The Little Friend

They were in: on the landing of an old-fashioned staircase, only three steps up, with another long landing at the top of the stairs. Bursting with excitement, trying not to breathe too loudly, they picked themselves up and skittered to the top—where, turning the corner, they dashed almost headlong into a heavy door with a fat padlock dangling from the hasp.

There was another window, too—an old-fashioned wooden one, with a sash lock and a screen. Hely stepped over to examine it—and while Harriet stood staring at the padlock with dismay, he began gesturing frenetically all of a sudden, his teeth gritted in a rictus of excitement: for the roof ledge ran beneath this window, too, directly to the window in the gable.

By pulling hard, until their faces were red, they managed to wedge the sash up eight inches or so. Harriet wriggled out first (Hely steering her legs like a plow until unwittingly she kicked him, and he cursed and jumped back). The roofing was hot and sticky, gritty beneath her palms. Gingerly, gingerly, she eased to her feet. Eyes shut tight, holding the window frame with her left hand, she gave her right hand to Hely as he crawled out beside her.

The breeze was cooling off. Twin jet trails traced a diagonal in the sky, tiny white water-ski tracks in an enormous lake. Harriet—breathing fast, afraid to look down—smelled the wispy fragrance of some night-scented flower, far below: stocks, maybe, or sweet tobacco. She put her head back and looked up at the sky; the clouds were gigantic, glazed on their underbellies with radiant pink, like clouds in a painting of a Bible story. Very, very carefully—backs to the wall, electrified with excitement—they inched around the steep corner and found themselves looking down into the yard with their fig tree.

With their fingertips hooked beneath the aluminum siding—which held the day’s heat, and was a little too hot to touch comfortably—they sidled towards the gable inch by inch. Harriet made it first, and shuffled over to give Hely room. It was very small indeed, not much larger than a shoe-box and cracked open only about two inches at the bottom. Carefully, hand by hand, they transferred their grip from siding to sash and pulled up, together: timidly, at first, in case the thing flew up without warning and knocked them backward. It slid up four or five inches, easily, but then stuck firm, though they tugged until their arms trembled.

Harriet’s palms were wet and her heart slammed like a tennis ball in her chest. Then, down on the street, she heard a car coming.

They froze. The car whooshed past without stopping.

“Dude,” she heard Hely whisper, “don’t look down.” He was several inches away, not touching her, but a palpable corona of damp heat radiated from him head to toe, like a force field.

She turned; gamely, in the spooky lavender twilight, he gave her the thumbs up and then stuck his head and forearms through the window like a swimmer doing the breast-stroke and started through.

It was a tight squeeze. At the waist, he stuck fast. Harriet—clutching the aluminum siding with her left hand, straining up on the sash with her right—shied back as far as she could from his frantically kicking feet. The incline was shallow, and she slipped and nearly fell, catching herself only at the last moment, but before she could swallow or even catch her breath Hely’s front half fell inside the apartment, with a loud thump, so that only his sneakers stuck out. After a moment’s stunned pause, he pulled himself in the rest of the way. “Yes!” Harriet heard him say—his voice distant, jubilant, a familiar ecstasy of attic darkness, when they scrambled on their hands and knees to cardboard forts.

She stuck her head in after him. In the dim, she just made him out: curled in a heap, nursing a hurt kneecap. Clumsily—on his knees—he rose and walked forward and seized Harriet’s forearms and threw his weight backward. Harriet sucked her stomach in and did her best to wriggle through, oof, kicking in mid-air, like Pooh stuck in the rabbit hole.

Still writhing, she fell all in a tumble—partly on Hely, partly on a dank, mildewy carpet that smelled like something from the bottom of a boat. As she rolled away, her head bumped the wall with a hollow sound. They were indeed in a bathroom, a tiny one: sink and toilet, no tub, walls of particle board laminated to look like tile.

Hely, on his feet now, pulled her up. As she stood, she smelled an acerbic, fishy smell—not mildew, though intertwined with mildew, but sharp and distinct and entirely vile. Fighting the bad taste at the back of her throat, Harriet hurled all her rising panic into battling the door (flapping vinyl accordion, printed to look like woodgrain), which was stuck firmly in its tracks.