In apartment 5922, six girls sat on the rug eating microwave popcorn and watching Crystal Kisses, enthralled by the sapphire eyes of Lymon Barry, who had put his hand on Rissa Peele’s shoulder and was drawing her toward him. Through Candy’s mind flitted one stray thought about how weird it was that Pearl would rather stand around on the roof than see this movie. Pearl was a really strange person, she thought, and after that she didn’t think about Pearl again, nor did any of the others.
Pearl decided to try stomping and yelling. She knew that the roof she stood on was not directly over anyone’s apartment—it was over that top floor that had no number, with the maintenance rooms and air ducts and plumbing and trash bins. But it seemed possible that a loud enough noise might go all the way through that floor and penetrate down into the next one, and someone might hear her.
So she stomped as hard as she could, back and forth across the roof, shouting, “Help, help, help!” Then she galloped for a while, making horse noises, and then she jumped with both feet, as if squashing a long row of bugs: thud, thud, thud, thud.
No one came.
The old woman who walked with a walker heard a distant pounding and called the building supervisor to complain about something wrong with the heating pipes. She got the usual recorded voice: “Supervisor’s hours are from nine to five Monday through Friday. Please leave your message after the tone.”
Dinner was over in apartment 5819, and the dishes had been washed.
“Didn’t Pearl say she had homework tonight?” asked Pearl’s mother.
“I don’t know,” said her father.
“She’s been down in the basement quite a while,” said her mother. “She shouldn’t spend so much time hanging out with those friends of hers.”
“I’ll go find her,” said Pearl’s father. “Which basement is she in, do you think?” Asphalt Area Building #31 had eighteen basements.
“Usually she goes to 5,” said her mother.
Pearl’s father went out the door and along the halls to the elevators, where he punched the down button. After seven and a half minutes, the elevator came and he got in.
Eight minutes later, he arrived in Basement 5 and discovered no girls there, only an elderly man asleep on the couch and two boys playing pool. “Did you see a girl here, about your age, short brown hair, wearing a green T-shirt?” The boys shook their heads and went back to their game, and Pearl’s father punched the button for the elevator again, trying to remember the apartment number of the girl named Candy.
Making noise got Pearl nowhere. She had to think of something else. She put her back to the locked door and leaned against it, shivering. Out in front of her loomed the boxlike structure that held the noisy machinery. Maybe she could find a way off the roof through there. She might be able to get inside and wriggle through an air duct. She’d seen it done in bank-robber movies—men slithering along through pipes, sort of like going down a slide headfirst.
She walked out into the darkness slowly, so she wouldn’t trip, and felt her way around the walls of the machine shed until she found a low door. The door wasn’t locked. She opened it, stooped over, and took one careful step inside, into a clammy-cold, pitch-black space that smelled of oil. There was another smell, too, that she faintly recognized. What was it? She stood still, sniffing. Beside her left foot something moved—a rustle, a skittering. With a shriek, Pearl leapt backward. Rat droppings, that was the smell. She slammed shut the door and staggered away. Horrible, horrible! Rats on the roof, and they would come out at night! She shuddered; she felt sick.
She got herself to the edge of the building again and held on to the railing with one hand. Think, she told herself. Calm down and think. She was about to freeze into a girl-shaped ice cube. She had to get someone’s attention. Could she drop something over the side of the building and hope a person going by below would notice? If she had a piece of paper and a pencil, she could write a note: “Help! I’m marooned on the roof of Asphalt Area Building #31!” She could put it in one of her socks, weight it down with her lip gloss and a few coins from her pocket, and throw it over the railing, hoping it didn’t land on some ledge or flagpole and never make it to the street. But even if it did make it to the street, who would notice a balled-up sock? They’d think someone threw it out the window. People threw stuff out windows all the time.
Anyway, she didn’t have any paper, and she didn’t have a pencil.
Pearl’s father couldn’t remember the number of Candy’s apartment, so he had to go home again and ask his wife, who told him it was 5804. He went there and rang the doorbell. Candy’s sister Mindy answered—she was getting ready to go out and had purple eyeshadow on one eye but not the other—and said that Pearl wasn’t there and neither was Candy and she didn’t know where they were.
“Maybe your mom knows,” said Pearl’s father.
“Mom, where’s Candy?” Mindy yelled.
“Down in Basement 5,” the mom yelled back.
“No,” said Pearl’s father. “I looked. She isn’t there.”
“She’s not there,” Mindy yelled to her mom.
“Well, then she’s in one of the other basements,” the mom called. “She’s always down there somewhere.”
Mindy smiled and shrugged. She shut the door and went back to her mirror.
Pearl’s father was stumped. Maybe Candy was always down in the basements, but Pearl wasn’t. He began to worry a little.
Pearl saw a flurry of motion out there in the dark. Ack! Was it rats? She picked up her feet and danced backward a few steps, then stood still, peering and listening. The wind riffled her hair. Nothing else moved. Something brushed against her leg, and she jumped wildly sideways—but when she reached down to swat it away, her hand came up with a nothing but a feather.
She steered her mind away from rats and focused on the only thing she could think of that might save her. There were people on Floor 60. They were closer to her than anyone. She had to make one of them know she was here.
She calculated. The utility floor just below her was maybe ten feet high. Floor 60 would begin below that. Every apartment had four tall windows. How could she get to one of those windows and knock on it? She would have to climb up the railing and down its other side. She’d have to hold on to one of the metal railing bars with her left hand, hang there above the thousand-foot drop, and somehow thump on a window ten feet below. To do this, she would need a ten-foot rope with something heavy, like a rock, on the end.
She didn’t have a ten-foot rope, and she didn’t have a rock, and she knew she didn’t have the nerve to climb the railing and hang off the side of the building. Thinking about it made a cold sweat break out on her hands. But the picture in her imagination helped. It just needed some adjustments.
The bars of the railing were about four inches apart. A small dog or cat could get between them, but not a person. Pearl put her face close to the bars and looked down—not all the way down to the tiny streetlights, just a little way down to the windowsills of Floor 60. Below her she saw three of them, narrow concrete ledges, visible because light was shining on them from inside the windows. And light from the windows meant someone was inside. Right down there was the person who could save her.
She wished she had an arm ten feet long. Then it would be easy: she’d just slip her hand between the rods of the railing, drop down her long, long arm and knock on the glass of the window. She didn’t have such an arm, of course, but as she imagined this, she saw how she might make one.
She sat down. The gravel poked painfully at the seat of her pants. She unlaced the boot on her right foot, took the boot off, and pulled the shoelace out of the holes. It was about two feet long. She did the same with the other boot. When she tied the laces together, she had a string almost four feet long, which was not nearly long enough. She took her socks off. They were knee socks, each one more than a foot long when stretched out. When she added the socks to the shoelaces, her rope was, she guessed, almost seven feet long. Still not long enoug
h.
She took off her jacket. The wind sliced into her, but she steeled herself against it. With an effort, she tied one sleeve of the jacket and one end of a sock together. From the end of one sleeve to the end of the other, her jacket was about four feet long. Her rope now looked like this: jacket, sock, sock, shoelace, shoelace. She thought it might be long enough. She threaded the last shoelace through one eye of one boot and made as strong a knot as she could.
Finished. Also barefoot, with numb toes.
She pushed the boot between the bars of the railing, making sure she was right above one of the lighted windows, and carefully, carefully, she began to lower her rope. With her forehead pressed against the bars, she watched until the boot hung just above where she thought the window ought to begin. It wasn’t quite far enough down. It would thump on the side of the building, not on the glass, and the person inside wouldn’t hear it. She needed another six inches or so, that was all.
And she had it. Though her arm wasn’t unnaturally long, it was long enough. She put it between the bars and stretched it downward until her shoulder was against the railing and the cold metal pressed against the side of her face. Then she flung her arm outward and felt the boot at the other end of her rope swing a little way out from the building and fall back toward it.
Bang.
She heard the sound, boot heel against glass.
She made it happen again, over and over. Bang. Bang. Bang.
At last there came a scraping, sliding noise, and a voice, sounding annoyed. “What’s out there?”
Pearl yelled with all her might. “HELP!” she cried. “I’m on the roof! I can’t get down! It’s Pearl, I can’t get down, please help me!”
Pearl’s father came into the kitchen, where Ray and Cam were eating ice cream out of a carton and the baby was banging a spoon against the table leg. “I can’t find Pearl,” he said. “Do you know where she went?”
They said no.
He went into the bedroom, where Pearl’s mother was asleep with a folded washcloth over her eyes. He decided not to wake her up, not yet; she was having one of her bad headaches. He decided to go down to the basements again. He’d try every one of them.
In apartment 5922, the movie was almost over. Lymon Barry had kissed Rissa Peele, and they were now strolling hand in hand along a beautiful wide avenue beside the ocean, with the sun setting in glorious color beyond them.
“So beautiful,” said Arabella.
“I wish it was me,” said Ronette.
They watched and sighed as Lymon and Rissa clasped each other in a long embrace that was silhouetted against the blazing evening sky.
“Pearl’s going to be sorry she missed that,” said Candy.
“Should we go tell her how good it was?” Bitsy wondered.
“Or do we still hate her for yelling at us?” said Farah.
They decided they didn’t hate her anymore, and after the movie credits had finished rolling, they trooped down to apartment 5819 and arrived there as Pearl’s father was coming out the door.
“Aha!” he cried when he saw them. “But where’s Pearl? I thought she was with you.”
“No,” said Candy. “She wanted us to leave her alone.” She rolled her eyes. “Isn’t she home?”
“No,” said her father.
They all stood looking at each other.
Down the hall and around two corners, the elevator door opened, and out stepped Pearl and a middle-aged woman wearing round glasses, a gray sweatshirt, and a baggy blue corduroy skirt. Pearl had a thick pale blue blanket wrapped around her. When she and the woman got to her hallway, Pearl started to run. “Dad!” she yelled. The blanket flapped.
Everyone stared at her.
“I got stuck on the roof!” she said, coming to a stop in front of them.
“Stuck?” said Candy.
“The door locks from the inside,” said Pearl. “You locked me out.”
“We did not,” said Arabella, but she looked uncertain.
“We wouldn’t do that!” said Ronette.
“We didn’t know,” said Bitsy.
Pearl gave Bitsy a withering look. “I want my scarf back,” she said.
The woman with the glasses spoke up then, addressing Pearl’s father. “I’m Margaret Golub,” she said. “Apartment 6033. Your interesting daughter caught my attention.”
Pearl had saved herself in more ways than one, as it turned out. Margaret Golub was a writer who spent most of her days sitting at her computer, trying to finish the novel she had been working on for seven years. When something had thumped her window and she’d opened it and heard a voice calling, she had rushed up to the roof and brought Pearl down to her apartment. She’d wrapped her in a blanket, given her hot apple cider to drink, and waited until she had warmed up enough to stop shivering. Pearl had explained to her how she happened to be marooned on the roof, and because Margaret seemed the sort of person who would understand, she also explained that she was on the roof in the first place because sometimes she needed to have enormous spaciousness and silence around her, to give her room for her thoughts and imagination, and it was hard to find anyplace that wasn’t crowded and noisy.
“You could come here,” said Margaret. “It’s always quiet here. Sometimes I talk to my cat, but otherwise—utter silence.”
After that, Margaret’s apartment became Pearl’s Special Silent Place. She went there often.
Margaret worked in a corner room, at a desk with a computer on it and nothing else. “I can’t have clutter around,” she told Pearl. “Clutter makes my mind fog up.” Margaret’s mind, it turned out, was rather like Pearl’s. Pearl had buzzing instead of fog, but they both needed space and quiet to clear their minds out and think the thoughts they needed to think. It made Pearl happy to have met another person like herself.
In Margaret’s living room, beside the very window that Pearl had knocked on, was a wide green armchair. “When you’re here,” Margaret said, “this can be your chair.”
Margaret laid out the rules. Pearl could knock on Margaret’s door any weekend morning between 8:30 and 9:30. She could stay for as long as two hours, and there would be no talking until after 11:00, when there might be some if they were both in the mood. It was good to have the rules clear. That made it easy for Pearl to go to Margaret’s without feeling shy or as if she was intruding. She got into the habit of going once a week, and sometimes twice. She would gaze out at the view from Floor 60, stroke the cat, and think her thoughts. Sometimes she brought a book with her and read. Sometimes, after 11:00, she and Margaret talked a little, and now and then they had lemon cookies or leftover Chinese food.
Pearl apologized for yelling at her friends. She explained to them that sometimes she had to be by herself, and it wasn’t their fault. After that, they didn’t tease her as much for being strange, and she enjoyed herself more when she was with them.
Bitsy had come over the day after the roof incident with Pearl’s scarf draped around her neck. She took the scarf off and handed it back to Pearl. “I wouldn’t have taken it if I’d known the door would lock,” she said. “Really, I wouldn’t.”
“That’s okay,” said Pearl. She thought how remarkable it was that her Fateful Wish—to be left alone—had come true twice, first in a bad way and then in a good way. If it hadn’t been for Bitsy, neither the bad part nor the good part would have happened.
She felt a little surge of gratitude toward Bitsy. It wasn’t Bitsy’s fault that she was different from Pearl in a few ways, like having a different kind of mind and different taste in colors. “You can keep the scarf,” she said. “It looks better on you.”
JANE YOLEN
WISHES
There is a moment in every wish,
a trembling, a small slippage,
a fracture along a seam of the mountain
where consequence and desire meet.
You do the after-you no-after-you step,
the one where you meet someone
in the street,
the school hall, the locker room
and spend awful moments trying to decide
who goes left, who goes right, who goes through.
We want so much,
we want so much not to want.
Wanting makes us weak, weakly we accept.
I will take what is given, give what is taken,
only do this for me first.
The wish spoken.
The deed done.
The mermaid trades her tail for legs.
The miller’s daughter gives her unborn up for gold.
Jack takes the goose, the harp, and hacks down the stalk.
All for what?
The tail was better than the legs.
The girl should have stayed at the mill.
Jack became the villain, not the hero.
We should be giving wishes away,
not taking them.
The old tales have it wrong.
Those kind of wishes gift us
a moment of fulfillment,
a lifetime of regret.
MEG CABOT
THE PROTECTIONIST
Every man has his breaking point. For me it was when I found the piece of paper taped to my little sister’s back that said, Boobies: Get some.
“Dave,” Jenny said when she saw my expression. She’d had no idea. Who knows how long she’d been walking around with it stuck back there? “I don’t care. I don’t even want boobs. They’ll only get in the way of my front walkover roundoff back handspring, which everyone says is so good, it’s sure to land me a first at the Kirkland Ranch tumbling invitational tonight.”
Jenny may not have cared, but I sure did.
“He’s gone too far this time,” I said as I scanned the cafeteria. Cody Caputo was never too hard to find. He was the biggest kid in our class, the only kid at Highland Estates Middle School able to eat an entire pepperoni-and-sausage pizza for lunch every day. “When you use offensive graffiti to verbally harass a victim because of her gender, it’s called a bias crime.”
What You Wish For Page 4