Free Beautiful Lies by Lisa Unger

garbage bag in the nearest can.
    I knew that Zelda would come before the sun rose and roll the cans out to the sidewalk, that the garbage would be picked up early in the morning even before I got out of bed, and the note and the photograph would be gone as if they’d never existed. What about this flame of curiosity I was talking about? It wasn’t out. It was just that I could not imagine the consequences of knowing the answers. I’ll admit it wasn’t exactly a noble decision but I chose ignorance.
    I headed back up the stairs feeling lighter with relief. I was halfway up when I saw a shadow on the landing above me, the figure just out of the line of my vision. I stopped in my tracks and my heart started to race.
    “Is someone there?” I said. I knew everyone in my building and had never once had a moment of feeling unsafe there. Any one of my neighbors with a genuine purpose for being on the stairs would have answered me. I heard a shuffling, someone moving against the wall. I looked behind me and the light on the landing below had started to flicker, then went dark. The sound of my own breathing was loud in my ears, adrenaline started to pump through my veins, and every nerve ending in my body throbbed with fear. I didn’t know whether to go forward or backward.
    “Who is it?” I said, louder.
    I looked around for something to defend myself with but there was nothing. Then I heard footsteps hard and heavy in a run. I pushed myself against the wall, as if I could disappear by making myself very flat. I was about to scream when I realized the footsteps were moving away from me. I crouched down and looked up through the space between the staircases and saw the figure of a man. He had a large build and I saw his gloved hand on the banister. He ran up the last flight and exited the door that led to the roof. I braced myself for the sound of the fire-door alarm but it didn’t go off.
    I sat weak with relief on the staircase and wondered how he would get off the roof. Then I heard the groaning of the fire escape ladder out front. I wondered if anyone else had heard it, too. But after a minute, the building was silent again, as if none of it had ever happened. I walked cautiously back to my apartment and closed the door. A second later I heard another door close and lock. I couldn’t be sure whose door it was, whether it was above or below me.

seven

    Obviously, I didn’t sleep much the rest of the night. I checked the gates on my windows and double-locked my front door and basically sat in my bed wide-eyed, startling at every little sound until the black sky lightened from charcoal to gray. Another night I might have called Zack or even my father, but since everyone seemed convinced that I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, I didn’t want to give them an incident that might prove them right. After a little while I began to doze until my alarm went off an hour or so later.
    I got up and made a pot of coffee. As I listened to the machine’s familiar hiss and gurgle and smelled the aromas from Veniero’s, I started to feel normal again. Everything about the night before began to seem surreal, as though I might have been dreaming from the moment I got on the train to go to New Jersey. I’d thrown out the photo and made a decision to consider the whole thing a hoax. In my sunny kitchen, I could halfway believe that I had imagined the whole encounter on the stairs. You know, because the
stress
was causing me to
hallucinate.
Anyway, it was over. It was just me, Ridley, on a normal Thursday morning. Denial…it ain’t just a river in Egypt. Seriously, I think it’s something your mind does when it has too much to handle. It takes a little vacation.
    I went into my office—really, it’s just a little space I have sectioned off with an Oriental screen where I keep my files and laptop. I rummaged through some papers on my desk and found the business card Uma Thurman’s publicist had given me. We’d met at a yoga