Wild Awake

Stanley Otter Fish would have been a famous composer if he hadn’t gotten run over by a truck. I wonder what would happen if I died, and the last fruit I had ever eaten was a pomegranate.
    I tell myself there are worse things than having a pomegranate be your last fruit.
    After a dozen more rattling steps, the fire escape ends and this weird iron swimming-pool ladder goes up the rest of the way. I clench my teeth and scramble up it, scraping my knees against the top rung in my hurry. Once I’m safely on the roof, I’m so dizzy with pent-up dread and relief I don’t even look around, I just crouch down and squeeze my eyes shut and breathe. While I’m crouching there, so close to the roof’s heat and dusty smell, the height and the climb and the whole situation overwhelm me all at once and I almost start to cry again. My knees hurt and I haven’t slept, and when I tried to fix my synth this morning, the power light flared and flickered and then winked out and I couldn’t make it come on again.
    I’m not supposed to be here , I think. I’m not supposed to be here and my brain is not supposed to be doing whatever it’s doing and I’m not supposed to know about Sukey and everything is wrong .
    Maybe if I wave my hands, someone will see me and call 911 and the fire department will come and get me down, not just from the roof but from everything, from Sukey being murdered and my thoughts going loud and then normal again and from this whole entire wreckage of a summer.
    I pinch myself again, viciously this time. Do you ever shut up? There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just looking for excuses not to be brave .
    I huddle there by the ladder, the strong side of me bullying the weak one, until the feeling evaporates and just like that I’m fine again. I lift my head and look around.
    In the middle of the roof, there’s a sagging plastic lawn chair. Beside it there’s a pile of cigarette butts, an old Discman, and a faded Coke bottle filled with rainwater. A chipped clay flowerpot has rolled under the lawn chair, spilling out a heap of black soil spotted with white pearls of fertilizer.
    I’m psyching myself up to investigate more closely when something catches my eye: a splatter of dirty yellow paint beside my right foot. I reach out to touch it and immediately spot another one a few inches away. I freeze, my pulse quickening, as my eyes pick out more and more of them, scattered all around me in a cloud. The colors have gone dull and filthy from years of dust and rain, but they’re still there, still visible, layers and layers of drips and splatters and spots.
    Sukey .
    I shift onto my hands and knees to get a closer look, ignoring the roughness of the rooftop on my grazed skin. Rubbing away the grime, I make out raspberry, purple, sea-foam green, like droppings from a psychedelic pigeon. Sukey must have stood over this place with her easel while she painted. These drips of paint must have flown off her brush as she lifted it to the canvas, splashing onto the hot roof. Sukey made art here , my brain keeps thinking, sounding it over and over like a bell—my Sukey, the one I remember, not the strung-out stranger that was starting to replace her in my mind. Even if she was screwing up and getting lost and making all the wrong decisions, at least she was still searching. At least she was still trying to get to that place her soul was from. And maybe, in spite of everything, she found it.
    As I climb back down the fire escape, I tell myself there’s no reason to be sad anymore—no reason to crash bicycles or fight with Danny or have stupid, fretful worries about the people on the bus. The world is good and I am good and love is good and if I’d only stop freaking out long enough to realize that, I wouldn’t have any problems at all.

chapter thirty
    All day long, I carry Sukey’s rooftop around with me like a pocketful of gumballs, an ecstatic secret I can hardly keep contained. I want to be good for the world—pure and true and wise and somehow saintly, somehow illuminated. I want to have experienced something that has changed me, and so I act changed.
    I take my synth to Skunk’s house, and we fix it in the shed using bike tools. The pieces of the exploded synth fit back together perfectly. You can’t even tell it exploded in the first place, and when I plug it into the extension cord, the power light glows bright blue. I play for Skunk for a little while, saying things like, “This is where Lukas