The strange boy with red hair was sitting under the same tree he always was when I walked home from school. I didn’t stop to stare at him, but I watched him out of the corner of my eye as I moved along the stamped-down dirt path. He was constantly writing in his notebook. I’d often found myself wondering what he was writing. Not that I cared, but it was a curious thing. I’d see him writing vigorously, his dark eyes focused and unseeing of anything but the paper in front of him. A time or two, I’d even watched him tear the paper out and shove it into a hole inside the tree. I’d thought about going to the tree when he wasn’t there and taking the papers out to see what he had written, but it felt wrong somehow, like an invasion of privacy. I sometimes felt that way as I walked through the field. I almost thought of it as his field. Some days I would see him in the center of it, twirling in circles, his eyes closed, his arms outstretched, his face pointed toward the sun. Some days I’d seen him talking to the low-flying birds in the sky or the field mice that skittered across the ground. He wore leaves and feathers pinned into his hair, and kept small bones of dead animals in his schoolbag.
Other kids at school told me that he was odd, and warned me to stay away from him. It wouldn’t be difficult. I wanted to stay away from everyone.
He was interesting, though, I thought as I pushed my fingers up against the rotting wood of the gate to my backyard. My old man’s backyard.
I sighed deeply and pushed the gate open, making sure it was closed tight behind me so Daisy couldn’t get out into the field. Daisy, my German shepherd, came over to greet me as I walked up the concrete path to the house. Her long tongue hung heavily out of her mouth, and her tail wagged anxiously. I leaned down on one knee and scratched behind her ears.
Daisy. Some days, she made it all worth it.
When I got inside the house, my dad yelled at me, just as I knew he would.
“What the hell took you so long to get home?” he shouted from the living room.
I felt my shoulders slump. “I walked home from school, Dad.”
“Don’t use that tone with me, Ancel. Remember who keeps a roof over your head.”
“Yes, sir.”
The volume of the television raised, and I knew I was dismissed.
Smoke wafted through the air as I made my way to my bedroom. The white walls were stained yellow from smoke— not just my dad’s, but whoever had lived here before us. The paint was chipped on all the corners, and there were holes in some of the walls. Those were mostly from my dad. We hung no pictures on the walls, because we didn’t have any family photos, and no snapshots of any time we looked happy. If there ever had been a time when we were happy.
The red carpet along the hallway was old and dirty. In the living room around my dad’s recliner, there were cigarette burns in the carpet from when he’d passed out in the chair and dropped a lit cigarette. Luckily, I was always home to catch it before it lit the entire house on fire.
I closed the door quietly behind me and set my bag on the floor. The walls were completely bare, as was most of my room. A small bed with minimal sheets, a table next to it, a lamp on top. I didn’t have much, but I didn’t need much. I didn’t collect anything or keep any mementos. My dad and I moved so often, they’d just get lost or broken in all the moves, anyway.
When I lay down on the bed and folded my arms behind my head, I stared up at the old, wood-paneled ceiling fan and listened to the sound of my dad yelling at the television in the living room.
I wanted to fall asleep and wake up tomorrow. Or never.
I wanted to drown out the sound of the ceiling fan, and my dad’s yelling, and the television. I wanted to ignore the flickering light above my head, the setting sun shining in through my window.
But instead of lying on my bed and wishing all the things in my life could be different, I closed my eyes and found myself wondering about crumpled-up pieces of paper in a tree that had been left there by a boy with hair the color of fire.