The HOA Secret

People in this neighborhood think something is wrong with me. I know they do because I've heard them not saying it. I turned thirty-four last spring and I still haven't brought a date to anything, and you can practically hear the gears turning behind their eyes when they say hello over the fence. Thirty-four and single by choice, and I mean choice, not like I got dumped and never recovered. I went to college, I got a degree in accounting, I watched every woman I knew pair off like socks out of a dryer, and somewhere around twenty-six I just decided I was fine on my own. I own my little house on Maple Crest Circle with a mortgage, I have a cat named Dorothy who hates everyone but me, and my Saturday nights involve takeout and a mystery novel. That is the entire dream, as far as I am concerned.

The couples around here have rituals. That's the only word for it. Damien and his wife do this thing every year where they renew some kind of vow on their anniversary, not the real legal kind, just a backyard speech and a toast, and everyone claps like it's news. Timothy and his wife have a standing Friday date night where they go to the same Italian place and order the same thing, and he told me about it once with this proud look like he'd invented romance. I used to feel a little sting watching that stuff, back in my twenties. Now it just amuses me. They work so hard at it, like love is a lawn that needs fertilizing on schedule. Meanwhile I'm over here with my book and my cat and nobody asking me where I've been.

So when the little envelope showed up in my mailbox, gold bordered, announcing the anniversary celebration of Damien and Robin, I almost tossed it. Fifteen years. They'd been married fifteen years and lived on the circle for ten of them, and every August there was this party. But I went, because I always go, because it's easier to go than to spend three weeks explaining why you didn't. And because Damien brings out the good smoked brisket and I'm not made of stone.

The party was the third Saturday in August, a hot one, the kind where the driveway still gives off heat at nine at night. Damien had converted his garage into what he called the party annex, which meant he'd shoved the cars out and strung lights and set up a bar on the workbench. His wife had plans for it, banners and a slideshow and a guest book nobody was going to sign twice. I arrived at seven with a bottle of wine I'd picked up at the grocery store on the way home from work, still in my office clothes because I hadn't seen the point of changing.

"You came!" Damien said, spotting me from the driveway, holding a bag of ice like a trophy. "Ayla. You're a lifesaver, actually. Can you give me a hand with the rest of this? Robin's cousin brought her three kids and I'm hiding in the garage until they calm down."

"That's a yes, then," I said, and set my wine on the fence post.

We made trips. Folding chairs from his shed, a second cooler, a big aluminum tray of what he claimed was his mother's recipe for rice. He talked the entire time, about the slideshow, about how Timothy was bringing his famous corn dip, about how the neighborhood had really come together since the road resurfacing fight of two years ago. I carried and nodded. Halfway through he pressed a plastic cup of my own wine into my hand, which was the nicest thing anyone did for me all night. It was fine. It was exactly the level of effort I'd budgeted for the evening.

The last trip was a stack of folding tables leaning against my chest so I could barely see over them, and Damien walked ahead of me into the garage to clear a spot. I shuffled in, ducked under the string of lights he'd hung too low, and set the tables against the wall by the lawnmower. And that's when I heard it.

A sound from the back of the garage. Low, sort of a sliding wet sound, like something heavy moving over something smooth. Then a second one, softer. Damien was already halfway out the door yelling at someone about the corn dip, so I stood there alone in the dimness with the coolers and my heart doing a little skip that I told myself was nothing.

"Hello?" I said.

Nothing. The garage was dim, just the string lights leaking in from the door and the small window facing the side yard, which was blocked by the stack of moving boxes Damien had never unpacked since he moved in. I should have left. I should have just left, that's the honest version. But I was thirty-four years old and I'd read four hundred mystery novels and my feet decided for me. I walked toward the back, past the workbench, past the colder patch of air where the freezer used to sit.

The boxes were stacked three high against the back wall, and behind them there was a gap, maybe two feet wide, where the previous owner had built some kind of storage nook. And in that gap there was a person. Crouched. I saw her before she saw me, or before she decided to let me see her, I still don't know which.

It was Lise. From three doors down, the reclusive one, the woman who moved in three years ago and never came to anything, not the block party, not the road fight meetings, nothing. I'd waved at her maybe six times total and gotten a nod twice. She was maybe thirty-three, tall, always in long sleeves even in summer, and here she was crouched in a dark garage at her neighbor's party she'd visibly not been attending in the driveway.

And her skin was moving.

I don't know how else to write that. Her skin was shimmering, rippling like the surface of a pot of mercury, like liquid metal poured over a human shape and still settling. The light from the string bulbs caught it and slid off in colors that didn't have names, silver and then something bluish and then silver again. Her face was still her face but softer at the edges, like a photograph developing in reverse, and her eyes were open and fixed on me and they were the wrong color, a pale reflective gray like a fish's flank.

Neither of us moved. I could hear the party behind me, Timothy laughing too loud at something, Damien's voice rising over the kids. In here it was quiet except for that sliding sound, which I now understood was her, her skin settling and resettling, and a low hum I felt in my back teeth more than heard.

"Well," I said, because my mouth does that. "Okay then."

"Don't," she said, and her voice was normal, that was the strangest part, it was just a woman's voice, a little rough like she'd been sleeping. "Don't scream. Please. Everyone screams!"

"I'm not going to scream." I wasn't going to scream. I was going to stand there with my knees half locked and my brain filing through every explanation on the shelf, costume, projector, trick of the light, very committed cosplay enthusiast in August, and finding none of them would hold. "Are you... what are you?"

She rose up out of the crouch, slow, hands out where I could see them, and the shimmering slowed and settled, the metal look smoothing down into plain skin, pale and ordinary, though I could still see it moving at the edges if I looked, like water remembering it had been disturbed. Her eyes stayed that fish gray. She was a little taller than me, and she looked, I don't know, embarrassed. That was the part that got me later. She looked like a woman caught in her bathrobe fetching the paper, not like a monster.

"I'm Lise," she said. "I live three doors down. You're Ayla. Number eleven. You have a gray cat."

"Dorothy," I said, stupidly.

"Dorothy," she agreed. And then, quieter, glancing at the party light spilling through the door, "You weren't supposed to see that. I picked this garage because nobody comes in during the toasts. Damien does his toast at exactly eight fifteen, every single time. I've watched the schedule for three years."

"You came to the parties."

"I come to the parties." She said it flat, like it was a fact she'd already argued with herself about. "I stand in dark rooms and I listen and I go home. It's the closest thing I have to..." She stopped. The shimmer at her wrist did a small ripple, like a shrug made of light. "It doesn't matter. You should go back out. The brisket's good, I've heard."

I looked at her hands, which were just hands now, human and ordinary, resting open at her sides. I looked at the door where the party was, my bottle sweating on the fence post, Timothy's laugh, my whole sensible mapped-out life sitting right there in the driveway waiting for me.

"Give me one good reason," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect, "why I shouldn't sit down on that cooler and ask you about forty questions."

She stared at me. Somewhere out front, Damien's voice hit the part of the toast where he gets choked up, and everyone went quiet to let him.

"Because you'll wish you hadn't," she said.

"Try me," I said.

She didn't tell me to leave again, so I sat down on the cooler. It was one of those folding ice chests with a cushion top, and the whole garage smelled faintly of charcoal and cooler plastic and whatever Damien keeps in a party annex, which is mostly folding chairs and a dusty surfboard.

Lise stayed standing. She kept her hands where I could see them, which I thought was considerate, like she'd learned somewhere that people calm down when you show them your palms. I appreciated it and it also made me feel a little like a horse being handled, but I let that go.

"Ask your forty questions," she said. "I'll answer maybe ten."

"Fair. Question one. What are you?"

She took a breath and let it out and her whole outline did a thing, a soft ripple that ran from her shoulders down to her ankles, like a flag remembering it was cloth. "I'm a shapeshifter. A real one, not the kind in movies with the fangs. I can take a shape and hold it. This one," she spread her hands at herself, at the tall pale woman in the long sleeves, "this one I've held for about nine years. It's the best fit. It's close enough to what I actually look like that it doesn't slide."

"Slide."

"Drift. Forms aren't clothes, they're more like a pose. Hold one too long and it gets tired, it wants to go back to the truth. Usually I can manage, I go home, I let go, I reset by morning. Tonight was..." She looked at the string of bulbs glowing through the door and her mouth twisted. "The noise. There's something about a crowd, all those voices layered, everybody laughing at different rhythms. It scrambles my grip a little. I've been standing in the corner of this garage for two hours holding myself together with both hands and then Damien got choked up in his toast and everybody clapped at once and it just came undone."

"In the middle of a party."

"In the middle of a party," she agreed. "Three years of standing in dark rooms and I pick the night a neighbor wanders in looking for a bathroom. I saw you come in. I thought if I stayed still you'd miss me."

"You're a tall woman with glowing skin. I was never going to miss you."

"I know that now!" There was something almost funny in it, dry, and I let out a laugh, one short bark that I muffled with my hand because Timothy's laugh carries and mine apparently does too. Lise's face did something at the sound. I couldn't read it. I've never been good at reading faces, which is one of the reasons I do accounting.

"Question two," I said. "How long?"

"How long what?"

"How long have you been... whatever the word is. Doing this."

She sat down then, finally, on a stack of folding chairs against the wall, and her knees were about level with mine and she looked at her own hands for a while before she answered. "Since I was born, I think. I learned to hold a shape before I learned to read. But hiding, specifically, hiding on purpose, hiding from people, that's..." She counted silently, I watched her lips move. "It's been most of my adult life. The last bad stretch was three years ago, right before I moved here. Someone I was involved with found out. Not because I told her. She found out the way you just did, by accident, and she handled it badly, and I packed up in about nine days and picked a town three states away where I knew nobody."

"That's awful."

"That's Tuesday," she said, and shrugged, and the shrug rippled all the way through her and settled again. "I moved here after a relationship ended badly, and the street name made me laugh. Maple Crest. It sounds like a toothpaste. And then I found out about the parties, the whole circle does this every August, and I thought, well, that's the safest way to have neighbors. Attend without attending. Stand in the garage, listen to the toasts, know everybody's voices, never be known back."

Out in the yard the toast had ended and the noise came back up like water