When I’m close enough to the wall to be sure of my aim, I wind up and rocket the stone toward one of the floodlights. There’s a miniature explosion when it hits, and the sound of falling glass. Instantly I’m retracing my steps, circling backward as both guards whip around.
“What the hell?” one of them says, and starts jogging toward the damaged floodlight, shouldering his rifle. I’m praying that the second guard follows. He hesitates, shifting his gun from his left hand to his right. He spits.
Go, go, go.
“Wait here,” he says to the driver, and then he, too, moves away from the garbage truck.
This is it: This is my chance, while the guards are distracted, examining the shattered light forty feet down the wall. I have to approach the truck at an angle, from the passenger’s side. I double over and try to make myself as small as I can. I can’t risk letting the driver get a look at me in his side mirror. For twenty terrifying seconds I’m on the road, totally exposed, free of the trees and gnarled brown bushes that have been serving as cover, and just then I have a memory of the first time Alex took me to the Wilds—how scared I was sneaking over the fence, how exposed I felt—raw and terrified, as though I’d been cut open.
Ten feet, five feet, two feet. And then I’m swinging myself up onto the ladder, the metal freezing, biting my fingers. When I get up to the roof I press myself perfectly flat, belly-down on a coating of bird shit and rust. Even the metal smells sick and sweet, like rotten garbage, a smell that must have seeped over the years into the truck frame. I turn my face toward the cuff of my wind breaker to keep from coughing. The roof is slightly concave, and ringed by a two-inch metal rail, which means at least I won’t be in danger of slipping off when the truck begins to move. I hope.
“Hey!” the driver is calling out to the guards. “Can you let me through or what? I’m on a schedule.”
There’s no immediate response. It feels like an eternity before I hear footsteps returning to the truck, and one of the guards says, “All right, go ahead.”
The iron gate clanks open, and the truck begins to move. I slide backward as the truck picks up speed, but manage to wedge my hands and feet against the metal railing; I must look like a giant starfish from above, suctioned to the roof. The wind whips by me, stinging my eyes: a biting cold that carries with it the smells of the Hudson River, which I know must be close. On our left, just off the highway, is the city: billboards and dismantled streetlights and ugly apartment buildings with purple-gray faces, bruised complexions turned toward the horizon.
The truck rattles down the highway, and I strain just to hang on, to keep myself from getting bounced off and onto the road. The cold is an agony now, a thousand needles on my face and my hands, and I have to squeeze my eyes shut because they’re watering so badly. The day comes dark and slow. The red glow at the horizon quickly smolders and burns out, getting sucked up behind the woolen clouds. It begins to drizzle. Each drop of rain is a tiny shard of glass on my skin, and the roof of the truck becomes slick and difficult to hold on to.
Soon, thankfully, we are slowing and bumping off the highway. It is still very early, and the streets are mostly silent. Above me, apartment buildings loom, enormous fingers pointing toward the sky. Now I can smell food scents carried out onto the street through open windows: gasoline and wood smoke; the closeness of millions and millions of people.
This is my stop.
As soon as the truck slows at a light, I retreat down the ladder—scanning the street to make sure no one is watching—and jump lightly onto the pavement. The garbage truck continues its lumbering journey as I try to stamp some feeling into my toes and blow hot air onto my fingers. Seventy-second Street. Julian lives on Charles Street, he told me, which is all the way downtown. Judging from the quality of the light, it must be a little before seven—maybe a little later, since the thick cloud cover makes it hard to tell time accurately. I can’t risk being seen on a bus looking the way I look—water-spotted, covered with mud.
I double back toward the West Side Highway, and the footpath that cuts north to south through the long, well-tended park that runs parallel to the Hudson. It will be easier to avoid people here. No one will be strolling on a rainy day this early in the morning. At this point exhaustion is burning the back of my eyes, and my feet feel leaden.