“Don’t!” I called up to him, but fell quiet in realization that any effort I exerted shouting was better spent hanging on. I squeezed my eyes shut, believing that each passing second was my last. The pain in my arms was so extreme that my fingers felt like they were slipping—even though they might not have been.

I became keenly aware that I smelled smoke. Not house fire smoke, but sweeter smoke, the gentle smoke of birthday candles. Behind my closed eyes, I saw Mom, much younger—without a strand of gray in her hair and with no bags beneath her eyes—carrying a cake with two glowing candles in the shape of a “3” on top of it—toward me and setting it down in front of me in an otherwise dark room. I recognized the cake; Peppa Pig had been drawn on top in icing. I turned to my right and saw Jennie next to me, and heard distant voices singing “Happy Birthday.”

A blur of smiling faces followed—schoolteachers, classmates, neighbors. And memories I’d long forgotten: trick-or-treating with Jennie around our neighborhood with Dad trailing behind us wearing a werewolf mask, shopping for school supplies, sitting in reading circles at Willow Elementary School, and slurping milk through straws from cartons in the lunchroom.

I wasn’t going to be able to hold on to the edge of the roof much longer. Memories were running through my mind’s eye so fast that I could barely process them, but in a level of detail that reminded me comfortingly of things I hadn’t thought about in so very long. The smell of sticky white classroom paste. The floral patterns of the matching patchwork quilts that were once spread across Jennie’s and my beds. Powdered donuts—Dad’s favorite treat on Sunday mornings.

Then I saw myself peering down at tree branches and grass from high above and heard childish laughter. I was at the top of the tree that used to be in the Emorys’ front yard. The summer that Jennie and I were six, we followed Trey in climbing all the way to the top, and we were too afraid to climb back down. Trey remained up there with us to comfort us, even though he’d climbed up and down that tree hundreds of times. Mom called the fire department to pull us down, and we went back up the very next day.

In the distance—in my mind, I realized—I heard faint sirens. They grew louder as the whirlwind of memories continued. Bickering with Jennie over her butchering of a doll’s hair. The warmth of Moxie, our dog, sleeping in a ball on top of my feet in my bed at night. Playing Cat’s Cradle with Candace on a field trip bus ride—Candace had lost her teeth before everyone else and always knew the best games.

And then sirens were blaring, and the smell of smoke was growing more pungent. I knew the time had come for the worst memory of all: waking up in darkness, choking. Running my hand against the wall of the long hallway and feeling my way out of our old house on Martha Road. Stumbling out onto the lawn in my pajamas with Moxie running in circles and barking around me. And looking back over my shoulder to see Jennie’s silhouette in the living room window. She could see that I’d made it outside, but she’d inhaled too much smoke to do so herself.