When No One Is Watching(50)

The question slithers icily down the nape of my neck.

I head up the stairs, just to prove I can. Mommy would have been ashamed at how I’m acting this week, shook by every little thing. One time when I was about eight, I woke her up to tell her a monster was living under my bed. She told me to get the .22 and shoot it, then take my behind to sleep.

I laugh a little at that memory, fortify myself with it.

When I get up to the second landing, there’s silence behind Drea’s door. Usually when she’s home, there’s music or humming, or just the thrum of her energy—the same thing that first drew me into the light of her friendship.

“Dre?” I knock. Silence.

I turn the knob.

It opens.

The apartment is sticky with humidity and smells of sage, coconut, and shea butter. Everything in the living room fits Drea’s personal color palette—yellow, teal, and orange, bathing you in brightness as soon as you step through the door.

The late-afternoon light from the sun setting behind the buildings across the street spears into the apartment, pinning down Drea’s belongings around the apartment: the altar with a half-burnt sage bundle and various crystals; the heart-shaped couch pillow I cross-stitched her name into during our home economics class; her college diploma, framed with a photo of me, her, and Mommy at her graduation.

A door slams down the hallway again and I jump, then breathe a sigh of relief. One of the best parts of her apartment layout is she gets the bomb cross-breeze, but if she doesn’t put a doorstop under her bedroom door, it’ll slam and open, slam and open.

I head back to her bedroom, pushing the door open and sliding the wooden triangle under it with my foot. The color scheme in here is different—all white and purple. I head over to her window; her polka-dot curtains flap in my face from the breeze but then go still after I shut the window.

She must have been home at some point today if her window is open . . .

My body tenses. This is where her air conditioner should be. Her brand-new air conditioner. There’s no reason for there to be a cross-breeze because this window shouldn’t be open.

My head starts to spin a little and I realize I’m not breathing. My brain is too busy trying to piece everything together, and has forgotten basic functions.

I have to get out of here. The air conditioner is gone, Drea didn’t tell me she was moving it, and anyone could’ve come in from the fire escape. They could be in here right now.

I start to dash out of the room, but a dark stain on Drea’s white duvet catches my eye and I skid to a halt.

Dried blood is dark like that.

I walk slowly toward the bed, heart in my throat and the fear threatening to blot out any sense I have left. Then the stain moves.

Tiny flecks of it crawl around the edges, and this time it’s not my mind playing tricks on me.

It’s not blood. It’s a clump of bedbugs.

A ripple of repulsion passes over my skin, leaving itchiness in its wake.

I run for a giant plastic bag from under the kitchen sink, force myself to ball the duvet up around the mass of bugs, and shove it into the bag, then run it outside after double-bagging it four times over.

I don’t think as I’m doing it, or feel. I’m on autopilot, just like last time . . .

I don’t know how much time passes after that. I search every crevice of her bed, her floorboards, her closet, but find no other evidence of the bugs.

I start to shove her clothes into bags to be heat-treated, but it’s too much.

I’m overwhelmed and she might not appreciate me all up in her stuff, especially since she already thinks I’m unhealthily obsessed with the bedbugs. I didn’t take a picture. By the time she comes home, I’m going to look like a maniac who threw away her favorite duvet out of spite.

She’s already suggesting therapy and I need to calm down. I don’t think she would hurt me purposely, like Marcus did, but the bite of restraints against my wrists isn’t something I want to feel again.

I place her clothes back into their cubbyholes and try to get the closet back to the neat state it was in before I tore through it looking for bedbugs. When I have it back in order, I pick up a few slips of paper that drifted out from the bottom-left cubby.

A receipt from the old Foodtown that’s currently being renovated so it can be reopened as a Whole Foods–type supermarket. A phone number and smiley face scrawled on a ripped scrap of paper with a blue ballpoint pen. An ATM deposit slip for fifty thousand dollars.

Fifty thousand dollars.

Drea tells me about all her side hustles, and especially if they pay even remotely well.

Fifty thousand dollars. What would pay that well and in a lump sum?

But this was from around the time I was in the deepest shit with Marcus. Maybe I’d forgotten, or she hadn’t wanted to rub it in while I was suffering. Yeah, that makes sense.

There’s a scan of the check itself on the receipt, which is dated from before I’d returned home. The name of the company it was issued by is hard to read at first, or maybe I just don’t want to see it, but it’s all too familiar to me.

I stare at it for a long moment, trying to reconcile it with what I know of the company. Drea would never . . .

She would never.

She’ll explain when she gets back. Of course there’s an explanation.

I march mindlessly back to the apartment downstairs and barricade myself in my bedroom with a bottle of wine and my cell phone. I wrap my hands in socks to keep from hurting myself as I scratch at imagined bugs crawling over my skin, and I jump at imaginary flecks of black just out of my line of sight. I can’t distract myself with TV because I need to hear if there are any more noises in the building, but I take a sip every time the possibility of what that check means pops into my mind.