The Edge of Falling Read Free

overlooking the Hudson River, placed both hands on the sides of my face, and kissed me.
    That was before so many things, though. Before everything, really. Now I don’t even know if he’s ever going to talk to me again.
    I decide to head outside. I shout good-bye to my mom, but the insulation in our house is so impossibly good that she doesn’t hear me.
    The heat when I get outside is suffocating. It hits you like a fan straight to the face. I turn down Sixty-Fifth, toward Madison. Abigail’s building is one over from mine, closer to Park, so this is generally my route of choice.
    I have this game I’ve played since I was first allowed to wander New York alone—which, incidentally, was young. Probably too young, but that’s one of those strange things about growing up here: Your parents tend to forget it’s a city and not just your hometown. I tried to enforce some rules with Hayley, but Hayley wasn’t one of those kids you had to really fence in. She was smart. She knew the entire alphabet before she was two years old, and she had memorized the Manhattan grid by three years later. She was the kind of kid who had the potential to grow up too fast, because despite her soft brown hair and nose freckles, when she opened her mouth, she could hold her own. People would talk to her like an adult. They treated her like one.
    Anyway, the game goes like this: Every time I get to an intersection, I cross whatever street has a walk sign. I only generally play when I have a few free hours, because there are times I end up very far from where I started. I’ve lived here my whole life, but even I am surprised by where the game sometimes takes me. That’s the thing about New York: You can own it, it can belong to you, and you’ll still never completely know it.
    I’ve never met a single other person who likes to play besides Trevor, and that could have just been because once upon a time he liked doing things I liked doing.
    The light changes at Sixty-Fifth and Fifth and I headdowntown, then cross over to Central Park. If you asked me point-blank whether I like living on the Upper East Side, I’d probably tell you no, but the truth is I really enjoy being this close to the park. I love the anonymity of the park, the fact that, even after spending my entire life on this block of Manhattan, I can still get lost in there. Maybe it’s why I play this walking game in the first place: to keep some of that spontaneity new New Yorkers are always going on about. People who come to New York from somewhere else love to say things like “in the time it takes you to cross the street, anything could happen.” The thing people forget, though, is that that’s true about every town. Not just New York.
    The light changes at Forty-Seventh Street and I head farther west, over to Sixth Avenue. I catch a light breeze that fails to pull my top off my back. It’s stuck straight on now, and I can feel the beads of sweat gathering at the back of my neck, threatening to drop. You wait all winter for summer in New York, and then it comes and that’s miserable too. In the city, anyway. At the beach the summer is exactly as it should be.
    My brain goes on autopilot when I play, and without even realizing it I’m down in the Twenties and crossing over to the Hudson River. There is a nice breeze off the water, I’ll admit it, and I close my eyes, briefly, and take it in. School starts tomorrow. School with the return of Abigailand Constance and not Claire. I wish she still went there. Last year was miserable without her.
    I quit playing the game as soon as I hit the Hudson—it’s too hot not to stay on the water—and decide that I’ll drop in on Claire after all. I was probably always planning on it, but that’s the thing about the walking game: You can’t really plan on anything.
    Claire lives on the top floor of 166 Duane Street, one of Tribeca’s chicest buildings, and the doorman lets me up immediately. His name is Jeff Bridges, like the