The man with the club reared back to deliver one last kick, but his partner stopped him. They left, muttering something that I believe included the phrase “ungrateful bitch,” and I helped the boy onto the curb. I had a strong urge to cuff his ear, but since I wasn’t actually his sister, I restricted myself to scowling.

“Are you suicidal?” I asked him. “Or simply a fool?”

“It’s lying. The painting. It lies, every day.”

I wanted to abandon him right there. This was not simply a sightseeing trip—I had real work to do. But his nose was bloody and his shirt was torn, and he was simply too pathetic to leave.

Besides, a lying painting was a mystery I could not turn down.

“And what lie does it tell?” I said, helping him to his feet.

“That the Upper West is safe.”

“Who did you lose?”

“What the hell do you care?”

“I have lost people too.”

“Well I’ve seen ’em disappear.”

“What do you mean?”

“C’mere,” he said and bolted down the street. What else could I do but follow? He turned down an alleyway, hopped a trashcan, and scurried up the side of the wall to grab the ladder at the bottom of the fire escape. His weight pulled it to the ground, and he began to climb.

It was five flights to the top, and I hadn’t gone ten steps before I felt my heart flutter, and my palms begin to sweat. I glanced down through the slats of the fire escape, and regretted it instantly. The ground looked suddenly very far away.

“You climbing,” called the boy, already two flights ahead of me, “or you just gonna quiver and sweat?”

Had I not just saved this ungrateful idiot from getting his head bashed in?

I climbed anyway.

By the time I got to the roof, he was already gone. I shaded my eyes against the morning sun, and saw him vaulting the low wall that separated this building from the next. I shook my head, and followed his lead. Across one roof, and then another, and then there was a gap—two or three feet between this brownstone and the one that held the painting. The boy—did he have a name, I wondered—leapt it without thought. I stopped short of jumping and nearly fell.

I should have said goodbye and gone back down to the sidewalk. If he’d yelled at me, if he’d been angry, I probably would have left him. But instead he laughed, and that I couldn’t bear. I pulled my skirts up high and executed a dainty little hop from one building to the other—as though death weren’t one misstep away.

“It wasn’t that far,” I said.

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Now tell me what the hell you’ve brought me here for.”