The Girl on the Stairs

I first encountered the weird girl in the stairwell of our apartment complex. I’d been living there for a few weeks but hadn’t noticed her before. She was definitely someone you would notice. Barefoot, even though it was February. She sat in the corner of the landing between the second and third floor. Not shivering, like the cold didn’t bother her at all. 

“Hello,” she said. Her back was to the wall, legs stretched out, so I had to step over them. 

The elevator was broken, and had been since we’d moved in. Hauling all our shit up three flights of stairs had been fun.

“Hello,” I replied. The bottom of her feet were dirty, smudges the color of wet ashes. I couldn’t get a feel for her age. Her face looked young, a few years younger than me, maybe thirteen or fourteen, but her eyes were almost, I don’t know, ancient. 

I rounded the corner.

“Hey, what’s your name?” Her voice, kind of high-pitched, with a bell-like quality, stopped me in my tracks.

It sounded familiar, but this early in the morning, especially before my walk-to-school smoke, stolen from the pack of my dad’s menthols, my brain just couldn’t quite place it.

I stopped.

“Reese.” I turned to face her. She wore a faded, oversized Planet Hollywood T-shirt over a knee-length tie-dye skirt and black leggings. It should have looked odd, the haphazard outfit, but on her, it was kind of cute somehow.

“Reese what?”

I shifted my backpack to my other shoulder.

“Cabot.”

Her eyebrows drew together, two dark arching lines atop a very pale face. “Hhhmmm, why does that sound familiar?” She set aside the book she’d been reading, a battered copy of Wuthering Heights. “Do you have any siblings, cousins?”

“No, I’m an only child and we just moved here.” I wanted to tell her there was something familiar about her too, but I stopped myself. I had just moved to this neighborhood, and it was definitely a rougher area than where I’d grown up. Whatever enchantment this girl might have over me, it wasn’t worth casting aside common sense. I couldn’t reveal too much about myself, not yet.

“What happened?” she asked.

“What do you mean, what happened?”

She sighed heavily, as if she didn’t have time to state the obvious. “People don’t just move here,” she gestured around the dingy hallway, scrawled with graffiti, “unless something happened. Something not great.”

I looked down at my feet.

“My dad lost his job.” There was a lot more to it, stuff I didn’t want to admit to the apartment building walls, let alone this strange, mysterious girl. 

Her piercing green eyes studied me. I got the sense she could read those things I didn’t want to admit like they were stamped on my soul, and she could see them like the words on the pages of her book.

Expression softening, she said, “I’ve seen a lot worse. You’ll be okay.”

And suddenly I felt a little better, for the first time since my dad had started drinking again, and the accident at the mill, where he’d been drunk on the job and run over his coworker with a forklift. He didn’t kill Jerry, who had actually been one of my dad’s best friends, and pseudo uncle to me growing up, and no formal charges were filed. The supervisor just handed him his walking papers, and now here we were.

“Yeah,” I told the girl on the stairs. “I graduate high school in a few years, so I figure I can hang in there until then.”

She twisted a few strands of black corkscrew curls together, deep in thought.

“So, it’s just you and your dad here?”

“Yeah,” I said again. “My mom died when I was little.” Winced a little. So much for me not revealing too much. I couldn’t help it, though. She felt like someone I’d known for a long time.

She nodded, as if she had expected me to say that.

“You don’t go to school?” I asked. I figured I was entitled to some questions of my own. 

Her face screwed up, as if she was confused. 

“Of course, I go to school,” she said. 

“But you’re not going now?”

The girl stood. She was taller than I expected. 

“No, it’s summer. There’s no school.” She pulled at the collar of my flannel. “Why are you wearing a winter coat during the summer?”

“It’s not summer,” I told her. Suddenly, I felt something shift, the cold suddenly replaced with stifling heat, humidity so thick it was hard to breathe. 

And as quick as the heat wave came, it was gone again.

I shivered as the icy wind blasted the back of my neck.

Something like realization clouded her eyes.

“I’ve had something like this happen before,” she told me. “Time can be…” she paused, bringing her hand up to her neck, “kind of funny here in the stairwell.”

Dread crept in on the edges. Kind of like the time I walked in on my dad passed out in the bathroom, half naked and soaked in piss.

Like I was seeing something I shouldn’t be.

“I should go,” I said.

She nodded. 

Before I turned to continue down the stairs, I asked, “What’s your name?”

“I have a feeling you’ll find out later,” she said. “Our paths will cross again.”

Satisfied with that answer, I exited the building, hidden cigarette all but forgotten. Despite all the shitty stuff going on, now I had something else, something besides graduations, to look forward to. 

Something else worth hanging in there for.