Girl Runner by Carrie Snyder Page A

cracking like a whip. Blindly, my arms slash out, hands slap the peak of the roof, fingers dig in. My face hits the hot metal, my legs slither straight. I hang like this, flat against the rough slide, flat against life. And then slowly, stiffly, I pull myself up, and mount the rooftop, like I’m climbing onto the back of a wild and unreliable horse.
    All of this has happened in less time than it would take to say good-bye.
    I gaze down on them.
    They are silent. My mother is climbing down from the tree.
    But I’m laughing, head thrown back, laughing like crying. Laughing like luck. Laughing like a child who knew she wouldn’t, couldn’t fall. I knew I couldn’t. I turn to look down on George, who crouches behind the windmill, pale as a ghost.
    “If you were Tilda’s daughter,” he says in a low and angry voice, “you’d be dead.”
    I am not Tilda’s daughter. I belong to the woman striding toward me across the barnyard, coming right up underneath so that her head tilts to an angle almost perpendicular, neck exposed, her face solemn with something that might—almost—be pride.
    “Now you get down from there safe and sound, young lady!” my mother commands me.
    “Yes, Mother! Right away, Mother!”
    It is a relief to be commanded, and a relief to see her expression ease into a wide smile, even if she is shaking her head.
    George holds his hand up to me, as if he could help me, as if I want his help, or need it. I swing my legs away from him, controlling this descent with my heels and the flats of my palms. We edge around the windmill on opposite sides and meet by the loosened boards.
    This is our chance to say something to each other—this seems to be our chance. But we don’t take it. So often, people don’t. I can tell he wants me to climb through the hole in the wall first: chivalry, control. I give him that. The gesture is small enough, and I can do it. It doesn’t hurt me.
    I go on ahead of George, descending the windmill steps. I don’t wait. On the way down, I pass my father walking up, nails and hammer in hand. He avoids looking at me. I guess he doesn’t know what to say, what expression ought to cross his face, so he chooses to say nothing, his features blank.
    But I hear him speaking to George. He doesn’t sound angry, he sounds tired, defeated, almost. He can’t find enough words, so he uses only a few. “What is wrong with you, boy?”
    I run across the mow floor and swing down the ladder into the stables below. I’m still running, across the spongy dirt floor and out into the yard. I still don’t understand that what I’ve done does not look to everyone else like it felt to me. It does not look heroic or brave. It does not look thrilling and original. It does not look like an act, which is already what I believe it to have been, believing myself invincible, believing therefore that the fall and quick catch were as foreordained and central to the performance as the fine balance, the precision turns, the element of surprise.
    They think I’ve almost died. They think I’ve risked everything for a foolish show-off’s game. They don’t understand what I’m doing.
    The problem will persist.
    There is life, as I see it, going on all around me, terrible in its uncertainty, frightening even. And there is me, as I see myself, preparing, practicing, anticipating a series of performances whose timing and discipline I can’t predict in advance, but must be ready for at all times. These performances are not life, as I see it. They exist outside of what is real and dreadful. They arrive given an opportunity. I am in control of them. I shape them. I fold them into being and present them to an audience in order to give the audience pleasure, in order to show the world in its mirrored state, which is a state of perfect order, and the opposite of the world we’re doomed to inhabit, dark with confusion and accident.
    The supposed slip, the apparent fall, the heart-stopping thrill of a moment nearly