The Boy Next Door Is My Nightmare

My whole life I was made to feel like my existence was only worth something when it was useful to someone else. Like my existence was just the benefit of others.A convenience and placeholder. The kind of person people used and then looked straight through and abandoned.

At twelve it was Brianna Cole and my colored pencils borrowed with a smile and returned snapped in half, no apology, not even the decency of a guilty look. At fourteen it was Tyler Mace and my lunch tray and the sound of an entire cafeteria laughing like they'd all been waiting for something to happen and I just happened to be that thing. I learned early that people like me didn't get to take up space without paying for it somehow.

But the one that stayed, the one I still think about on quiet nights when sleep won't come, was Hanna Rose.

We met at church and she had this way of smiling at you like you were the only person in the room, and I had been so starved for that feeling that I never stopped to ask whether it was real or fake. We passed notes during the sermons, she texted me good morning every single day and for a while I thought, okay. This is what it feels like to have a real friend.

Then came the comments. Small at first. Gentle, even. Things about what I should eat, how I should dress, pills my mom could buy to help me slim down — like I was a project she had quietly taken on without telling me. I told her once, softly, that I didn't even eat that much. I just wanted her to understand me.

She took that and handed it to every girl in our congregation. Gluttonous. That was the word she chose.

After that, she looked straight through me on Sunday mornings. Greeted everyone around me, smiled at everyone beside me, and treated me like I had never existed at all, like the friendship had only been about physical appearance until something better came along.

I think about her on the nights I feel most invisible in my life. which is exactly why I recognized the feeling the moment my mother's calm voice floated across our kitchen on a Tuesday evening and I knew, without knowing why yet, that this was going to become another one of those memories.

"His name is Micah," Mom said, folding a dish towel like this was a perfectly ordinary conversation. "He's six. Karen just went back to full-time work and their regular babysitter cancelled. She asked if you were available. I told her yes."

I set my fork down very carefully. "Tell me you're joking."

My mother, Linda Owens, did not look up. "You needed a job, Zara."

"A job. Not a babysitting gig you signed me up for without asking."

She gave me the look. The one she had been perfecting for seventeen years — the one that said this conversation is already over. Then she named the figure Karen Hendricks was offering and I felt my resistance quietly collapse. It was almost enough to replace my laptop. The one Tyler Mace had knocked off a library table three weeks ago while his friends filmed it and laughed.

I picked up my fork and stabbed a piece of broccoli. "Fine."

The Hendricks house was twelve minutes from ours, which felt like a personal joke from the universe.

I stood at the front door on Wednesday evening with my backpack over one shoulder and a carefully practiced expression of neutrality on my face. I could do this. Six-year-olds were manageable. You give them a snack, you let them watch cartoons and you make sure they don't injure themselves, that's simple.

I knocked twice and the door swung open and every rehearsed thought I had dissolved.

Chase Hendricks stood in the doorway in a grey hoodie and low-slung sweatpants, dark hair pushed back like he'd been dragging his hands through it all day. He was tall — taller than I expected — with sharp jaw and hooded eyes that moved over me slowly, like he was arriving at a conclusion he wasn't particularly pleased about.

He looked at me the way boys like him always did. Like they were deciding whether you were worth the energy but underneath it, so quick I almost missed it, something else passed across his face. Something that looked almost like interest before he buried it completely.

"You're the babysitter," he said.

"You're the brother," I said back.

The corner of his mouth moved but not with a smile. He stepped aside without another word and I walked in.

I was halfway down the hallway when his voice came from behind me, low and unhurried. "Do you always walk into people's houses like you own them?"

I stopped and turned around slowly. "And do you always open the door and make girls feel like an inconvenience?"

Something shifted in his expression. He pushed off the doorframe, closing the distance between us in a few easy steps, and before I could process what was happening, my back met the wall. Not roughly but deliberately and his forearm rested against the wall beside my head, his body close enough that I could see the details of his face — the dark eyes, the slight tension in his jaw, the way he was looking at me like he was trying to figure something out.

"Treat you like what?" he said quietly.

My chin lifted on instinct. "Like a human being. Try it sometime."

The silence stretched between us, thick and strange. His eyes dropped to my face — not my eyes, my face — just for a half second, before he pulled back like the moment hadn't happened. Like he hadn't just had me pinned against his hallway wall looking at me like —

"She's here, she's here, she's here!"

A small body came rocketing down the staircase and crashed headfirst into Chase's legs. The boy looked up at me with enormous brown eyes and a gap-toothed grin so wide it took up most of his face.

"Are you Zara? Mom said your name is Zara. I'm Micah. I'm six and I lost a tooth." He yanked his mouth open and pointed aggressively at the gap. "See it? It just fell out. Chase said the tooth fairy isn't real but I don't believe him."

"The tooth fairy is absolutely real," I said, crouching down to his level.

Micah beamed. Then he grabbed my hand and started pulling me toward the living room like we were already best friends and always had been.

I didn't look back at Chase but I felt him watching me the whole way down the hall.