Lush trees, a calm lake and fresh air; three things that usually instilled the same peace into Trish's constantly frayed mind as such an environment might portray.

Usually.

It would have been the perfect opportunity to free her mind of all her schooltime worries if it hadn't been for him.

Trish stared out of her parent's bedroom window at the figure at the end of her driveway. The dusk haze obscured him slightly, but it was him.

Slouched over in the same grey hoodie she had seen him in on their first meeting, he leaned over to where Trish's wheelie bins stood and, after a glance in the direction of her house, he pulled the lids open.

"I knew it," she said through gritted teeth.

There were still two days until rubbish collection, which happened once biweekly, so at least two of the bins were full. Her parents constantly nagged at her about making sure she kept the lids down but it wasn't until two weeks earlier that she experienced why.

She had gone out after breakfast to throw the rubbish away as she usually did, and had found half of the contents of each bin ransacked and spilt all over the driveway. The foxes had gotten in and had a field day, and as much as she knew she hadn't left them open, her parents didn't agree, and she had spent the next hour cleaning it all up.

That was also the first time she saw him. Dressed in his grey hoodie, the boy from next door treaded quietly along the outer border of her front yard and, to her curiosity, stopped to watch her for a moment before continuing on his way.

At the time, she'd only had her suspicions. There was no reason for him to have done something so absurd, but she knew she had closed the bins, and besides, she'd had just as senseless acts done to her before by so-called friends at school.

Trish let out a deep sigh and turned her back to the window.

Is this karma? she wondered.

She had been mean to someone, and then people were mean to her. She did truly regret her actions, and if she ever saw him again, she would wholeheartedly apologise.

Why am I still being punished? She wondered, before slowly making her way downstairs and out to the end of her drive to close the bins.

She peered down his driveway, considering if complaining would be worth a try. She had no idea what kind of person he was, except that he made an effort to pick on a complete stranger.

How would he react if I confronted him? she thought before deciding instead, to just pull the bins away from the fence in the hope of deterring him from reopening them.

* * *

"Sorry. I didn't make an order," Trish said to the fourth delivery man that night.

"I'm at the right address, aren't I?" he asked, raising his smart pad to show the delivery information.

"Right address, yes. But I didn't order anything."

The delivery man pushed the pizza box into his bag and huffed back down the driveway, mumbling a length of expletives along the way.

She'd already turned down a Chinese order, a tandoori order and a good old fish and chips order.

Where someone had managed to order fish and chips from was beyond her, but there it had been, with all its vinegary goodness wafting through the air. She'd been tempted to accept it, except, that went completely against her ethics. Someone was clearly pulling a prank, and she wasn't about to fall for it.

Trish leaned further out of the doorway and focussed as best she could at the patio windows of the house next door. Surely if it was a prank, it had to be him, but where was he enjoying his efforts from? Only their patio extended out far enough for him to be able to see her distress, or rather lack of as she very convincingly put on a not-bothered attitude.

Whatever, she moaned internally, realising that she would probably only look more like a fool if he were watching. So with a quick shrug of her shoulders, she went back in and closed the door.

There can't be many more, she decided and felt almost a tinge of jealousy over the fact that the boy next door, who had only recently moved in, already knew three more delivery places than she did.

Trish and her parents had been coming out to their lake house ever since her first year of secondary school. It was the year of the incident that changed her whole secondary school experience and was something she would never forget.

It had all started as a mere joke that the other children were in on, because which pre-teen doesn't find playing pranks on the other kids funny? It just so happened that the student they had chosen as their target, they felt would be even more entertaining due to his complete deafness.

Richard Wilson was the school's first student to take part in their brave new complete immersion project. A project where children with impairments or disabilities attended school alongside the other children and studied with them in complete harmony.

Little had the school imagined that a certain group of children would bring the whole idea to an emergency stop.

It had just been a prank, she screamed internally. Everyone had been doing pranks on him, and how was she to know that it wasn't just a fire drill that day? She'd never have sent him to the upstairs boy's toilet if she had known there was a real fire.

It was supposed to be hilarious when the teacher called his name in the line-up and he wasn't there. Then she'd get her badge for finally pulling a prank.

But that's not how it went down. Richard got cornered by the fire, and although he had gotten out he'd had to spend time in hospital due to smoke inhalation and also some trauma, Trish had heard.

Her friends branded her prank as evil, and they all turned on her, subjecting her to constant taunts and, low-level bullying. And the school administrators, once they learned about what she had done, suspended her and made her parents pay for damages to the school's reputation, as their whole immersion program was thrown into hot water.

"Why am I thinking about this?" Trish questioned and gave her head a vigorous shake. "It's all in the past."

And then, the sound of the doorbell, suggesting yet another delivery, reminded her that her past still affected her present.

* * *

The gentle stroke of her hair, as it tousled against her face, lulled Trish into a surreal-like state of tranquillity. Over the last week, Trish had placed a self-appointed prohibition on relaxing in her garden due to the boy next door's sudden need to sit in the garden at the exact same time that she had been used to doing so.

He didn't speak to her, he didn't even look at her. He just sat in the corner of his garden with his back to her, his hoodie pulled up, and his shoulders slouched over. Any onlooker would assume he enjoyed such a miserable-looking solitude, but due to his antics the weeks before, Trish knew his cold presence was just another way of him annoying her.

That day however, she had already seen him leaving on his bicycle, and as soon as he was out of eye's reach, she had run down to enjoy whatever was left of the midday sun which had been made ever so more pleasant with the gentle breeze that accompanied it.

"What the hell?" she screamed, jumping up from her sleep and instinctively lifting her soaked arms out in front of her to shake down. Her head spun wildly in search of the culprit who, she should have already guessed, stood on his side of the fence with his water hose in his hand.

"Sorry," he said, in a much more cheerful way than was justified.

Trish squinted against the sun to finally make out his features, but his trademark hoody cast a full shadow over his face.

"What the hell, man?" Trish screamed more from the frustration that his face was obscured due to the shadow of the late afternoon sun.

There was no response from the boy except that he lifted his hand and tapped a finger against his ear as if to indicate that he was wearing headphones.

Trish dropped her legs over the side of her garden lounger and screamed again, louder. Again he didn't respond, but she did vaguely catch a smirk as he turned his back to her and began to water the rest of his garden.

* * *

Trish pulled her knees up to her chest and pressed her mouth into them fighting the urge to scream. She only had two more weeks to endure his utterly ridiculous yet constant pranks, and then he would have been returning to wherever it was he had come from. That much Mrs Mackenzie, Trish's other neighbour had told her. Why Mrs Mackenzie thought it would be a good idea to give him Trish's mobile number without her consent was beyond Trish.

"His parents wanted to invite you to their leaving barbecue, but you weren't home," she had said as her way of an excuse.

"I've never even met his parents," Trish moaned into her knees. "Why would she fall for that?"

Trish's shoulders slumped at the sound of her phone ringing. She picked it up, pressed the answer key and pushed it against her ear without saying a word.

"Er, hello?" a cautious voice questioned. "I'm looking for Trish."

"That's me," Trish said.

"Oh great. I just wanted to let you know I found your keys," came the reply.

Really? Trish thought and clicked the end call button before dropping her phone back down. That was the twelfth call over the last two days from a random person claiming to have found keys that Trish hadn't even lost.

How many sets of keys has he left around with my phone number? she wondered. How long is this going to go on for and ... her inner rambling halted at the sound of her doorbell.

"That's it," she growled through clenched teeth. "Enough is enough."

Trish stomped down to her front door and straight past the pizza delivery man screaming ' I didn't order,' behind her back as she continued her march straight towards Little Dickie's house as Mrs Mackenzie had so fondly called him.

What a stupid name, Trish thought. A stupid name for a stupid boy. And then, as she pressed down on his doorbell, she bit down on her tongue on almost screaming the sentiment out loud, only for fear that his parents might hear her.

Merely a second passed before she reached out a second time to press the doorbell, and then a third time, her anger growing with each chime.

Trish's hand halted on her fourth raise at the sound of the latches being undone, and then a confused yet somewhat familiar face of a young boy appeared behind it.

"Is Dickie home?" Trish asked in the sweetest voice she could muster. "I'm from next door."

The boy gave a not-so-bothered hmm and turned back into the house gesturing behind him for Trish to follow.

Entering the house of a stranger you were about to give the largest earful you could offer probably wasn't the wisest thing to do, never-the-less she did, and followed the boy into the living room.

There he sat; her nemesis, dressed in a much more approachable way than when she usually saw him but slouched as usual over a small laptop. Eyes wide and cautious she watched as his brother, as Trish assumed, reached out to tap his shoulder.

Six weeks of pranks and all the distress they had brought with them were nothing compared to what she felt when the boy turned his head and caught her gaze with his.

"Richard?" she finally got out as no more than a squeak. "Richard Wilson?"