I shouldn’t have complained about the ceiling. There were crazier places you could hang out. Like where we were now.
“I have a bad feeling about this.” I was sweating, but I couldn’t wipe my face. I needed my hands to stay right where they were.
“That’s weird.” Lena smiled down at me. “Because I have a very good feeling about it.” Her hair was blowing in a breeze, though I wasn’t sure which kind. “Besides, we’re almost there.”
“You realize this is insane, right? If a cop drives by, we’re gonna get arrested or sent to Blue Horizons to visit my dad.”
“It’s not crazy. It’s romantic. Couples come here all the time.”
“When people go to the water tower, L, they aren’t talking about the top of the water tower.” Which is where we would be in a minute. Just the two of us, a wobbly iron ladder about a hundred feet above the ground, and a bright blue Carolina sky.
I tried not to look down.
Lena had talked me into climbing to the top. There was something ab
out the excitement in her voice that made me go along with it, as if something so stupid might be able to make her feel the way she did the last time we were here. Smiling, happy, in a red sweater. I remembered, because there was a piece of red yarn hanging from her charm necklace.
She must have remembered, too. So here we were, stuck on a ladder, looking up so we didn’t look down.
Once we reached the top and I looked out at the view, I understood. Lena was right. It was better up here. Everything was so far away that it didn’t even matter.
I let my legs dangle over the edge. “My mom used to collect pictures of old water towers.”
“Yeah?”
“Like the Sisters collect spoons. Only for my mom, it was water towers and postcards from the World’s Fair.”
“I thought all water towers looked like this one. Like a big white spider.”
“Somewhere in Illinois, there’s one shaped like a ketchup bottle.”
She laughed.
“And there’s one that looks like a little house, this high off the ground.”
“We should live there. I’d go up once and never come back down.” She lay back on the warm white paint. “I guess in Gatlin it should be a peach, a big old Gatlin peach.”
I leaned back next to her. “They already have one, but it’s not in Gatlin. It’s over in Gaffney. Guess they thought of it first.”
“What about a pie? We could paint this tank to look like one of Amma’s pies. She’d like that.”
“Haven’t seen one of those. But my mom had a picture of one shaped like a corncob.”
“I’d still rather have the house.” Lena stared up at the sky, where there wasn’t a cloud in sight.
“I’d take the corncob or the ketchup, if you were there.”
She reached for my hand and we stayed like that, at the edge of Summerville’s plain white water tower, looking out at Gatlin County as if it was a tiny toy land full of tiny toy people. As small as the cardboard village my mom used to keep under our Christmas tree.
How could people that small have any problems at all?
“Hey, I brought you something.” I watched as she sat up, looking at me like a little kid.
“What is it?”
I looked over the edge of the water tower. “Maybe we should wait until we can’t fall to our deaths.”
“We’re not going to die. Don’t be such a chicken.”