Gabriel. I crawl to the window. He is on the street below, leaning against a stop sign. I can see his cocky grin all the way from the fourth floor. He hasn’t texted me in days, but he was never good at texting. What he’s good at is kissing and making me forget myself. Wouldn’t you like to forget yourself, Lyric?
I’m out of my room and through the front door before anyone can protest. My dad catches me at the elevator.
“Where are you going?”
“Away.”
“Away where?”
“Away from the family secret,” I say as I push the Close Doors button.
“What is going on out there?” Mrs. Novakova shouts as the elevator doors shut in my father’s face.
Gabriel waits beneath a lamppost. “Hey! Don’t they let you keep the prison jumpsuit when you get out? I was hoping you’d still be wearing it.”
I pull him close right there in the street and press his lips to mine, hard.
“The Big House has changed you,” he says.
“Take me away from here,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He grins and leans in close. His breath on my ear feels like a furnace. “I know a place.”
I know what “I know a place” means. Gabriel has an endless number of places, dark corners, and abandoned subway platforms—semiprivate escapes for hands up shirts and breathy make-out sessions. He uses me, then vanishes, sometimes for weeks on end, but right now it’s my turn.
“Let’s go.”
I grab his hand, and we run down the street like we’re being chased. We zip down an alley, then another, and with a mighty leap Gabriel snatches the end of a fire-escape ladder and pulls it down. Flakes of decades-old paint and wrought iron shower down on us as the metal shrieks against itself. He’s up it like a squirrel, scurrying from rung to rung, urging me to do the same. I follow the best I can, until we are on a rooftop—the open sky above, Coney Island stretched out for miles, and not a building nearby high enough for anyone to spot us.
Gabriel rushes to the edge of the roof and sweeps his arm out at the neighborhood like some teenage conqueror. “Nice, huh?”
“Is this your clubhouse?” I ask as I take in the rusty lawn chairs and discarded beer cans scattered as far as the eye can see. There’s a pack of rolling papers sitting on a nearby ledge and a pair of grimy Air Jordans that must be twenty years old.
My inner-city Peter Pan grins, then sits down and pulls me into his lap. He offers nothing romantic, nothing to be pressed into a scrapbook or to give comfort in the quiet, lonely hours. Gabriel is what he always is—sloppy and hot. He is lips, tongue, fingers, and gasping breaths, a noise that drowns out the world. I want to melt into this boy, kiss him until I can’t remember who I am. I want to drown in the smell of his neck. I take a peek around. We could make a secret I wouldn’t mind keeping, something to hold on to, a last memory of teenage recklessness. This isn’t how I imagined my first time, on some dirty rooftop with a boy who doesn’t know my middle name, a boy who has never once asked when my birthday is or how I got the little scar on my upper lip.
But who cares? You could be dead tomorrow or in one of those camps you’ve heard about. Right now you’re alive and free. It’s the best you can hope for in Fish City.
But this is ridiculous. I’m going to get sunburned on my back, and a pelican will take a crap on me. Plus, this boy doesn’t love me. This is just part of his routine: kiss, fondle, unbuckle, unzip, stop texting, repeat. I’m sure I’m not the only girl he’s brought up here.
He frowns. “Headache?”
“I’m just trying to ignore myself.”
“Huh?”
“I think I’m ready.”
He looks at me, mildly confused, and then a smile stretches across his face. “Ready ready?”
“I need a second.”
“Yeah, sure,” he stammers. “That’s totally cool. Can I do anything to help?”
“No, I mean, yes. Just go away for a second. I need to think. Do you have any condoms?”
He stands up and reaches into his pocket and pulls one out. I want to push his part-time butt off this roof, but I still go to work on my belt.
“I’ll be over here,” he says as he crosses the rooftop to a blackened chimney. Once he’s there, I watch him remove a pair of fancy binoculars. He holds them to his eyes and points toward the beach.