The Girl Who Would Be King(8)

I position the ladder next to the corner, along the short side, where I’m less likely to be heard, and climb up. Climbing takes two seconds and part of me wishes it took longer so that I won’t have to start the hard part so soon. I push the flashlight deeper into my pocket and creep to the edge closest to the house corner. The metal shifts in the mud under my feet. Damn it. I reach out with my right arm before the ladder can send me flailing onto the yard, and position my fingers along the edge of the brick lip. I do the same with my left hand until I’m just hanging there about fifteen feet up, my feet dangling. I try to put my feet on the brick lip, but it’s far too small. I should have taken off my shoes. With my toes, perhaps I could have gotten some grip on the tiny edge. I think about trying to get back on the ladder and doing just that, but just as I think it the ladder starts to fall. I squint my eyes shut and grimace, anticipating the inevitable crash, but with everything so wet and mushy the sound is muffled, and the ladder, blissfully, doesn’t close up on itself, which would surely have been loud. Instead it just lays there ineffectively on its side. I think how lucky I just got and then chide myself for celebrating while I’m hanging off the edge of a building, fifteen feet in the air, in the rain, by my fingertips.

In a way I’m not sure what to do now, as the task I’ve set for myself seems impossible, but then my arms start without me. My arms do all the work as my legs dangle uselessly below me and I marvel at them, as they seem to be on autopilot, just moving me up brick by brick. The next time I look down I’m at least three floors high and passing a bank of windows. It’s funny because my arms feel like they belong to me more than ever before…kind of the way my legs feel when I run, and so I just let them do it. My arms and I are at the top in no time. Both my hands grasp at the metal gutter, pulling me up and over the edge. The gutter gives a little, but holds.

I stand up on the roof as the rain bathes me and I feel like a whole new person, like a person I knew was lurking inside, but hadn’t known how to talk to, until now. It’s amazing.

So now I just have to find a tiny silver locket in the rainy dark. No problem. I turn on the flashlight and decide to just start circling the roof from the outside and working toward the center. But just as I begin I slip on a loose shingle. When the first one breaks free several more join it – sliding out from under me and taking me with it. I shoot off the edge of the roof toward dark oblivion.

If I hadn’t spent the last eleven years not speaking I know I would have screamed.

Instead, I reach my hand out instinctively as I go over the edge, and catch a couple more crappy shingles that crumble under my grasp. The gutter is my last hope, and I manage to snag it but the weight of me falling is too much for it and it pulls away from the edge of the house with surprising speed. I think there’s no way not to go down, but my body tells me otherwise. My weight swings with the motion of the detaching gutter and when it bends back toward the building again I leverage myself up and back onto the roof, barely. Holy. Shit. That’s the only thought in my head, about a thousand holy shits.

The flashlight has rolled into an intact part of the gutter and when I slide over to retrieve it I see the locket and chain, glistening in the flashlight’s beam. I reach out and pocket it like a kid that just found the freaking Holy Grail. But as I stand up and survey the damage I’ve done I realize this is going to raise serious eyebrows. Part of the gutter is torn away from the building and at least two dozen shingles have either broken or fallen off the house entirely. The damage will be visible from the yard. I look around for a solution; there’s nothing. The building is like a lonely island in the yard, the nearest tree at least a hundred feet away. As I stand there, knowing I’m screwed, lightning strikes a warehouse down the street. I watch it, transfixed. Both because I’ve never seen lightning hit anything before, and also because it seems like something ridiculous out of a cartoon. But it gives me an idea.

I walk to the chimney on the south side of the house; there’s a direct line between it and where the shingles have crumbled and the gutter has broken. I position myself behind and slightly above the chimney. I bite my lip in horrible anticipation and strike my fist at the bricks. It hurts like hell but it does break apart. My hand is torn up and bleeding a little but I hit it a few more times anyway, trying my best to make the chimney look ‘struck by lightning’. I then position some of the bricks and broken stone on the roof in a random falling pattern toward the gutter. I even jam two of the bricks into the gutter to make things look more feasible. Then I drop a few to the ground, making sure they hit the grass quietly and not the concrete loudly. Satisfied with my cover-up I head back to the side of the building where I came up, only to realize, stupidly, that I have no way down.