Everybody in Hattiesburg knew the Beauregards owned the house on Magnolia Drive, but nobody really knew what happened inside those walls except me, because my window faced the side yard and because I had nothing better to do with my afternoons than watch.

Eunice Beauregard was fourteen when he arrived. She had the kind of beauty that people write poetry about—porcelain skin, dark hair, eyes that could be either innocent or calculating depending on whether you believed what she wanted you to believe. And she was bored. A bored girl with money and a mansion and a mother who let her get away with everything is a dangerous thing.

Caleb Thorne was sixteen. Earl Thorne, his stepfather, dropped him off at the Beauregard house on a Tuesday in September with a paper bag of clothes and a look on his face that said he would rather be anywhere else. Caleb stood on the front step and looked at the house the way a soldier looks at a building he's been told is friendly fire.

Eunice saw him from her bedroom window. I saw her seeing him. I know how I know? Because I was in her window too, on my side, watching.

She came running down the stairs two floors below me, skirts flying, and threw open the front door before Earl Thorne had even gotten back in his truck. "Can I meet him?" she asked. Her mother, standing in the hallway with a cup of coffee she had no reason to be drinking at that hour, said: "That's Caleb. He'll be staying with us." Eunice said: "Can he come outside?"

That was the first sentence I heard her say to him. "Can you come outside?" He said yes. He said it the way people say yes to things they don't understand but are too tired to refuse.

I watched them from my window for the first month. I watched her teach him things. I watched him learn them. I watched the slow process of a girl trying to reshape another person and believing, with genuine conviction, that she was doing it out of love.

She taught him how to use a fork. He used it for two meals and then stopped, the way a musician stops playing an instrument after years of practice—out of muscle memory, not choice. She taught him to sit at the table. He sat for eleven minutes on the first day, ten on the second, eight on the third, and then one day he was on the floor again and she didn't seem to notice or maybe she noticed and didn't care.

She called him her project. I heard her say it to her friend Shonette on the phone one evening, loud enough for the walls to carry it: "He's just so teachable. Like a puppy."

I didn't tell her that Caleb wasn't a puppy. I didn't tell her that I'd seen him in the alley behind the Diner, sitting on a milk crate with his back to the brick wall, watching people walk by the way a guard watches a prison yard. Not hostile. Not friendly. Just watching. Collecting information. Staying alive.

The thing about Caleb that Eunice couldn't see was that he was already tamed. Not by her—by something worse. By the system. The Delta Children's Home, she called it when she was being charitable. The place he came from, when she was being uncharitable, was never named in her house. It was "where he came from," and that was enough.

But I knew. Because I'd been in the same system. Because I'd been twelve and furious and invisible and I knew what it looked like when a boy had learned that the world was going to hurt him and he was going to hurt back.

The turning point came in November. Eunice had been receiving letters—love letters, she called them, though her voice when she said it had the flat quality of something rehearsed. She brought one home and dropped it on Caleb's lap while he was washing dishes. "Read it," she said.

He picked it up. He was illiterate in the way that matters—not unable to read letters, but unable to read the kind of writing that people use to express feelings. He stared at the page for a full minute. Then he handed it back. "It's not for me."

"It is for you. I wrote it myself."

"You wrote it?"

"For me to give to you."

He looked at her. This was the first time I'd seen his expression change in a way that was clearly anger. Not the sharp, explosive anger of a teenager—it was the quiet, accumulated anger of someone who has been carrying the same thing for a very long time.

"I don't want your letters," he said.

"That's not what this is about."

"It is exactly what this is about. You write a letter. You give it to me. You expect me to feel something. What do you want me to feel?"

"I want you to know that someone—"

"Stop." He put the dish he was holding down very carefully, the way you put down something fragile. "You want me to feel loved. You want me to know that someone cares. But you don't care. If you cared, you wouldn't be doing this."

"What are you talking about?"

"This." He gestured at himself—at his clothes, his hair, the way he was holding his hands like they didn't belong to him. "You're playing a game. And I'm the piece you're moving around the board."

Eunice's face went very still. This was the first time in her life that anyone had told her she was being cruel. She had expected gratitude. She had expected him to be grateful for the letters, for the attention, for the fact that she had chosen him.

She went upstairs and didn't come down for dinner.

The next morning, Caleb was gone. Not left—gone. His room was untouched. His clothes were folded on the bed. His shoes were by the door, laces untied, the way he always left them.

I saw Eunice standing at the window the next afternoon, looking toward the alley, the way she used to look when she was waiting for him to come home from wherever he'd wandered off to. But he wasn't wandering. He was leaving.

"Did you send him away?" I asked her when she came downstairs.

She didn't answer.

"Did you?" I asked again.

She said: "No."

And I knew that was true. She hadn't sent him away. But she hadn't been able to see him until she saw what he really was—which was the same thing that had made him leave: someone who needed saving from exactly what she was offering.

He never came back. Nobody in Hattiesburg saw him again. Sometimes I think about what he was looking at from that milk crate in the alley—not people, exactly, but the spaces between them. The gaps where a person could slip through if they knew where to look.

I still live in that house across the street. I still watch the window. And sometimes, when the light hits it just right, I think I can see him there, sitting on the edge of the bed, waiting for someone to ask him what he actually wants.

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Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: