The Fire Escape

New England sunlight spilled through the crooked slats of the blinds and the smudged glass of the window, making irregular shadows on the green carpet. Three empty cans of Barq's cream soda rested undisturbed in an open pizza box, next to a lone, cold slice of Pepperoni Lover's pizza. The cans, crinkled a bit, reflected the sunlight onto the dingy gray wall in two intense spots.

The stillness in the cramped living room was disrupted by the movement of a thin, bare foot--which pushed itself up and out from under the brown flannel blanket that covered what had seemed to be a heap of clothes in one corner. A loud, throaty yawn followed, and then a face appeared from beneath the blanket--gray eyes blinking in the bright light of morning.

"Greels?" The voice was slightly muffled, but familiar, and Michael knew it came from behind the bathroom door. He groaned.

"Greels!"

"Wha--what? What is it?"

"Can I come in there? What are you doing?"

Michael rolled himself into a sitting position and pushed a few strands of stringy brown hair out of his eyes. He looked at the clock. Eleven. He looked at the bathroom door. Suzy. "Yeah. Come on in, Suzy."

The gray door began to open--at first slowly, then more forcefully--until he could discern her familiar shape standing in the doorway, slight and black against the light that poured in through the bathroom window. The window with the fire escape. Michael couldn't remember how many times he'd damned that fire escape. Too many.

Suzy remained in the doorway, squinting around the room. "You haven't cleaned up yet."

"No, Suzy."

"Oh." There was a pause. "Well...are you ready?" She walked forward a few steps until she stood on the green carpet, hugging herself as if she were cold, her head darting this way and that as she studied the room.

"Ready," Michael did not even attempt to conceal his annoyance, "for what?" She looked at him, an expression of innocent surprise on her face.

"You promised to take me! You can't mean you've forgotten. Last night? By the lilac bush?"

"The lilac bush?" Michael crawled onto the couch, dragging the blanket with him. "Last night?" Suzy's arms dropped to her hips and her pretty head fell to one side. Anger flashed in her eyes.

"I knew you'd forget."

"Yeah." But it wasn't that he'd forgotten where he'd promised to take her. As far as he knew, he'd never promised her anything at all. It was that he'd forgotten what a lilac bush was. "Is that the one with the bunchy flowers?"

Suzy wasn't having any. This was evident in the fact that she walked past him to the window and stood there, her back to him, staring at the dusty blinds. Silently. When Suzy was silent, she was raging inside. This Michael was aware of--despite the fact that he had met her only last week. He decided to drop the bunchy flower issue and go straight for the throat.

"I never promised you anything, Suzy."

Silence.

"What are you doing here, anyway? It's only eleven o'clock. Can't a guy get any sleep without people climbing through his windows?"

Suzy kept her back to him. "I came up the fire escape."

"I know." And he did, too. She always came up the fire escape. He had a front door--a perfectly good one. But she always came through that confounded window with the broken latch by way of that confounded fire escape outside his bathroom window. He had often wondered what kind of an idiot would build a fire escape outside a bathroom. A bathroom!

"Greels--"

"It's Michael."

"Your friends call you Greels--"

"You're not my--", there was a pause as Michael exhaled, "Just call me Michael, okay?"

Suzy whirled around and fixed him with a stare that might have fried an egg. "I hate you Michael Greeley! Who do you think you are? Some kind of a god? Sitting here in your apartment as if you hadn't a care in the world! When people make promises, they--", she looked confused, and her lower lip began to tremble, "When you make a promise, you--you--"

Michael watched as she burst into tears and ran for the bathroom, then listened as the window slid open and crashed back down, as the fire escape clanged and rattled under the light weight of her descent. There was no reason why he should have felt guilty about her crying. He knew he hadn't promised her anything--at least not intentionally. She had been reading things into his words since the day he had met her. So he really couldn't understand why he felt that his day had been ruined, and why his morning slice of leftover pizza just didn't taste as good as usual.