Boy Next Door: Part 2

By PENELOPE TODD

Now there were lighter footfalls on the gravel driveway, on wood. I dressed as fast as I could. I brushed my hair into an elastic and headed for the door.

'Hey, what's with the early start?' Dad was in the kitchen already.

'I've got to check something.'

Saturdays I usually lie in bed till Dad brings me a cup of sweet tea. But it's not every day someone moves in next door.

Outside the sun shone between the tall flats over the road and flared along our path, lighting the first red and gold leaves in the cherry tree. Six steps from the back door I knelt at the hedge. When I was small I could walk straight through this gap they kept trimmed open, to visit Gwen. The leaves had grown back now so I had to crawl in. I held my breath against the crackle of twigs. Breathed out. Perfect. A hedgehog's view of the front door and the removal truck with its big jaw flopped open.

And a boy, stepping blind down the rap, chin thrust back by the cardboard box he hugged to himself. Steering himself by the rusted gutter that sagged like a dirty collar around the house.

I could just make out the green scrawl on the box: Joe's Junk. Joe. Checked shirt almost to his knees, sleeves rolled on thin pale arms. Purple basketball boots unlaced under long shorts. A flop of blonde hair, slits for eyes, concentrating. Fierce. He was biting the edge of the box now, manoeuvring round the doorstep.

Gone.

I heard Joe's feet creak through the kitchen, die away in the hall. Dad called it my second home when Gwen lived there so I knew every bit of it.

He'd be going down the side passage now, up the three steps to her room. Gwen used to let jasmine grow in through her window so it wouldn't shut all the way. Since she'd gone to the nursing home a year ago it seemed like the house had slumped into the driveway.

When Gwen died at the start of summer I took a long coil of jasmine to the funeral, and Dad came up with me to put it on her coffin.

Last month there'd been a scurry of real estate people; an ambush of agents, Dad said, and now, suddenly, someone was moving in. One boy about my age. Thirteen, maybe less.

Publisher: Longacre Press

Price: $16.95

Age group: 9-13 years


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