Wild Awake - By Hilary T. Smith Page 0,67
twists up like a wet shirt. I hate heights, hate-hate-hate them, and the fire escape looks like it would collapse if you blew on it too hard.
“Go on,” says Doug.
“I don’t know.”
“You want to see what your sister saw, this is as close as you’re gonna get.” He pats me on the arm, gazing up the fire escape with an expression of such naked yearning I feel ashamed.
“You stop by when you come down,” he says, “and tell me what it’s like up there.”
The fire escape clangs each time I take a step. I grip the rusty handrails, silently uttering threats to the Imperial Hotel: If I die climbing this stupid fire escape, I will come back and burn you to the ground before they even get a chance to demolish you. Cars rumble past on the street below, and the smell of their exhaust pricks my nose. I can hear the bass thump of someone’s sound system and see the white splatters of pigeon droppings on the tops of faded awnings. Look at you, sneaking up fire escapes, laughs the Sukey in my head, but I’m so mad at her I don’t even answer. Each rattling step sends my heart racing. Every time I glance down, my guts contort. I can smell the cloying stink of the Dumpster in the alley below. That’s where I’ll land if the fire escape gives out.
The higher I climb, the more I start to worry about the most random and trivial things, as if my brain has given up on trying to distinguish the important stuff and is just firing at everything that moves. I wonder if Math Boy found the solution to his equation. I wonder if Stanley Otter Fish would have been a famous composer if he hadn’t gotten run over by a truck. I wonder what would happen if I died, and the last fruit I had ever eaten was a pomegranate.
I tell myself there are worse things than having a pomegranate be your last fruit.
After a dozen more rattling steps, the fire escape ends and this weird iron swimming-pool ladder goes up the rest of the way. I clench my teeth and scramble up it, scraping my knees against the top rung in my hurry. Once I’m safely on the roof, I’m so dizzy with pent-up dread and relief I don’t even look around, I just crouch down and squeeze my eyes shut and breathe. While I’m crouching there, so close to the roof’s heat and dusty smell, the height and the climb and the whole situation overwhelm me all at once and I almost start to cry again. My knees hurt and I haven’t slept, and when I tried to fix my synth this morning, the power light flared and flickered and then winked out and I couldn’t make it come on again.
I’m not supposed to be here, I think. I’m not supposed to be here and my brain is not supposed to be doing whatever it’s doing and I’m not supposed to know about Sukey and everything is wrong.
Maybe if I wave my hands, someone will see me and call 911 and the fire department will come and get me down, not just from the roof but from everything, from Sukey being murdered and my thoughts going loud and then normal again and from this whole entire wreckage of a summer.
I pinch myself again, viciously this time. Do you ever shut up? There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just looking for excuses not to be brave.
I huddle there by the ladder, the strong side of me bullying the weak one, until the feeling evaporates and just like that I’m fine again. I lift my head and look around.
In the middle of the roof, there’s a sagging plastic lawn chair. Beside it there’s a pile of cigarette butts, an old Discman, and a faded Coke bottle filled with rainwater. A chipped clay flowerpot has rolled under the lawn chair, spilling out a heap of black soil spotted with white pearls of fertilizer.
I’m psyching myself up to investigate more closely when something catches my eye: a splatter of dirty yellow paint beside my right foot. I reach out to touch it and immediately spot another one a few inches away. I freeze, my pulse quickening, as my eyes pick out more and more of them, scattered all around me in a cloud. The colors have gone dull and filthy from years of dust and rain, but they’re still there,