The roof | Nicole Fersko

At my new high school, there was only one room where we all convened, which was a lounge with gray lockers along both walls. It didn’t look like a school, it looked like a brown stone house with school-like props like lockers, desks, and whiteboards. Even the teachers seemed like they were hired actors. Mocca, the biology teacher, always had her hair curled and said ‘y’all’ instead of ‘you all’. Barbara, the history teacher who always matched her shoes to her bags. Diego, the Spanish teacher who wore only pink bow ties. Joseph, the math teacher with a white beard who had a poster of Bob Marley in his classroom. There were only 65 students in the whole school.
On my first day, during lunch period I was sitting in the lounge, quietly eating a ham sandwich. The kids that went to this school looked different. They seemed more mature, but not in a good way. Although we were all fourteen, the kids there looked like they had been through a lot. Wiser. Travis, who spoke with a thick accent from Queens, and was wearing a t-shirt that said ‘Money, Guns and Pussy’ was telling people about the wilderness program. He was acting out what happened to him the night he was taken to the program.
‘In the middle of the night these big men came into my room and told me I could only bring a clean pair of boxers and nothing else. My parents just stood there watching. I couldn’t bring anything. I couldn’t even bring my phone,’ he said.
Andrew who was wearing a black hoodie sitting near me said, ‘you’re lucky they let you get a fresh pair of boxers. I was sent to wilderness with just one pair. I had no idea where they were taking me, and I ended up in a forest in bumblefuck upstate New York.’
I looked around the room hoping to see other confused faces like mine, but there were kids nodding along and they started telling their own stories.
A girl who was wearing red fishnet stockings said, ‘You think that’s bad. Try being locked up for two months.’ Everyone went silent. I kept thinking this is where the bad wolves end up. Everyone started sharing why they had ended up there. For most kids it was drugs. For others it was because they committed a crime. And when it was my turn to speak I said, ‘I just did things that made people laugh.’ Travis and Andrew started laughing.
‘Nothing wrong with that! Am I right? We could all laugh more these days,’ he said to everyone in the lounge.
They were right. There was nothing wrong with making people laugh and after hearing other people’s stories, I felt like an angel compared to them.
The only ‘normal’ people at that school were Ellie, Luna, and Rachel. I met them all on separate occasions but we all bonded over the fact that none of us were drug addicts or criminals. Before long, the four of us would do everything together: We’d wait for each other after class, we’d go to lunch together, and spend weekends together.
For years, when the weather was warm, the four of us would go up on my silver-coated roof. We would sunbathe in our awkwardly fitting bikinis and talk about the crazy people in our school.
Luna was also Jewish, but she wasn’t a New York Jew, she was an Israeli Jew. Luna’s parents owned an Israeli-Italian restaurant. At times after school we would go there and alternate between eating pasta with vodka sauce or humus platters. Luna’s mom, who was usually walking around frantically yelling at the waiters, would come sit with us and light a cigarette while she told us stories about the military. Somehow her stories started there and ended with ‘do not trust men’ or ‘always protect yourselves girls’. Rachel wasn’t Jewish, she was Catholic and always wore red Converse, loosely fitted jeans and a choker necklace. She only spoke when there was a reason to. But when she did, she always said something that resonated with me.
‘Do you guys want a cig?’ Ellie said, pulling out a pack of Marlboro 27s. The roof was where I smoked my first cigarette. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t inhale, I blew out puffs of smoke. But it didn’t matter because as the four of us sat on our towels and held out our cigarettes, I finally felt like I had found my family. We talked about everything: boys we had crushes on, girls we wanted to look like, and all our insecurities about ourselves. The roof was where Luna told us that, during lunch, Ryan had asked her out. He was older than us and was in the Navy. They dated for a few months and it had been the first time Luna fell in love. When she talked about him, she’d squeeze the army dog chain around her neck that he had given her on her birthday.

‘Doesn’t that chain make you feel like you're his property?’ Ellie asked.
‘No, it means that he wants to be with me forever. It’s Romantic you idiot’, Luna responded.
A couple months after they’d got together someone told someone that told Luna, during lunch break, that Ryan had cheated on her. Luna hadn’t come to school for days to avoid him. When she came up to the roof in tears we hugged her and told her how we hadn’t trusted him to begin with. After school, the four of us waited at his bus stop. Luna slapped him across the face and handed him back his chain.
‘Don’t you ever disrespect me again,’ she said, turning around and whipping her long brown hair in front of his face. We followed her down the street and put our arms around each other.
On Pi Day rumors started going around that Andrew was going to throw a pie in my face. Every time I saw him in school that day, he held up his key lime pie and pretended to throw it at me. During chemistry class, one of my classmates whispered, ‘I heard Andrew is going to pie you after school.’
I told Rachel, Ellie, and Luna during lunch break that I thought it was all a disguise and that he was going to ask me to prom.
‘He’s just behaving like kids do in elementary school when they have a crush,’I said.
‘Maybe he’s going to give you the pie and ‘will you go to prom with me’ will be written on it,’ Ellie said.
‘Maybe he’s just going to do what he said he's going to do. Throw a pie in your face,’ Rachel said.
That whole day all I could think about was whether he was going to ask me to prom or throw a pie in my face. I watched the bell in class until it rang. I waited at the bus stop on the corner with Rachel. In the distance I saw Andrew walking towards me holding a pie in his hands. He looked me dead in the eyes and smashed the key lime pie in my face. He put a finger on my face and licked the cream off of it. ‘Yummy’, he said. I stood there speechless. Whipped cream was dripping on the concrete. He started laughing and running down the block. Rachel took her half-eaten baloney sandwich out of her bag and chased him down the street.

The roof was also where we confessed things to each other. After the Ryan incident, Luna, like her mom, swore off all men. While she sipped on lemonade, she told us about how her father had left her house when she was ten to get something at the store and hadn’t come back until five years later. Ellie told us that she’d never met her dad because he was out of the picture and she didn’t want to go into details. Rachel told us that the most her dad interacted with her was to give her allowance at the end of the week. She always ate alone at home. I told them that I had just found out that my dad had incurable cancer. None of what we had to say to each other on the roof became a long story or needed an explanation. We didn’t go into details, we just said things plainly. If there were moments of silence, it didn’t mean no one knew what to say, it meant that we had been taking in each other's words.

One Sunday, Ellie and I met at the station to go to Jones beach. We brought our bikes along, hers was silver and mine was blue. We devoured a pack of Cheez-it crackers and drank Snapple iced teas on the train. We didn’t talk much. We sat bopping our heads up and down as we listened to an indie playlist on her iPod. We would lip-sync the songs we knew together. At the beach the air smelled like salt and seaweed. We sat on a purple blanket watching the waves crash onto the shore. I picked up a handful of sand and watched the granules pour out. Ellie looked at me and asked me if I knew how much time my dad had left. I told her I didn’t. We listened to music while lying down on the towel. The sand was soft beneath us. Our bodies gravitated closer. This is wrong, I kept thinking. Why am I thinking about kissing Ellie. My body tensed up and I ran and jumped into the sea and swam away as far as possible from her until she was just a small ant in the distance. I felt the sea hold me and carry me slowly.

My younger brother and sister were always dying to come up on the roof to see what us big kids were doing. The same way I wanted to absorb everything the older girls were saying in the locker room. It was sacred knowledge. It was like getting a sneak peak into the mystery that was adulthood. At times, they would give us a few dollars just so that they could sit with us. We accepted this, on the one condition that they don’t speak. The two of them would stand nearby and watch us smoke cigarettes and listen to us talk about losing our virginities. When I wasn’t home they would go into my room and raid my closet and look through my drawers. They found my diary, which had a sticker on the cover that said, ‘boys are stupid, throw rocks at them.’ I knew they would find it one day, which was why on the front page I wrote a note for them, which said ‘Dear Julia and Lorenzo, I know you are about to read my diary. You may find out some things about me you don’t like and it may confuse you. But go ahead at your risk.’ They had also found my expired condom collection that was in a white paper bag thinking it was the leftover Halloween candy.

Towards the end of high school, Rachel made new friends who she started going to lunch with. They would go to the park around the corner and come back high to class. At first I thought it was an occasional thing, until her eyes were bloodshot red every day. On my 16th birthday when I blew my candles out Rachel was passed out on the couch in the living room. I shook her and poured water on her face to wake her up. It had seemed like she had done more than just smoke a joint.
On the roof, she’d be quieter than usual and was more reserved about her life. She always looked like she wanted to be somewhere else or like she already was somewhere else. During the summer before 11th grade we didn’t see Rachel at all. She completely disappeared. She never answered our phone calls anymore and at a certain point we stopped trying to contact her. When school started again in the fall, I saw her, and she had gotten thinner and her complexion was pale. She had heavy bags under her eyes. I had expected her to say something after not seeing each other for an entire summer, but she walked past me as if we were strangers.

The roof was where the kids could be kids. Outside of the house I felt I had to act a certain way and couldn’t say certain things. My parents never came up on the roof although they knew that we were smoking up there. The only adult who came onto the roof was Alexander, the Swiss painter, one of the family friends that was staying with us. He wore all black and sat looking up at the sky smoking a cigarette. When my friends and I were up there at the same time, we didn’t talk to Alexander and he didn’t talk to us: we just acknowledged each other's presence. Before he went back to Switzerland he painted a family portrait of the six of us. He had painted each of our faces from looking at photographs he took of each of us during different times of the day. Dad was the only one smiling, and my facial expression looked like I was trying to resist something.

That painting is now inside of a storage unit in Northern Italy wrapped in bubble wrap amongst other pieces of furniture and boxes from that house and that time. My last memory of the roof is from the day my dad died. There were no clouds in the sky. All I could hear was a truck garbling garbage. I expected to cry but I didn’t. I expected the world around me to stop, but it didn’t. The traffic on the tree-lined street below was still flowing. My birthday still happened a week later. It was a surprise. My friends and mom had organized it. I still graduated from high school in the long violet dress I’d picked out a month before, and heels I stumbled in.
What stopped were the visits to dad at Mount Sinai hospital, which had been my routine for the previous two years. The train ride from downtown to uptown. Walking through the revolving doors and throwing a penny into the artificial pond at the entrance. The long corridor to his room, 3B, and the sound of nurses’ shoes on the pavement. Bringing him Matzo ball soup in a takeaway container from the Second Avenue deli. The white hard sheets on his bed. Listening to his boy scout stories from when he was a kid.
After he died, mom decided to move with us back to her hometown in Italy, the place she had left when she was twenty-seven. Everything from that point on from the roof to when we moved remains in my mind in fragmented moments. Blowing out the candles of a Carvel cake for my 18th birthday. The bright stage lights that pointed in my face as I received my high school diploma. The diner my family and I went to after the ceremony, with the red couches, where we sat in silence eating greasy burgers and slurping down Oreo milkshakes. Picking out the only all black clothing I owned for the funeral and deciding whether to wear makeup or not. Writing a speech for my dad’s funeral. Sitting in the front row with my dad's casket in front of me. Sitting on itchy furniture by a vegetable platter at my aunt’s house for the shiva.The highway driving back from the funeral in New Jersey. The sound of masking tape and cardboard boxes being shuffled around as we packed up the house. Labeling boxes of all our belongings with black Sharpies. The movers’ heavy footsteps up and down the stairs. Electrical wires hanging from the ceiling where the blue chandelier was. Our echoes becoming louder as the house became emptier. Saying bye to friends as we loaded the car. Passing by the Hudson river on our way to the airport.

Nicole Fersko is an American-Italian memoir writer and translator from New York City. She is based in London. She is the founder of Sidewalk Trento, the first open mic community in Trento, Italy. She is the editor-and-chief of Dimensions, a literary and art zine showcasing visual and written works by the international Sidewalk community. The excerpt above is from Bad Wolf, a memoir that she is currently working on.