Rebirth14 min read
Rooftop Riddle: I Fell, I Rose, I Chose
ButterPicks12 views
I remember the notice like a folded paper heart, and I remember the railing—the cold metal under my palm. I remember the wind that night, the hollow echo of my own breath, and the loosened screw that no one ever fixed.
"Who would write his name and mean me?" I said to the empty rooftop.
"Who indeed," the wind answered, but it was only me who heard it.
They told stories about me later: Lila Hill, the quiet dancer who could not stop following Everett Cruz. They said I chased a ghost. They said I leaned too far from a railing and fell. They said it like it was simple. They did not stay to watch the papers fall with me.
"Everett," I whispered into the phone, waiting for someone to explain what I could not. "Please pick up."
"Don't call me," he said, his voice dry like winter grass. "Stop pestering me."
"I got a note," I told him. "Someone used your name."
"Then ignore it." He hung up. He always hung up like a closing door.
I waited until the shadow fell long across the rooftop. I took one step and then another. My foot landed on the loose screw. My arms moved for the rail. Then hands shoved me forward.
"Ow!" I cried, and the world opened like a mouth.
I did not feel the fall like the movies show. It was a slap of sound, a rush of light, then a bed of pain. Then there was nothing at all—no heat, no breath, no beating chest—only the cold lift of awareness. I floated above the place where I had been and watched the crowd run. I watched friends who never showed, teachers who called the police, and a campus that wrapped itself in silence.
"She must have been depressed," the police wrote later. "Suicide suspected." They closed their notebooks as if that sealed a secret.
I woke to an empty campus. My body was already taken away. My voice was not mine but a thin thread. I moved through walls and across light. I did the only thing I could: I returned to the rooftop.
"Who pushed me?" I asked the empty rail.
No one answered. So I kept looking.
The first days as a ghost were clumsy. I tried to rest on the steps. I couldn't. I tried to sleep in the theater seats, but posture meant nothing to a being without weight. I drifted into the art classroom and found a new kind of warmth.
"Who left that book?" a teacher asked, picking up a sketchbook that had fallen from a desk.
"It wasn't me," a voice said. I looked up. The teacher's face had that kind, still light. She reminded me of a warm coat. Her voice was a lighthouse.
"Students, today we will speak about line and life," she said. "Who draws more from life than from fantasy?"
"That's Ms. India," a girl in the front said. "Her classes are like a home."
I listened. I followed. I sat at the back of her class and watched colors bloom on paper like small suns. Being dead meant I could hear everything and no one could hear me. It was lonely and quiet—and oddly tender.
Three days later Everett Cruz learned I was gone.
"Did you hear?" his roommate asked.
"Yes," he said, folding a shirt. "When was it?"
"Three days ago," said the roommate. "The forum's full of it. People say she chased you."
"It's none of my business," Everett answered as if he could step out of a story.
But it was his name on that note. It had been his voice on that last phone call. Whether he wanted it or not, he was the last thread tied to me.
I floated through the campus like a cold season, hearing things I had never wanted to hear awake. I learned their schedules, their habits. I watched Everett sleep, and I felt a strange, new ache. When someone called his name, his face softened for just a second.
"She won't hurt you now," I told the night.
A week passed. I wandered into the cafeteria and then into the library. I learned how to rest in the sun without feeling it. I learned that the living keep small rituals that matter a lot. I found one of my favorite things: a wooden bench near the fountain. I laid my ghost-hands on it and laughed silently at how much I still wanted to sleep like someone with lungs.
A storm came the night I shouted to the sky. "Why can't I move on?"
Lightning answered like a punctuation mark. Then, in a twist I did not understand, I felt a pull like a tide. I found myself chest-deep in a dim room, and when I blinked, the calendar on the wall showed a date two summers before the rooftop. The air smelled like lemon soap and old newspapers. A woman with kind hands held a bowl of porridge.
"Lila, are you alright?" she asked.
"My—" I felt for the scar on my forehead and found only skin that remembered pain it had never yet received. "Li—"
"Don't call me that," the woman laughed. "You're home. Eat."
I was home. I was in my childhood house and I was alive again. The days smeared in a new order. I had returned to the summer before college, before the rooftop note, before the push. I could feel a strange soft victory in the shape of it. I had one life to fix what was broken.
"Why me?" I asked the sunlight.
"Why not you?" said the quiet in the corners. I had been given a second chance, and the sky looked like a map.
This time I walked different paths. I did not use my last life to chase Everett. I kept my distance. I waited by the bus with my head down and practiced saying nothing into the wind.
"Where will you study?" my neighbor, Grandma Hart, asked as I packed.
"I don't know," I answered. "Maybe something quieter."
On the bus, I read the previous year's course catalog like it was a prophecy. I remembered the teacher with the warm hands—India Eklund—and I remembered the class about line and life that had made the dead me so alive.
"Apply to illustration," I told myself. "Make your own life, make your own money, don't make your whole life someone else's heart."
I reported to the bookstore the next morning. The job was small: shelving, helping customers find what they wanted, breathing between pages. The owner was not only kind, he was practical, and he smiled as if nothing in the world could hurt him.
"You can start tomorrow," he said. "We pay monthly."
"Thank you," I said. It felt like a small penny.
Two jobs later, I had saved for a plane ticket of my own. I bought a better dress and lent a shirt to Grandma Hart. I applied to A University at a different program—Illustration; not dance. I did not want to stand under lights anymore. I wanted to make pictures that could speak for me.
When I returned to campus, everything felt the same and everything felt changed. Everett Cruz still stood clean in the halls and the sun still made his jaw sharp. But I did not run toward him like I used to. I let him stay across the square, and sometimes I watched him without looking like someone waiting for a miracle.
"You're different," Harper Donovan said one afternoon, reading my face like a recipe.
"I am," I answered. "I came back with a single rule: no chasing."
We spoke about simpler things. I listened to Ms. India Eklund teach about composition, and I worked late in the library. I learned how to be alone without turning hollow.
The campus noticed me differently now. I had a small group: Harper, Journey Anderson, and Allison Costa. They were girls who filled rooms with sound and left them better for it. I had made a careful wall around myself. I let a rare hand in—Hudson Craig.
Hudson was not like Everett. Hudson carried his art on his shoulders like a loose cloak. He smiled like someone who found rain interesting. He had a quiet power that had nothing to do with family or privilege. He drew in charcoal and made faces look like buildings.
"Do you like drawing?" Hudson asked one day in the illustration room.
"I do," I answered. "It's safer than dance."
"Show me," he said.
So I showed him lines I had kept like secrets. He did not make them into something else. He kept them honest.
"You're good," he said slowly. "You have a voice."
"Thanks," I said. It felt like a seed.
Meanwhile, a rumor clocked into the school forum: I had been seen with Hudson. Then Everett read something on the same forum. The campus liked gossip as if it were a festival. People pick sides in the weather.
I made no promises. I did not want promises. I wanted solid things: a job, rent, designs, a bank account that did not rely on smiles.
"You're hard," Everett said once, standing by the library, watching a page turn.
"You made me so," I answered, under the breath of years. "You didn't call when I needed you. You talked like a closed window."
He didn't answer. He had a way of answering with silence.
Weeks passed. The rooftop stayed sealed inside my memory, but I could not forget the mold of the railing. I wondered about that push more than ever. Ghostly logic had told me it was a random shove. Living logic, later, told me it looked planned.
One afternoon, the forum blew with a photograph of Hudson and me, sitting at a small table, laughing over a shared cup of tea. Comments piled up like rain. I read everything and then I deleted the feed from my head.
Everett found me in the crowd later that week.
"Why didn't you come to the hospital?" he asked.
"We aren't in the last life," I said. "You didn't answer my call the last time. This life is different."
His face collapsed like something bored of waiting. He tried to say something earnest, and it came out like a stone. He left with as much quiet as possible.
I thought I'd left the past behind, but the past had its fingers in the seams of my days. I found myself drawn again to the rooftop—not to jump, not to remember, but to look for proof. I wanted to know who had put the paper in my coat pocket the first time, who had loosened the screw.
I asked: "Who wants me gone, but can't say it?"
I followed threads. I listened to the campus. I followed gossip. I watched the small circles of people who had power: a circle lead by Giuliana Jorgensen. She had a smile that was very sharp and a calm that was too precise.
"She looks like everyone else's perfect," Muriel Hart said, leaning back in a cafeteria chair.
"She always had a plan," Harper answered. "She came in with the same clothes, same laugh, same corners all polished like glass."
I watched Giuliana at an awards night later on, her dress a cut of moonlight. She moved like someone who measures steps for others.
One late night Hudson and I stayed at the illustration studio. We worked on a piece with too much coffee and too little sleep.
"There's something wrong about the way people push," I said. "The push that night had a pattern. It wasn't random."
Hudson eyed my hands. "Who do you suspect?"
"I have names," I said. "But I need a witness. Or a camera. Or something that proves a person can be cruel in public and call it accident in private."
"Then set the stage," Hudson said. "Artists do this all the time—we set trees to make a shadow."
We planned a reveal. A public place where truth could not be easily folded away. A place where spectators would hold their breath. The convocation hall, full of parents and professors, at the annual campus art exhibition—a place Giuliana loved because she liked applause more than applause liked her.
Hudson whispered, "We will show them what she could not keep hidden."
We worked with Ms. India Eklund, who was more generous than I deserved. She let us include a piece at the exhibition that was not my art alone but a small installation of truth.
On the night of the exhibition, the hall smelled like polish and perfume. The crowd had come for an evening of talent and small triumphs. Giuliana stood near the stage, radiant and watched. Everett had come, though I did not know whether to call him a friend or a shadow.
Hudson's installation was a set of panels. It looked at first like simple charcoal panels of campus life. But in the center was a looped projection: a grainy clip filmed by a hidden camera in the rooftop stairwell. We had placed it there days before the show, with Ms. India’s blessing, saying it was for light research on campus movement. And we had a second camera set in the storage room.
The project meant many things at once. It meant proof. It meant a witness that could not be silenced by a closed police file. It meant the possibility that one night someone's cruelty had a name.
When the lights dimmed and the footage rolled, the room shifted to a winter of quiet sound. People leaned forward. The clip started with the rooftop scene: a folded note bearing Everett’s name, then shadows, then a shove—and a face turned toward the stairwell camera. It was sharp, composed, the exact smile Giuliana wore on the stage.
"No." A woman’s voice. "It can't—"
"It is her," someone whispered.
"Giuliana?" Everett said, like he needed to taste the name again.
On the projection, the camera followed steps. It moved to another clip taken in the storage room on a different night. There, hands pushed the door closed from outside and the footage matched the moment I had been trapped. The hands were manicured. The bracelet had a small charm. The jacket sleeves fit.
The charm was one I had seen before: a tiny silver crescent, a staple of Giuliana's style.
The hall filled with sound that was not music. People murmured. Someone gasped. The footage kept rolling, sliding into angles that showed Giuliana stepping away, composed as if she had only stolen a moment, a theft that would be called mischief. She sat in the front row, pale and tidy, as if the camera had no power.
"She did this," I said.
Giuliana's face went pale in the projection and then in reality, and she looked smaller than I had ever thought possible.
Someone in the crowd shouted, "Why would she do it?"
"Jealousy," said another voice.
"I saw her argue with you once," a student said, pointing at a clip from months earlier: Giuliana speaking quietly and harshly to someone I did not recognize—a whispered plan, a promise to do what it takes.
Giuliana rose, like a tide. Her voice shook as she spoke to the packed hall. "That's not—"
"Stop." Everett stood up. He did not look at me. He looked at her, and his voice was a blade. "Why did you push her?"
She faltered. The whole world held very still for a breath.
"I—" Giuliana swallowed. The room watched the slow unspooling of a person who had been used to folding everything into calm edges. "I was angry. She smiled at everything and everyone. I thought—her being gone would make room for me to be seen."
The confession came out like a cracked cup. People around us did not clap. They leaned back like they had been hit by rain.
"You planned two things," Everett said, his voice hollow. "You wrote that note. You loosened the screw. Why?"
"I wanted him," Giuliana said, and this time the room took a step toward her, as if to remember the shape of a monstrous truth. "I wanted attention. I wanted Everett to look at me the way he looks at you."
"You thought you could fix love with a fall?" Hudson asked quietly.
Giuliana's smile had evaporated. "Nobody else listens, Hudson. They listened for someone gone."
"Did you know she died?" Everett's voice rose. "Did you know you made a life end?"
"I didn't mean—" she started. She kept trying. Her words fell away like leaves.
At that point the punishment began—not a swift law, but something closer to a demanded honesty. The hall had become an arena. The audience that had come to praise art had become jury and judge. It was not meant to be cruel; it was meant to be full of light.
"Stay still," Ms. India said, stepping forward with soft authority. "Everyone, please. Let her speak."
"Speak what?" Giuliana whispered. Her voice had changed from composed to cracked. Sweat gathered like weather on her forehead.
"Tell them who helped you," Everett said. "Tell them how many times you planned this. Tell them why you thought you could control consequence."
For the first time, a sound like a sob came out of Giuliana without control. People began to film with phones. I could see the cameras in the crowd—dozens of small eyes making witness.
"You're a coward," one parent said from a row back. "You hurt a girl for a look."
"But—" Giuliana said, then everything broke.
If punishment is real, it needs witnesses and steps and the slow unmasking of motive. Here, the punishment slipped into a long public unraveling.
"Why did you lock Lila in the storage room?" Everett demanded.
A silence. Then, the memory of a clip we had in the projection—a step, a hand, the door held closed—like the clasp of someone else's cruelty. Giuliana's phone buzzed in her hand like a treacherous heartbeat. It had texts from an unnamed friend, arranging dorm access, timing, the night, the detail of a screw. The friend had signed with a nickname: "Karter." I had reasons to suspect others.
"Yes," Giuliana said finally, voice thin. "Karter helped me. He wanted money. He thought it would be a prank. He didn't expect—"
"Where is he?" Everett said.
The room suddenly hummed. A man in a dark jacket near the back stood up. It was Karter Bowman, a student who had never been in anyone's good light. He stepped forward like a man in a weather he had chosen.
"It was a joke," Karter said, his voice smaller when so many ears tried him on. "We meant to scare her. We didn't mean for her to die."
"You staged a fall," a teacher said. "You set a loose screw. You forged a name. You locked a girl in a room and pushed her toward a railing. There is a world of difference between a prank and a crime."
"You made it a murder," Everett said. "You made it a plan."
Giuliana was quiet. She looked older than she was. Inside the hall, reactions changed like weather. Some people turned away in disgust. Some took out phones to film. Some whispered prayers. The parents sat, stunned and small and human.
"Do you feel anything now?" a student asked Giuliana.
She opened her mouth and the answer came like a small wind. "Yes. Small, and empty. I wanted attention and I got a life taken. I didn't mean to break anything real."
"Then face what you did," Ms. India said. "You will answer to the law. You will face campus hearings. But there is also the thing people can do now: they can know. They can throw light on what you did so it cannot be hidden again."
Giuliana tried to walk away. Students blocked her path with their bodies like a living wall. Parents filmed like a slow archive. A teacher read out the clip, played it again, and again. People took turns telling the story back to Giuliana so she could not pretend it had been a dream.
Her reactions changed over the course of an hour: from icy denial to sharp rage, then to pleading, then to a collapsing plea for forgiveness that was thin and small. She tried to charm, tried to lie, tried to cry, tried to blame. None of it took. The crowd hardened like iron cooled.
In the end the punishment was not one blow. It was the long, public unmasking.
People came forward with details: an argument in the library where Giuliana had told Karter to "do what it takes"; a text chain in which Karter joked about "a scare" and Giuliana answered with a heart; a video of Giuliana entering the stairwell early that night and a second person following with a flashlight. A teacher who happened to have looked out their window that night and remembered a shadow; a student who had seen a cigarette pack by the rail the next morning.
The room could not return to normal. Giuliana sat on the stage while her life fell apart in small loud clicks. People cried. Cameras kept filming. The police were called. The dean read out statements about immediate suspension and internal investigation.
All the while, Everett stood back from me, as if he had been blind and suddenly had his eyes opened. He looked like a man who had found the missing corner of a puzzle.
"She must answer for what she did," he said. "And because this was done in the dark, we will bring it into the light."
Giuliana's face had become an unmade thing, like clay too often worked. She was the kind of person who had used other people's quiet like furniture. In the end, the punishment was the truth in public—uncomfortable, long, and without the shortcuts people wish for.
Afterwards, hands and murmurs and the hum of phones, people left the hall with images and a verdict forming in their lips. Students and families filed out like a slow tide. Some clapped. Most did not. The weight of what had happened sat like a rock.
I found Everett at the back near the exit. He looked smaller than he had in memory, and there was something new stitched to his face—an act of seeing.
"Do you forgive me?" he asked me, looking unsure how to ask for something he had never once given before.
"Forgiveness is heavy," I said. "You can choose to carry it. Right now choose to look and to fix. This was not only one night."
He swallowed. "I will. I will help."
That night, after the crowd dispersed and the cameras stopped pointing, I walked the roof one last time. The railing felt cold and honest under my fingers. I had seen a person punished, not by violence but by the long work of truth. I had been given a strange gift: a second life and the voices of witnesses.
Hudson reached out and took my hand like a painting matching its frame. He did not say anything heavy. He said, simply, "Come home."
I did. In the quiet that followed, I put back the note I had kept folded in my pocket—the one that had once brought me to the edge. I let it lie on the rail where the moon could read it too.
I never forgot the roof. I never forgot the cold metal under my palm, or the small sound of the screw loosening. I did not let myself chase Everett again. I let myself learn to draw, to work, to save. I let people see my work and not my fear.
Months later, at the small graduation exhibition where I hung my first full series, I placed one drawing at the entrance. It was not an accusation, not a plea. It was a small picture of a rooftop railing with a tiny folded note resting on it.
"Why that?" a girl asked me, pointing at the sketch.
"Because sometimes a place remembers," I answered.
"Do you forgive her?" the girl asked.
"Forgiveness is a path," I said, "not a single choice."
I left the exhibition that night holding Hudson's arm. Everett watched from across the crowd and nodded like someone letting a stone sink. Giuliana's name was spoken in campus meetings and folded into legal files. Karter was expelled. The punishment had been public and long; it had been the slow dismantling of a false calm.
"Are you happy?" Hudson asked me once, months later, while we stood near the fountain.
"I'm okay," I said, and the fountain splashed like a laugh. "I have my life. I have work to do. And I have pages to fill."
He smiled and kissed the sketchbook I had carried like a talisman. "So do it."
I did.
The End
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