Page 15 of Middle of the Night

“I didn’t know that,” I say, trying to hide the surprise flashing through me like heat lightning.

Ashley Wallace is back on Hemlock Circle.

“Your parents probably didn’t mention it because they know you had a huge crush on her back in the day,” Russ says, grinning.

“I did not.”

“You totally did. We all did.”

Jennifer shoots him a look. “Oh, did you now?”

“Did I say ‘we’?” Russ stalls with a sip of coffee. “I meant Ethan and Billy.”

“He meant that none of us did,” I add. “She was older.”

Five years older, to be exact. Not much of an age difference now, but completely out of my league when I was ten and, despite my present-day denial, hopelessly in love with Ashley Wallace. With good reason. Ashley was fun and funny and, at that stage of my life, the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. Also, she was cool in a way a slightly dorky ten-year-old could only aspire to be. She wore T-shirts bearing the names of bands I’d never heard of but wanted to listen to. Smashing Pumpkins. Violent Femmes. Her favorite was white with black letters inside a black rectangle that simply read “NIN.”

“What does that mean?” I once asked.

She half smiled. “Nine Inch Nails. They’re awesome.”

The next week, when my parents took me to Sam Goody and said I could buy whatever CD I wanted, I grabbedThe Downward Spiral. My father stopped me before I could reach the register. Eyeing the parental advisory sticker slapped on the case, he said, “Whoa now. A bit too grown-up for you, don’t you think, sport?” I didn’t think that, yet I dutifully put the CD back and picked up theForrest Gumpsoundtrack, not because I wanted it but because it was a two-disc set and therefore cost my parents more money. A hollow victory.

But the real reason I liked Ashley was the fact that she was nice. Not fake nice, like some of the girls at school, or condescending nice, like most of those girls’ parents. Ashley was genuinely kind. Any boy my age couldn’t help but fall in love with her a little.

“I guess I’ll ask her, too,” I say, suddenly anxious at the prospect. It’s been almost thirty years since I last saw Ashley Wallace, and when it comes to people, I’ve found that sometimes memories are best left undisturbed.

“Good luck, buddy,” Russ says with a wink.

I shake my head, wave goodbye, and cut through the yard to the sidewalk circling the cul-de-sac. I turn left, which takes me past first my house, then the old Barringer place, the route bringing forth the memory of making this same trek after I woke to find Billy gone.

In that initial confusion, with the tent zipped shut but a gash in its side, I first thought Billy had torn it open. A ridiculous notion for several reasons, but I was ten.

And once the idea was in my brain, I couldn’t shake it, leading me to next come up with reasons why he’d rip his way out of the tent. The only one I could think of was a bathroom emergency. So I left the tent the proper way—unzipping the front flap, crawling outside, standing once I was on the grass—and headed indoors. The house was silent when I came inside, with my parents still sleeping upstairs and Barkley doing the same on the living room couch. Hearing the patio door slide shut woke him, setting him into a frenzy of barking that immediately woke my mother.

“You’re up early,” she said as she crept downstairs, a robe thrown over her nightgown.

“Where’s Billy?”

My mother replied with a tired shrug. “He’s not outside?”

“No.”

I didn’t think to tell her about the state of the tent, and how there was now a slice in the side big enough for a toddler to walk through. I was more concerned with finding out where Billy was. Worry had started to creep in, even though I didn’t quite know it at the time.

“I’m going to check the bathroom,” I said.

“The one upstairs is empty,” my mother said, which made me headdown the hallway past the kitchen to check the first-floor powder room. It, too, was empty.

While I did that, my mother had stepped outside, presumably to make sure I wasn’t mistaken and had somehow overlooked Billy sleeping in the tent beside me. A sign even she wasn’t thinking clearly in that moment.

“What’s this?” she said when I joined her in the backyard. She was by the side of the tent, peering through the sliced fabric the exact way I had done minutes earlier, only from the inside.

“I think Billy did it.”

Unlike me, my mother knew the damage to the tent hadn’t been the work of a ten-year-old boy. “Ethan, run over to the Barringers’ and see if Billy is there.”

That made as much sense as anything else. It certainly seemed reasonable that Billy would go home to use his bathroom instead of ours. Or that he’d had trouble sleeping in the tent and opted to return to his own bed.

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