Afterparty(86)

I say, “You can’t go on the roof.”

“Watch me.” I almost can’t make out the words, it’s so noisy. And then she yells, “Pact, pact, pact, pact! You have to come or I’m doing it myself. And what’s the point of that?”

I don’t remember.

Then I do.

By then she is climbing the cordoned-off stairs to the loft. By then I’m chasing after her. By then I’m yelling “No!”

There are narrow metal stairs, curved in a corkscrew, from the balcony up toward the roof. The staircase ends with a door to a steep passageway that takes you back inside the building, along a corridor with taped-up pipes and discarded cleaning supplies, old brooms and paint cans, just below the roof. At the end of the hall, Siobhan pushes through a door marked ALARM WILL SOUND, but there’s just the sound of rain, and the night sky.

The roof is slippery and you can feel the wind, not enough to topple you, but enough that you have to pay attention.

She says, “Come on!”

I reach out for her, but I slip and she gets me by the upper arm. Not to pull me up, to pull me down. I try to steady myself, but my heels are too high and too fragile.

I yell, “Siobhan, stop it! This isn’t funny!”

“Pact!” she says. “You promised. So you have to do it. I am totally bombed, I am as mellow as I get, so mellow, and it isn’t working, is it? You know it isn’t. You’re a wreck and it’s never going to get any better for you.”

“Siobhan, I’m fine! That pact was stupid! We’re both going to be fine.”

“You need me! You know you do, you can’t cope without me, and I’m so out of here.” She is pulling on my arm, pulling toward the edge where the roof slopes down, across an expanse of tar paper and toward the tiles that are slick with mud and rain.

“No! Siobhan! Stop!”

“You can’t live without me,” she says, panting, pulling me along the roof, yanking on my wet hair. “Can’t live either way.” Her breath is labored as we struggle there, pulling and pulling away, pushing toward the edge as I maintain the wholly unrealistic hope that I can somehow talk her out of this.

Because I see where this is going.

This is going over the edge.

I am not going over the edge.

She is pulling me by my arm and by my hair, toward the edge of the roof. Each time I think I’m braced, that I’ve figured out how to balance myself, how to crouch down and push back with each new surface—tiles, and tar paper shingles that seem to tear like paper, and flat places covered with jagged little white stones, and then a slope that ends in puddled, muddy rainwater—we’re on another surface and I’m struggling again to keep my balance.

I yell, “Siobhan, no!” and I keep trying to pull her back, but she’s stronger and we go down onto the flat of the roof, crawling over stones. I am pulling away and her nails are cutting into the skin on my forearms as I pull away from her grip. Almost free, not quite. I fall on top of her and she seems to be rolling away. But she’s taking me with her toward the edge, where the roof swoops downward and the rows of broken Spanish tile are treacherous, and the surface can’t be mastered.

I yell, “Stop it! Siobhan, stop!” But I can’t pull away, she has my blouse and my hair and she’s on top of me now, rising to her knees and pulling me up with her.

She says, “It’s a pact! You said! You can’t back out!”

But I do. I back out. I end it.

I grab onto a drainpipe just before we reach the sharp incline of the overhanging eaves, and I hang on.

I’m crouched on the edge of the roof and I’m panting and soaked, and I’m not even cold.

I have been running and running uphill. I have been rolling to the edge of the roof, sliding down a precipice of Spanish tiles and planes of gritty tar paper. Between my fingers, there is slime and a brown paste of decomposing leaves scooped from the rain gutter.

From the rain gutter that saved me.

The rain gutter I grabbed onto, onto the pipe that braced the rusty gutter to the roof, when she rolled over me, when she closed her eyes and grabbed me hard, when she tried to pull me with her, pull me down, down over the edge, and then I couldn’t hold her anymore. I couldn’t hold her back. Couldn’t hold back the dead weight of her, pulling and falling. All I could do not to go over, not to fly down with her, not to plummet through the branches to the awning, down, down to the hard sidewalk, all I could do was to push her off me.

Was to push her over.

Was to brace myself and push her as hard as I could, push her off me, push her headfirst off the roof, before she could pull me down with her.





CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE


THE LAST TIME I SEE Dylan that night, I am alone on the edge of the roof, and he is standing by the stairwell. He is coming out of the stairwell. He is pulling himself erect. He is pushing back his hair, but it sticks to his face. Or maybe he has been there, crouching there, just outside the door all along. Maybe he saw.

I’m pretty sure he saw.

Drenched with rain, dark strands of hair dripping down his face.

He peels off the wet black dinner jacket. And I think, Not here, what’s wrong with you, not here, not now, not again, not ever. He takes my arms and threads them through the wet sleeves, and he rolls the cuffs up just above my wrists.