What I remember most clearly about that day is how evil we were to her younger cousin. He was visiting from Poland, or Russia, or Israel, and all he wanted to do was use the computer to play Jumpstart Fourth Grade, which was the best game available at the time. Of course, Lily wouldn’t let him, said it was her house so she decided what we were going to do and when. I remember this poor kid with his crew cut and goggle eyes and accent asking what we were going to play next, unable to conceal his hopefulness, shooting glances at the tan desktop in the corner of the room. Lily said, “dress-up,” she and pulled out the princess gowns.

            I should make it clear that I didn’t like having playdates at Lily’s house. I didn’t like playdates with Lily at all, really. When she came to our house, I hid my favorite stuffed animals and begged Mom to let us watch videos the whole time.

            Lily’s family was new to the homeschooling community—the New York Home Educator’s Alliance—and my mother had taken it upon herself to welcome them into the fold. I’m sure it seemed like the natural thing to do from Mom’s perspective. Lily and I were the same age, we were both girls—how could we not become best friends? Mom didn’t care that I already had a best friend—Elliott was my best friend—and there was a whole crowd of kids right on our block who were much more fun to kick around with than Lily. Anyone was better than Lily, I would argue. Lily was weird.

            “That is unkind, Sophia,” Mom would say. Then she would pick up the phone and schedule another playdate.

            Lily was weird, but so was I, so were all homeschoolers. Plenty of my friends from the neighborhood were in public school and, honestly, they were pretty weird, too. Sasha and Freddy from the block always wanted to play an ongoing game, Armadillo Adventures, where we crawled around their bedroom and curled into balls anytime anything startled us. Trevor and I got scolded for drawing butts on the sidewalk with chalk. Even Elliott told me she had the power to talk to plants. I developed that power, too, for a while.

            So, it really wasn’t Lily’s weirdness that made me dislike her. It was her constant prodding and goading, her ability to identify something you did not want to do and to needle you with it.

            Much of this memory is foggy—I was eight or possibly even younger—and my mood was stormy because, beforehand, Mom and I had fought viciously about the playdate. I did not want to go, I said. I didn’t like Lily. “She is a sweet, lonely little girl,” Mom said. She was not sweet to me, nuh-uh, no way. I said Lily stank. Mom said no TV for a week. I countered that such a punishment felt disproportionate to my crime. Lily wasn’t even around to hear me say that she stank. Mom said, “You are being ungenerous to a kid who needs friends. I just want you to make an effort.” I asked if by making an effort I could earn back TV for the week. I had a Bugs Bunny tape rented from the video store and had only watched it once so far. Mom agreed. Soon, I was on Lily’s doorstep in Carroll Gardens. I was doing this for Bugs Bunny.

            Lily let me in with her usual indifference. She was a bit taller than I was, with hair the color of wet sand and pale eyes that she often screwed into a performative squint. I remember her saying often how she liked cowboy movies, but we never watched any when I was over there. She wore long T-shirts with images of realistic horses on them, and there were some plastic sheriff badges peppered around her room, so maybe it was true. Maybe she did like cowboy movies. I didn’t really care.

            I was pulling off my sneakers in the hall, about to ask what she wanted to do, when out of her room wandered a little kid with a shaved head. He looked as lost as I felt, maybe even more so. Lily turned to him.

            “Did you find it?”

            The boy shook his head.

            “Well it’s not out here,” she said. “Keep looking.”

            He went back into her room. His lack of resistance was striking to me. Lily refocused.

            “I told him if he could find the frog beanie, I would give him something. I forget what.” She smirked, reached into the pocket of her shorts, and pulled out the beanbag amphibian. “Keep looking,” she called in mock-singsong. Then she stuffed the frog behind an umbrella stand.

            What a relief to have the cousin there. He soaked up so much of Lily’s focus. The first ten minutes of the playdate were killed just watching him circle the bedroom, bending down and peeking under dressers and opening toy chests to rummage inside. When he lifted her bedspread, Lily smacked his hand. When he asked for a hint, she rolled her eyes. I sat in her computer chair swinging my feet, relieved that I couldn’t be roped into participating. I was in the loop, knew the futility of the quest. Lily kept trying to get me to giggle with her, but I couldn’t find humor under the circumstances.

            When her cousin went into the closet to dig, Lily slammed the door and leaned against it. “We got him,” she screamed. “We caught the warthog. Help me hold it closed.”

            I felt like I was stuck to the chair with hot glue. I stared at her. No sounds came from inside the closet.

            “He’s not even going to try to escape,” said Lily, and I saw, just for a moment, a look of grief crossed her face. She opened the door and out he came, blinking and bland.

            On it went like that. The search for the beanbag frog ended without resolution. Lily called it off by pulling out a box of plastic soldiers. I wondered if she had forgotten the frog itself, shoved behind the umbrella stand. The idea that it could become lost there, gathering dust weeks into months, felt heartbreaking, and I excused myself to the bathroom, grabbing the toy on my way back and dropping it onto the pile by Lily’s bed when she wasn’t looking.

            In hindsight, I wonder why I felt this protective impulse for a beanbag frog, but not for Lily’s cousin. Is it just that it was easier to save a toy from obscurity than to protect another child? That was part of it. I knew Lily well enough to understand she wouldn’t push me too far. Goading people into things was her specialty, but I had the power to resist her. My parents had taught me how to say no. Even in early childhood, they were clear that there would be situations where I would need to refuse other people, reject ideas, turn away from commands.

            So, Lily knew she wasn’t able to force me into certain things. I suppose I could have extended this power to protect her cousin. But it was easier to sit on the edge of the bed and watch her dress him in gowns and pearls, make him repeat embarrassing phrases in hopes of earning a snack from the pantry.

            But then, later, we were in the basement under the pretense of searching for an old rocking horse Lily said she had. The cousin and I stood warily at the bottom of the creaky wooden stairs as Lily poked around shelves. The basement was like most others in Brooklyn: cool, damp, and earthy with a cracking cement floor.

            The rocking horse couldn’t be found, of course, and Lily turned to her cousin and told him, her voice totally without inflection, to undress.

            Silence. I looked up at the exposed light bulb glowing harshly. My vision started to fuzz from the glare. When it cleared, Lily was looking at me, face as unreadable as an abandoned farmhouse. She turned again to her cousin.

            “Come on.” She snapped her fingers.

            Without looking, I realized with horror that he was reaching for the waistband on his gym shorts. A flood of heat surged up my body, constricting my throat. There was also an unknown tug in my stomach and my crotch, a desire to watch this unfold.

            “Kelly Marie wants to talk to you,” said a voice clear as spring water. It took me a moment to realize the voice was mine. Both Lily and her cousin were looking at me now. I saw that already he had started to lower his pants, the whiteness of his underwear bright in the gloom.

            “Who?” asked Lily.

            “Kelly Marie,” I said. “She wants to talk to you.”

            “Where?” asked Lily.  

            I thought again about Bugs Bunny. He was—then, as now—a spirit guide to me. His life was threatened pretty much every episode by hunters, mad scientists, and carnivores, but Bugs did not live in fear. He escaped through wit and speed. All the world was his stage and he was the player. A tall gray rabbit in a low-cut dress could become an enchantress. He could talk his way out of anything, and he could have fun doing it.

             In the basement, I had known I needed to stop Lily’s cousin from taking his clothes off. If he had gotten naked down there, her power over him would become limitless. There would be no stopping her. It even occurred to me that I might never escape her if I bore witness. There were ramifications beyond my scope of understanding.

            The wily rabbit dashed through my mind, commanding me to act and act quickly.

            I said the first words that came. They were utter nonsense.

            But it was enough to call a halt to the stripping in the basement. My body still felt numb. Inexplicably, a scrim of heaviness was falling around my shoulders. I realized it was disappointment, regret for what I had circumvented. I turned and left the basement before I could reverse course. Lily followed me up the stairs, her cousin trailing behind.

            “Okay,” she said back in her bedroom. “Who’s Kelly Marie?”

            I didn’t have an answer. What had been important was getting us out of the basement. Now it didn’t seem like we’d traveled far enough. If I didn’t carry on with what I’d started, Lily would lose interest and turn on her cousin again. Worse: she might come after me. Her room with its wood floor, green bed, and toys categorized in jumbled piles began to feel hot and suffocating. Lily was squinting again. Keeping her eyes fixed on me, she reached out and took a plastic sheriff badge off her desk, turning it over in her hand. The cousin stood limply. He wants to sit down, I thought. He’s exhausted just being here, and he can’t even sit for fear she’ll pounce. I noticed, maybe for the first time in my life, the prickling of sweat along my scalp. It reminded me of my comics at home, Peanuts or Tintin, where tiny water droplets would fly from a character’s head in moments of nervousness. Even Lily’s desktop computer, hulking and dead in its place, seemed to be staring at me, waiting. I thought of the rascally rabbit.

            “Backyard,” I said.

            I didn’t like anything about visiting; I’ve made this clear. But there was one thing that attracted me about her house, and that was her backyard, or, more specifically, the backyard next to hers.

            Like most Brooklyn brownstones, Lily’s yard had a large patio, a lawn, and several flowerbeds, all contained in a perfect rectangle surrounded by a high wooden fence. The yard on the left—visible from her porch—was a veritable junkyard. The house next door may have been abandoned or, at least, out of use. This was in the ’90s and Brooklyn real estate was heating up but had not yet reached molten temperatures, meaning there still existed unrenovated buildings that were not drawing rent. I suspect the brownstone next to Lily’s was merely a storage space for the owners, but I have no way of knowing.

            Whatever its origin, the backyard was a spectacle, piled high with bulky objects rusting and fading with the seasons. From ancient stoves and refrigerators to rolls of rotting linoleum to fenders and a blank, cloudy gumball machine, the space was entirely stuffed with things. In our occasional moments of civility, Lily and I would sit on her porch and play I Spy in the yard next door.

            “I spy a long, silvery tube.”

            “I spy something that once cleaned dishes.”

            “I spy a rotting Winnie the Pooh doll.”

            But, of course, the yard was not novel to Lily. She saw it every day. I found it fascinating, which is another thing that doesn’t surprise me anymore. It’s in my nature to stare into crumbling relics, caring so deeply and thinking so hard that I become almost vapid. This is something I’ve done all my life.

            We trailed into her backyard, three children, one bored and sharpening her claws, one wary, one thrust into a leadership position, wishing she could go home.

            “Kelly Marie is in there,” I said weakly, gesturing towards the yard next to Lily’s, a jungle of wire, rust, and waterlogged planks.

            Lily sneered, but she played along. She stepped around one of her mother’s flowerpots—one that was taller than we were and filled with shrubbery—and showed us the hole in the fence.

            “We will see,” said Lily.

            So through the fence we went. Lily, challenged and confident, led the way, then me, then the cousin.

            The junk made it so we had to crouch and crawl delicately, crab-walking, ducking, and maneuvering our bodies through cracks. We had developed enough to have inklings about risk and injury. I knew to stay away from rust, knew that rust could poison. But there was rust everywhere—box springs, hubcaps, nails sticking from wood. This was truly a briar patch of sorts, but I was no rabbit. My body had no lapin agility. My wit was also struggling to keep pace. By leading the charge, Lily had effectively grabbed the reigns of the story. Now she was the one leading us to Kelly Marie, the nonentity I had spit into existence. I followed the bottoms of Lily’s sneakers as she crawled deeper into the yard next door. Wood, metal, and shattered plastic formed a dense roof over our heads. It was dark.

            There was a clearing, of course. Tires and rolled fencing conspired with car engines and bent beach chairs to form a space roughly in the center of the yard, clear sky over head, the branches of the trees that, I realized, would be budding soon. It was almost spring. The weather was warming. Down here, though, the air was cool and damp with smells of standing water and decay. Lily turned in her squat. I leaned against the smooth stone of a shattered birdbath. The cousin sat on the ground. It was soundless here, and we spent a moment listening. Gradually, we picked up noises from the outside world—a garbage truck huffing down the street on the other side of the buildings, music from someone’s radio. We acclimated. Our heartbeats steadied themselves, or, at least, mine did.

            “Where is she?” Lily sounded impatient. Now that the novelty had worn off, she was growing irritable. I had been dreading this moment. There was, of course, nobody here. The house next to Lily’s was almost definitely devoid of life. Even if it hadn’t been, Kelly Marie was a figment, a device. Lily’s cousin had a finger in his nose, and, for a moment, I saw why she treated him the way she did. Then he met my glance, his eyes imploring.

            “Kelly Marie wants to talk to you,” I said to Lily.

            “Yeah, yeah. Where is she?”

            I had no answer so I repeated the phrase. Lily puffed out her breath.

            “Uh-huh, yeah, so?”

            “She wants to talk to you.”

            I kept my tone deliberately empty. Or, perhaps, that was just how I felt. There was nothing left here. Nobody was coming. It was a complete dead end. Lily did a mock glance at our surroundings, theatric. She rolled her eyes.

            “Kelly Marie wants to talk to you,” said the cousin.

            I was taken aback. He had been almost mute up to this point.

            Lily didn’t like his intrusion. “Shut up.”

            “But Kelly Marie wants to talk to you,” I said.

            The cousin repeated.

            “She wants to talk,” I said.

            “To you,” he said.

            Again we said it. A chant now. She would appear, an apparition like Bloody Mary, like a future spouse down the well at midsummer. Kelly Marie, Kelly Marie, Kellie Marie. She wants to talk to you.

            Lily protested. Her voice was angry, but it weakened. There was power in numbers. I hated being aligned with the cousin, but it was too late to turn back. We chanted and chanted and when we returned to ourselves, Lily was gone, back toward the fence.

            The cousin smiled at me. I did not return the smile, but I nodded. A move of cold stoicism, I can admit now.

            The shriek came from the other side, piercing our fortress of junk.

            It was Lily, of course, with a torn knee and thick drops of blood on the brickwork, but, for the smallest second, I thought the scream came from Kelly Marie. We had summoned a demon in pain. She would not be silenced and would have her revenge. I noticed again I was sweating even though it was cool in our clearing. My body was changing, growing significantly that day—but this observation is probably hindsight.

            Pulling in a breath, I crawled away from the cousin, keeping my pace steady. I could hear Lily crying now, a low, thin wail. The nail that had caught her protruded from a board right before the fence. On the other side, Lily was clutching her leg. The daylight dazzled me. So did the blood.

            Things happened quickly then. I climbed the steps to the porch, found Lily’s mother who swept into the yard, lifted her daughter up, carried her inside. Lily’s wails were muted suddenly as the door closed behind them. I was alone in their garden examining dots of blood on the ground.

            The cousin came back through the fence a couple moments later.

            “What took you?”

            He stared at me, his pupils shrinking in the light.

            “Kelly,” he said.

            “Marie.”

            My mother never made me go back to Lily’s house after that. She was summoned to pick me up and, in the car ride home, I felt a silent accusation emanating from the front seat. I was probably imagining it. Lily had been taken to the hospital. She would need stitches. The cousin had been taken along for the ride. That was his lot that day, I guess.

            Now, I am grown. I do not have a daughter yet, but I have not ruled out the possibility in the future. Finding a man who I could imagine as a father has been unsurprisingly difficult. It doesn’t bother me much. I’ll either have a child someday, or I won’t.

            I doubt Lily still lives on that block in Carroll Gardens. I walk past sometimes. Most brownstones look the same, so it’s difficult to remember which one she lived in. The building next door has since been fixed up and rented for a king’s ransom. Still, sometimes, in the peripheral side-world of my glance, I see a child’s face, pale and lank, peering out from behind dark windows. She has been summoned, I think. She is here now, and she wants to talk to you.

*