10
When Lily left the house to head to school, Eddie was sitting in his electrical car up the street following her until she went inside St. Finnian's Catholic School down the street from the house. Brad O'Keefe came out from his house to follow her, but Lily didn't notice him or bother with him. She joined up with her friends, Renee, Leah and Ashley, and they cackled and laughed in unison over incidents in her life as Brad mooned over Lily from afar. He'd been in love with her since Eddie could recall, but Lily just thought of him as the boy from next door. When she changed from just Lily to the incredible Lily, though, his hormones jumped to attention and saluted! Eddie couldn't stand it. Lily was never going to think of Brad in that way, and Eddie felt he was going to have to set him straight. He'd rather save Brad from a future of pining for Lily than watch him forever waiting for her and something that could never be.
While Lily was in school, Eddie drove over to the Moseby Street warehouse and watched from a diagonal angle from a coffee place at the corner. The distance was a block away, somewhere around a hundred to fifty feet. This day, he saw a van from Exact Cleaning Crews arrive with the keys to the gate and the side door. They spent five hours in the place and then departed so apparently someone was carrying out business for the place. After they locked the place back up, Eddie checked his watch and realized the time. Lily was getting out of school. Traffic was light before the school buses hit the streets. Hoping he wasn't going to be accused of being a pedophile from watching the kids, Eddie parked down Decatur Street down from the school and watched as the buses filled up on the one-way street next to the church and the kids came pouring out the side. He saw Henry first laughing and racing to get out of the place, and then Jimmy a few steps behind him. He was alone as usual. Not a lot of friends, a bit slower than most and taking his time, he stopped to talk to a fellow classmate then continued on to walk home. Brad O'Keefe was almost right behind him, out-going and jovial with his buddies from the Science Club. They didn't talk much about science; it was more of a fan club for Science Fiction movies. By now, the crowds of hormone-driven and drug-addled kids had thinned out and Eddie realized that he had not seen Lily. Where was she? He looked down the street to his brother's house and then up to Main Street. Eddie's hand reached to pick up the binoculars from his passenger seat, and he looked up the street. The secretive redhead was heading away from the school!
"What's the dilly, Mrs. Dolly?" Eddie reached to start his car. When he did, he heard a tapping at his car window. He looked out and there were two police officers there. A lean African-American male officer and a short petite blonde female officer, they were gesturing to him to get out of the car.
"Can you get out of the car, sir?" They asked him.
"There is a very logical explanation." Eddie started then felt his body spun around and his hands pulled behind him and handcuffed. "There is a logical reason for this! There is a logical reason for this!" He was screaming. His head pushed to the hood of his car, he noticed Lily the length of the block away and looking back at him. She turned round again and headed on her way. "You win this round, Lily! You win this round!" He started wondering. How did she know he was outside the school?
A secret grin on her lips, Lily headed up to Main Street lined with shops and businesses. She stopped off first at Exact Cleaners to get her keys back from the cleaning crews and then to pay their bill for the job. She used cash because that way the bill could not be linked back to her. Departing that place, she caught the bus at the corner and rode it to down to Tisdale Street, walking over to Moseby Street and taking a brief look of her surroundings before locking and relocking the exterior gate behind her at her new acquisition.
Letting herself into the structure, she entered the stairwell and headed up to the second floor, taking the freight elevator from there to the third floor. She had told the cleaning crew to take the front stairwell up and down as the top floor of the back stairwell was still blocked on the third floor. She checked that out. The machines were still ensconced just as had left them against the doors, but she still had the second floor doors to that stairwell to seal or block off from people she didn't want here. That would leave only the elevator going up and down for her, and as long as it only worked as according to her mental commands, it meant no one else could use it.
Both the second floor and third floor had been vacuumed. With the lights working, the blue-green walls appeared more dingy and a bit more decrepit with the better illumination. They needed to be painted. She mulled over that decision and looked through one office after another doing a visual check of the offices and rooms. The trash bins from the other day had been dumped out back into the dumpster and ready to be filled up again. Tucking her red hair behind her left ear, she motioned from one room and through a corridor to another office. The cleaning crew had set aside the boxes or moved the furniture in the course of their job, but they hadn't exactly been orderly in it. Lowering her head a bit, Lily extended her right arm and gestured the desk in the room to lift up off the floor and relocate over against the door into the room. She maneuvered her same hand toward the boxes in the room and lined them across the top of the desk against the wall as added weight to that barrier. That room barred from entry, she turned and looked out the windows of the room. She looked out over the grassy space under her and the fence cutting her property off from the empty row of businesses next door. They had once been a series of small enterprises. A barber shop, a vacuum repair place, a sandwich place, a fresh fruit and vegetable shop… but when the center of town shifted, the businesses started doing less and less and the bands of street kids and vandals started moving in to the area. They didn't bother the shipping place next door nor the garages or local manufacturers, but they did intimidate the small business owners. That's one reason hardly anyone wanted this location. Lily smiled a bit thinking about the first time someone tried to break into this place; she'd make sure they'd believe in ghosts by time she was through with them. She turned on her heel and through the corridor to the other office and back out to the hallway.
Mentally forcing the elevator to take her to the third floor, she emerged at her secret apartment to judge the work done for her. The walls had been clear by her efforts, the carpet had been vacuumed and shampooed, the abandoned boxes stored in a second floor office and the bathroom off the one former office had been polished clean. It still did not suit her at all. It had been meant to be a washroom, not a full bathroom. The space next to it was the private bathroom to another office next door. Lily flushed the toilet to see if it worked then started seeing what she wanted instead of two separate rooms with plumbing. Her desires reaching out, her wishes crackling through the plaster of the place, her eyes gazed upon cracks appearing in the wall, creating sections of plaster pulling themselves free upon both sides of the wall. Where there had once been a wall, she willed a doorway to appear to her and she now had an opening into another washroom with another toilet and another sink, but it was not a real doorway. The support beams were still there. They were little effort for someone of her psychic power. First the nails started popping out of it, and then the wood beams in their started rattling free. The doorjambs to the other bathroom also came loose and exchanged placed with the disassembled wall. Where there had been a wall was now a door; where there had been a door, the sections of wall pulled themselves together back into place. Lily now had a dual bathroom: two sinks and two toilets adjacent to each other. The extra set would have to be replaced by a bathtub. To conjure one of those was beyond the extent of even her power! Lily turned round on her left foot perusing the world she was creating around her. The rooms were barren, except for the few desks and objects she had moved around. She had no decorations, nothing to hang her jacket on, nothing to place her things…
She thought of all the objects in her parent's attic that could be used to fill this place. There was the old heavy mirror from their bedroom in the attic, bric-a-brac and décor from Sean's mother that she recalled as a child, an old dresser bureau purchased from a yard sale that had never been used except to store junk and even a old department store mannequin that Uncle Eddie had brought to the house and never took away. That might make a very interesting decoration properly clothed! It might not be a suit of armor or a family crest, but it was definitely something interesting if it mother had not lived up to a lingering promise to toss it out in the trash. Lily turned round once in the outer office picturing this place a home well away from her embarrassing family. It might not be the castle she wanted, but she was going to make it into one.