Two houses with dormers sit so close, their roofs nearly touch. They hold age old enemies. Their hate is legend among their peers and they divide the school in two. The parking lot, the gym, that's his. The cafeteria and auditorium are hers. The hallways are tense shared space and their history class is barely controlled war zone.
One night, after a particularly bad day, he looks out his window to see her sitting on her roof in the rain, crying. His lights are out so she assumes he was is bed. She had to get away for a few minutes. The silence coming from her brother's room is too much. She tries to stand up and slips, but her enemy opens his window and crawls out to steady her. They settle down, each on their respective roof, legs crossed, knees touching across the tiny space between them. In the middle of the night, in the rain, he holds her hand while she falls apart and listens as she whispers about how her family is disintegrating. Her brother is dead. Her parents are fighting. She is adrift at sea with no direction and no will to keep sailing. He tells her about how he lost his mother and his father got mean. How this house is full of bottles and smells like pain and feels like something worse. He wipes her tears and he holds her until the bone-deep cold recedes just a bit. They part with a weight between them, something new and bold that neither of them quite wants to admit: an understanding of the other.
And when they pass each other in the halls, she rolls her eyes, but not as hard. And his insults get a little weaker every day. It's a month later when he crawls across to her window to knock. Her lights have been out for a week. She hasn't been at school in a week. Something is wrong, he knows it in his bones. So he slips out of his window and across his little stretch of roof. He hesitates before he pulls himself across the gap between their homes. Things will be different if he does this. There's no going back. But the moon is high and he can hear music blasting in her room and hear her parents yelling at her to shut it off so he moves. The knock startles her from the haze of pain she's been in. His face is open, clearly full of worry and her heart aches more than she knew was possible. She crawls out from under a mountain of blankets and hidden by the sound of her music, crosses the room to unlock the window. He doesn't hesitate. As soon as the window is open, he is inside the room, holding her, smoothing her hair, letting out the exhale he's been holding for a week praying that she was okay. Her parents come and go at the door, yelling at her, yelling at each other until the rest of the house is silent and the music has made a home for them.
She tells him in gasps, that his birthday passed, and then hers the next day, and it is too much for her. The idea of existing without him, celebrating without him, being without him. She locked the door a week ago and never wanted to come out. She hurt, she told him, in a way that was indescribable he held her tighter because he knew exactly the kind of hurt she meant. When her tears were dry and the exhaustion was taking her over, he helped her down the hall to the bathroom and rummaged until he found a towel. Her parents were gone, in separate cars to separate places, their hearts in separate worlds and matching states of hurt. She promised not to lock that door forever as he went back and waited in her room. He turned down the music until it was bearable but did not turn it off. He knew she was using the volume the drown out the pain as he once had. As he still did. And when she came back, she looked both fresh and more exhausted than before, sunken and small in an oversize shirt that hid her shorts. It was her brothers. It belongs to a ghost now she tells him; though he isn't sure if that means her brother or her. But he knows too well how it could mean both. He tucks her into bed and listens to her stories and lets her cry and laughs the few rare times she laughs. Late into the night, almost morning, they fall asleep, him on the floor beside her bed with their hands stretched out as if they tried to keep hold of each other in their sleep.
The sun wakes him up, and he presses a gentle kiss to her temple before crawling back across the roof to his own bedroom. When the sun rises, he sees her turn the bedroom light on and he lets out a sigh of relief. They eat lunch together, on their own respective roofs, legs stretching across the gap and resting against one another. It is quiet and easy and it feels like something stronger than shared misery that starts stitching their hearts together.
It is different in the hallways now, when she smiles at him and he offers to carry her things. They had always been the heads of two opposing factions, and the rest of the student body doesn't know what to do when their leaders sit down at the same lunch table or stay late in the parking lot. No one can uncover what stopped their fighting or what makes him look at her in awe when she is looking away. No one knows what makes her smile when she hears his name or what makes them walk the halls hand in hand.
The roof becomes their sacred space, where no matter what, they can just be. He holds her there when her father leaves. She traces his scars earned in battle with his father. Together, they share the load of a broken life, far too young to have the wisdom they both carry in their eyes.
They sit on their own respective roofs for a few more years. And then they take turns sitting on the bed or the floor in the other's dorm room. And then he sits on the balcony of her first apartment, and she sits next to him at the celebratory dinner when he gets his first promotion. They sit together at a table surrounded by their friends who still didn't understand the change, even after he bought a ring and she a dress and they vowed to sit on rooftops together forever.
They sit together on the balcony that belongs to both of them after they sign the lease papers because the roof they wanted was too much.
It takes years, but finally, they buy a little house with dormers of it's own and they put the nursery on the top floor, not realizing that the next door neighbor's house had a dormer of it's own. Roof lines barely separate.
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