Previously posted as "Listen to the Dark". I figured my short ones would be better served as part of the compilation.
It was quiet. It was always quiet at night. Even at 11 on a Wednesday night, the only sound in little apartment was the leaky faucet in the bathroom dripping steadily. Some nights the TV was on or there were phone conversations going on, but some nights Liz didn't come home until Jess had been asleep for hours. She would still be sleeping when he left for school the morning. Sometimes she fell asleep right on the living room couch, still wearing her clothes from the day before even though they smelled like gross smoke. Those days were okay. When that happened Liz was just getting ready to start her day when Jess got home from school, so she was actually around to make him dinner or ask him about school before she went out again.
Theoretically she had a job, doing temp work for an agency that didn't care about what she did in her time outside of work. She didn't seem to go to work much, though. Instead, she went out with her friends a lot. They lived down the street from a bar that they all liked. Liz had said before that it was so close to their apartment that she could be home in just a couple of minutes if anything ever went wrong. The phone number for the bar was posted on the fridge, but Jess had never bothered to call. He could figure out things for himself.
He was only 11, but he had gotten pretty good at being alone. After school he might go to the park to read or hang out for a while, and then he would come home and do his homework. He always did his homework, and he got pretty good grades even though he had no one to check it for him. He didn't really like school, but he knew that people who went to school got good jobs and made enough money to live in nice places. Jess liked the idea of moving to a nice place someday. An apartment by the park, maybe, where the plaster in the living room wasn't cracked and the window in his bedroom wasn't always stuck open a couple of inches. So he made sure to always do his homework.
Jess made himself dinner too. Using the stove wasn't hard. He didn't like reaching into the oven to pull things out when they were hot, but if he used the oven mitt that didn't have a hole it was okay. If Liz had forgotten to go shopping and there was nothing to cook, he would make a peanut butter sandwich. Sometimes if Liz had just gotten paid she left money for takeout. Jess liked Chinese the best, and the place on the next block always gave him a ton of food so it lasted a couple of days. Chinese nights were the nights Liz stayed out the latest. If she had gotten paid, that meant she had more money to spend with her friends.
After dinner Jess usually watched TV, but they didn't have cable and their VCR was broken so most of the time it was boring. He always ended up reading instead. Books were free because he could get them from the school library, or walk to the public library if it was a nice day. Sometimes he would pick out a book and the librarian would say he needed a note from his parents to check it out, so he would just put it under his jacket when no one was looking. He always made sure to put it right back on the shelf when he was done reading it, so no one knew that he had taken it in the first place. Those books were his favorite. They were so much more interesting than the boring chapter books his school librarian pushed on his classmates.
Jess tried to stay up and read as late as he could, always hoping that his mom would come home before he went to bed. When she did he could fall asleep to the sounds of her moving around in the living room or watching TV. When she didn't, that's when Jess would sneak Liz's radio out of her bedroom. If she noticed the days when it was missing, she didn't say anything. Jess didn't listen to the radio a lot normally, but on those nights he would turn on the local rock radio station and turn the volume up as high as he could without the neighbors hearing. At first it had been hard to fall asleep with such loud music playing, but after a while he became used to it. Even when a song he didn't like came on, it was better than the quiet. With the music playing, he could almost pretend that someone was there with him. When the radio was on, he didn't feel so alone.
