Strange noises tonight, persistent and furtive. A raccoon, Lydia thinks. Roof rat or mongrel, scuffling about the trash cans.

The view from her bedroom window up high: fenced yard, pool with forgotten raft, alley. 

Downstairs her parents bumble about, like they hadn’t all just had another three-way row. Shouts, tears, all the trimmings. Outside Lydia’s locked door, the familiar tin tray waits. Melamine plate, faded blossoms. Styrofoam-white bread lathered in congealing mayonnaise. Cheese peeled from plastic. Bologna, factory-cut. Everything crumbly-dry at the edges.

She’ll refuse this latest apology and refuse until her willpower softens. Then buckle at the knees, devour plasticky sandwich and tepid milk, both. Kneel, obey, and keep your mouth shut when you chew. Rules for life.

Come morning, she’ll call her fiancé Raymond to mend fences. Re-enroll in community college. 

“Time you lose your selfish whims,” her parents said. Some airy-fairy life—paint, canvas, grotty attic apartments—isn’t for their daughter. “Just finish your associate degree,” they said. 

Soon she’ll be an anesthesiologist’s wife, anyhow. Pregnant after, picking mini blinds for a starter home, safe and numb.

A dropped lid strikes asphalt like a cymbal’s crash.

Slipping onto the eaves and shimmying the downspout, easily accomplished. Lydia’s sneaked out many times—whenever Raymond felt needy. Meaning those foggy-window sessions in his car, half in the scene, half elsewhere entirely.

The dewy grass tickles and dampens her purple Converse. She cranes to see through the fence, then unlatches the gate.

Someone’s in the alley, hunched in moonlight, busy at something. Heavy, sweet rot. Wet cardboard, faint gasoline. Lydia clears her throat. The figure lurches upright. 

Random boy she knew in high school. Knew of, for nobody really knew Alik. Showed up mid-semester in that funny pullover, a rough wool, hand-knit. Behind him in line, she’d smelled lanolin and something else—complicated, not entirely unpleasant. His family moved here from some unpronounceable place, he’d said. The exact location changed whenever he was asked.

Alik holds a long rope of something meaty—what flashes in Lydia’s mind is guts. Sausage, though, so not too far off, really. The tail of the rope trails into the Smith’s garbage can.

“The hell are you doing?” she asks. 

Lydia’s own tone surprises her. Baffled, righteous anger, like someone whose privacy has met disrespect, boundaries covertly crossed. The orderly sanctity of the neighborhood surrounds them both—a grid of streets named after flowers, alternating but repeating houses, squares of chemically verdant lawn. Alleys are for throwing away what you don’t want or care to be reminded of. You leave things back there. They tidily disappear.

Grease gleams on Alik’s lips. He chews a big mouthful, making zero effort to hide it. Stares back like something half-tamed—direct and unafraid. She remembers hazel eyes in daylight, hints of new, nameless colors. Sharp cheekbones. That surprising fox-gleam in his hair.

“I’m never not hungry,” Alik says, rather bluntly. “People toss perfectly good things. You’d be surprised.” To demonstrate—or to challenge and exasperate her—he tears another bite from a link. “If you want, I could show you—”

“Disgusting,” she snaps, creeping closer. 

But Alik turns and hops on his bike, making his rickety way out, sausages looped over one shoulder.

Another week trudging to stifling classrooms. Her parents happy again, or happily ignoring her. Raymond busy studying organic chem. “We’ll grab a nice date night soon,” he says, something wry underneath. Meaning dinner, movie theater, a crooked heart traced in the foggy Volkswagen window—his signature move. 

Cute gesture, the first time or two.

During dragging moments, Lydia goes elsewhere. Flashes to hot, feral eyes, teeth glinting in darkness.

 I could show you…

At night, she heads to her window to loom. Some barmy Juliet, she inwardly chides, wearing diaphanous things in her bedroom alone.

You’d be surprised…

Senseless reverie, all this. Infatuation, limerence. Like nothing she’s done before. Like running away to join the circus, eloping with madness. And yet…

And yet.

Alik never shows.

Is he impoverished? Is he "the needy” her parents donate to every Christmas, a white envelope, its check made out to an ephemeral idea? 

Or is his strangeness self-directed and chosen?

She’s heard he lives on the west side. A ten-minute commute in the family sedan becomes hours of calculating circumlocution. Which plain, stolid cottage stands for Alik? Which private property no trespassing sign, patrolling pit bull, tilting chainlink fence?

Round and round, but not in circles. In boxes, following each block. 

Her headlights catch a hissing opossum—nothing more.

At the gong clang in the alley, Lydia flies from the bedcovers. Climbs down in sandals fast. Crosses the yard in something silly and vintage: bedraggled satin ribbons, birthday cake-colored chiffon.

Alik’s by her trash can, smoothing crumpled paper. 

Another sketch of him she’d failed to get exactly right. Lydia prays for the ground to open, swallowing her.

His face holds surprise, then shy, spreading excitement. “Care to explain?” One eyebrow hitches high.

Caught out, she finds no reason to deny it. 

“Show me what you do,” she says. “Out here.”

Merely studying some fascinating, possibly eldritch creature—glossy head down, gorging, a Pan of the backstreets—that’s all, Lydia tells herself. 

Bananas gone freckly or gently bruised. Lettuce still crisp at its core. Cheese streaked with mold—some meant to be there, some not. Hard rolls he gnaws. Down the alley they slowly drift, as though browsing the aisle of some dark, secret grocery.

Finally, under a dead streetlight, Alik proffers avocado gently nudged from its rind. Lydia closes her eyes, heart pounding. She lets him place it on her tongue, crossing a threshold.

Soft. Smoky. Edging toward spoiled. The taste lingers. The feeling richens—delirious wealth, an unbound thrill.

A freedom.

Behind the Bellwether household, they chew luscious scraps of fatted filet. At the Jones’s, leftover canapés. Near Dr. Abalos’s back gate: pudding skins, baked beans, halibut cheeks. 

“I’m always starving,” she says. “I’ve always been hungry.”

“So together we’ll dine,” Alik says, and they do.