Sara Luzuriaga

My mom told me I should give a gift to the downstairs neighbors. My apartment was on the second floor, a one-bedroom with big windows and a stink bug problem. It was an old suburban house, converted into a duplex. When I first moved in I stood outside, looking up at the stone walls and two floors, imagining that the whole thing was mine, the back porch, too, and the garden.

A young couple lived downstairs. I ran into them only casually and said, “Hey, guys!” in that way I have, already pulling faces and doing a little dance with my arms. They’d nod back. It was a guy in his early-thirties with some sketched-looking tattoos on his forearm but an otherwise straight-laced demeanor, and his girlfriend who was so beautiful I started fantasizing about her privately. She didn’t smile much and had reddish hair. When I ran into her alone I’d say, “Hello there!” and she’d raise an eyebrow. The boyfriend wasn’t much friendlier, but seemed to enjoy patronizing me. “It’s pretty hot out,” he said once when he saw me coming downstairs in black jeans and a long-sleeve. I considered dropping trou then and there to see how he’d react. I figured he’d sort of nod and hold the door open for me gallantly, not looking at my hooha.

On the phone with my mom on a Saturday evening I said, “I think they hate me.”

“Everyone hates you,” she said. “You think you can just say anything.”

“I mean it, Mother.”

She told me to bake them cookies. I asked if she was making fun of me, and she was. I’d never baked cookies in my life.

“Write a little note,” she suggested.

I bought them a box of grocery store sugar cookies, the kind that always feel cold against your teeth and are decorated with a thick layer of too-sweet icing dyed bright blue. I sat on the kitchen floor, smoking a j out the window, shuffled some girly pop and wrote them a note: Hey, neighbors! Maggie here, from upstairs. You can call me Mags. Been too busy with the move-in to actually introduce myself. Enjoy some of these sweet treats. Looking forward to talking soon!

I wrote the note and read it twice over, thinking how very strange it was that I’d written this. I thought of the downstairs neighbors reading this note and thinking of me as the type of person who went out of her way to buy “sweet treats” for her new neighbors. I was pretty high by then. I went downstairs, dropped the cookies in front of the door, rang the doorbell, then ran back into my apartment, my heart vibrating in my chest.

The following Monday on my way to Parks Elementary for teacher meetings before the school-year started, I saw the neighbors had hit me back with a gift of their own. It was a bag of baby carrots, with a note that read: Maggie — we’ve talked it over, and decided we’d like to invite you for tea in the backyard. We know the backyard is ours, but we want to give you the opportunity to use it.

I brought the note with me to work, and the bag of baby carrots, which I made everyone pass around the room at the morning meeting.

“Nobody wants baby carrots for breakfast, Mags,” Dana said. She thought she was a big-shot because she taught fifth grade. I said, “Is that so?” and started eating my way through the bag. I made chewing noises so loud that Principal Gutierrez asked me to quiet down. He had to ask me twice because I was looking out the window, thinking about the downstairs neighbors and wishing I could tell my ex-girlfriend Taylor about them.

“Stop being discriminatory, Gutierrez,” I said.

“Don’t push me.” He had no irony about himself, the type of man who called us “ladies” when he told us to quiet down, even though there was a handful of men on the teaching staff.

During lunch break I stood across the street from school, smoking a cigarette. There was no smoking on school property. The fourth and fifth grade teachers always busted me. Emilia, my classroom assistant, crossed the street to join me. She was a sophomore at Wheelock College, where she studied elementary education. Her hair was in lots of little braids down her back, dyed purple at the ends, and she had perfect skin.

“Smoking’s bad for you,” she said, leaning on the tree next to me and rummaging through her 7-Eleven bag.. “Cigs are so 2007.”

I blew smoke into her face. She coughed artificially and waved her arms around until the air was clear. “It’s gonna be a long year,” I said, “if you keep that up.”

Emilia shrugged and pinched the black nub off her banana. “I’m just saying.”

That night I wrote the downstairs neighbors back while waiting for my Dominos delivery. It was a hot late-August day so I had my AC on full blast, but then the air started smelling like the disinfectant from my gynecologist’s office so I opened the windows, too. I wrote: Thanks for the carrots. Was a strange breakfast. Would love the opportunity to use your garden. Let me know when.