Three Nights at the Window

PART ONE: THE NOISE

The first night, Imani heard it at 2:40 in the morning: a scrape, then a soft knock, coming from the window above her bed. She lay still with her whole body listening. When it stopped, she counted to a hundred before she let herself breathe normally. She did not tell anybody. She was eleven, and eleven-year-olds are supposed to be finished with being frightened at night.

PART TWO: THE PLAN

The second night, Imani did something different. She was still afraid, but fear had gotten boring, and boredom made her brave. She set her father's flashlight under her pillow and stayed awake on purpose.

At 2:40 it came again. Scrape. Knock.

She counted to three and turned the light on the glass.

A branch. One long arm of the maple in the side yard, gone leafless in October, tapping the window every time the wind came down the alley between the houses.

Imani laughed so loud she woke her father, who stood in her doorway squinting and said, "Girl, it is three in the morning," which she thought was a fair thing to say.

PART THREE: THE OTHER WINDOW

The third night, Imani did not need the flashlight. She heard the scrape at 2:40 and knew it, the way you know a voice through a wall.

But she got up anyway, and she went down the hall to the room where her little cousin Junie had been sleeping since August, and she knocked on the door.

"Do you hear a noise at night?" Imani asked.

Junie, who was six, and who had not been sleeping, and who had not told anybody either, started to cry.

So Imani got the flashlight, and the two of them sat on Junie's bed, and Imani showed her how to count to three and then look.