Chapter 04
amy
Amy leaned out of the school’s attic window, her eyes fixed on the teenage boy perched at the end of the ridge next to the weathervane. She tried not to think about the hundred-foot drop onto hard cement that was just one wrong step away.
She called out to the boy again. ‘Raylan!’
He didn’t even glance in her direction.
She watched as he pulled his knees a little way in towards him, his feet flat against the steep pitch of the roof, and took a small plastic pouch from his back pocket.
He calmly rolled an old-fashioned joint as if he was sitting in the back seat of his car, rather than a hundred feet above the ground.
‘Raylan, please! Come back in!’
He finally looked up and gave her a warm smile as he licked the edges of his Rizla paper. ‘Hey. It’s all cool, Ms G.’
Amy knew it was all very far from being cool. Raylan was stoned out of his mind. If she couldn’t persuade him to come back in, there was a high likelihood he’d slip and fall five floors to his death.
She heard the sound of sirens in the distance. She knew that even when the fire crew got to the school, their ladders wouldn’t reach this high.
She’d always had a good relationship with Raylan. He was easy to like: he was a good-looking kid in a classic, James T. Kirk kind of way, like a young Chris Pine, and he had a laid-back, easy charm: too laid-back, too easy. He skated when he should be held to account.
If Raylan wouldn’t listen to her, she doubted he’d listen to the fire marshal.
She was going to have to go out and get him.
If she stopped to think about it, she’d freeze.
She climbed out of the window onto the roof, trying not to picture the drop below her, and started inching along the guttering towards Raylan, her palms slick with terror.
When she finally reached him, she turned around and backed up the steep roof on her ass so she could sit next to him on the ridge. The building seemed to sway beneath her. Dark spots danced before her eyes, and she willed herself not to faint.
‘You’re not going to fall, are you, Ms G?’
Her mouth was too dry to speak. She fastened her gaze instead on the hazy mountain range on the other side of Lake Champlain, the way she did when she was fighting seasickness on the ferry to New York.
The lake was one of the largest lakes in North America, a hundred miles long and nearly fifteen miles across at its widest point, bordered by the states of New York and Vermont, and the Canadian province of Quebec.
It sometimes felt like living by the ocean.
She and Raylan sat in silence for a few moments. Seagulls circled raucously above them. Amy could hear the wind and the rapid beat of her own heart.
‘So, what’re we doing up here, Raylan?’ she managed finally.
He exhaled a long stream of smoke and stubbed out his blunt on the slates between them. ‘Shit’s blowin’ up out there, Ms G.’
‘You’ll be done with this town in a few weeks,’ she said. ‘Amherst, right?’
Raylan Adams was one of the brightest students she’d ever taught. Amherst College, one of the premier liberal arts schools in the Northeast, had contacted him and asked him to apply.
He shrugged. ‘It’s a scam, man. You can’t get a job without a degree, then you gotta work for the man the rest of your life to pay for it.’
Amy wanted to contradict him, but he had a point. A quarter of a million bucks for a four-year degree, with no guarantee of a job at the end of it. She didn’t blame the kids for becoming disillusioned.
‘How old are you, Raylan?’ Amy asked. ‘Eighteen?’
‘Nineteen.’
‘Nineteen,’ Amy said wistfully.
Below them, the fire engine swung into the parking lot. Half the school had come outside to watch the drama, despite Amy’s instructions to the staff to keep the kids inside. Amy recognised her husband’s red Ford pickup as it screamed in behind the fire marshal’s truck.
What was Mac doing here?
Looking down was a mistake. She felt giddy again and gripped the ridgeline either side of her. One wrong move.
‘Raylan,’ Amy said. ‘How about we both go back inside now?’
‘I’m kinda cool here.’
‘I can’t go back in until you do,’ she said. ‘And I’d really like to go in while I’m still buzzed from passive smoking.’
He looked at her and gave a lazy smile. ‘OK, Ms G. Sure.’
She couldn’t quite feel her feet as she edged back along the slates; she wasn’t sure if it was adrenaline or the weed.
The white faces of her colleagues peered out of the window looking onto the roof.
Jesse threw her a rope, but she was too afraid of losing her nerve even to look where it had fallen on the slates, much less reach for it.
She couldn’t quite believe it when she reached the safety of the window and climbed inside, still alive, still in one piece, her relief reflected on the faces of her staff.
She turned back to Raylan, just a couple of feet away, and reached through the window to help him inside.
And then he slipped.
Amy instinctively flung herself towards him as he tumbled down the slates, catching hold of his left arm with both hands. Jesse just had time to grab her legs as she was sucked back out of the window by the boy’s weight.
Seconds later, the guttering below Raylan’s feet gave way. Amy felt sick as she heard it smack onto the parking lot a hundred feet below.
Amy was five-foot-seven and reasonably fit and strong for a woman in her early forties, but Raylan was six-foot-two, a dead weight, like a sleeping bag filled with wet sand.
She could already feel the teenager slipping from her grasp.
Her arms felt like they were being yanked out of their sockets.
She was upside down: the blood was rushing to her head, and it was difficult to breathe.
Her hair was in her eyes, and she couldn’t see anything.
She prayed for both their sakes that Jesse had a good grip on her legs.
A rope slapped against her back; someone had coiled it back in and thrown it out to them. It dangled limply on the slates a few feet away.
‘Raylan,’ she cried. ‘Grab the rope!’
Raylan jerked and twisted as he reached for it with his free hand, adrenaline snapping him out of his high, but it was too far away. Someone pulled the rope back in and tried again; it landed closer this time.
Her hands slipped from Raylan’s forearm to his wrist. She couldn’t hold him much longer—
And the next split second he was gone.