Sarah Langan

For a second he thought he could feel her inside him. It was a bad feeling, like an enemy in your bed

Smart machine, the subcon- scious. It insisted on survival, even when good manners would have us all six feet deep.

If you hate someone, does it mean you never loved them?”

This is where I live. Under a sign marked empty.

“Is it a party? Are we invited?” Larry Wilde asked.

They weren’t invited. Gertie Wilde knew this, but she didn’t want to admit it. So she watched the crowd out her window, counted all the people there.

Gertie and her family had moved to 116 Maple Street about a year before. They’d bought the place, a fixer-upper, for cheap. They’d meant to renovate. To reshingle the roof and put in new gutters, tear up the deep-pile carpet and nail down bamboo. At the very least, they’d planned to seed grass across the patchwork lawn. But stuff happens. Or doesn’t happen.

The inside of 116 Maple Street was haphazard, too. As a kid, you might have visited this sort of home on a playdate and intuited the mess as happy, but also chaotic. You had a great time when you slept over. You never worried about the stuff you had to bother with at home: making your bed, hanging your wet towel, carrying your dishes to the sink. Still, you wanted to go home pretty soon after, because even with the laughter, all that mess started to make you nervous. You got the feeling that the management was in over its head.

Maple Street was a tight-knit, crescent-shaped block that bordered a six-acre park. The people there dressed for work in business casual. They drove practical cars to practical jobs. They were always in a rush, even if it was just to the grocery store or church. They didn’t seem to worry as much about their mortgages. If their parents were sick, or their marriages weren’t happy, they didn’t mention it. They channeled those unsettled feelings, like everything else, into their kids.

They talked about extracurriculars and sports; which teachers at the local, blue-ribbon public school were brilliant miracle workers, and which ones lacked training via the social-emotional connection. They were obsessed with college. Harvard, in particular.