Behind Blossoms

She had always wondered what was behind that wall of flowers. Though it was not so much a wall, only bushes after all, with patches of the white wash house showing through like pallid skin through mange on a dog. Mangy flowers. She smiled at the thought. There was a little parakeet in the window, dangling out through the tacky lace drapes by the cooling unit from 1974. It never moved. That plastic bird had been poking its body through that window since Tenten developed a hippocampus. Considering her recent passage into adulthood, that was quite a long time. She had always wondered about the mysterious man behind the wisteria.

Buzzwords had flown about when she was young, words like "pornography" and "statutory". Tenten hadn't figured it out until she was thirteen, though she did catch a glimpse of his eclectic apartments on Halloween the previous year. Possibly one hundred shelves lined every wall, and they were all stacked with DVDs and video tapes. It made her pale to think about what they could contain.

Some of the children in middle school spun lies and rumors about the old man in duplex C2. They said he was a murderer, or an old hermit like Ben Kenobi, someone with strange powers. Tenten never listened. It was nonsense, after all. Despite her resolve, there was a mystery behind the Wisteria. To this day, she has never figured it out.

The truly captivating thing was the other half of that duplex. There was a window box filled with roses that climbed along the wall and up the windowpane, a frenzied mass of thorns and livid blossoms. This unsettling spray of furious red roses framed the entire half of the window. That, to Tenten, was a greater mystery than the wisteria man. It wasn't until middle school that she finally figured it out.

A Hyuuga lived there. More than one, her mother said. A father, his brother, a grandmother, a son and a daughter (cousins to each other) lived in that house. Hyuuga was one of those family names that everyone has heard. There are streets that linger on the outskirts of town that bear that name. It must be an old family. In some areas, it was like McLaughlin or Smith, but those two names belonged to different families. There could be two or more different families with that last name. The Hyuugas were all one. There was only one Hyuuga family. You hear the name 'Hyuuga' and you know exactly which one. Apparently, they had spread out over the years. Some of Tenten's acquaintances in neighboring provinces had met Hyuugas. There was no mistaking them. They had weird, blind eyes. Tenten knew only two, and she met them both at the age of thirteen.

Neji was never really her friend. They ended up with all the same classes for six consecutive years of school. She only ever interacted with Neji when she didn't know anybody else in that class. He shared her lack of enthusiasm for the rest of the human race. There were few that they would care to 'get palsy' with. Sometimes they felt like the only two sane individuals on earth. His cousin Hinata was never in their classes. She was younger.

Contact with Neji was scarce, and Tenten could count the number of words they had exchanged annually on her own digits. It was her fifteenth year when things began to change.

She had no idea that he lived so close until then. The duplex was visible through her back window, and the little driveway into the block complex was right behind her back fence. There were four total, and the one shared by the Hyuugas and wisteria man was mostly unobstructed from her bedroom window. If she moved to the bathroom window and stood on her tippy-toes to look out, Neji's house was completely visible. Otherwise, she only saw the half of the window that contained the cooling unit from 1974. Yeah, the Hyuugas had one too.

One afternoon, fifteen-year-old Tenten was standing on the balls of her feet (she was tall enough now that standing on her tippy-toes was unnecessary) and caught sight of her long-time acquaintance. He leaned out of the window amongst the roses, which had begun to brown on the cusp of September. A tacky lace curtain blew across his cheek with the autumn winds. Yeah, the Hyuugas had one too.

Tenten observed her quiet friend. They seemed to understand one another, but she'd be damned if she started wanting to see him more than he wanted to see her. There was apathy and a balance to their relationship. Neither cared about social graces, and they retreated to one another because they knew that they didn't have to make an effort to interact. Neji seemed content to sit beside her, use her as a shield to keep other, chattier girls at bay. Tenten didn't mind. She felt like the roses at his window when he did that. He liked to sit by the window and peer through the petals, hiding his pale skin and dark hair through the burgundy blooms. Tenten giggled at the thought. Wallflower.

They grew together, until Tenten's parents passed on. Thankfully, they left her the house and had the bills sent to some distant relatives. It felt so strange coming into her barren home under autumn rains and clouds of gravestone gray. Tenten adapted. It happened when she was still fifteen, after her flickering affections for Neji developed. It was the sight of him by the window every afternoon, blind eyes settling on her through the roses. She noticed the smooth lines of his face, half-hidden by blossoms. In the fall he hid behind thorns, until the spring would come again, giving him tender buds to stare through. The next year was when the wisteria man came out of hiding again.

It was in the newspapers. Not just the local newspapers, either. It was in the big newspaper, the one that the city folk liked to read. Tenten lived in a small town of about five thousand, so news spread quickly. Someone was dead. Someone was murdered in Tenten's small town of about five thousand. Little crimes were big news there, and this was huge. They found the body in a park near her house, not ten minutes away by foot.

Tenten's favorite place was the park. It was lower than the rest of the town, a divot in the earth filled with trees. They placed streetlamps along the paved paths that always stayed lit. It was so dark there, in the shady glen. The main part of the park was paved, concrete strips, gazebos and benches trying to cut the shadows, but between the last path and the backs of the properties up the hill (towards Tenten's house at least) was thick, shady woods. She loved to walk through the dirt paths after a rain. The soil was loamy and moist, and the trees let fat droplets fall from their leaves. She loved being under the canopy, hearing the chirrups and rustlings of the post-precipitation crowd.

The body was found in a hollowed cave, made by the remains of the biggest tree. It was a shell of bark, shielded on the top by a slender fallen oak. Someone had tucked a body away after the recent rain, placing it inside the dead damp wood. Dead trees, dead men.

Few people ventured that far back into the glade, though from the busy street to the side of the woods, it was visible. One booted leg dangled out of the wood that day. One booted foot from the roadside resulted in the entire local police force. The bodies didn't stop.

Tenten was in high school by then, and of course, the long forgotten rumors about the wisteria man started up again. Stories about the gruesome murder arose, horrific tales of meat cleavers and cheese graters. It didn't scare Tenten. She actually watched the news. The guy was shot once in the back of the neck. That's it.

The next body was under a park bench. Then one in the bathrooms. Then one behind the post office. All with singular gunshot wounds to the back of the neck. All men between the ages of thirty-five and forty. And the last one was a Hyuuga.

She didn't see much of Neji after his father was killed. She didn't see much of Neji until the next year. He seemed so different. He was colder, more sterile and stoic. He still kept her around to keep away unwanted company, but Tenten wondered if she was wanted company or just convenient company. The killer was never caught that year, but stopped after the Hyuuga. Neji carried a silent vow to find him. Tenten started to eye the plastic parakeet with a bit more scrutiny.

She was eighteen now. August was ending, just like it had three years ago when she first spied Neji behind his dying roses through her bathroom window. He rarely came to his window. Tenten vaguely wondered if she would ever see him again. They would both go off to college soon. Her reverie was disturbed by a knock on the door. No one had rapped on her door since before the deaths of her parents. She barely noticed the first time. Her guest had to knock a second time, more insistently, before Tenten even realized that someone was there. Casting her thoughts aside, she paced along the hallway.

"Neji," she stated upon opening the door. He downcast his eyes, tossing a newspaper article to her feet. She peered over it.

"I took care of him," he said, soft and dark. The headline was about the disappearance of a local man. Wisteria man. "For my father."

"Oh. You want some tea?" she offered quietly, eyes flicking upwards. It was another gray day. Childhood in sepia, splashes of red for roses and white for the blind eyes of the little boy that hid behind them. Gray days followed her parent's death. Tenten was numb to the world since then. It didn't bother her that Neji had flecks of blood beneath his fingernails. Like little rose petals.

He followed her inside.

"You're sure you won't get caught?" she asked, breath chasing away little plumes of steam from her cup. His reply came during her sip.

"Positive."

Conversation ended at that. Gray days since her parent's death, and they would always be so. She looked at the blind eyes of the boy, no, the man across the table.

"So," she began, uncertain of how to finish her statement. There was a pause.

"There are a lot of chatty girls in life," he said. She held a secret smile behind her teacup. Gray days, certainly, but maybe with a splash of red for roses and white for the eyes of the man behind them.