Five girls climb out of a window onto a fire escape. One holds fire. Click, fire. Click. 1 Click, fire. Click. The girls have music, too. Tame Impala and Cage the Elephant. They talk and they hear. Eventually, they listen.
It feels like I only go backwards, baby.
Every part of me says, “Go ahead”
Then I got my hopes up
again, oh, no, not again
The girls feel the music lift them. Somewhere above the fire escape. Suspended. Their flight is electric and still. They forget how to walk, how to speak, laugh, the friction between their unshaved legs and denim. They forget their chipped nail polish, uneven fingernails, callouses, bright red blemishes, widow’s peaks, dark roots, small lips. Then one girl, the one with dark, shoulder-length hair and dark eyes that disappear when she smiles, remembers the weight of her head. The others remember too. It’s like their necks, which were never tilted back, fall, collapse, bend forward. They see the fire escape again. And the opening for a ladder, which doesn’t reach the ground. The girls think of jumping, and it scares them that they have the power to jump. They climb back through the window. One girl still holds fire.
Two girls decide to be friends because they’re wearing the same brand of sweatshirt with neon stripes. Then they realize they’re from the same city and know the same restaurants and schools and people and maybe they’ve met each other before. It’s June and they feel like outcasts. They’ve never felt like this, they tell each other. One of them is lying and the other girl knows, but she pretends not to. The girls are on the same program. It’s a writing program at a college. The girl who lied likes to write and the other girl can’t, but she’s lying when she says this.
There’s a tennis program happening on campus at the same time. They meet two boys in the dining hall, and they plan to see each other late that night. The girls leave their dorm, propping the front door open with a cinder block because they were told their key cards won’t scan past curfew. The boys do the same. They meet at a bench by the pond. It’s under a weeping willow. The girls chose to meet there because it’s romantic. On the walk back, the girls decide they don’t like the boys. One boy talked about sex too much. The other boy smelled.
The next night, the girls and the boys plan to meet at the bench again. The girls are caught breaking curfew. The program director talks to them in the morning. He makes them call home and explain. They get in trouble again for skipping class. Twice. And then because some of the other students think they’re mean. The girls disagree. They complain that the other students don’t invite them to sit together at lunch. They say they don’t feel welcomed. But the girls wouldn’t want to sit with the other students anyway. The director knows this, but he doesn’t make them call home this time.
The girls hide in the basement after the director finishes talking to them. They sit on a bathroom floor, on cold tiles, and they talk about escaping. They think they could climb out of the frosted window above their heads. Through it, the girls can see the silhouettes of flowers. No one would see them leave the building if they went through the window. They could run away if 3 they wanted to. Just for the afternoon. There’s an ice cream parlor in town, not too far. They could hitch hike.
One of the girls stands. She pulls herself up onto the vanity top and reaches for the window. She pushes it open. The glass swings out more easily than she expected. She feels the mulch beneath her fingers. Then her friend calls out to stop her. She says she doesn’t want to get in more trouble. They’re both seated on the floor again. They text the boys to meet at the bench that night.
A girl and a boy stand together on a roofdeck. There are other people there, people they know well, but they stand apart. They’re looking over the brick wall, over the edge of the roof. The boy is on drugs. Cocaine. He brags about doing it off of girls’ breasts. He shows the girl a video. She doesn’t want to watch it, but she does. The boy talks like everyone wants the same things he wants. Drugs, money, sex. The boy has all these things. He’s the happiest he’s ever been, he tells her. She doesn’t disagree.
The girl smells cigarette smoke. Someone else stands by the wall now, not far from them. She inhales and imagines the burnt air pooling into her lungs. She holds her breath for a while, trapping it, and feels faint. The boy’s playing another video. She doesn’t watch. She leans far over the brick wall and looks down at the little taxis and cross walks and green awnings. A man rides a bike.
The girl steps back from the wall. She asks the boy what he’d do if the wall gave out and he fell all the way down to the street. He says he’ll probably die before his body reaches the ground.
I don’t know Amara well, but we lean in close as we talk. Our words are softly spoken and rushed in the restaurant, which is now emptying. We’re two seated at a table reserved for three. Two glasses of water and two glasses of prosecco and one candle and two dessert menus. The waitress hasn’t returned.
Amara asks if I knew Jack. I nod. We dated. Not for long. We weren’t old enough to love, but I’m sure that we did. I can no longer ask him, though, so I’ve started to doubt.
Amara is sorry. She has questions. She wants to know if I can answer them. She wants to know why Jack tucked the little blue bible into his back pocket, the one he got at Confirmation. Why he wrote the letters. Why he followed through with it after writing the letters, after, she imagines, envisioning his older sister’s eulogy, his parents clasping each other’s hands in the front pew, the pallbearers carrying their friend’s weight down the aisle. I don’t know the answers to her questions. I didn’t get a letter. I did get a goodbye, two weeks before, a text to meet by the MET steps that I thought meant let’s get back together.
Amara is sorry again. She can’t understand why people do it. Sometimes, she admits, she thinks about it. Not on purpose. The thoughts are fleeting. They come to her when she looks out the plane window, when she stands on the glass floor at the World Trade Center’s observation deck, when she watches the Macy’s Day Parade from the balcony of her grandmother’s 5 apartment. But she’d never do it.