Only Child(19)
Andy read all the Harry Potter books in first grade. Daddy always tells that to everyone, and I can tell he’s really proud about that. I tried to read the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, because I’m also in first grade now and I wanted Daddy to tell proud stories about me, too, but the book had a scary picture on the front and a lot of hard words. Andy made fun of me because it took me like half an hour to read two pages, so I stopped.
I found the On switch on the robot arm and flipped it up. I tried to get the claw to pick up a pencil from Andy’s desk, but it was hard, and the claw kept dropping the pencil. Then I thought I heard a sound on the stairs like someone was coming up, so I turned it off really fast. If Daddy was coming up, he would probably get mad at me because I was in Andy’s room touching his stuff. I saw Andy’s closet door was open, so I went inside and pulled the door closed, but not all the way.
I almost couldn’t hear the party sounds in the closet. Andy’s closet is really big, such a waste for a boy, Mommy says. Andy didn’t put his clothes away. There was a big messy pile of clothes on the floor behind the hamper. I put the clothes in the hamper and walked all the way in, behind the handsome shirts and the jackets that were hanging up, and there was a whole space in the back. It was dark back here, but I could see Andy’s sleeping bag rolled up in the corner of the closet, and I sat down on it. I sat really still and my heart was beating at super speed and I was waiting to see if Daddy was going to find me, but nothing happened.
I sat on the sleeping bag roll and then I thought about how yesterday I was in the closet in my classroom, so now it was two days in a row that I was sitting in a closet. I never sat in a closet before today and yesterday, because closets are not for hanging out, they’re for putting stuff away.
And there’s not a lot of space in closets, which I don’t like. I get scared in smushy places. Sometimes Andy puts a blanket over my head only because he knows how much I hate that. He holds it tight and laughs when I start feeling scared and try to get him off me, but he’s too strong. And on elevators Andy always makes jokes like “Hey, scaredy-cat, I know this one’s going to get stuck! We will be stuck in here for like days with nothing to eat, and we’ll have to go to the bathroom right in here!” He keeps talking like that until Mommy tells him to stop, and then he makes faces like he’s dying behind her back.
Daddy got stuck on the elevator at his office once and he wasn’t scared, but other people next to him were. Daddy said it was funny because they were only stuck for a few minutes, so what did they even get scared about? But I don’t think that’s funny. I would get scared, too. Andy calls me a scaredy-cat all the time, and he’s actually a little right about that. I get scared a lot about different things, especially at bedtime or in the middle of the night. It’s stupid that it’s like that. Sometimes I wish I could be more brave like Andy and Daddy. They’re never scared of anything.
When I started thinking about what happened yesterday when the gunman came, I wanted to get up and get out of the closet, because my body started to feel exactly the same as yesterday with my heart beating fast. I was breathing too fast and it made me dizzy. But I couldn’t get up for some reason. It was like my body was all hard and frozen from being so scared. I wished Daddy would come and open the closet door and find me, and that was the same as yesterday, too, when I was wishing that Daddy would come.
But Daddy and nobody else came, and I kept sitting there with my frozen body, listening for sounds. But it stayed very quiet. I put my hand in the pocket of my pants and took out the angel wing charm Miss Russell gave me, and I rubbed it in between my fingers. “Love and protection,” I thought in my head. I started to feel better. My heart started to slow down and my breathing calmed down.
“No one is coming,” I whispered, and it was strange that I was talking to myself and no one was here to hear it, not even Clancy. But it also felt good, like one part of me was talking to another part of me, and it helped me calm down. So I kept whispering: “There’s nothing even scary in here. It’s just Andy’s closet, and it’s not really that tight in here.”
I unrolled Andy’s sleeping bag and spread it out and sat on it crisscross applesauce. I looked around and it was hard to see in the dark. There were only a lot of dusty fluffy things in the corners and some of Andy’s socks but nothing else. It was like a secret space in the house that no one knew about except me. “Secret hideout,” I whispered into the closet. “This is going to be my top secret hideout.” I started to like sitting in the quiet and listening to my breathing: in—air up my nose—out through my mouth with a puff, in, out, slow now, because I wasn’t really that scared anymore.
When I let myself think about yesterday, the scared feeling came back, so I tried not to let those thoughts float around in my brain anymore. “Get out of my brain, bad thoughts!” I pretended like there was a safe in the back of my head like the one Daddy has in his office where he keeps important papers so no one can steal them, and I pushed the bad thoughts into my brain safe. “Zip it, lock it, put it in your pocket.”
I liked that I was in here and no one in the party knew where I was. I could come in here all the time now because Andy wasn’t here anymore and he couldn’t yell at me anymore and tell me to get out.
I started to think about how it was going to be without Andy—it was going to be better at home. There wouldn’t be any more fighting, and I was going to be the only child in the family, so Mommy and Daddy could do a lot more stuff with just me. Like they could both come to my piano recitals and they could both stay for the whole time. That never happened before—because of Andy. At the spring recital, Daddy couldn’t come because Andy had lacrosse practice, and at the summer one, right before school started, the whole family did come, Mommy, Daddy, and Andy, but before it was even my turn to play my song, “Für Elise,” Mommy had to get up and leave with Andy because he was behaving bad.