by Eric Walters
“Ready and willing,” Ella said.
I wasn’t necessarily feeling either of those things.
He started walking, and we fell in beside him.
“You really worked hard to find me,” he said.
“I’m fairly persistent,” Ella said. “And social media is a powerful tool.”
“I got messages from a bunch of people telling me you were looking for me.”
“I figured I’d just put out the word and you’d hear about it.”
“How did you even know to look for me?” he asked.
“I asked some people who would be the best street artist to go out with, and your name kept coming up.”
“I guess I should be honored.”
“Us too. Thanks for the invitation to join you.”
“It’s nice to have company. Usually it’s just me, the rats, cats and a few raccoons. The only people I see are the ones stumbling home after a night of drinking and partying. And, of course, there’s the occasional police car.”
“Is that a problem, the police?” I asked.
“There’s always a danger. They’ve arrested some of my friends. That’s why we do it in the middle of the night, dressed this way, and why I’ve chosen to hide my face.”
“How long have you been doing this?” Ella asked him.
“About two years. I started when I was in my first year of art school.”
“You went to art school?” I asked.
“You sound surprised. Don’t you think this is art?”
“Of course it’s art. I was just surprised because I thought street art would be more…I don’t know, organic, than done by an artist trained at some school or college.”
“Believe me, this isn’t anything they’re teaching me in school. I have one more year before I graduate with my degree in fine arts and design,” he explained.
“That’s impressive,” I said. “Do you want some help with the stuff you’re carrying?”
“Sure, you can take this.” He took the big canvas bag off his shoulder and handed it to me.
I was surprised by how heavy it was. “What’s in here?”
“There are cans of spray paint, brushes, ropes and assorted stencils.”
“Stencils?” I asked. “What are they for?”
“You’ll see soon enough.”
“The stencils I understand,” Ella said. “What’s the deal with the rope?”
“Are either of you afraid of heights?”
Ella laughed. She knew very well how I felt about heights. I looked at the ladder on his shoulder. No matter how he extended the ladder, it wasn’t going any higher than my height.
“No problem with heights at all,” I said. Ella nodded approvingly.
I pressed myself flat against the roof of the building as I carefully looked over the edge. Night Crawler had a rope tied to his waist and to a chimney as he perched on the ledge below us. We were a lot higher than a stepladder. Cody had used the rope to move us from one building to the next along the attached roofs, getting us higher in steps until we were now on the top of a five-story building. The scene below was silent and still. There were no moving cars and no people, although it was still brightly lit by the streetlights. In fact, it was so bright that I was sure Cody would be visible to anybody who did go by.
He was using a big stencil—sort of a large cardboard cut-out—to do his art. He taped it to the wall and then spray-painted, the cardboard protecting places that weren’t supposed to be painted and the cut-out part creating the image on the wall. This cut-out was of a big dancing raccoon—which was one of Night Crawler’s favorites to use. It was a great symbol, a creature wandering around the city at night, making his mark and avoiding people.
Before we’d started to climb, we’d done a few pieces below. It didn’t look like much when we were doing it. But once the stencil was pulled away, the image was revealed. Ella and I got to do one of the raccoons almost completely by ourselves.
Cody also did a couple of sayings—Art in a Frame is Like an Eagle in a Cage, with a big eagle painted on the side, and a second that he said he had written just for me. It was simple—Do More, Feel More, Be More. I had to admit it was pretty amazing. I was thinking of making it my header on Twitter, so I took a picture of it.
Cody was working on the sixth image, so it looked like a chorus line of dancing raccoons. If it looked good from up here—upside down—I could just imagine how fantastic it would look from below, when you could take in the whole perspective. After he was finished I wanted to take a few pictures to share on social.
“You’re handling the height pretty well,” Ella said.
“I’ve been higher. Besides, this is pretty cool.”
“Cool enough to take Cody up on his offer to come out another time?” she asked.
“I think I might.”
Ella gave me a big smile, and we exchanged a high five.
Cody had asked us to do street art a second time. He’d also asked me out for a coffee, and I’d politely turned him down. He’d seemed okay with it. More okay than Ella had seemed. It wasn’t that she’d said anything, but she’d given me a quick look that I caught out of the corner of my eye. Did she want to go out with him? Was this her feeling invisible? It wasn’t like I’d said or done anything. Then again, maybe I was just imagining things.
There was a car coming up the street. There hadn’t been that many, though more than the occasional vehicle. It was the middle of the night, but it was also the middle of the city, so some traffic was inevitable. Cody had told us not to worry, because generally people looked straight out of their windows, seldom up.
The car was moving very slowly. Maybe he was a delivery guy. I could have used a pizza right about then. Adrenaline and fear created appetite, and I felt like I was starving.
A bright light came from the passenger side, and the beam of light swept along the storefronts, as if someone was searching for the right address. Suddenly the light shot upward and started to sweep across the tops of the buildings.
“It’s the police!” Ella gasped.
Cody desperately started to scramble up the rope, trying to get off the ledge and onto the safety of the roof. Before he could reach the top, the beam of light swept over him and then past—they hadn’t seen him! But then the light retraced its route to catch him, brightly, squarely, in its angry eye.
A metallic voice boomed out, “Stay where you are!”
Instead, Cody pulled himself over the edge and flopped down, practically landing on top of the two of us.
“We have to get moving!”
Ella jumped to her feet, and I scrambled to do the same. The beam of light shone above the edge and just caught the tops of our heads. I ducked down.
Cody grabbed his bag and started running, but instead of heading back the way we’d come, he ran along the tops of the buildings in the opposite direction. We ran after him. There were more than a dozen stores in a row, each roof not more than a few feet higher or lower than the one beside it. We jumped down or climbed up as we went from building to building, the gravel and pebbles on the roofs sounding under our feet as we moved.
Suddenly Cody skidded to a stop, and we did the same. We were at the end of the row of stores, a laneway separating us from the next row of stores.
“What now?” Ella asked. “Do we go back?”
“Not back,” Cody said.
He tossed his canvas bag across the gap, and it landed with a thud on the roof on the other side of the lane.
“It’s not that far,” Cody said.
He backed up a dozen steps.
“He’s not really going to—”
Before I could finish my sentence, he’d run to the edge and launched himself, practically hanging there in midair before crashing down on the other roof and rolling. He jumped back onto his feet.
“It’s not far,” he hissed. “I made
it easily. You can do it.”
I looked at Ella, who was looking at me. I shook my head.
“I agree,” she said. “I’d rather be arrested than break my neck.”
“What do we do now?” I hissed over at Cody.
“Lay low—wait them out. They’ll get called for something important.”
I thought about my ride-along and how the sergeant had said that sometimes something important didn’t happen all night.
“Besides,” Cody said, “they’re probably not going to climb up after you.”
“Probably?”
“No guarantees.”
“What about your ladder?” I asked, thinking maybe I could entice him to come back over. “Don’t you need it to get down?”
“I’ve got another length of rope in my bag. You can use the ladder. Besides, it isn’t mine. I grabbed it from one of the backyards a couple of blocks over. Good luck,” he said.
He turned and started away.
“But Cody, you can’t just leave us here!”
He stopped and turned around. “Actually, Cody isn’t my real name.” He turned back around and ran off. He jumped down to a lower building and disappeared, although we could still hear his footfalls as he vanished into the dark.
“Nice, very nice,” Ella muttered.
“What do you expect from a guy named Night Crawler?”
“So what now?” Ella asked.
“I guess we wait and hope they don’t climb up to get us.”
DAY 41
I startled awake, and it took me a few seconds to remember where we were—on a roof downtown, in the middle of the night. Wait—it wasn’t that dark anymore. I pulled out my phone—it was five thirty. I was glad my father and brother were still away. It would have been hard to explain—Sorry, sleeping on a roof—be home in the morning.
Ella had her head on my leg. Her eyes were closed, and she was asleep and gently snoring. She looked so peaceful that I almost didn’t want to wake her, but we had to get moving.
“Ella, wake up,” I said, shaking her gently.
“I don’t want to get up, Mommy,” she mumbled.
“Mommy?”
Ella’s eyes popped open, and she instantly seemed to figure out that not only wasn’t I her mother, but we were also far from her bedroom.
“Do you think they’re gone?” she asked as she got to her feet.
“We can only hope.” I crept over to the corner edge of the building, where I could look down. The streets were coming alive with vehicles, but there was no sign of any police car.
Slowly, quietly, we made our way back across the tops of the buildings. The energy and fear and adrenaline of the previous night were replaced by creaking, cold joints and sore backs from sleeping on the cold, gravel-covered roof. We reached the store where we had gotten up onto the roof. I lowered myself over the edge and dropped to the lower level. Despite how gently I tried to land, there was still too loud a thud. Ella dropped down beside me, and the sound echoed across the rooftop.
We continued to move, trying for quiet but not quite succeeding. We went to the edge, and I peeked over.
“The ladder is still there.”
“Do you see anything else?” Ella asked.
“Nothing. We’re all alone. Let’s go.”
I stepped onto the ladder and started down. Ella was immediately behind me. I reached the ground and—
“Good morning.”
I spun around, jumped and screamed. It was Sarge and Todd.
For the second time I sat in the back of a police car. The fact that the doors didn’t open from the inside meant something much more significant this time. Ella was trying her best to remain brave. It wasn’t working so well. Todd and Sarge were in the front seat, the police radio adding a soundtrack like every scene of every police TV show and movie I’d ever watched. I just wished this was one of those scenes instead of real life.
“You weren’t who I thought would come down that ladder,” the sergeant said.
“Not quite who I expected the Night Crawler to be,” Todd added.
“Neither one of us is the Night Crawler!” I protested. “Honestly!”
“We know that, but we saw the raccoons and knew it had to be him up there with you,” Sarge said.
“He was, but he ran and left us.”
“Is this guy a friend of yours?”
“A friend wouldn’t have left us,” I said. “We don’t even know his real name.”
“So we’re supposed to believe you wandered up that ladder, dressed in black, and accidently bumped into him?” Sarge asked.
“No, I arranged to meet him,” Ella said.
“Maybe you can arrange for us to meet him.”
“I contacted him on social media. He agreed to take us out for the night.”
Todd laughed. “So you sort of went with this Night Crawler on a ride-along, like you did with us.”
“Pretty well,” I said.
“So this was one of the differents you’re doing,” Todd said.
“Exactly.”
“Except this one was illegal,” Sarge added. “Are many of your activities illegal?”
“No, of course not!” I said. “Right, Ella?”
“Technically, I’m not sure if we did anything illegal tonight. It’s not like you saw us painting any graffiti.”
“Well, if you want technical,” Sarge said, “I do see paint on your hands.”
I looked at my hands and then Ella’s.
“That’s just, um, circumstantial evidence,” Ella said.
“Great, I have a teenage lawyer in the back of my car,” Sarge said. “So, lawyer, how about if we forget about the vandalism charge?”
“That would be great!” she exclaimed.
“And instead we’ll charge you with trespassing, intent to commit burglary and, in your case, attempting to avoid arrest by taking flight.”
“What?”
“You ran last night. That could easily be seen as attempted escape or even resisting arrest, don’t you think?” he said to Todd.
“Definitely. We could even find some other things to charge them with. We could have their car ticketed and towed while we’re taking them down to the station to book them.”
“Is that technical enough for you?” Sarge asked Ella.
“More technical than I’d like. Sorry, sir.”
“Good. Now there’s one other way we can play this,” he said. “You can both promise that you’ll never do this again and that no more of your little different things will involve breaking any laws, and we’ll let you off with a warning, and you can both be home in time for breakfast.”
“You’d do that?”
“Sophie, you seem like a good kid.” He turned to Ella. “You too. Good, but mouthy.”
“I am a bit too mouthy sometimes. I know that and—”
Sarge put a finger to his lips to silence her. He got out of the car and opened the back door for us. I climbed out and Ella hurried after me, bumping into me.
“Thank you so much,” I said.
“Yes, thank you,” Ella echoed.
“You know this whole different thing is interesting,” Sarge said. “But remember, Shakespeare said to thine own self be true.”
“You’re quoting Shakespeare?” Todd said.
“Yeah, you got a problem with that?”
Todd held up his hands like he was surrendering.
“Do you think because I’m a cop I can’t be cultured?”
“I’d never say that,” Todd said.
“How about you two?” he asked, turning to us.
“No, sir, definitely not, sir,” Ella said, and I nodded enthusiastically in agreement.
“It’s a quote from Hamlet where Polonius is talking to his son Laertes, and believe me, I’m old enough to be the father of all of you.”
“Y
ou’re actually a lot older than my father,” Todd said.
“It’s not too late for me to put you in the back of the car. What that quote means is that a person needs to remember who they are. Sophie, you’re not a criminal. You’re a good person. Don’t lose that while you gain other things.”
“I’ll try to remember. Thanks for that as well.”
They got back into the squad car. “Now go home, and no more trouble,” Sarge said through the open window.
They drove off, leaving us standing beside my car. Todd reached out of the window and gave a little wave goodbye.
“Well, on the bright side, you got in a new different,” Ella said.
“And almost got arrested doing it.”
“No, you don’t understand. Doing the street art was one different. Nearly getting arrested was a second. That’s two differents in one day. Congratulations!”
“And you didn’t even count the sleeping-on-the-roof part,” I added.
“Then that’s different times three. Great work!”
DAY 43
I posted the picture to both Twitter and Instagram. It was me, but it wasn’t me. Well, at least the hair wasn’t me. It was my eyes and my face looking out from beneath bright-purple hair. I’d had to choose between purple, orange and green, and I had to keep my hair this color for a week. The purple brought out the blue of my eyes, making them an even darker, deeper blue.
At first Ella had tried to convince me to actually dye my hair. Instead we went with a compromise involving purple hairspray and purple hair chalk. Ella did the honors. We went into the garage, and she covered me with an old sheet so only my head and hair could get bombed. Ella wore an old pair of work coveralls and a plastic shower cap on her hair, and we both put masks over our mouths and noses and ski goggles to cover our eyes.
Using a comb to part my hair, she sprayed it strand by strand. It was slow and smelly and hot and messy as the purple aerosol drifted through the air and landed on the concrete floor. I was so glad I’d moved my car out before we started. Finally she used the purple hair chalk to get individual pieces that were missed.