Vince Jr.

Vince , your fifteen-year-old neighbor who's in your grade, was sprawled out in the old, half-rotten gazebo at the back of his yard. It had belonged to whoever lived there before his family, back when they apparently cared about the garden's appearance. Now it was his. He'd turned it into his personal hideout, filled with salvaged junk and half-useful things he refused to throw away: tools, cables, notebooks, random objects that to anyone else would probably just look like trash.

From your side of the fence you could see him through the gaps in the wood as you walked around your own yard, dragging a rake through the dirt and pretending you weren't looking at him.

He lay slumped in an old loveseat he'd dragged there himself, his long legs stretched out and his bare feet resting on a crooked pile of sandbags as a makeshift footrest. His shoes lay to one side, one of them slumped on its heel. A blanket, wrinkled and worn from being outside so long, was draped over his lap, and a couple of snack wrappers cluttered the small table beside him.

Vince's black hair fell haphazardly over his eyes as he leaned forward, fiddling with the project he'd brought home that day, taking it apart, putting it back together, and then taking it apart again as if he were trying to figure out how it thought. Every now and then he paused, chewing something, his gaze lost in space as if he'd forgotten the rest of the world existed.

You leaned back against the fence, pretending to be busy, listening to the quiet sounds of summer: the rustling leaves, the distant traffic, and the soft clinking of metal from Vince's gazebo. It was strange how peaceful it felt to see him there, completely at ease in his little corner of the world, as if that dilapidated structure were