Alone in Paris

Chapter Three: The Boy

Creak. I sigh, rolling over onto my stomach, but not opening my eyes. Creak. I pause, listening—still half-asleep. Creak! My heart jolts just before I catapult out of bed. I stand beside my bed, listening to the steady footsteps as they climb the stairs.

I leap across the bed to the closet on the other side. Swinging the door open, I quickly slip inside, fully awake and alert now. Someone is here.

Since my apartment is at the end of the hallway, maybe it's unlikely that they'll choose to check out mine. Finding me hiding in a closet is even less likely, right? I gulp.

I press back against the wall of the closet. It's empty for the most part. I only have so many clothes (a summer dress, a single pair of jeans, and two T-shirts), so I don't have much to hide behind. My breath catches as I imagine the walls closing in on me. I can't lose control. Not right now.

My heart begins to thunder against my chest when I hear footsteps.

Whoever it is, they're close. Real close. The closet door is shuttered, so I can see through it when I peek through the gaps. A figure walks into the room then.

My breath almost catches when I see that the person on the other side of the door is wearing jeans. I can't get a good view of him—the boy that stands in my room—but I know it's the boy from the other day. His back is to me, and the aligned shutters on the door block my vision of his head.

I watch as he pauses at the window, staring outside for a long, dazed minute. I wish I could see his face, if only for a moment. Turn, I will. Move. Do something!

Why is he in here? Why would he come in this room out of all the apartments in the building? What would possess him to come here? Had he already looked in the other apartments? Did he hear me jump out of bed?

He moves then, and my attention is focused back on what he's doing. He pauses at the rocking chair, picking up something and staring down at it intently. My eyes widen. It's my sketchbook. He's looking at my sketchbook.

I watch as he begins to flip through it, powerless to stop him. Words of protest are tattooed on my lips, but I can't call to him—not without being exposed. I lean against the back wall quietly as I bite back words of halt.

As time passes, my legs grow tired. I sit down. He doesn't leave. He wanders my room before heading to one of the other bedrooms a little ways down the hall. I stay crouched in the back of the closet until I don't hear the floorboards creak anymore.

I get to my feet, slowly opening the closet door. It quietly groans as I push it open to search for any sign of the boy. No footsteps echo off the old walls, no sound comes at all; it's eerily quiet. With a sigh, I sneak out of the closet and to the door of my apartment. It's been left open. I glance down the hall, but no one is there.

I turn and go over to the rocking chair, where I expect to find my sketchpad, only to find that it isn't there. I search my room, my apartment, and the building, but it's nowhere to be found. The boy took my sketchpad.

Days pass. My sketchbook doesn't turn up, and neither does the boy. The fear and sadness stay glued to my heart as the days go by. I try to go outdoors to sketch (in a notebook that hasn't disappeared with the mysterious boy) and read, but I can't always make myself leave my apartment.

Every day feels like the last: gloomy, dragged on, familiar, and uneventful. There is nothing I can do to fill the gap in my life. I'm an unsocial orphaned freak with nowhere to go, no one to see, and nowhere to be. I don't know what to do to fill the gap, and now, I'm not so sure there is anything I can do to fill it.