Friendly Dating - Kira

Chapter 3 - Finding the Bridge

Yes, I am aware that once I reach the bridge, I'm going to be out in the open, but I think that if there are other people there, I could just bash straight onward, ignore them, and pretend that I do this every day.

If he is alone, I could lure him into a more secluded area and hope nobody stumbles upon us there because being caught hiding would probably be worse.

There is also the possibility that I'm about to be the brunt of a cruel joke of some kind... hence the hockey stick. No, Ethan isn't usually downright cruel; he is just gross, inappropriate and highly annoying. He loves freaking me out. I think it might be his favourite hobby, right alongside surfing.

One day, I was happily sitting on my bed listening to music, cutting images of my favourite actors from a magazine - I was in ninth grade at the time and heavily into making montages for my wall – when I noticed movement in the upstairs window of the house next door.

Our house is a double-story building, with all the bedrooms on the second floor, mine being the only one with a window facing the Fletchers' house. Their house is a sprawling one-floor building with an attic space converted into a small bathroom and bedroom. Mr Fletcher's youngest sister used to live up there but finally got a job and moved to another town shortly before this incident, and without my knowledge, Ethan had moved up there that day.

Since then, his bedroom has had a window facing mine.

Apparently, moving into his aunt's old room suited both Ethan and his father since they required more and more space from each other. I was highly disappointed that Delia didn't move up there instead, but she has a lovely, large bedroom and when Ethan moved upstairs, their shared bathroom became all hers. She has no desire to swap with him.

The fact that he gave up his large bedroom in favour of the much smaller one upstairs speaks volumes about the deterioration of his relationship with his father.

Well, I reflexively looked out my window, and I'm not sure whether Ethan did it on purpose or not, but I was suddenly the sole audience of an amateur strip show... in reverse. Ethan was getting dressed after - as all the evidence pointed to – a shower. I screamed and dove for my window to close the curtains with enough force to promptly cause the railing bracket to snap, dropping the curtains on my head.

That was also how I found out that the brackets were garbage.

I yelled at Ethan to close his curtains, but he pretended not to hear or understand and just grinned at me and gave me more of a show. I couldn't close my curtains anymore, and I couldn't get the big sheet I'd taken from the linen closet to stay up, covering my window; no matter what I tried, it kept on falling down, so I did the most logical thing I could think of. I took four of the flat-topped bar stools from the kitchen downstairs and placed them on my bed, two at the foot and two at the head and draped the sheet over them.

While I sat seething in my makeshift tent (I had to move very carefully not to cause a collapse), I could hear the pest laughing in his room. Honestly, these two houses were built way too close to the wall separating them.

The things I've seen and heard...

It took my father months to remember to get me new hooks. I was too embarrassed to make a case for their urgency, and at that stage, I was the only one in my household aware of the room swap in the Fletcher household. My father is always a bit scatterbrained, and since I didn't usually bother with my curtains (not since that room became vacant), he didn't carve a note into a body part to remember to buy some.

Not that he ever does that...

Normally, the lack of curtains wouldn't matter as the only way to see into my window is from Ethan's bedroom or their roof; visibility is blocked by trees from all the other angles. Well, I enjoyed months of being a forced witness to Ethan-related chaos and perversions. I did my own dressing and undressing in the bathroom and always hung out in my room in a tent of some kind, and when I wanted to dance to my favourite music, I did it on the side of my room, the furthest away from the window, after dark with the light turned off, or when I was sure that he wasn't home.