Skylar’s voice comes out quiet. “I hate that place.”
“Me too.”
I keep driving past it, around the corner, down toward the old alley I always walked.
I park, cut the engine, and get out. Skylar is already out by the time I reach her side. I grab her hand, and she lets me take it without a word. Her fingers slide into mine like they remember the shape of this even after everything.
We walk down the lane together. It still smells the same in ways I wish it did not—damp brick, old rubbish, piss, and the kind of stale rot that clings to forgotten places.
The brick walls along the laneway are still tagged in angry colors—the graffiti faded and bleeding into the brick, worn down by years of weather.
Then the old building comes into view.
Skylar slows. “You’re taking me to the roof?”
I gaze at her standing there, the faded graffiti behind her, and for a second I see both of them at once.
The girl she was—seventeen, with defiance in her chin and fury in her bones—and the woman standing in front of me now—older and bruised in ways that don’t show on the surface but that I know are there, braver than any of us ever had the right to ask her to be.
When we reach the old building, neither of us moves for a moment.
Then Skylar looks at me. “If this roof kills us, I am haunting you first.”
I almost smile. “Fair enough.”
“I mean it, Rivera.”
I push the side door open.
It groans against the frame the same way it always did. The spray paint still covers every surface. The rusted ladder bolted to the far wall crawling up into the shadows.
I test it first with my weight on the bottom rung.
It groans.
Skylar stares at me. “Reassuring.”
I climb first, the metal biting into my palms, rust flaking beneath my fingers. Each rung carries me back and forth at the same time, to the boy I was and to the man trying to stand in his place. The boy who brought a girl up here because up here, nobody was watching and nobody was waiting to fuck them over.The man who still believes that and who needs to believe it tonight more than ever.
At the top, I haul myself onto the tin roof.
It creaks. Still dented and sun-baked. It still half-collapses in places that have been doing so since before we first stood on it.
I turn and reach down.
Skylar looks up at me from the ladder, her face caught between shadow and the last of the evening light. The sight of her from here, reaching up, trusting me with her hand, does the same thing to me it did the first time.
Fuck.
There it is again.
The moment that fucked me up the first time.
She places her hand in mine. I close my fingers around hers and pull her up.
When her boots hit the tin roof, it groans beneath us, the same hollow groan it made before.
We walk to the same place we sat years ago—both of us navigating by memory to the spot where the tin is least likely to give way and the view opens up the widest. The town spreads out beneath the bruised orange sky, rooftops, trees and tired streets.
