No wait, that’s not what happened. This is what happened.

Helen called Jane at 5 in the morning.

“There’s an enormous hot air balloon here,” Helen said. “At the park. And nobody’s guarding it.”

“Hot damn! I am on my way,” Jane replied. 

Jane parked her bike against a tree, and the two girls approached the balloon. The hot air balloon was part of a realty advertising campaign, it looked like. It was just going to go straight up and hang there, tethered to the ground by a long rope. Jane and Helen climbed into the basket.

It was wonderful. There was a flame thrower in the basket, pointed up into the balloon. When Jane pulled a lever, giant flame spewed up with a roar, and the balloon lifted skyward. When it reached the end of the rope, they were almost two stories high. They could see the harbour, and the bridge. Nobody spoke for a long time. It was early, and the air was still cool, and they were flying.

“I got accepted to MIT,” Jane said, after a few minutes. “In their physics program.”

Helen smiled and pulled the flame again. The balloon creaked against the rope. 

“Let’s never go back down,” Helen said.

“What happens when we run out of fire?” Jane said, like she was perfectly serious. 

What a silly thing to worry about.

the end.

Jane called Helen from the train station, the day she was supposed to leave.

“I thought your train was this afternoon!” Helen said.

“I got the time wrong,” Jane said. “I had to take a taxi down, and my train’s already boarding.”

“I can take a taxi down there too,” Helen said. “I can be there in like twenty minutes.”

“The train’ll be gone by then, Helen,” Jane said. “I’m glad we got to hang out last night at least.”

“But all we did was watch stupid movies!” Helen said.

“I’ll email you when I get to Boston,” Jane said. And then she had to go.

This was their last summer before they went off to separate schools. They were laying on their backs looking for faces in the clouds, talking about the future. When they talked about the future, they didn’t discuss school. They made plans for some undefined future when they were together again.

“We can get a train pass for like five hundred dollars,” Helen said. “A month-long train pass. We can go anywhere we want. We can do anything! New York City! San Francisco! Lawrence, Kansas! We just show up at the train station and pick a place off the map. We can do anything.” 

“We can go out to the desert,” Jane said, “and take Peyote. We can go on a spirit quest. Find our spirit animals. I’ll bet my spirit animal is John Candy.”

“I want John Candy. Can two people have the same spirit animal?” Helen said. 

“I don’t see why not.”

“We can take the ferry to Alcatraz and try to swim back to shore.” Helen said. “Like escapees. We’ll be lost forever.”

“We can just walk around doing nothing at all,” Jane replied. “We can just talk about dumb things and make stupid jokes and laugh. We can get ice cream in Denver. What the hell is in Denver?” She laughed.

“So much ice cream,” Helen said. “And that sniper I guess.”

“Oh yeah,” Jane was quiet for a minute. “Snipers always hide in bell towers. If I was a sniper I wouldn’t hide in a bell tower. That’s the first place people look. Obviously the sniper’s in a bell tower. That’s where snipers go.”

“Well, it gives you a pretty good view,” Helen said.

“I’d hide out down low.”

“What, like you’d shoot people from the bottom of a well?”

“Yes,” Jane said. “And it would never even occur to anyone to look down there. The bodies would just keep piling up around the mouth of the well, and everyone would be going nuts, trying to figure out which bell tower I was in.”

When the windows started bursting out of the buildings above them, they went inside. A hotel was sheltering people, and handing out glow sticks. So Helen and Jane sat at the back of the hotel’s lobby, glow sticks lit around their necks, and listened to the broken glass whipping around outside.

“My father wants to pay for my tuition,” Helen said.

“So you don’t have to get a student loan?”

“I’m getting a student loan,” Helen said. “I would rather go into debt than take a dime from that man. I remember what he did to my mother, even if she acts like she doesn’t.” Helen took the glow stick from around her neck and looked down at it. “It’d be easier if I’d gotten a scholarship, though,” she said. 

The hurricane went on and on around the building, and to pass the time Jane and Helen started trying to guess why the other people hiding out in the hotel had been outside. Jane pointed to a young woman, dressed all in black, sitting by herself.

“I bet she was robbing a bank,” Jane said. “Or a jewelry store. She’s probably got pockets full of diamonds.”

There was a group of young men in business suits.

“Professional hitmen,” Helen said. “In town for some kind of conference.”

There was a female security guard, sitting by the window, flicking her flashlight on and off, looking bored. She didn’t look much older than Helen.

“I’m sorry I didn’t congratulate you about getting into MIT,” Helen said to Jane. 

“It’s okay,” Jane said. “Dal’s a good school, too. You know that.”

“Richard Feynman never went to Dal,” Helen said, and Jane laughed.

“You don’t even like Richard Feynman,” she said. 

But Helen didn’t say anything. She just turned the glow stick over in her fingers for a while.

“I guess you do like Buzz Aldrin though,” Jane said.

Hurricane Anthony was on his way. It was all the news would talk about. It was a powerful storm, especially for so early in the hurricane season. Even at school, the announcements took a break from talking about the upcoming prom to warn students about the impending hurricane. When the bell rang for  their last class, Jane and Helen went outside and stood looking at the sky.

The wind was already picking up, and the clouds were dark to the south. It was the exact right kind of dark, too. Suitably threatening. The sky was ominous and violent. Disaster was coming. Finally!

“This is going to be amazing,” Helen said. Her voice sounded far away in the wind. 

They went to Jane’s house first, and then Helen’s. They got their bike helmets, and waterproof clothes. And then they went downtown, near the waterfront, where the hurricane was going to land.

In a lot of ways, being out in a hurricane is like being in a space ship. Gravity doesn’t apply in the same way anymore. Helen could lean forward at an impossible angle, and the wind held her up. She put her arms out to the side, laughing into the wind. Beside her, Jane tried to match her angle, but the wind kept staggering her backward. 

So she jumped straight up, and the wind carried her back a few feet. Both of them let out a shriek, and Helen jumped up into the air, too. It carried her a few feet before gravity won out again. 

“Oh my god,” Helen yelled. “Oh my god this is amazing.”

The could see people lined up on the waterfront boardwalks, with the waves crashing against the wood around them, surf splashing high into the air. But Jane and Helen had lived here all their lives. Laughing and jumping in the wind was one thing, but the ocean was no joke. It killed people. 

So they stayed up between the buildings, laughing and jumping, and holding onto each other’s arms. A security guard came running out of one of the office buildings to scream at them, his arm held up against the wind and rain.

“Are you stupid?” he yelled. “Get inside!”

“Fuck you!” Jane yelled at him, “These are our salad days!”

After the movie, they walked along the highway. When they started walking, the sky was grey, but it got darker and darker as they headed away from the city. They climbed up the rocks along the side of the road, so they were up above the approaching cars.

“Why does it have to be so far?” Helen said. “Oh god, I am going to sleep forever.” 

“We’re almost to my house,” Jane said. “You can stay over, if you want”. 

“No,” Helen said. “No, I just want to go home.” She stopped and put her hands on her knees. 

Jane stopped too, looking back past Helen, where the city stretched out wide and bright. It felt like Christmas lights after looking into the same yellow headlights for half an hour. The city was a mess of streetlights and traffic signals lined up and around the brighter shapes of billboards and office towers. 

“Oh,” Jane said. “I think we’ve been looking the wrong way.”

The secretary’s name was Ruth. She led Jane and Helen to a leather couch, and asked if they wanted juice or coffee. The couch was so comfortable. It was ridiculous. There was no reason for a couch to be that comfortable, especially not in a big office building. Jane ran her fingers up and down the leather stitches.

“Juice?” the secretary said again. 

“I’ll have a juice,” Jane said. “Sure!”

When Ruth was gone, Helen nudged Jane in the ribs and pointed to a spiral glass staircase that went up and out of sight. 

“What do you think is up there?” Helen said. But then Ruth was back with Jane’s juice, and she led them down the hall and into the CEO’s office. He was a tall man with silver hair and a warm smile. He came out from behind the desk when they entered, and he shook Jane’s hand first, and then Helen’s.

“Thank you, Ruth,” he said, and the secretary left. He turned back to the girls. “Now,” he said. “How can I help you? Ruth tells me you’re writing some kind of profile for your school newspaper?” Helen shook her head.

“No,” she said. “We just said that. We wanted to see if it would work. We’ve never met a CEO before.”

“You aren’t students?”

“No, we are,” Jane said. “We just aren’t writing anything for the school newspaper. Do you play chess?”

“I’m sorry, there’s been some kind of miscommunication,” the CEO said. “I’m unfortunately very busy right now.” He pushed a button on his desk, and it buzzed. 

“We just think every CEO should play chess,” Helen said. “It’s weird that you don’t.”

“Are you a very good CEO?” Jane said.

And then Ruth was behind them.

“Ruth, these young ladies were just leaving,” the CEO said, putting on a pair of glasses, and turning away from them. They followed Ruth back out of the office. Jane paused in the doorway.

“I have a book about chess that you could borrow,” she said to the CEO. “Bobby Fischer wrote it. It’s pretty good.”

“Do you play chess?” Helen was asking Ruth in the hallway. “Maybe you should be CEO.”

The next day, Jane called Helen again. It rang twice before Helen picked up.

“Pigeon phone,” Helen said. “Pigeon speaking.”

Back in Halifax, Jane felt she was running out of time. It was just a feeling. Time for what?

She called Helen in the morning, before she left for school, but Helen sounded funny when she answered. Her voice was weird, and Jane wasn’t sure it was her.

“Hello?” Helen said.

“Uh, is pigeon there?” Jane said. 

“What?” Helen said. She laughed and Jane started laughing too.

“I have no idea why I said that,” Jane said. 

“Pigeon!” Helen said. “What!?”