Pour Vous

At half-past three in the morning on Jacobs street in the sleepy hamlet of Tilden, a young girl read a worn chapter book under her covers. She kept a headlamp next to her bed for her late night escapades into worlds far beyond the daily malaise of eastern Massachusetts.

The secret to getting enough rest while reading deep into the night centered around a firm belief that if you told yourself you slept well in the morning, you’d feel energetic. It didn’t often work, but on those days Jannie would eat some hot peppers her dad dried in their cupboard.

Jannie heard a creak in the old Victorian house her parents bought a couple years earlier. It had a different weight from the other creaks and groans of the settling wood. Jannie had categorized all the different noises of the night to avoid being caught staying up late by her parents. She clicked her headlamp off. Another creak sounded, this time it came closer.

Jannie pulled back the bedsheet and waited with semi-closed eyes to feign sleep. Her dad might have gotten up for a snack. He liked to sneak bites of the cheddar cheese block he stored at the back of the fridge. As if Jannie and her mom couldn’t see the steadily decreasing amount.

The door to her room slowly opened and Jannie waited for her dad or mom to say something. The ruse was up— she’d been busted reading again.

But no words came. Jannie opened her eyes a little wider to see no one standing in the moonlit patch by the door.

Another creak. A flicker of movement in the hall.

A dark shadow filled the doorway. Jannie clutched her blanket and stared at the patch of darkness. “Dad?” she whispered as she shrunk into her covers. She knew that wasn’t the right question.

Je suis pas ici pour vous,” a deep voice said. The little girl shook like a dormouse in a rainstorm. The shadow moved away.

***

A scrawny, curly headed girl sat at a library table with three other skate kids. Various beanies and textbooks filled the table as they checked their phones and leaned back in their chairs.

“Do you think death is one thing? Or do you think there are different reapers?” The group stopped staring at their rooms to gawk at the girl for a second.

“J, that’s a weird question coming from a person pretending to study math,” Nolan said as he flicked through a battered health textbook. He wasn’t doing any better studying, but he liked to keep Jannie on her toes.

“Just curious,” Jannie mumbled. She kept half-heartedly sketching the edges of graphs on her grid paper as Nolan looked at her arms. A couple new scratches were there.