Through the Wall by Jack Caseros

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​Through the Wall


   “Nico,” Amari whispered, his lips brushing the rough edges of drywall that separated our bedrooms. “Niii-co. Are you there?”
   I was always there. Before a mouse had chewed through our shared wall in the housing complex, I had never considered that the most popular kid in the second grade slept on just the other side. I never considered that I would find him balled under the bed he also had pushed up against the wall, his sobbing interrupted only by a sharp, croaking inhalation.
   When I first heard Amari through the wall, I thought my hideout had been ruined. But I didn’t find Amari, the first pick in gym class. Not the nucleus to a constant orbit of girls. I found an ear framed in crumbled drywall, a mouth that confessed all the same things I could never say.
   Being closed in under my bed was the only way I could end my day. It felt like a time capsule, untouchable and easily forgettable. No one to taunt me, no one to pull my ponytail or piss in my apple juice.
   It had never even occurred to me that there could be monsters under the bed. In my house, they had free reign. Amari felt the same way. Whenever he felt his parents’ footsteps lurching upstairs, he pressed an eye against the hole in the wall, trying to find me in the dark.
   “Let me through, let me through!” he’d say, like I was responsible for keeping the hole too small for Amari to squeeze through when he most needed it.

                                                                                                                                ***

   Nothing could be left unknown—not my fear of heights or Amari’s fear of clowns—not the first time I had an erection and thought I had woken up with a new appendage—not Amari’s dream of becoming an Olympic sprinter, being the fastest kid on the block and probably every block in every country in the whole world—not my fantasy to marry Nekeisha Dawson, nor Amari’s dream to hold hands with Trevor Colson, even if those things made no sense to us at the time—not Amari’s strained weeping when I asked why it sounded like his mouth was full of cotton—being treated like a diseased goat—another goddamn mouth to feed—ungrateful failure—but—nothing was too sacred for the hole in our wall.

                                                                                                                                ***

   Sometime after Easter, I spent a night alone with my face in front of the hole, waiting for Amari to poke me awake with a ruler that never came. I woke up in a sneezing fit after midnight, knocking my head on the bed frame.
   The next morning I found Amari waiting for the bus. Like usual, he pretended he didn’t know me.
   I understood. We would have to talk about it through the wall.
  But that night Amari only wanted to talk about Power Rangers. About how the Green Ranger randomly shows up and fits into the existing Megazord. No one knows him, no one trusts him, but in the end, he’s there for them. We had already debated the Green Ranger. I didn’t want to rehash old news.
   “Amari, please…tell me,” I begged. “What’s going on?”
   He didn’t answer.
   I wouldn’t have understood anyway, not until it happened.
  In three days, Amari’s family was gone. Someone new moved into Amari’s room. They rearranged furniture, setting their bed on the opposite wall. No more listening ear, no more honest mouth. Now, when the lights in the other room were on, they bled into the dark sanctuary beneath my bed.

                                                                                                                                ***

   Even if I wasn’t cocooned beneath my bed, I was still awake. I wrapped myself in bedsheets and stared at the ceiling. It felt so far. Like a cavern, or a castle hall. Through my window I could hear the chorus of traffic that was quieted under the bed.
   And then, like a whisper that focuses your attention in a crowd, I heard a voice. I threw off the sheets and slipped under my bed.
  There were whispers coming through the hole in the wall—two voices from the bed on the opposite side of the room. Two boys were talking into each other’s mouths. Something about Oh God and not yet and the occasional mm-hmm. The room was lit by a single candle, a K-Ci & JoJo cassette playing on a boom box.
   I had to ask what they were so excited about. Then, they didn’t seem so excited. They coughed and cursed. I asked if they were okay.         
   Nobody wanted to answer.
   The boy without the pencil moustache crawled over to me, sticking his face against the grate.
   “Who are you?” he asked.
    I asked if he knew Amari. He wanted to know why. I told him Amari had gone away, but maybe Amari would visit if he knew him.
   The boy kneeling at the hole looked back at the boy on the bed.       
   “You know him?”
   “What? I didn’t know there was a fucking hole there.”
   “Amari,” he said. “I thought you said we were alone.”
   “He’s just a kid.”
   The kneeling boy was on his feet now. His heel pounded into the wall, cracking the drywall.
   “Hey, hey, chill. What are you doing?”
   “You promised we were alone.”
   I rolled out from under the bed, where their shouting competed with the jack-hammering of a truck’s engine brake outside my window. Their argument didn’t even make sense. They were together, not alone. They were together, without a wall in between. They didn’t even have words in the way—just mouth directly to mouth.
   I didn’t wake up the next morning. I hadn’t fallen asleep. I waited at the kitchen table, ready to tell my mother about the hole in the wall.




Jack Caseros is an Argentine-Canadian writer and environmental scientist whose creative work has appeared in cool places like Every Day Fiction, Syntax & Salt, and Drunk Monkeys. His uncreative work has appeared in drearier places, like boardrooms and government databases. He’s an Assistant Fiction Editor for Pithead Chapel and a student in Stanford’s Online Writing Certificate. You can read about how exhausted Jack is at www.jackcaseros.wordpress.com.