The ladder was already set up when we got outside. It was my father’s and it was usually in the garage. When or how she got it out, I don’t know. But that was how we got to the roof. She handed me her backpack and started up the ladder first.
Once on the roof, we figured out how to balance ourselves against the slant. She took the backpack from me and started unpacking it.
“So how old are you now, Robbie?”
“Seventeen,” I said. Then after a moment asked her the same question.
She twisted off the cap of the wine. She brought it to her lips but didn’t drink any.
“Seventeen, like you,” she said.
“Still?”
She chuckled and took a sip of the wine. “That’s kind of how death works.”
I nodded. “That makes sense.”
“Does it?” She turned to me with a smirk. “You’re much more accepting than I was.”
“Why are you here?”
“I always liked you, Robbie. I mean since the dance. So I figured why not?”
“You went back to your boyfriend though.”
“What?”
I took the wine from her and had a sip myself.
“The Michigan kid. You went back.”
“Well, yeah. But there was status with that. I mean, his father is Max Cohan.”
“Who’s that?”
“Seriously? Have you even heard of hip-hop? Cohan basically owns it. ”
She opened the Tupperware and held it out to me but I shook my head.
“What do your parents do?” she asked. She picked up a scoop of the lasagna and put it in her mouth.
“My mother’s a…cleaner and my father owns a barber shop.”
She stopped chewing and looked at me. There was tomato sauce on the corners of her mouth that disturbed me.
“Is that a lollipop way of saying he kills people and she gets rid of the bodies?”
“What? No.”
“So your mother is actually a maid.”
“Sorry, can’t offer any status. But I assume you had already figured that much out.”
“So how can you afford Wellcourt?”
“Scholarship.”
“Ha. I thought they only gave those to the black kids.”
“You were wrong.”
“Your mother’s really pretty.”
“I’m sure she would appreciate that, coming from a dead girl.” I drank some more of the wine.
“I’ve always been jealous of people with red hair…too bad you don’t have it. Is it true one of your uncles is locked up for murder?”
“Who told you that?”
“My father is basically the best lawyer in the city. I know a lot of things I shouldn’t know…did he do it? Murder someone?”
“We don’t talk about it.”
“What does that feel like? Killing someone.”
“In a way, shouldn’t you know?”
“That’s different. And anyway I didn’t really kill myself.”
“Then who did? The Michigan kid.”
“No. Cindy Pittman.”
“The girl who got kicked out of study abroad?”
“Yeah, her. She was always jealous of me.”
“Hmmm.” I took a chunk of the lasagna. It was pretty gross cold but I swallowed it any way.
“You’ll need to finish that,” Lorna said, pointing to the wine.
It took me some time to get through the bottle but she didn’t rush me. She just leaned back on the roof and closed her eyes. Her earrings shone in the streetlights. They looked like they were worth at least 4 pairs of soccer cleats. When I finished the bottle I set it in the gutter so it wouldn’t roll off.
I leaned over Lorna and she opened her eyes. She sat up and reached for my face the way she had the night in the limo. But she didn’t kiss me as she had then. Instead she lowered her hands on to my shoulders and gave me a solid push.
My neck snapped when I hit the ground. My mother blamed herself. How had she not known? My father was more honest. He admitted he didn’t know what was going on with me. They only found the Tupperware and the wine bottle on the roof. I guess Lorna took her backpack.