ANNA WAS THE GOOD ONE. People had always thought of her that way. The one who wouldn’t cause problems, the one who was kind—considerate. The one who opened doors for people, who bought thoughtful birthday presents and volunteered for food drives.
If someone had told me before, back when she was alive, that someone had called her a whore, had scrawled it across the wall of the boys’ bathroom, I’d have assumed they were making a terrible joke.
But someone had written that about her, had written it out in permanent black ink. Someone who’d seen her with someone? The person she’d been with? I didn’t know.
I WAS STARING OUT THE window in class, still thinking about the graffiti, when I saw a girl sitting on the edge of the roof—legs dangling back and forth, dark hair blowing in the breeze.
I thought it was Anna. Which meant it had happened, that I’d finally, officially lost it—not just momentarily seeing her in someone else, but seeing her in a place where there wasn’t anyone at all.
I closed my eyes tight and then reopened them.
The girl was still there. She wasn’t Anna, but she wasn’t a figment of my imagination either. It was a real girl up there, leaning forward at a dangerous angle.
I got up and ran out of the classroom. The hallway was longer than it had ever been. When I finally reached the stairs that led to the roof, I took them two at a time. I slowed down only right before I reached the door out to the roof, as my only working brain cell warned me against startling the girl perched on the ledge.
As the door closed quietly behind me, I stood and looked for the girl, afraid I might already be too late. I wasn’t. She was still there, her darks curls moving in the wind.
It was Mona, Lauren’s friend. She sat with her back to me, arms at her sides, holding on to the ledge with a troubling lightness.
I walked toward her cautiously, at an angle, so that she could see me before I reached her. She turned as my shadow fell along her back.
“Hey, Mona,” I said.
“Jess?” Her eyes were red, her skin pink and blotchy.
“That’s right,” I said as I kept walking toward her.
With a few more steps, I reached the ledge. I carefully lifted one leg over and then the other, sitting back as far as possible.
Don’t look down, I thought. Don’t look down and don’t think about Anna.
First, my eyes disobeyed me, training themselves on the pavement below, and then my brain disobeyed me, and I thought of Anna. Anna underneath the blue sheet. I clutched the ledge hard, the rough concrete grinding into my palms.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” Mona said.
“Okay.” I didn’t believe her. I thought it was probably exactly what it looked like. I looked down at her hand resting on the ledge. I wondered if I’d be able to grab her in time if I needed to. I moved my hand closer to hers to improve my odds.
“It’s quiet up here,” she said quietly. “It’s a good place to think.”
So is the library, I thought. So is the base of one of the many trees surrounding the school. There were many, many places that were good places to think—good places to cry, even—that were on ground level.
“It’s a nice view,” I said instead, making myself stare out in the distance. Keep talking, I thought. Something neutral, something mundane. “I can almost see my house.” I pointed with my free hand, leaving my other one near hers, tightly grasping the ledge. “I think it’s behind those trees. Where’s yours?”
She skimmed the horizon and then pointed to a spot close to the park. “Over there,” she said. “The one with the reddish roof and the blue siding.”
“I run through that park. There’s a path at the edge that goes out through the fields.”
She nodded. “Yeah, my mom used to go jogging on it—I’d go with her sometimes.”
“She stopped?”
She smiled for the first time since she’d seen me. “Oh yeah—she hates exercise. She just wanted to lose weight—she was always in a terrible mood when she got back. My dad and I practically begged her to stop.” She paused. “I’ve seen you running on the track—it looks like you actually enjoy it.”
I thought about how it felt when I was running. The quiet satisfaction of my body doing what I asked it to. The relief of not being so much in my own head for a while, the tension inside me temporarily loosening its hold. “I do like running,” I said. “I didn’t think I would, but I do. It feels like it makes me…clean, somehow.”
I didn’t know quite what I meant by that, only that it felt right.
Mona nodded like she understood. “That’s how I used to feel about cheerleading,” she said. “I knew exactly what I was supposed to be doing, exactly where I was supposed to be. I had this complete faith in my body that it could do whatever it needed to do, to flip through the air.”
I imagined Mona hurtling through the air, doing a high flip, knowing that she would land perfectly on her feet—and that being all that mattered in that particular moment. I could remember her last year, leaning against her locker, laughing, wearing her cheerleader outfit. She’d looked confident, happy—so sure in her skin that it almost hurt to look at her, even as you couldn’t quite bring yourself to look away.
“What happened?” I asked.
“It didn’t feel the same anymore. I lost that feeling, that sense of ownership over my body. Plus, I couldn’t cheer anymore, not for—” She paused and shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s different. I’m different.”
“Maybe you’ll get that feeling back,” I said.
“Maybe,” she said. “Sometimes I come out on game nights, just sit outside in the parking lot and listen to the music, try to imagine myself doing it again. I can’t, though. I think that version of me, of my life, is gone.”
She sounded so tired, so lost. And I knew it too well, what it felt like to lose a version of yourself. I closed my eyes, overwhelmed. It was all too close to the bone. The sadness. Girls on roofs, girls and windows. Losing their balance. Falling. Jumping.
“You don’t need to stay,” she said. “Really. I promise I’m not going to do anything.”
I wanted to believe her. I wasn’t sure I did. Promises could be so easily broken.
“It really is peaceful up here,” I said. “I think I’ll stay for a while. Until you’re ready to go back inside.”
“Okay,” she said.
And so we sat there together, not speaking.
And I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d prevented something from happening or only delayed it.