The Hidden Room

Life has been pretty good for me lately I’d say. I’d worked for a couple of years back in Montgomery which was almost a couple of hours away from my hometown of Burton, Alabama. I didn’t mind it up in Montgomery, but it wasn’t home. I missed living in a small town where there’s barely any traffic and there’s places and space to just go for a walk in a field if you want to, like where I grew up. 

When I got my new job I knew exactly what I wanted to do about a place to live. I moved back in with my parents of course for the time being but I wanted to build a place of my own and I had dreamed of getting to do this for years. I wanted to build myself a little bardominium style house, one with a high ceiling and a huge living room, I knew whatever I was building was going to be for just me unless I got married or something someday so I could make it exactly how I wanted to.

It didn’t take long to find exactly where I wanted to build it either, I built it right on some land on my grandparents’ property right next to their house. First, we got a metal building guy to do the outside shell of the house which was about a one thousand square foot rectangle that was about 15 feet high at its tallest point and after about 3 months, the help of my parents, and a couple of contractors; it was finished.

Me and my dad built all the walls and ceilings and we got some outside help from an electrician and plumbers. We worked on the place nearly every day for those 3 months or so except a couple of weeks where either my parents were on a vacation or I was out of town on a work trip but the house came out exactly how I wanted it to be.

The house was a rectangle with one half of it being one large living room with the kitchen on the other end of it, the other half was a small hallway where there were two bedrooms and a bathroom off it. I had argued for a while with my parents at the beginning of the building process about what to do with the ceiling as I just wanted everything to be open at the top and maybe just a ceiling over the side of the house with the bedrooms. This would leave basically the living room to be open to a nearly 15-foot ceiling which might be a waste of space, but I loved the high ceilings. My parents convinced me that it would be more practical to close in the top of the living room which left me with a lower ceiling in the living room, but I feel like I still got what I wanted for the most part.

“What you want to do tonight, Aaron?” asked my younger brother Eric. Eric would usually come home to visit about every other weekend. He left home a couple of years ago since he started school at UAB in Birmingham.

“What you want to do? Not much going on sports wise,” I replied as Eric stood up from his chair as we were watching some old episode of Family Guy that I had seen about a thousand times. This was our usual routine to go out to eat somewhere on whatever day Eric was back in town and then would come back here and find something to do before the weekend started where we’d mostly hang out at my parents’ house.

“Got a great idea though, you’re probably not going to like it I’d imagine,” said Eric as I already had a good idea at what he was about to mention.

“Paperball?” I replied begrudgingly.

“Of Course,” replied Eric as he went for an open notebook that I had laying on my desk in my bedroom. Paperball was basically wadding up a couple of pieces of paper together and taping them and playing baseball except the ball is paper and your hand is the bat. An inning was 2 outs since it was hard to get an out with just one person trying to field anything that is hit. It was one of those things that I actually did like playing but throughout childhood and even now Eric loved playing it so much that it was almost a drag, but I’d happily play tonight though.

“Alright then, let me get the furniture moved then,” I replied. Since I’ve been living here, the home plate would be in the kitchen while first base would be the wall that divided the hallway and the living room. Second base was the wall next to the front door, and third base was the TV.

“We’ll do first to 50 then, sound good?” asked Eric to which I nodded.

The game followed as usual, Eric would jump out to something like a 10-run lead on me before I got him out by tagging him with the ball and me suddenly scoring a little bit and playing better defense. Before you knew it, it was 47 to 48 with me having 48 in the bottom of the inning and I had a ghost runner on first base (ghost runners to keep up with who was on base since it was of course just us 2).

Games at my house would tend to take a little longer since my ceilings were lower than at my parents’ house and any ball hit into the ceiling counted as a foul ball but any ball that hit the far side wall above where the door was, that was a home run and all I needed to win. I then destroyed one, a line drive going right towards the wall. After a couple of seconds of anticipation, it landed just a couple of inches under the ceiling resulting in a home run and a win for me.

“Yes! What a comeback, right Eric?” I said mockingly as I rounded the bases even though it wasn’t necessary for paper ball of course.

“Man, I’ve been sucking lately for sure,” said Eric as he picked up the paperball that I had just hit a home run with and smacked it from under the hallway doorway up into the ceiling. It didn’t seem like a big deal at first but I did want to keep that paper ball just in case we played again tomorrow night.

“Where’d you hit it?” I asked Eric as he had walked into the hallway to get it.

“Wow, come see where this thing ended up,” said Eric as he walked out of sight further into the hallway.

I followed him into the hallway and looked up to see the paper ball lodged into the door in the hallway ceiling that led into a little loft area that was above the ceiling of my hallway, bedroom, and bathroom.

“Jeez how’d you do that?” I asked Eric as we both looked up at the rectangular wooden door that was in the hallway ceiling near the bathroom. There was a wooden ladder that we installed back when we built the house that ran up the wall separating the hallway and the living room that went up to this door that really looked like any typical attic door. Eric was already halfway up it; the paper ball quickly came falling to the ground as Eric simply just took off the door’s latch and pushed the door upward.

“Cool, what stuff you got up here?” asked Eric as he peeked his head through the door.

“Basically any crap that I can’t put in the closet,” I replied. I haven’t been living in my house for too long, but I had made a couple of trips up there so far, it was mostly old toys up there and holiday decorations that my parents made me move out of their house.

“Nice, I remember playing with that way back in the day,” said Eric as he was now out of sight and in the attic.

“What you looking at?” I asked as I had a hard time remembering exactly what stuff was still up there.

“LEGOs, there’s also hot wheels stuff too, pretty neat,” said Eric, I could now see the door opening and Eric climbing down the ladder.

“You didn’t stay too long, thought you were always up for adventure,” I said as Eric was now back on the ground of the hallway.

“Way too hot up there, dark too. You should invest in some light up there cause it looks like a nice space up there, probably could have an entire new room up there if you wanted,” said Eric.

We went back to rotting away watching TV in the living room for the rest of the night and slept in for a while the next morning which was certainly far from out of the ordinary for us. Eric probably not as much but I was always starving for a day like today when I could wake up whenever I wanted given that I had a regular 9 to 5 job.

Both me and Eric woke up to the sound of knocking on the front door. I looked through my bedroom window to see that it was our grandmother.

“Good morning y’all, sorry if I came to early,” said my grandmother as I opened the front door for her. As she said that I glanced up at the clock on the wall and saw that it was already 10 AM.

“No grandma that’s fine, we needed to get up anyway,” I said as I let her in the house, being my next-door neighbor my grandmother of course had a key to my house but she never just walked into the house on her own.

“Hey grandma, great to see you,” said Eric sleepily as he had sat up from the inflatable bed that he would sleep on when he spent the night at my house.

“Hello boys, your mom said that Eric would be here this weekend so I wanted to bring over some French toast for y’all,” said grandma as she walked over to my kitchen table and placed the couple of plates of French toast and a bottle of syrup and placed them down.

“Awesome, thanks grandma, can’t ever get enough of that stuff,” said Eric as he gave grandma a hug. She was a typically warm and caring type of grandmother that always would bring stuff over to us whenever Eric was over and on top of that she was a great neighbor too. Always there when you needed them and not there when you wanted to be left alone. It had been of course hard on her whenever my grandfather died about five years ago but over time she had managed and had even started working part-time again.

Grandma hung around for about 10 minutes or so asking mostly questions to Eric since she didn’t get to see him as often, all the while both me and Eric were already wiping syrup off of our chins from devouring the French toast. She left and me and Eric mostly crapped away the rest of the day between throwing the football around before going over to my parents’ house to spend the rest of the day with them.