Then, last Tuesday, a moving truck the color of a bruised plum parked outside.
Heat flooded my cheeks. “I don’t stare.”
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.
“Come sit,” Jack Radley Rafael said. “I don’t bite.” My Neighbor-s Son PART 1 - Jack Radley Rafael...
“You’re the girl from 42,” he said. His voice was low, rougher than I expected. “The one who pretends not to stare.”
“Sure.” He took a drag from the cigarette, exhaled a plume of smoke that curled up like a question. “Then why are you out here at two a.m., Lena?”
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. Then, last Tuesday, a moving truck the color
I watched from my window as they unloaded: a worn leather armchair, stacks of books in crates, a guitar case with a cracked latch, and boxes labeled Fragile – Records in sharp, angry handwriting. The new neighbor was a woman—sharp-shouldered, dark-haired, always smoking on the porch like she was posing for a black-and-white photograph. Her name, I learned from my mother, was Celeste Rafael. She was a pianist. Divorced. And she had a son.
“Bad night,” I admitted.
But tonight was different.
And I knew, with absolute certainty, that was a lie. End of Part 1.
So I ignored him.
I rolled my eyes. I didn’t need friends. I had a plan: finish high school, move to the city, become invisible until then. New people meant questions. Questions meant answers. Answers meant trouble . A tall boy with messy dark curls, always