My eyes scan over a small, round, second-story window, right under an arch. I see what I swear are eyes, staring back at me.

And then, just like that, they are gone.

FIVE MINUTES AFTER the pastor leaves for work in the morning, Aisha leads me to his front door and illustrates her devious plan. She turns the doorknob and pushes open the door.

“This is Billings. Lots of people don’t lock their doors here,” she says as we walk into the living room. It feels weird to be in there without him knowing, but on the other hand, at least we haven’t broken and entered; we have simply entered.

The door to his office is closed. She pushes the door open.

She exhales. “Shoot.” There is no box there.

“Damn,” I say back.

We wander the house, peeking into other rooms. The box is nowhere to be found. I begin to wonder if she was seeing things yesterday. We scour his bedroom. No box anywhere. Then I think about last night, and seeing him in an upstairs room. I know it’s a two-story house, but we open all the doors and don’t come upon a staircase.

“There has to be a way upstairs,” I say, leaving out the part about me seeing him last night. I don’t need to make this any creepier than it already is. Aisha takes the lead, wandering until she comes to a stop next to the bathroom. We look up. A string dangles from a square in the ceiling.

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, there is.”

She pulls the string and slowly a hatch opens. A ladder comes down, and we climb up. She goes first, and I follow, staring at her apple-shaped ass.

The room upstairs has such a low ceiling that we both have to hunch our shoulders. At the far end sits a window alcove with a brown, high-backed, weathered leather chair facing the attic. I maneuver behind it to the window and see that it looks down into our house, through the window above our kitchen sink. As I do, the chair swivels a bit.

Next to the chair is a small table with a half-full coffee cup on it. Probably from last night, when I saw him up here. There is an album cover next to the cup. At the mouth of the alcove is a record player with a record on it. I’ve never seen one in real life before.

“Uh,” Aisha says, pointing across the room. I turn around. The “2” box. A shiver runs through me.

She opens the box, and I walk over to the pastor’s chair. On the table next to the coffee cup, the album cover reads “Steve Forbert” in big red letters. Mr. Forbert has a mullet and a pug nose. He looks like no one who is alive in the world currently. The eighties. Wow. I pick up the album, turn it over, and a name is scrawled across the top in black Magic Marker:

Smith.

“My grandfather’s,” I say, almost like I’m croaking out the words, and Aisha comes over and takes the album cover from me.

“It was just out on the table?” she asks. I nod. The album itself is on the record player.

She hands the album cover back to me, and as she does, an envelope falls out. Its corners are frayed and yellow. I pick it up, and the first thing I see is that it is addressed to “Pastor John Logan, 923 Rimrock Road, Billings, MT 59041.” There is no return address, but there is a postmark in the upper right corner, on top of a twenty-cent stamp with Eleanor Roosevelt on it. The postmark reads, “Thermopolis, WY, 7/19/82.” The envelope has been opened carefully with a letter opener, with the letter neatly folded inside.

I remove the letter from the envelope. Even the paper feels old.

I turn the letter over and back again, scanning for a name. I find it on the bottom of the second page: R. S.

“Those are my grandfather’s initials! Holy crap!”

We look at each other, amazed.

“Well … Read it,” Aisha says.

I read the letter out loud.

I look at Aisha and crack up. She looks horrified, so I keep reading.

“My dad and my grandma,” I say.

Aisha nods. I look back at the letter and speed up my reading.

I look up at Aisha and hiss, “What the …?”

“Wow,” she says. “Just, wow.”

Suddenly, I’m very aware that we’re in the pastor’s house without his permission, and I am in possession of something he surely does not want me to have. A piece of information, maybe, but there are more questions than answers in it.

“It was in the album the pastor was listening to?” Aisha asks.

“Yup.”

“He must have been rereading it,” she says.

I think about him watching our house last night, and I get this chill, like he’s been thinking about me. It’s super creepy. “Well, we’re definitely taking this,” I say.

She nods slowly. “Just know, if we take this stuff, he’s gonna know it’s missing. You were just asking about your grandfather and the divorce. He’s gonna know you took it.”

I think about that, and then I stuff the letter into my pocket. My grandfather had a secret. A nightmare and a secret we take to our graves? I have to find out what this is.

She goes back over to the “2” box and opens it. Inside are neatly stacked envelopes, a notebook, several folders, and a couple cassette tapes and albums. It’s my grandfather’s stuff. I just know it.

Aisha rushes to the window as if she hears something. She peers as far right as she can.

“Shit shit shit,” she says.

“What?”

“That would be the pastor’s car,” she says, panic obvious in her voice.

We rush into action. I repack the box as neatly as I can, and Aisha dashes over to the stairs. She pulls them up with all her might. They barely budge.

“They’re stuck. Maybe they don’t close from up here,” she says, sounding desperate.

“Fuck,” I say.

“Okay,” she says. “Hang tight.”

Before I can even react, Aisha leaps down the stairs, and in one quick movement she pushes the stairs up and slams them shut. I stare at the closed attic hatch like an idiot, thinking, What the hell just happened? Then I run over to the window, and, to my right, I watch the pastor slowly ambling toward the house from his car. I quickly shut the box, turn off the attic light, and hide behind the chair. The back door creaks open downstairs, and I glance out the window to my left just in time to watch Aisha scamper from the back door to the front yard of our house. She’s safely out.

That’s a lot more than I can say for me.

I SIT MOTIONLESS behind a leather chair in a window alcove of my neighbor’s attic, thinking about betrayal.

If I ever get out of here, Aisha is gone. She couldn’t have taken one extra second to explain to me that we were going to leap down the stairs? She had to lock me in? I am so pissed with her that I don’t care where the hell she sleeps. Just not in my basement. I’ll go back to being the guy with not too much going on, stuck for the summer with his crazy, dying father and his weird, psychobabbling mother.