stopped. The shifting clouds had kept most of his features in shadow, but in the harsh, unforgiving floodlight, I got my first good look.
The cement block wall was close to six feet high, and he could have rested his chin on it. He was also older than I’d initially thought, though his age was hard to pinpoint since he looked several days overdue for a shave. But more than anything, I noticed the reddened outline of an open palm on his cheek.
Seeing the mark on his face made the fighting more real than the moving shadows and sounds had earlier. His mom had hit him...a lot. I didn’t care how old he was; that wasn’t okay. Especially since it was obvious to me within a minute of talking to him that he wasn’t going to hurt anyone. He was visibly distressed by the thought of me, a complete stranger and admitted vandal, jumping off a one-story roof.
It’s not okay.
I mentally shook that thought away when I realized that the shadows that had abandoned him were no longer surrounding me either. And his eyes were trailing just as freely over me, my too-small old gym shorts and faded Jim’s Auto Shop tee, up to the tangled mass of dark blond hair piled on my head.
I tried to imagine the view from his perspective and hit the brakes when the picture of a vagrant twelve-year-old formed in my mind. A feeling of inadequacy wrapped around me like a sweaty hug and I almost jumped down just to get away from it. And him.
“What are you doing up there anyway?”
I doubted he could see the dark sleeping bag I kept up there, so he couldn’t guess that I slept on my roof more nights than I slept under it. More important, he didn’t need to. “I like to look at the stars sometimes.”
He looked at the sky and then back at me. “Stars? Seriously?”
I didn’t bother looking up. There weren’t any stars that night. The sky would have looked blank if not for the moon, although even that was in the process of being swallowed up by clouds.
“I said sometimes.”
“And the other times?”
“I just like to get out of my house. It’s quiet up here.”
He smiled. “You mean usually.” It wasn’t a big smile. More of a quirk of his lips on one side, a brief flash of teeth. It was the weak smile more than his words that brought me right back to feeling awful for him.
I bit the inside of my cheek and tugged at the hem of my shorts, trying to cover more of my legs. Then I sat on my hands to keep from pulling my stupid bun down.
His eyes flicked down to track the movement of my legs. He took a step back, then half turned before facing me again. “You can’t go around jumping off roofs, okay? You’ll break your leg or something.”
I bristled at his words and let them fuel an equally flippant response. “As opposed to my hand?”
I couldn’t actually see his injured hand with him standing that close to the wall, but I saw his shoulder lift and assumed he was flexing it. The muscle in his cheek—the one that was still red from being slapped—twitched. I immediately felt responsible. Not just for a thoughtless comment, but for reminding him of what I’d witnessed.
As easily as if I’d called them, the snakes slithered back inside.
Neighbor Guy nodded, to himself or to me, I didn’t know, and left without another word. He didn’t go back inside, which relieved me to no end. Instead I stood and watched as he walked around the side of his house and got into a navy Jeep parked in his driveway. With an urgency that rocked his vehicle, he backed out and hit the brakes hard before he turned and drove off, a grinding noise echoing behind him.
The solace my roof usually provided abandoned me after that. I no longer felt like I’d helped him, not in any substantial way. Uselessness gnawed at me for hours before I moved to the flat part of my roof, which covered the patio, and drifted into an uneasy sleep.
The grinding noise roused me sometime before dawn. I didn’t function well at that hour, but as I watched him park and enter his house, something occurred to me that was so obvious, I wondered how I’d slept at all.
I slipped silently off my roof—without breaking either of my legs—and through my window. In my room, I pulled open the bottom drawer of my desk and found a stack of coupons wrapped in a rubber band. Mom had designed them back when she’d decided all the shop needed to thrive was a little advertising. She said people still had to drive, even in a bad economy. Coupons, flyers, we’d even done a commercial...it was pretty awful, but she’d been so happy the day we shot it. The advertising did help, but her enthusiasm had waned when the business didn’t boom the way she’d anticipated. We hadn’t seen a coupon all year.
I thumbed through the stack and pulled one free. Before I lost my nerve, I scribbled a few words on the back and hurried out the window so Dad wouldn’t hear the door.
I knew what that grinding noise meant. He needed new brake pads like, yesterday. Probably not the most important problem in his life, but it was the one I could fix.
I walked up to the Jeep and clamped the coupon underneath his windshield wiper.
I did owe him for the window, after all.
The sky was beginning to lighten as I climbed back through the window. My T-shirt snagged on the latch, jerking me back, and I kicked my desk lamp trying to regain my balance.
The lamp didn’t break, but the accompanying crash as it hit the floor was loud enough that I wasn’t surprised when my bedroom door swung open and Dad burst in brandishing a baseball bat.
“Jill, what...?”
Under different circumstances, a father catching his daughter sneaking into her bedroom in the wee hours of the morning would be followed by a lot of yelling. Dad took one look at me crouched on my desk and sighed. “Still with the roof?”
I could hear the weariness in his voice. He didn’t get enough sleep as it was without me waking him up early. He worked all the time, partly for the money—stupid Pep Boys had opened a shop two blocks from us and we were starting to feel the pinch—but also so he wouldn’t have to think about Mom leaving him. Leaving us.
“Sorry, Dad.” I closed the window behind me and hopped off my desk.
He raked a hand over his wild mess of dark, bent tangles. It was getting long in the back. Mom always had him keep it neat and short, but it was starting to brush past his collar. “You can’t keep doing this. Not at five o’clock in the morning. Only serial killers get up this early.”
I didn’t try to follow that line of logic. “Or cross-country runners. You remember which one I am, right?”
Dad yawned wide enough that I could count the fillings in his teeth. He shuffled farther into my room and set the lamp back on my desk. “Didn’t Dahmer run track in high school?”
“Ha-ha. You’re funny at five o’clock in the morning.”
“I should be catatonic at five o’clock in the morning. You should be catatonic at five o’clock in the morning.”
