phones, and from the chatter he could make out amid the chaos, it seemed, improbably, they were all still working on the demands. Some were convincing their parents to withhold their tuition payments until every item was crossed off to Marisa’s approval. These parents, watching two children dangle from the building, didn’t have many objections.
More of Hamish in the world than he gave it credit for, maybe. Thinking of his brother, how much he wanted him to have stayed alive long enough to witness this, to see this, Peejay didn’t cry. He felt his strength increase.
* * *
Ms. Duli watched Amira perform her wild maneuvers, her heart in her throat. Jordi stilled. The rain kept coming down indiscriminately, not caring about demands met or fire engines arriving or Jordi Marcos’s father dropping to his knees in the muddy outskirts of the soccer field to pray.
“Now what?” Omar said as loudly as he could muster. The pain in his hip felt too intense to ever go away. “Can I drop him?”
Amira imagined the scenario, the forces at play and how well her body was prepared to counteract Jordi’s weight. The bell rang. Sixth period. Jordi slipped another three inches and Omar slid with him, the glass in his side tearing through muscle and grinding against bone. Which bone, Omar couldn’t tell.
A school board member threw up in the bushes.
Below Amira, she could hear someone pounding on the glass. Students were throwing chairs, trying to get another window to shatter. The roof, it seemed, had been a fluke. Over her shoulder, the gray city stretched out. It was a nice view here, not marred by the glare or the tint of the roof garden’s enclosure. She could see the whole campus, the fire truck trying to angle itself through the gate. She needed more time. For the ladder to arrive, for Omar to hang on, for Marisa to save the world.
She could see Omar’s arms shaking. “I don’t...” he started to say, the words draining his energy. “I can’t hang on.” Amira looked down at the space she stood on, just twelve inches wide, six inches across. They wouldn’t both fit. If Omar let go, Jordi’s full weight would come down on her, at an angle that was hard to predict. He’d likely knock her off the ledge.
Then Jordi slipped a little more and Amira got a better hold of his forearms, and she thought she could do it. She’d planned to be stronger than Omar all along. What other choice did she have now? She breathed in deep. “Okay,” she said. “Swing him and let go when he’s on your left. I’ll carry the momentum and hang on. Just watch his head.”
“Are you sure?” Ms. Duli shouted. She looked around for Jankowski, who taught physics and maybe could do an equation to figure it all out?
Omar said something Amira couldn’t make out, but it must have been convincing to Ms. Duli, because she reached down and tried to help him shift his weight to control Jordi’s movements. Amira felt the rhythm of Jordi’s swaying, getting a sense of his weight, preparing her knees, her back, her core muscles. Then she nodded, and Omar let go.
She bent her knees to take on the weight, and felt her feet slide on the wet surface below her. All over the world, but especially on the soccer field, especially in the foyer, breaths caught. Eyes closed in horror. Others widened. How did we get here? many thought.
In a judo move (decathlon event number seven), Amira swung Jordi’s body around the A/C shelf she stood on, throwing herself down onto it so the brunt of her torso lay square on the only thing between her and the ground. Jordi’s arms scraped the side of the building, and the brief sensation of falling made him come to. Thankfully, his first thought was that he was dead, and he remained still, trying to figure out where in the world he was. Amira was able to maintain his weight. She was curled on the A/C shelf, and Jordi still hung in the air, but her arms were fresh and strong and there was no glass in her hip.
The crowd whooped when they saw Omar pull himself back into the garden. Sure, there were still two children high above the ground, but they had a brief reason to cheer, and it felt worth celebrating. Even some police officers cheered a little, then cleared their throats and went back to holding