8 (this one is a little tough)

Bitter wind. I was full of it as a teenager. I could taste it on my tongue. Bitter is just the rotting inside of loneliness. I didn’t exist to my family. Ton was grown up and finishing high school. He was getting ready for college. He was my only ally and he was leaving me. Ma met a new guy and it was pretty serious. I overheard her talking about moving in with him. He lived in Whittier. That was far away, and therefore impossible. I blocked that out. Pa lived in Puerto Rico with his new wife, Cherie (pronounced Cherry or Sheri with an accent, depending on how much wine she had) and their new baby Beau. I saw pictures of Beau and I hated him instantly. I especially hated the picture of my Pa holding this brat in the outdoor shower at their beach house. He sent that picture to me. What was I going to do with it? Was I supposed to be happy with his newfound joy? Look at me. I’m a 40-year-old Dad. Whatever. They were so far away that it wasn’t real to me anyway.

The neighbors across the street took me in. I had a lot of dinners with them. Me and Tracy liked to sneak over to my house. It was so scary in there that we dared each other to go in alone. How long could we hold out before running out screaming? My house wasn’t mine. It felt like someone else lived there and resented me for intruding. I was alone in a house that treated me like an intruder.

One night the lights went out. It was October, the scariest month of the year. Not only was it the Halloween month, but also the month with Santa Ana winds. They blew in like a dry, hot hurricane. When the lights went out, I was alone in a scary house and the wind howled outside. It was very Nancy Drew. I was too scared to take advantage of the sleuthier side of me. I grabbed a book and a flashlight and sat out front on the curb. The street was empty. Everyone was inside their homes surrounded by family and candles, probably laughing and having fun with the dark. I sat outside, hungry, scared and alone. The wind blew hard, and it was impossible to hold a page still to read it. I turned off the flashlight and sat in the dark, hoping that my Mom was coming home tonight and not staying at her boyfriend’s house. I turned to look at the house and kept seeing things in the dark windows. My brain was filled with voices, or the wind. Either one blew through too fast and hard to catch.

I stayed out there for at least an hour. Nobody was coming home. I hefted myself off the curb and trudged back to the house. I was scared, terrified. That thing was in there. The thing that hated me so much. But I was tired. I didn’t care if it hurt me anymore. I used the flashlight to grab a handful of cookies and ran down the hall to my bedroom. I dove under the covers and turned off the flashlight. This would have been fun with someone else. It would have made a perfect slumber party, with the scary story already in place.

I huddled under the covers, not even letting my nose peep out. I must have fallen asleep, because I was jolted awake by my brother screaming and pounding at my window. He always forgot his key and if he came home too late he jumped the fence in the backyard and pounded on my window to wake me up. Then I would go to the back sliding door and let him in. If my Ma was home, she never heard any of it.

But this time Ton was yelling. It was still dark inside the house, but I heard the thrum that meant the electricity was back on. You never know that thrum is there until it is put out. Then there there is nothing where the thrum was. An empty space between your mind and the world that is normally filled with the noises underneath.

Ton was yelling at me to let him in and he was waving a shovel. I was confused and groggy. I shlumped to the backdoor to let him in as usual, and he vaulted in like the wind was chasing him. “Ang, go lock yourself in the bathroom!”

“How come? Ton, how come? What’s wrong? Toooonnnn!” I was feeling his panic and it scared me. The last time I saw Ton look this scared is when he came home from seeing the Exorcist with his buddies. He came home and pounded on my window as usual. But he looked white in the night light. I let him in and he told me to never ask about the Exorcist. It didn’t look like much fun so I didn’t ask. I later found out that Ton was so scared he couldn’t sleep. He snuck into my Mom’s room that night and slept in her bed with her. She slept like she was dead and never knew. He was a senior. Big man.

Now the big man was waving a shovel and yelling at me to hide. I hid. I heard Ton talking on the phone…kind of breathless; almost crying. Someone knocked on the front door and when Ton went to answer it, I came out from my hiding place. It was Brian. He looked breathless too. The wind wasn’t blowing outside anymore. Somehow, the Santa Ana’s came inside our house instead.

When Ton jumped the fence in his usual manner, he moved toward my window and saw something there. At first he thought it was our dog Chewy, but he heard Chewy whimpering on the other side of the yard. Not Chewy. Chewy was a sissy. I didn’t even think of bringing him out front with me when the lights went out. I would have had to console him too and I wasn’t up to it.

Ton was confused. If it wasn’t Chewy, what was huddled underneath my window. He picked up a shovel and walked toward it, too afraid to breathe. Then a man jumped up, ran at Ton like he was going to kill him and as Ton raised the shovel, the man jumped the fence and was gone. Ton called all his friends. They showed up one by one at our front door. They all looked relieved that there was nothing they could do. It was too dark to see who it was and the man-thing was too far gone to chase. They hung around the house talking about what they would have done to the poor soul who chose my window to sleep beneath.

Nobody worried about the fact that I was home alone when the stranger jumped the fence and sat beneath my window. Also, my window was open. The wind wasn’t blowing any more, but it left behind a very bitter taste.