Cobwebs Read Free Page B

feet scrambled to save her. Somehow she landed her sorry self on the first landing of the fire escape. She collapsed, her hands cold and gritty with flaked-off rust. She’d made it one whole flight down.
    She straightened her soft blue pajamas under her behind, wiped her streaming eyes on her sleeves, and wondered at the image of the boy on the Promenade that appeared suddenly in her mind. What must she herself look like?
    She leaned back against the brick. She could breathe now. The breeze blew silver-lined clouds across the moon. The city lights trembled but stayed pretty much in place.
    She thought,
I’ll never make it to the bottom alone.

5
    “ I want a boyfriend!” Annette moaned out over the balcony of her apartment.
    I don’t,
Nancy thought. If she were to fall in love with somebody, if she were to want to marry someday, there would be all these
considerations.
It wouldn’t just be a matter of pretty blue eyes. She poked her toes through the balcony railing and studied them. “You just keep doing what you’re doing,” she told Annette. Annette was going to every dance and church thing and strutting the streets lately looking like—well, looking like the other girls in their homeroom, with their curled eyelashes and fingernail polishand shaved legs. Those legs bothered Nancy. She wasn’t allowed to shave hers. Instead she made her fashion statement with crazy tights and bright shoes that didn’t go against the school dress code of black skirt and white shirt, even if they didn’t exactly go
with
it.
    “That’s what Shamiqua says, too,” Annette said. Shamiqua! Nancy peered at the little kids running around the Promenade playground across Pierrepont Place, and tried not to feel bad. Shamiqua was queen of homeroom, and queen of the dances. It was Shamiqua who had told Annette today that some boy named Jimmy might ask her out.
    Annette flapped the
Daily News
at Nancy, changing the subject. “Look. He saw him again.”
    “Who saw who?”
    “Well, nobody
saw
anything. Just the results.”
    “Who saw what results?”
    “Nestor Paprika, that reporter. ROBBER IMPOUNDED. He says it was the Angel. Do you think it was that ghost boy from the Promenade?”
    Nancy’s mouth fell open at the stream of loose connections Annette had just made. She said, “If he were the Angel, he’d be trying to be inconspicuous. Walking onthe railing of the Promenade isn’t very inconspicuous.”
    “Spoilsport,” said Annette. “He dropped a hammer on the robber’s head.”
    “Ouch. Is he dead?”
    “The Angel? I hope not. Shamiqua told me this fantasy she had about him. They were up on the roof and he was fluttering his black wings over his head…”
    “Did you read the English yet?” Nancy said, to change the subject again. She had heard enough about Shamiqua. What kind of fantasy? Fluttering black wings on a rooftop. Yes, Shamiqua definitely sounded more interesting than
she
was. Nancy consoled herself: she was still the one Annette asked over after school to keep her company.
    Annette made an annoyed sound, but took out the book. “Want me to read it to you?” she asked, as usual. Nancy nodded, as usual. They were reading Hemingway, which bored them, and Walt Whitman, which made them cry, the best thing so far in high school English since Greek myths freshman year.
    And you O my soul where you stand,
    Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
    Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
    Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
    Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
    From the balcony over Pierrepont Place they peeked through the leaves of the Promenade trees at slivers of silver downtown Manhattan. Annette laid the book in her lap, and wailed out to New York, “I want a boyfriend.”
    “I know it, Annette,” said Nancy wearily. “Half of Brooklyn surely knows it by now.”
    “Surely,” mimicked Annette.