“Hater.”
Shane leaves, and I take a moment to smell my own breath before I enter the house: it’s bad. Even if I had mints or gum, which I don’t, there would be no masking the smell of booze on me. Inside the house, I can hear Mom’s TV in her bedroom rumbling quietly. The back kitchen light is on, and a half-eaten microwave meal is sitting on the counter with a fork standing upright out of the hardened lasagna that remains inside the plastic tray. An empty coffee cup sits in the sink.
Mom’s shift rotation at the hospital gets her in late at the moment. She normally walks through the door at midnight and heats something up in the microwave, since she won’t have had chance to eat all day. The coffee isn’t part of her normal routine, though. She must have wanted to get some caffeine flowing through her veins so she could stay awake. This does not bode well for me. I pull the fork out of the lasagna and place it beside the cup in the sink. The microwave meal goes into the trash.
Upstairs, Mom’s door is wide open, and the woman herself is sprawled out on her bed, still wearing her blue scrubs, TV remote loosely grasped in one hand. Saturday Night Live is repeating on the screen even though it’s Thursday. She stirs when I tiptoe into the room and turn off the television, but she doesn’t wake up. Thank god. I’ll get a grilling in the morning no doubt, but for now she has no idea what time I got back, or that I’m freaking wasted.
I dab some toothpaste onto my toothbrush and head into my bedroom, trying to brush quietly—the bristles scrubbing back and forth on my teeth sound like they’re loud enough to wake the dead. I’m trying to yank the chain on my blind with my left hand, the black material lowering lop-sided and uneven, when I notice the small, curled up form of the girl sleeping on the porch roof opposite my bedroom.
The roof in question—the narrow, three-foot wide area of flat bitumen on top of the ground floor bay window next door—is barely big enough to accommodate the sleeping girl. She’s covered with a thin blanket, arms wrapped around her body, knees drawn up right underneath her chin. In the dark, with so little light from the moon, I can barely make out her features, though her lips look blue. I’m reminded of an illustration I saw once when I was a kid. Snow White, surrounded by seven sinister-looking dwarves. I was sure, when I was seven years old, that those dwarves meant to do Snow White harm.
I put down my toothbrush on my desk, use both hands to pull up the stiff sash window, and then I lean into the night and spit out the toothpaste I’m holding in my mouth.
“Hey. Hey, Coralie.” I lean out of the window a little further, the windowsill digging into my stomach, making me feel a little sick. I’m still so full of beer. God, I’m gonna feel like death tomorrow. “Coralie Taylor!” I hiss, leaning even further out of the window. If she doesn’t wake up soon, I’m gonna end up vomiting down the side of the damn building. She remains curled into a ball, wrapped in the pale green, thin blanket, despite me calling her name.
I reel myself back in through the window and grab a couple of pencils off my desk. I’ve been playing basketball for four years now and I’m pretty fucking good at it. However, thanks to all the alcohol sloshing around my insides right now, my aim seems to be a little off when I throw the first pencil; it hits the guttering below the narrow roof and bounces off, falling to earth and disappearing into the jungle of rhododendron bushes below.
“Shit.”
I try again, and this time I hit Coralie right on the arm. She shoots upright, gasping, hands pulling at the green blanket, putting it tight around herself. I’ve never seen anyone look so panicked. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Fuck, sorry. Coralie, hey, it’s okay. It’s only me. It’s Callan.”
Across the gap between our two houses, Coralie narrows her eyes at me, squinting in the dark. “Callan? What are you doing?”
“What are you doing? You could roll off that roof in your sleep.”
“I won’t. Or at least I haven’t yet.” She looks exhausted. There are dark circles underneath her eyes, and…and her lip is split. Now that my eyes have adjusted to the night a little, I can see her features much clearer, in fact, and it looks…it looks as though there’s a deep purple bruise flowering on the right hand side of her jaw.
“What happened to you? To your face?”
Coralie covers her jaw with one hand, looking away. “Oh. Yeah. I fell off my bike.”
My brain has been cloudy up until this point, but for some strange reason I can now feel everything sharpening, coming into focus, the alcohol burning away in my system. “Your bike? I’ve never seen you riding a bike.”
She smiles. “I’m sure there’s plenty you don’t see, Callan Cross. How was your party?”