Our apartment was on the sixth floor of the building. But for now, Ethan and I sat in the lobby —half-soaked, shoes squelching, jackets dripping onto the tile—watching the rain through the glass doors. It felt like the almost of home. Safe, but not quite there yet.

“Are you alright?” he asked. His voice was soft, but I could hear the worry stitched into it.

I just nodded.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That… he was just so crazy.” He looked down at his shoes. Even then, I knew he felt guilty.. Like he couldn’t protect me. 

“But he was harmless, you know that, right? Those people… the ones from the harbor district… they can be like that.”

I didn’t answer. Instead, I asked, “Can you sing me that song again?”

And so he did.

His voice was quiet, almost a whisper, echoing in the tiled lobby like something from a dream.

“Molly Sparrow’s
Boat on the narrows
Into the sea she goes...
Molly-poly-oly...”

The front door of our apartment greeted us with a handmade sign taped slightly crooked to the wood—a piece of stiff pink construction paper, curling at the corners, covered in doodled rabbits and my careful, uneven handwriting:

Here live Molly Sparrow and some other people.

My parents thought it was adorable. Ethan didn’t.

The door creaked as it swung open— the kind of old, soft creak you barely notice until you’ve lived somewhere long enough for it to become part of your life’s soundtrack. The smell of home wrapped around us right away. We stepped into a wide double room that served as both a living room and a kitchen. The living room was a maze of cozy clutter— shelves stacked with art books and cracked pottery, a crooked standing lamp that leaned like it was listening, and sculptures from Mom’s collection perched on every flat surface. They were strange and beautiful—twisted stone figures with too many limbs, or none at all.

The walls were covered in framed photos: birthdays, vacations, blurry candid shots of Ethan and me from years ago. 

At the far end of the room stood a wide glass window, supposed to provide a view of the city.

In reality, it offered a close-up of someone else's wall—just another patchwork of concrete, rusted pipes, and satellite dishes. Even the skies were blocked by buildings on buildings on buildings. 

But just to the left, framed perfectly between two towers, there was one window. Her window. The ballet dancer. She lived alone, I think. Always practicing, always graceful. Sometimes I watched her for whole afternoons, imagining she was dancing for me alone.

A narrow hallway split the living room from the kitchen and stretched toward the bedrooms and bathroom. My room was the one at the very end.

We dropped our backpacks by the entrance with twin thuds and kicked off our shoes. The security system let out its usual warning beep, but Ethan silenced it with muscle memory before it could scold us.

Rain slammed against the big window in slow, rhythmic waves. It made everything feel far away—muffled and gray, like we were underwater.

I rubbed my hands together, fingers stiff and red, and headed to my room to change into the warmest clothes I could find: fleece pajamas with dancing foxes, and the fuzzy socks with little grips on the soles. Then I returned to the living room, dragging two extra comforters behind me, bundled like offerings. You could never be too safe from cold.

Ethan had wandered into the kitchen. He was reading a note stuck to the fridge with a cat magnet—our mom’s neat handwriting in blue pen:

Dinner is in the oven. Use the mittens this time! If anything happens, call the restaurant.

She always wrote “if anything happens.” 

They were already out on their date night—one of those mandatory “reconnect” things their therapist had told them to do, or at least that’s what Ethan had told me. I didn’t know much about that stuff. I just knew they used to fight a lot, and now they didn’t.

Ethan came back and flopped onto the couch beside me. The TV was on, but only static snow danced across the screen—the antenna always went weird when it rained too hard.

“You look like a wet, sad hippo,” he said, patting my head like I was a pet he regretted adopting. His hair was just like mine—thick and curly— but cropped short and brown like Mom’s. 

He pulled his textbook into his lap and went back to studying. I sat beside him under a pile of blankets, watching the television flicker like it was trying to tell me something.

Then I got bored.

I dragged my feet down the hall and into my room. It was dim and familiar—soft shadows under the bed, the hum of the radiator like a faraway beehive. From my backpack, I pulled the stack of red paper and returned it to its place on the bottom shelf, tucked beneath an old shoebox full of erasers and buttons.

I stood there for a moment, staring at my walls.

They were covered in drawings—wild, overlapping murals of creatures and towers and oceans, stretching corner to corner. On the corner, there was a drawn figure I called “Mr. Shady,” a blob made out of stars and shadows. He was my favorite drawing. 

My mom had once bought me poster boards and canvases. I never used them. Too neat. Too clean. The walls were better. The walls felt mine. I pulled open the drawer under my bed and took out my favorite pencils—half-worn black and red ones, their ends chewed and labels rubbed off. I knelt down, scanning the surface until I found it: a small patch of untouched space, hidden between a flying wolf and a snail with a castle on top of his shell.

That’s where I started.

Two eyes, huge and red.

They stared at me as I drew them, round and watching, wide and waiting. I didn’t know who they belonged to yet. I just knew they were looking.

I paused, pencil in hand. I wasn’t sure what to do next.

So I left the markers where they were, slipped back into the hallway, and returned to the living room to see if the TV had started working again.

When I came back, Ethan was on the landline.

“Please call me,” he said quietly, his back to me. “Steven, please. I lo—”
He stopped.
Then he hung up.

I didn’t say anything.

It wasn’t my secret to ask about.

He turned around, probably trying to figure out how much I’d heard.
“So,” he said, shifting into a smile. “Leftovers. How about we pick a movie and eat popcorn for dinner?”

I lit up like it was a real holiday.

I don’t remember when I fell asleep. Probably halfway through the movie, curled up beside him on the couch, my head slipping sideways on his arm.

He pulled the cassette out when it ended—that soft click-whirr—and carried me down the hallway, whispering something about how heavy I’d gotten.
“Biggest kid in the world,” he muttered, mostly to himself.

He tucked me into bed without turning on the light.

I lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling, listening.

The rain had stopped.

Outside, New Babylon sang its usual nighttime lullaby—distant sirens, soft engines, the hush of wind between towers. It all folded together into one quiet, familiar song. Wrapped in my green blanket, I fell into sleep, warm and safe.

I was standing on the Pink Bridge.