Episode II
5.
As my body hurtled toward the other building, I felt like a bug flying toward an oncoming windshield. Given the size and density of the two objects (my skinny body and the brick building), there could only be one outcome when the two collided. A greasy, wet stain on the side of the building. A stain that once was named Max.
Happy birthday to me.
But as I was in mid-leap, on my way to safety or a fifty-foot drop, I pulled up some more words that Jesse had said when he’d broken the world record in the long jump. “I decided I wasn't going to come down,” he’d said. “I was going to fly. I was going to stay up in the air forever.”
“Fly,” I coached myself. “Fly, dude!”
Again, I felt the tingly rush of adrenalin tightening my skin and enflaming my blood. Would it be enough?
Jesse Owens, who on a single day in 1935 set three world records and tied a forth, came through for me. Instead of smashing into the side of the building and falling fifty feet to a painful and messy death, my feet cleared the edge of the roof with a foot to spare. When my Converses hit the roof, I skidded a few feet, then tumbled to the ground and rolled for a few more feet. When I got up, I just kept running for the door that led off the roof and away to safety.
I opened the door and, shielding my body behind it, looked back at the woman chasing me. She stood at the edge of the roof, eyeing the distance as if considering making the jump herself.
Don’tdoit, don’tdoit, don’tdoit, I chanted in my head.
“Hey!” a man’s voice shouted from somewhere on the ground. “What’s going on up there? You okay, lady?”
She scowled at me with anger and frustration, a combination I’ve seen many times before from my teachers and guidance counselors. Then she turned and started walking away.
“Lady!” the man called again from below. “You need help?”
She turned and looked at me, a slight smile creeping onto her lips. “I’m good,” she called to him. “Thanks.”
That smile freaked me out a little.
I looked at the tattoo on my arm. It was starting to fade away as the black sands had nearly all drained to the bottom. The butterfly was lazily flapping, the tortoise was just barely sleepwalking now. I only had about twenty minutes of Jesse Owens’ athletic ability left. I decided to use it to run to the only person in the world powerful enough to protect me: my crazy, one-eyed grandmother.