By Jessica Manack
I washed the dishes, like I did every night, looking out the window at the trees, black against blue. When the trees blended into the sky, black on black, I knew it was time. Our time.
Saturday nights, Tim’s mom watched TV until she fell asleep in her chair, so it was easy for him to take the car without question. He’d stop at the bottom of my driveway, the lights my queue to go.
The places you weren’t supposed to go were our places. The places where no one was spitting on us. Or calling us Frenchy, or Big Nose, or LibertyAve. Once we hit the main road, the dark made a cape around us: we’d turn something up loud, and blast fast through the black, the empty highway a stage for the deers’ brief and frantic performances. The kudzu exploded into hominid stomps, viny ogres backing away from us up the mountain.
Transgressions large and small were Tim’s favorite. He’d come to school wearing a Mercedes hood ornament around his neck, no one daring to ask where it came from. His impulsive nature could be destructive or hilarious. There was the night we were all driving home from the diner. He pulled into the shiny new gas station, walked in, did a cartwheel in the center of the store, a perfect 10, and walked out, leaving the patrons staring, mouths agape. I envied that he didn’t spend a lot of time on deliberations, lists of pros and cons.
He parked the car in the shadows on the east side of our school and we walked over to the loading docks. The pallets were still stacked in the same way as last weekend – a rudimentary ladder, easy to scale. He let me go first in case I missed a step, but I never did, too scared to second-guess, quick as a wick’s flicker.
When we went up to the roof, I felt like a queen surveying my kingdom. I wrangled some currency I had never managed to grab in the puzzling economy of high school. Sometimes we’d look down at the cemetery and watch kids from school partying there, secret meetups. This was the one time we had any power over them, our altitude briefly giving us a higher status, an omniscience.
After I made it up safely, Tim climbed to join me. Only, once he had a solid hold on the lip of the top, he gave the pallets a hard kick, sending the stack clattering to the ground. I felt the air rush out of my lungs.
“What did you do that for?” I gasped.
“That was for telling Jake. His uncle’s a cop,” he huffed, stomping off to the corner with the best view of the highway.
“But he hates his uncle,” I shot back, trying to stay close, but every time I approached, he moved. To the spot where you could watch the planes coming in. Overlooking the meadow the foxes moved through. The sky was clear and we could see the whole world below. But there was nothing to enjoy about spying that night. His kick had reordered the atmosphere.
I wondered what I’d do to get down, who I’d even call. Tim was a cat, would relish the challenge, could probably jump down and remain unscathed. I hadn’t had the years of daredevil training he had.
I walked around aimlessly, made another pass by the pallets scattered below, hoping that somehow, I’d see them righted. I didn’t, but I saw a shifting shadow, a voice coming from the dark.
“Allison? Allison! Is that you? How do you get up there?” Jake asked, as I walked over to the edge. I could tell he hadn’t believed me. I guess he’d come to investigate.
I didn’t want Tim to know we weren’t alone. I also didn’t want to be there until morning. “Usually, the pallets are stacked up and it’s easy. But they fell…” I trailed off.
He silently rebuilt the stack as it had been, climbing up until three were in a series stable enough to hold our weight. I tried to tell him with my eyes that this was a bad idea.
“Not tonight. We can come back another day. Can you give me a ride home?”
I knew that turning my back on our danger was breaking some kind of compact. I knew that I could even lose my status in the world of misfits. I wondered if, next Saturday, I’d even see the lights at all, breaking through the night.
Jessica Manack holds degrees from Hollins University and lives with her family in Pittsburgh, where she serves on the editorial teams of Rust Belt Magazine and the Pittsburgh Review of Books and as poetry reader for TriQuarterly. Her writing has appeared widely in anthologies and journals, and her poetry collection Gastromythology (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions) was published in 2024. http://www.
