Remembering Kiki

• Amy Hodgson, Grade 11, Marian College
• Short Story
• 2012

Excellence Award in the 'Legendary 2012' competition

Every night I watched her moonlit silhouette climb the ladder up to her roof, blanket and pillow in hand, novel in her mouth. Seven nights a week she climbed that ladder to the roof, three stories high. She flung the blanket and pillow violently onto the roof, the ladder shaking with the force of it. As she freed her hand, she grabbed the novel from her mouth and placed that on the roof too. I observed her sit with her torch every night and read for exactly an hour and a half. Legs crossed, blanket draped over her head, torch light glowing beneath the blanket, she read each night. When she was done she would align her pillow and blanket in the crevice of the roof, wedge herself in cosily and fall asleep underneath the stars. She didn’t seem at all worried. She slept on the roof most nights, except the chilly ones, but not once did she worry about rolling off. She didn’t seem to consider what would happen if she suddenly started sleepwalking and walked right off the edge. She lived in the three-storey house next door and every time I went to visit her on the roof, my knees trembled and buckled beneath me like a newborn foal. But I was a worry wart, too scared to do anything new or remotely dangerous. I was too scared to stand too close to the microwave, to ride over bridges, to ever slide down a fireman’s pole. But Kiki, she jumped off roofs, rolled down hills, fed the zoo animals and rode her bike like the devil. Every night I watched her, watched what I could never be, before I lay my head down on my Bob the Builder pillow.

It was the day before it happened; that was the last time I saw her. I went to visit her on the roof, her last night on the roof. I climbed the wooden ladder slowly and cautiously thinking about all the horrific injuries that could occur if I misplaced just one foot. I sat beside her on the roof, clinging tightly to the shingles beneath my quivering thighs. We talked, and I stared at her scarred and scabby knees. She told me each one of their stories, the time she fell off the ladder her second night on the roof, the occasion when she flipped off her bike onto a rose bush, and then onto the concrete and into the lake and the scraggly rough scar that happened when she fell on a nail. I couldn’t help feeling sad, I wanted to wrap her up in her hand-knitted blanket and never let her fall again. But I would never have had the guts to tell her this, and she would never let me do it. She lived for the excitement and fun, although I wish I had known when I was on the roof with her, on her last day, that she would die for it as well.