My name is Lena, and I had just turned seventeen. I lived at 42 Maple Street, in the kind of quiet suburban neighborhood where the biggest crime was Mrs. Gable letting her roses choke the sidewalk. The house next door, number 44, had been empty for three years—ever since the old Rafferty woman went to a nursing home. Weeds took over the lawn. The porch swing rusted. I’d grown used to the silence.
“Come sit,” Jack Radley Rafael said. “I don’t bite.”
“He’s your age,” my mother said, peering through the blinds. “Maybe you’ll be friends.” My Neighbor-s Son PART 1 - Jack Radley Rafael...
Tonight, my father had yelled at me for two hours about my “attitude.” Tonight, my chest felt like a clenched fist. I couldn’t sleep. So I did what I always did when the walls felt too close: I slid my window open, swung one leg over the sill, and dropped onto the old oak branch that stretched between our houses.
For three days, I caught glimpses. A tall boy with messy dark curls, always in a faded gray hoodie. He never waved. Never smiled. He just sat on their back steps, sharpening a pocket knife against a whetstone, over and over. Weird , I thought. Stay away. My name is Lena, and I had just turned seventeen
Then, last Tuesday, a moving truck the color of a bruised plum parked outside.
He knew my name.
I froze, half on the branch, one foot on my sill.
Heat flooded my cheeks. “I don’t stare.” The house next door, number 44, had been
And I knew, with absolute certainty, that was a lie. End of Part 1.