectly clean plate in the dishwasher.

“Thanks,” I say, holding it up and taking a bite. Mom purses her lips, but she goes back to her lunch in front of her computer at the counter.

My mom finishes her sandwich quickly and without much conversation, then begins carrying boxes from the garage to various rooms around the house. Everything has a label: TOWELS, DISHES, CLEANING SUPPLIES, MOVIES, and KENSI for the few boxes that go to my room. I haven’t been called Kensi or Kens out loud in years. I miss that too. 

The kitchen has more boxes than I do; most of my things are still in the back of the Honda. My music books were already here and waiting for us when we unlocked the doors this morning. Dad brought them on his way to the office, afraid they’d get misplaced or damaged during the move. I could never say this to him, but there are only a few pages in that box that I really care about—the ones with notes I wrote, for me, for my ears and heart to hear.

I’ve been playing the piano since I was about three. My grandmother left my mother her old piano when she died, and I somehow knew what to do with it the moment the movers left it in our home. I couldn’t reach the pedals, and my fingers barely spread far enough to strike a chord, but I could hear something and instantly mimic the sound. Music came to me before most of my words, and my father was quick to nurture my gift. 

Dad plays brass instruments, so he always sought out the help of others to instruct me. My first music teacher was no longer able to teach me after a year, and I outgrew the next by the time I was ten. I’ve been studying with Chen ever since. He’s a music composition professor at the University of Chicago and has scored many of the independent shows that play in the theaters downtown. My father hired him to give me private lessons, to challenge me and make it impossible for the best programs in the country to ignore me and “my gift.” But what my father doesn’t know is that when Chen comes over—while he’s not at home—we play jazz. 

Now that we’re out of the city, I’ll only be able to see Chen once a month, unless I take the train into Chicago on my own. My dad expects me to step up my independent playing. He even went as far as to make sure my extra periods at school were all time in the music room. 

I think of everything I miss because of this move, my afternoon jazz with Chen is what I lament the most. It’s been replaced by a gilded light fixture and a soaring ceiling that will make my playing echo out into the streets. It will be impossible to run away from the sounds my fingers will be forced to make. But I will practice, and I’ll play the Bachs and the Mozarts and the Beethovens—those seemingly impossible songs that have become habits for my hands. I’ll practice because that’s what my father expects, and if I meet his expectations, he’ll support my decision to study in New York or…or Paris or London or Rome. Anywhere…but here. 

And then, I’ll be free.

Unable to avoid reality any longer, I finally give in and venture to the driveway and the open hatch in the back of the Honda where most of my belongings still rest in taped-up cardboard boxes. My clothes are all stuffed into pillowcases; the wrinkles will have to be dealt with later. 

With the last box wedged between my hip and the bumper, I reach up to slam the hatch closed again. The dark pair of eyes staring at me from the other side of the car make me jump—effectively dropping my boxes to the ground, spilling clothes and books and random trinkets from my girlfriends. 

On instinct, I bend down to gather everything back into my arms, expecting help with my now disorganized load. Instead, I hear the steady drumming of a basketball along the pavement, and when I bend down just a little lower, I see his gray Converse slide slowly away from me, up our driveway toward the garage. 

“Unbelievable,” I whisper to myself as I stand with only half of my things, relenting the fact that I’m now going to have to make two trips. My red sweater is barely clinging to my grip, one sleeve dragging along the ground as I cross the driveway to my backdoor. My new neighbor keeps his back to me the entire time, his focus on the slow dribble of his ball. I give him a good long stare as I push my ass into the door a few times, my free fingers fumbling for the handle, desperate to get it open. 

“Thanks for helping,” I whisper again, following it up with the word asshole in my head. 

Suddenly, his dark eyes are on mine, and I would swear he heard me with the smug smirk that creeps into one cheek. The ball never stops moving. His hand never stops moving. He’s operating completely independent of the hypnosis he’s attempting to put me under—the soft squint to his eyes somehow making them more ominous. I’m not quite sure he isn’t evil. And I’m also not quite sure that this hypnosis isn’t working.

A gift, the door behind me unhinges and I stumble backward inside, somehow catching my balance so I don’t make a complete ass out of myself in front of mister darkness. 

I race upstairs quickly, tossing my pile of things on my bed without care, hurrying to the window to orient myself with exactly what my view is in relationship to the driveway. With one push of the curtain, I know. 

His eyes are right back to me, almost as if he were expecting me to look—expecting me to find him. The damned smirk on his face is still there, and my heart is thumping away at my stomach, not so much from flutters…as panic. The ball is still in motion, and I can’t help but beg myself to remember the sight of him, so I can think about it later and decide if he’s really as scary as my instincts tell me he is. 

His white T-shirt V-necks, and the sleeves hug his biceps. He’s wearing long black basketball shorts, and his hair is short, but long enough on top for the strands to twist in various directions. From a distance, he’s a really good-looking guy. But I have a feeling—and a fear—that it’s his eyes that hold the power. From fifteen feet up and fifty feet away, they literally smolder. If I weren’t such a social pariah, I would march back down the stairs and introduce myself. I’d ask him why he’s dribbling a ball in my driveway, using the hoop bolted to the eave of our garage. But my feet are stuck to the carpet of my new bedroom, and my hands are burning from the roughness of the curtains my hand is now squeezing. 

When I think I can’t handle much more, his lip twitches, and then he blows me a kiss and turns around to shoot the ball into the hoop. 

What. The. Hell. Was. That?

I let go of my grip on the curtain and fall to my knees, wishing there was some way I could erase the last five minutes of my life. Instead, I slide so my back is against the window’s wall, so I can’t see him, only hear the rhythmic thump of the basketball for the next twenty minutes.

When I feel safe enough to look again, I crawl to my knees and peel the curtain fabric back an inch. The hoop is quiet. The driveway is quiet. Now is my chance.

Racing to the driveway, I scoop up the remaining things that I left there before and close the hatch to the car. I don’t glance at his house, and I don’t dwell long enough to know anything for certain. But I am positive that the front door was open—the inside of the house barely hidden behind a thin porch screen. 

And I’m pretty sure my mystery neighbor from hell was standing there…watching.