and then killed them. At first I felt sorry for them, because as a fellow prisoner I knew what they were going through, but then I realized each one of them had done something terrible to the girls, so it was probably for the best when the princesses and peasants and warrior girls started by cutting off the monsters’ hands.
Then, one evening, when the sky was soft and purple and fireflies flickered close to the ground, she peered at me with her head cocked at a curious tilt. “It was you, wasn’t it?” she said. “Those people in the park, in the winter. You did that, didn’t you?”
I’d been waiting for this for weeks. “I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.”
“Three different times it was an accident?” She laughed the way you laugh when you don’t believe something, but didn’t sound mad. She hadn’t known them, so what was it to her if their heads had come off. “How did you do it without paper?”
I asked if she ever had known what it was like to want to do something so bad, only not be able to, that you thought you were going to explode. She didn’t have to think about it. Well, that was me without paper. Until I’d noticed a layer of frost on the inside of the windows overlooking the park.
“All I did was look through the glass and use my fingernail to scratch an outline around them.” And then flick my fingernail across their necks. “I didn’t mean anything. The first time I didn’t even know it would happen.”
She looked confused. “When I first asked you how it worked, you told me you
Right. I had. So maybe I was mad at the people for being able to be out while it was snowing and I had to stay inside. Maybe I’d done it the second time to make sure the first was really my fault. Maybe a third time just because I could. Mostly I remembered the way they fell, first one part and then the other, straight down into the snow without any sound.
“Is it something you’ll always be able to do?”
“I guess so,” I told her. “But I heard my parents talking once and they were wondering if I might grow out of it someday.”
She nodded, very solemn, very serious. “I have to think about this.”
“Are you mad at me?”
But she was already gone from the window. I still heard her voice, though, and it gave me hope: “I’ll never tell on you, if that’s what you mean.”
Later that night I was awakened by the basket clunking at the window. I turned on a light, the only light burning in the whole world, and got out of bed to see what she’d sent me. It was a picture, Roni and two boys, one obviously older and one who looked younger, plus a woman and a man. Roni wasn’t smiling, at least not so you could see her teeth and whether any of them were crooked or not, and I sort of remembered what it was like, having to pretend to smile that way.
Her voice was a whisper now, floating like a mist across the space between our rooms.
“If someone was going to come over, and I told you what time, and you knew who to look for, and you saw him, could you do it then?” she said. “The trick with the head?”
I rubbed my eyes and looked at the picture some more. “Who to?”
She made a sound I’d never heard. “Don’t make me say it.”
A little later I turned out the light because maybe it would be easier on her that way, and I listened to her breathe and leaned in the window in the moonlight so she could see I would stay there for as long as it took.
“The one in the middle,” she finally said.
It was early August when I heard her crying. I didn’t even know she did that, because she seemed very much older to me, twelve or maybe as old as thirteen, and I thought nothing could get to her that bad any more.
I suppose I’d always been afraid that all of this would only be for the summer, or a year, anything but forever, that it was too good to last. I’d made a friend and so had she, and as far as I knew, no one else in the downstairs world was even aware of it, and this was just the way we liked it. But tomorrow she would be going away again. They would be coming to pick her up and take her home again.
“Nothing will change there,” she told me. “They say it will this time, but I know it won’t.”
It was a long time before I understood what she really meant by that. At the time, all I knew was that it meant a lot to her, meant
“You could come over here,” I said. “I’ll hide you.”
She laughed through her tears. It had been a long time since I’d heard it, the you’re-such-an-idiot laugh. “You don’t think your parents will notice me down there looking for the keys?”
“That’s not how I mean. Just come across. Like we did with the paper and everything else.”
“On the rope? It’ll never hold me.”
It could. I was very sure of this. I told her how it could.
I didn’t mean for this to make her cry even harder, but it did.
I stayed awake the rest of that night, pinching myself whenever I got sleepy, in case Roni changed her mind. It was kind of fun, because I hardly ever got to see the sunrise, and now I had a reason, something important to do for once.
“Okay,” she said when the sky was first beginning to go pink and orange. “I think I trust you.”
We started with her legs.
Had I ever drawn anything this carefully before? Never. Never in my whole life.
She tied each one to the rope by the ankle, and once I‘d pulled them across I unfastened them and rested them side-by-side on my bed, toes up, the way they’d be if she were lying there whole, and I never knew she had a birthmark the size of a quarter on one thigh.
Now we had to start planning more carefully, because once we did the first arm, she wouldn’t be able to tie things very well with just one hand, so she had to start tying parts of herself to the line ahead of time. The last thing she did was lean over to one side with her head in the basket and wait for me to take care of the rest.
After I had all her parts laid out in place I thought of my assistants, my human spiders, and how happy we made the audience and how loudly it clapped for us. I really wanted to try it, except Roni hadn’t agreed to this, and probably wouldn’t like it, and I could see how impatiently her head was staring at me from the pillow.
So I just drew her back together again like normal.
“What did it feel like?” I wanted to know. “Did it hurt?”
“Not much.” She thought awhile longer. “Cold, though. It felt cold.” She looked around at all the space I had, a whole floor to myself. “This is nice. This is really, really nice.”
We cut the rope and pulled all of it over, then cut it into little pieces so she would never have to go across again. Some of the pieces we threw out the window, down to the ground and up on the roof, and the rest we hid. I knew where to hide anything.
I knew where to hide her when they brought breakfast up, and we shared it even though it wasn’t enough for two of us. I knew where to hide her when the governess came, so she could listen without being heard. I just wasn’t sure where to hide her if anyone really came looking. And they would, I was sure of it. It wouldn’t matter that there were locks on the door at the bottom of the stairs. They’d still come looking. Because they knew there was something different about me.
But for as long as it lasted, it was the best day of my life.
In between the fun stuff, we kept watch at the window, and listened, and late in the day a car stopped in front of the house next door. People got out and I recognized them from the photo she’d sent me, including the one in the middle.
I held up paper and a pencil. “Do you still want me to? The trick with the head?”
We watched them walk closer, and I was glad all over again that I wasn’t a girl, because I couldn’t ever imagine myself looking that confused over a simple question.
“No,” she finally whispered. “I couldn’t really do that.”
I sort of remembered what that was like.
It was less than an hour before they came, but before then we heard people calling outside and watched them troop over to the park and back again. Eventually the doorbell rang downstairs, big bonging chimes you could hear all the way up here.
It was time.
