Two Birds, One Stone

11. Birthday Boy

It took fifteen minutes to get onto St. Favre street, and as soon as I did, I understood Stevie's concern.

    It was a run-down area. The kind of place that was full of shops and restaurants, but lacking ones that were actually still in business.

     Nobody around. The perfect place for one person to take advantage of another.

    It didn't take long to find the red brick hotel building. It's top surpassed that of all of its neighbors, and from what I'd seen, it was the only building in the area of its color.

    I didn't see any shady guys walking around, but I was careful nevertheless to make sure anything valuable in my car was hidden and double-check that I'd locked my doors.

    The air smelled old and wrong, and everywhere I looked displayed signs of neglect. The ground was cracked and littered with trash, the windows were smeared and greasy. I wasted a good two minutes trying to figure out how to get into the abandoned building, before trying the door and rolling my eyes when it opened without any difficulty.

    The elevators had old, yellowed papers taped to their grimy doors that read Out of Order. I wondered how long ago those were put up. There was a door that opened to a stairwell, where a roach crawled over my shoe as I ascended the cement steps and I could have sworn I saw beady eyes staring up at me from one corner. My stomach didn't settle until I reached the final flight and stepped out into a narrow, smelly hallway, lined with doors and dimly lit by the moonlight coming in through the windows.

     There was a square patch of light on the floor at the other end of the hall, and I followed it upward to see a trapdoor in the ceiling. With a breath of relief, I hurried to it — there was no ladder of any sort, but I didn't even have to jump to latch onto the opening in the low ceiling. It was easy enough to hoist myself up, and when I was through to the top, my eyes were instantly caught by Jamie's, meters away at the center of the roof. He was sitting cross-legged, staring at me with a mixture of wariness and relief.

    "Where have you been all day?" was the first thing I said. Part of me still wanted to be angry with him, to just yell out every bit of stress I'd felt in the last eleven hours. But I knew that it would be pointless — that it would get us nowhere. So I settled for calm.

     Jamie's frown was apologetic. "Around. I've been finding places like this — quiet ones, where I can see the sky. It really did start off as just a walk."

     Through gritted teeth, I said, "And would it have killed you to tell m— us where you were? Or answer a single text or phone call or — we were thinking of calling the police, you know. That's how worried we were. But you didn't really think about that, did you?"

    Jamie seemed to shrink into himself a little, like a child being scolded, but he never averted his gaze. "I — I know. I'm sorry."

     I approached, sat down across from him with a foot of space between us. "What are you doing?"

      There was distress in those blue and hazel eyes. Whatever Jamie had run off to solve obviously wasn't fixed yet.

      "I don't know," he said, suddenly quiet, if not shaky. "That's the thing, Liam. I have no fucking idea what I'm doing."

     I knew that he was talking about more than his disappearance, more than just sitting here now on the roof. But I had no idea what to say to that -- I wasn't any more confident than he was.

     "I woke up this morning thinking it would be fine, you know?" he continued, looking down at his lap. "That we could just keep things the way they were, maybe a little different than before, and it would all be fine. But then I thought of — I don't know what I thought of, but this morning when I woke up I panicked and . . . I don't know how to do different than before! I feel like I cut myself fully open last night, and now I don't — I . . . I don't know how to piece myself back together. I don't feel like I have control of me right now, and that's fucking scary, okay?"