I Woke Up to Find My Car Completely Repainted Pink, and My Neighbor Denied Everything Until the Next Morning

My name is Christine, and I want to tell you about the year my neighbor Denise painted my car pink, and about what happened the very next day, and about the thing I understood by the end of it that I hadn’t understood at the beginning. I promise it’s worth the telling. But you have to let me start at the start, because the ending doesn’t mean anything without the whole slow road that got us there.

Denise and I had been feuding for the better part of a year, and if you’d asked either of us how it started, we’d have given you completely different stories, both of us cast as the reasonable party and the other as the unhinged one. That’s how these things always go. Nobody in a feud thinks they’re the difficult neighbor. The difficult neighbor is always the other person, across the fence, in the house you now can’t look at without your blood pressure ticking up a notch.