This isn't so much a story as a retelling of an incident that happened to me when I was younger. Back then, I lived with my parents and my older sister in apartment in the city and each summer we would drive out to a small cabin that my uncle owned and stay there for a few weeks.
The cabin was pretty small, though it hosted four bedrooms, a living room and kitchen. Each of the rooms were uncomfortably tiny. Still the size never really bothered us, nor does it play a relevant part in this story.
The bedrooms were situated on top of each other, two were on the ground floor looking out on to the backyard, and the other two were directly above those with a small staircase and landing leading up to them. My parents and sister always stayed in the bottom two rooms while I enjoyed the solitude and privacy of having the top floor, if you can call it that, to myself.
The room I liked to stay in was the first on the landing. It was small and much the same as the others with nothing of any distinction to it. However, a year prior to this story, the shared wall between that room and the other room and been damaged. I don't remember exactly how this happened but almost half of the wall had crumbled away. For whatever reason my uncle had been unable to get it fixed and so as a temporary solution had patched it up with sheets of cardboard. Not the best idea, I know, but that was what he did, and from the uneven placement of the sheets and the numerous strips of duct tape, it looked like he had done it himself.
This new "construction" left sizable holes from which I could peer into the other room, but that didn't really matter considering that room was always left unused when we visited and at the time I hadn't even paid much attention to it.
The year following that, when we went back, the wall still hadn't been fixed and wouldn't get fixed for about another four years. That year my sister had invited one of her friends to come say with us at the cabin. I was really annoyed about this at the beginning...but that feeling passed away quickly. My sister is a few years older than me, and at the time of this story she and her friend must have been around 20-21.
As you might imagine her friend stayed in the bedroom next to mine, on the top floor. Her name was Anna and she was an annoying girl, or at least I thought so. She always spoke down to me or went out of her way ignoring me. I'm pretty sure she thought that just because she used to get high grades since kindergarten that she was smarter and better than everybody else. She had that snobbish and priggish air around her that most over-achievers seem to possess.
Physically speaking, she was an attractive girl, not "sexy", but attractive. She had a pretty face and long brown hair that fell across it; a nice body that wasn't too fat or too thin; and average sized breasts that always managed to fill up her top. Up to that point that was just about all I knew about her body.
The thought of spying on her wasn't something that occurred to me immediately, not even when we were at the cabin and I could hear her unpacking in the next room. It was something that happened quite by chance one evening. I was hunting around my room for something and went to look over by the broken wall. Her room was dark and I didn't even know if she was in the house. But, suddenly, the light came on and I was left with an unmitigated view inside her room.
From where I stood, I could almost see three quarters of her room. I saw as she walked in and went up to the mirror and stood before it checking out her outfit in the glass. Before I could even realize the wonderful situation I had found myself in, she pulled off her top and began hunting through her bag for another. The scene sadly wasn't that exciting, she was wearing a camisole under her top and so really she hadn't undressed at all, but still, it left a lot to look forward to.
I camped out beside that broken wall that night, crouched there in the darkness. I imagined myself a spy or a secret agent waiting for his target, childhood imagination and all that. My
parents were already in their bedroom while Anna and my sister and were downstairs doing something. They all presumed I was asleep.