Definitely not to code

When Kelly called me last night and told me the Roark was almost naked and covered in stones, I wasn’t all that surprised. Roark does things like that all the time. Sometimes it’s stones, sometimes it’s brewing yeast, sometimes it’s arthropods, but in the end it’s just near-naked Roark, writing under his burden and shouting nonsense, and if you’ve seen that – let’s count… five times? – then you don’t need to see it again.

Kelly would not be dissuaded, however, and without too much hassling on her part I agreed to come visit them at Kelly’s old house. Housemates still indoors informed me that I would find the trio in question – Kelly, Roark, and Sarah, that is – on the roof of the house. This, unlike the above news, was a surprise. For one thing, Kelly is terrified of heights, and for another, their roof is far too steep to sit comfortably anywhere.

So I thought.

After climbing out an upstairs window and ascending the steep incline with more than a little fear in my own heart, I looked around the pinnacle and suddenly understood. Some thoughtful former tenant of the house had built a level platform roughly eight feet square on the very apex of the roof, and the three missing kids were snuggling on it. They were a little drunk. Roark was, as promised, half-naked.

“Did you bring any roof-cohol?” Roark asked me after I’d settled in. Sadly, I hadn’t. Really, I was too preoccupied wondering how, after being intimately familiar with their house for the last nine months, I could still have been unaware that such an amazing structure existed on their roof. After all, Marta lived there for a long time, and this is the same girl I once had to bodily restrain from performing a balancing-beam act over a 60m drop. The platform should have been her favorite place in the world. I voiced these concerns to Kelly, who brushed me off with something like “we weren’t supposed to go here.” Well, yeah. The drop-off on either side of the house is at least 30 feet, and the roof slopes at around a 60-degree angle with horizontal.

For around an hour, I was essentially held captive on the roof (them: “You can’t leave!” me: “You guys are annoying.”). I could have probably broken free, but the cost of a slight miscalculation in my escape attempt probably would have been a broken neck, or at least a nasty bump. Roark yelled obscenities at passersby, Kelly kept invoking stories from Europe (“Awwww, do you guys remember Prague?”), and Sarah acted as official pillow.

After everyone climbed down (Kelly: “let’s go get some ground-cohol”), we noticed we were missing Kelly. I clambered back up to the peak, and sure enough, she was sitting at the top, too scared to move. I applied all my skills of persuasion to the issue, and eventually talked / helped her down. I felt like a hostage negotiator.

One thing’s for certain: I am going to sleep on that roof before the summer ends. And I’m going to listen to “Sleeping on the Roof” while I do it.