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  For Kaiti. There’s so much I wish I could have said to you.

  Introduction: Balloon

  I saw a balloon going 90 miles per hour.

  It was tied to a truck, so there was an explanation for it, but I don’t know… I guess you still just never expect to see a balloon going that fast. Balloons aren’t designed for that. They aren’t aerodynamic enough. This one was wobbling all around in spastic little circles, making a sound like wp-wp-wp-wp-wp-wp-wp-wp-wp-wp-wp-wp-wp-wp-wp-wp-wp. It seemed genuinely out of control.

  I was laughing so hard I had to pull over.

  I feel just like that balloon.

  1. BUCKET

  The first time I can remember feeling truly powerless, I was three, and I was trapped sideways in a bucket in the garage.

  The bucket belonged to my dad. He used it for washing the car.

  I don’t remember exactly how or why this started, but through some contortion of childhood logic, I decided that I needed to get my entire body into the bucket.

  The bucket had other plans.

  Maybe I had something to prove. Maybe there was a compelling reason to need to be entirely inside the bucket that I don’t remember. But I couldn’t let it go. The fact that I couldn’t fit my whole body into the bucket infuriated me.

  Initially, attempts were confined to car-washing days. Slowly, though, I sought out opportunities to make extracurricular assaults. I’d sneak into the garage by myself to try out different configurations.

  That’s how I ended up alone in the garage trapped in the bucket.

  When both my shoulders finally dropped below the bucket’s rim, I felt only the briefest flash of triumph before the sensation of being trapped kicked in.

  I had done it: my entire body was in the bucket.

  Except now, the only thing I wanted was to not be in there anymore.

  No amount of thrashing could free me, but it did make the bucket tip over.

  And suddenly, there I was—sideways, four limbs deep in a plastic car-wash bucket—only three years old, and already doomed to spend my life scooting around like the world’s saddest upside-down hermit crab.

  This is not what I’d been trying to accomplish. I didn’t even realize it was possible. That’s the scary thing about decisions: you don’t know what they are when you’re making them.

  Fortunately, it wasn’t permanent. I was rescued when my parents accidentally walked close enough to the garage to detect screaming.

  And the bucket was relocated to a high shelf to prevent me from interacting with it.

  It wasn’t enough.

  The incident had only strengthened the drive to exert my will upon the bucket. I wouldn’t be content with anything less than total domination now. A bucket shouldn’t be able to stop a person, and I was willing to do whatever had to happen to prove it.

  The only thing worse than getting trapped in the same bucket nineteen times is surrender.

  Explanation

  That was the first chapter. The second chapter is next. It is loosely related to the first, but this isn’t some perfectly sequential masterpiece of order where every segue makes sense.

  For the sake of trust building, the third chapter will follow the second. But then we will jump directly to chapter five, do you understand? No chapter four. Why? Because sometimes things don’t go like they should. This is an inescapable property of reality, which we all must learn to accept. There just isn’t enough power in the universe for everybody to have all of it.

  Anyway, the numbering structure will continue as normal thereafter. This was a charitable decision on my part, and we should take a moment to appreciate the fact that I did not explore the full extent of my power. And believe me, I could have. I could have made these chapters be any number I wanted. I could have invented a totally unrecognizable number system based on snake pictures. Shit, I could’ve called them all chapter 2 and refused to acknowledge that I did that.

  But we are civilized, friendly people, and sometimes it is best to restrain ourselves.

  2. RICHARD

  For the first few years of my life, the only people I knew how to find lived in my house.

  We had a neighbor, Richard. But Richard was quiet and rarely outside for long, so I didn’t know about him.

  One afternoon, though, Richard went outside.

  That’s how I found out about him.

  I did not interact with Richard. I just saw him. He probably didn’t even know. He stood in his driveway for a minute or two and then went back into his house. But I saw him. I think that was the main thing.

  It was very exciting. A person lives next to us! A person! He lives right there! And I SAW him! When will he go outside again? What else does he do? Does he know about Dad? Who is his friend? Does he like whales? Is his house the same as ours? Which room does his grandma live in?

  Desperate to catch another glimpse of him, I’d lurk near the windows all day, just staring at his house.

  I think I expected it to go somewhere. You can’t find out there’s a person living right next to you and then never get any answers. Maybe if you’re 100 years old and you know everybody, but not if you’re 3. Not when it’s the first stranger you know how to find. I just wanted to know more. Anything.

  And this is as far as it would have been able to go if it wasn’t for the dog door.

  My grandma usually supervised me while my parents were at work. She’d drink screwdrivers and do the crossword, I’d run around the house and do whatever. If she hadn’t seen me in a while, she’d check to make sure I still had all my fingers, but escaping wasn’t a big concern. The doors were locked. Just in case, there were jingle bells on the handles.

  The dog door was the single weak point in the fortress.

  The revolutionary impact the dog door had on my ability to observe Richard was second only to the discovery of Richard himself.

  I was cautious at first.

  I just wanted to get a little closer. Just a little. I’d sneak out through the dog door and go stare at his house from the edge of our driveway, hoping this would summon him. When it didn’t, I’d sneak a little closer. Maybe it’ll work if I stand in Richard’s driveway… or, actually, maybe I’ll just go over to this little window here and see what I can see…

  I started sneaking out more frequently. I started sneaking out at night. And the fact that I was sneaking seems to suggest I might’ve been at least partially aware that this type of behavior should be a secret, but I don’t think I’d reached that crucial developmental point where you’re capable of recognizing how creepy you’re being.

  However, on the night I found the cat door in Richard’s garage, even my undeveloped, fish-level brain could sense that a boundary was about to be crossed. A tiny, instinctual trace of doubt—the wisdom of my ancestors whispering through the ages: This might be too weird of a thing to do…

  Of course, one of the main features of undeveloped, fish-level brains is poor impulse control, and before I could complete the thought, I was in Richard’s living room.

  I hadn’t prepared for this possibility. I’d dreamed of it, sure. But I wasn’t expecting it to HAPPEN. So I just stood there for a little while and then retreated to regroup.

  A concrete objective never e
merged, but the missions became bolder and more frequent. I started bringing things back with me. Richard’s things.

  They seemed valuable, somehow. Richard likes these things… Perhaps they contain the secret to Richard…

  A nonsensical collection of Richard’s possessions slowly accumulated at the back of my toy drawer.

  This would prove to be my downfall.

  Long before that, though, my mom noticed that I’d mysteriously disappear sometimes. She wasn’t worried yet because she didn’t think I knew how to get out of the house, but one day she asked me where I’d been.

  And I said:

  “Hanging out with Richard.”

  “Hanging out” was a misnomer—Richard had been hanging out by himself, and I had been standing in his hallway just out of view—but this was concerning news to my parents. They didn’t even know that I knew Richard, let alone that we’d been “hanging out.” They went over and knocked on Richard’s door and asked him about it, probably with thinly veiled suspicion regarding Richard being a child predator. And Richard, who was still somehow unaware of all the hanging out we’d been doing, told them he didn’t know anything about that.

  I imagine things were tense for a bit. The suggestion that I’d been hanging out with Richard was disturbing for both my parents and Richard. But the clues piled up. I couldn’t control myself. I took more things, bigger things. I also branched over into hiding things for Richard to find. Pretty rocks, pieces of string, letters I’d tried to write. At that age, I didn’t know how to spell very many words, so the messages were fairly cryptic: the entire alphabet, followed by the word “Mom” and a drawing of the sun. Rampant scribbling, hundreds of tiny circles, and… is this a spider??

  The spider was supposed to be Richard. I hadn’t figured out how many arms and legs people are supposed to have yet, so I just put a whole bunch on there and hoped it was enough. I didn’t want him to feel offended because I shortchanged him on legs.

  It must’ve come off like being haunted by a defective but well-meaning ghost.

  The connection should have been obvious. But, when faced with a mystery like, “Where did my remote control go? Why is there a piece of paper with a child’s handwriting on it hiding in the VCR? And how do these rocks keep getting in here?” almost no rational adult would jump to the conclusion “because a child has been sneaking in through my cat door and leaving these for me to discover.” Not even with clues. I don’t know what theory Richard came up with to explain it, but it almost certainly wasn’t that one.

  Similarly, when faced with a mystery like “Why does our child keep disappearing? And why has our child been ‘hanging out’ with our 40-year-old neighbor?” almost no rational adult would jump to the conclusion “because our child has become obsessed with our 40-year-old neighbor, and ‘hanging out’ is a loose term to describe the activity of spying.”

  The thing that finally blew my cover was stealing Richard’s cat.

  Stealing it wasn’t the original plan. The opportunity presented itself, I seized it.

  It was a strong animal. Getting it into the drawer was difficult. I didn’t have a plan for what to do with it, but I knew I had something valuable. And I think the idea was that I should save it for later. For when I figured out how to capitalize on the probably unlimited potential of this.

  It lived in the drawer for a while. I don’t know how long. Hours, probably.

  And now it is time for a quick fact about cats: cats aren’t good secrets, because, under extreme duress, they have the ability to make a sound like:

  YAOAOAOAOAOAOAOAOAOAOAOAOAOAOAOAOAOAOAOAO

  My parents eventually realized the sound was coming from inside the house and located the source of it.

  They weren’t expecting to find quite so many of Richard’s things.

  I don’t know if they put the pieces together immediately, or processed them individually as they came up—“First of all, there’s a cat in this drawer; how about that. Next up: there appear to be a considerable number of objects under the cat. This one is a shoe. This one is a piece of bread. This one is a credit card bill. Huh… it’s addressed to ‘Richard the Neighbor…’ ”—inching closer to the truth with every clue until the ultimate answer to “What does ‘hanging out with Richard’ mean?” was revealed. There was more than enough evidence to answer the question.

  That’s got to be a strange moment for a parent. There’s this omnipresent fear of predators and monsters, and you just… you never quite expect to find out the monster is your kid.

  They confronted me after a strategy meeting about how the fuck to handle this. That’s not something the books prepare you for. There’s no chapter on what to do if you suspect your child is a predator. There’s no Hallmark card for “Sorry we accused you of being a molester; we didn’t realize our kid was sneaking into your house and stealing your spoons and animals and watching you while you sleep. We’re really, really sorry.”

  That primal shame instinct I’d felt in Richard’s garage flickered back online a little bit. Looking at the objects, and the freaked-out cat, and my parents’ confused faces, I realized that, yeah, maybe this had been a weird thing to do.

  I felt like I should explain why I had done this, but I didn’t know either.

  So we all just stood there, feeling weird about ourselves and each other.

  The cat was stoked to be free, though.

  Karma

  3. NEIGHBOR KID

  My neighbor’s 5-year-old is a social juggernaut.

  I can’t leave my apartment unless I figure out how to deal with her. She gets up at 5 in the morning and hangs out directly in front of my door like a bridge troll—all who wish to pass must answer her riddles, and the only riddle she knows is Do you want to see my room?

  She doesn’t understand why I won’t do it.

  Permission isn’t really the main issue. Her dad, Julie, and everybody she knows could give me permission to look at her room while crawling on their bellies and begging me to look at her room, and I still wouldn’t do it. This isn’t the kind of situation where you want to set a precedent for caving under pressure. I mean, what’s gonna happen? I go look at her room and then she leaves me alone forever?

  I thought it would die down after a few weeks of nonstop rejection, but she is relentless.

  She’s always telling me how great it is, wildly exaggerating the number of lamps she has like it’s gonna change my mind after seven consecutive months of saying no.

  I’ve said no every time for the whole seven months. She won’t take it. In fact, a direct no only seems to provoke her.

  Is this how negging works? I act like this kid’s room is no big deal, and she becomes singularly obsessed with proving her room’s value?

  I have never met anybody who is this determined about anything. I honestly don’t understand where she finds the motivation to keep going.

  Here’s the thing, though: part of me is legitimately starting to wonder what the fuck is so special about this room. Is there a portal in there? Is this a cry for help? Does she really have six lamps? What on earth could anybody need that many lamps for?

  She’s the weirdest person I know. If anybody’s got a magical bedroom, it’d be her.

  But this kid’s a one-way friendship train with no brakes. I can’t risk encouraging her. The second she senses weakness, she’ll be crawling in through my windows.

  It’s getting hard to navigate around. I see her at least twice a week. Sometimes multiple times in the same day. The interactions are tense, only barely avoiding the fact that she’s been asking me to look at her room for seven months, and somehow it hasn’t happened yet. We’re gonna have to deal with it eventually.

  In the meantime, it’s a precarious balance between not provoking her and not destroying her self-esteem. I mean, the easiest way to end the interaction would be to ignore her and use my superior strength to overpower her attempts to restrain me—I don’t have to answer her questions. But she’d keep trying, and you c
an’t brutally reject a kid at least two times every week and expect it to not leave a dent. This poor kid is already weirder than anybody. So I try to be nice about it, which means I have to lie. Every day, this kid comes at me harder and harder, and I have to invent some fable to explain why I still can’t look at her room.

  I have to leave 20 minutes early to have enough time for the debate.

  Saying no to a socially considerate adult is hard enough. If saying no to a socially considerate adult is like fighting a serpent, this would be like fighting a serpent, but you can’t use your arms or legs, and you can’t touch the serpent or hurt the serpent’s feelings. Also, the serpent doesn’t understand the words “no” or “sorry.”

  And now we are going to pause the story and tell the rest of it later. Don’t worry—no matter how unrelated it seems, it’ll loop back. I’ll give you a signal when it’s about to happen. A symbol.