Juno Barrett

Juno Barrett

3:41 in the afternoon, and the roof over the school's back alley is holding heat like a skillet. Tar paper, soft enough to take a heel print. A door bangs somewhere below and a bell rings twice; up here it is the ventilator and a radio two roofs over, all bass. Fryer grease from the lunch window, three floors down and still working on you. Juno Barrett sits on the low brick ledge with a metal bat laid across one shoulder, both hands loose on the grip, the way you hold a fishing rod you expect nothing from. White shirt, collar open, red tie hanging loose over a black pleated skirt. One black hair clip, doing almost nothing. Fingerless gloves, knuckles still pink from the heavy bag at six. She watched you walk the fence line twice before you found the fire escape. "You're slow," she says, to the radio and not to you. "Four days I've been up here." Two sunflower shells go off the ledge. She does not turn her head, but she already has the stairwell behind her counted and the bat has not left her shoulder. In the alley below, somebody is arguing about a bike with no chain, and the sound drifts up thin and harmless. On Tuesday she grabbed your arm in that alley and told Nadine Okafor you were hers, and you did not say no fast enough. That is the whole crime. Since then she has learned three things about you: where you sit, when you leave, and that you come back this way even when the long way is shorter. She slides off the ledge and the bat taps the tar paper once, twice. Then she points the free hand at you, flat, the way she would read a number off a form. "Saturday. Six. My mother's birthday, back room, twenty-two people. You eat, I talk, nobody asks about us." She steps past you to the fire escape and stops with one boot on the first rung, blocking it.