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“Over here!” she choked out.
Relief washed over me. She wasn’t dead. I crouched down to sit on the ridge and slowly slid down the roof until I reached the gutter.
Her fingers were curled around the gutter pipe. Her body dangled in the air.
Should I go get Dad and Miranda? Should I try pulling her up?
Shit, I had no idea. I never thought either of us would be stupid enough to legitrunacross the roof like a maniac.
“Help me,” Gracelynn pleaded, tears and raindrops running across her face. “Please!”
I grabbed onto her wrists and leaned backward, starting to pull. Sharp spikes of rain blurred my vision. Her skin was cold, wet, and slippery. Her wrists so delicate I was scared I’d break them. Her fingersclawed into my skin, grasping, as she wiggled, trying to use me as a human ladder. She drew blood, just like her mother had done to my father tonight.
I decided I wasn’t going to share Douglas Corbin’s fate. I wasn’t going to bleed for a Langston woman ever again.
“Pull me harder!” She moaned. “I’m slipping. Can’t you see?”
The soles of my feet scorched as I tried to yank her up the roof. The odds were against me. Physics too. I had to climb uphill over the wet shingles while pulling someone my own weight. “You need to hold on to the gutter. I have to call Dad.”
“I can’t!”
“We’re both gonna fall.”
“Don’t leave me!”
Did she think I wanted to kill her or something? I was about to tip over too.
“Look, I can hold you for a few more seconds and give your arms a rest, but then you gotta hold the gutter for a minute or two until they get here.”
She slipped away from my grasp an inch. Wriggled in the air like a worm. “No! Don’t leave me! I don’t want to die.”
“Don’t look down,” I roared, falling to my knees, pulling harder, with everything I had in me. It felt like my limbs were being ripped from my body. But she was too heavy, too wet. “Just ... just look at me.”
The pressuring, unrelenting weight of her was gone suddenly. My body jerked backward. The back of my head slammed against the shingles. A distant splash assaulted my ears.
She fell.
Shefell.
Frantic, I crawled along the gutter, squinting down, trying to see past the rain and the mud and the thick bushes. Grace had landed on the canopy covering the empty pool. The belly of it was deep, and there was water all around her.
Gracelynn didn’t move. Her legs were in weird angles, and I immediately knew, even before she started screaming, that it was all over for her.
No more fancy tulle costumes, Russian tutus, or dance camps in Zurich.
My stepsister’s ballet career was over.
And so was my life as I knew it.
The x-rays arrived minutes after Dad and I got to the hospital.
He hadn’t looked at me, not even once, the entire journey there. I relayed to him everything that had happened, maybe other than the part where I’d goaded her. No need to be holier than the pope. Besides, she survived, didn’t she?
“She’s going to be okay, though. Right?” I chased him down the linoleum corridor to her room now. I was so full of adrenaline I couldn’t even feel my legs.
“She better be, for your sake,” he snarled, staring ahead. “What did you two do up there, anyway?”
“Played a game.”
