Watching You: Part 1 – Chapter 1 – On The Leash

My parents got divorced the summer before senior year.

Everybody kept asking if I was okay.

I was.

They should have done it years earlier. My mother stopped pretending she loved my father sometime around my sophomore year. My father stopped pretending he believed her not long after.

The only thing that actually surprised me was how much quieter the house got once neither of them had to keep performing for the other one anymore.

She asked if I wanted to move with her.

I said no. One year left. No point changing schools.

She nodded too quickly.

My father didn’t argue.

Everybody won.

Three weeks later a moving truck showed up two doors down. I was on the porch.

The dog came out first.

He’d correctly identified the weakest party in the negotiation. His leash was too thin for him, his collar too loose, like whoever bought it had guessed instead of measuring. The leash, frankly, was optimistic. He wasn’t running away.

He’d simply worked out that he could.

I noticed her legs before I noticed her face.

That’s probably shallow. Then again, they started somewhere down at her shoes and seemed determined to reach another postal code entirely, and I remember genuinely thinking they would never end, all the way up to a blue line of fabric that eventually, mercifully, gave up and let them stop.

Then the hair. Past her shoulders, catching the wind before the rest of her caught up to it. I wondered, in the specific stupid way an eighteen-year-old wonders things, what it would feel like. Whether it was as soft as it looked or whether it had that dry, stretchy quality some hair has that photographs better than it feels.

Then everything narrowed down to her eyes.

I couldn’t tell you what color they were. People always want that detail and I’ve never had it to give them. What I remember is the lashes. They were trembling – not blinking, trembling, a small continuous motion like something underneath them hadn’t settled yet.

Eyes don’t shake.

Fear does.

The dog bolted after something. She went after him instead of letting go, which physics did not recommend and she did anyway.

I heard it before I saw it. A short sound. Not a scream.

She landed knee first, then a hand, then her hip took the rest. Hands up before anything else – the body deciding the face is worth saving before the brain’s caught up to the fall.

Then she looked around.

Not at her knee. Around.

I’ve had a long time to think about that look and the closest I’ve gotten is this – she was checking whether it was safe to be embarrassed yet. Whether anyone had seen. Whether somebody nearby needed her to be fine instead of hurt.

Nobody was around.

I was, but she hadn’t found me yet.

She got up on her own. Picked up the leash. Said something to the dog – quiet – and it came out sounding less like a correction than an apology.

She apologized.

For getting hurt.

The dog forgave her immediately. Tail going, no charge, no explanation required. I remember thinking he had a healthier relationship with blame than she did, which is an odd thing to think about a stranger’s dog, but there it is.

Nobody apologizes for getting hurt by accident.

Somebody taught her that.

She went inside. Door closed.

I didn’t knock. New girl, dog, bleeding knee – good excuse, the kind anyone would use without thinking twice. I thought about it and didn’t, because the second she knew someone had seen, she’d start managing what I’d seen instead of just being whatever she actually was.

I didn’t want managed.

The next morning I saw her at the bus stop. She missed it. Didn’t check her phone to complain to anyone. Didn’t sigh. Just sat down and pulled a book out of her bag like she’d already made peace with the outcome before it happened.

She always carries a book, I remember thinking. Like she’d stopped expecting things to go her way, and packed accordingly.

The wind caught the cover. A name, written in the corner, the way people label things they’re afraid of losing.

That’s how I learned it.

She never knew she’d introduced herself.