So Yesterday Read Online Free PDF Page A

door,
already up the front-stoop stairs and stabbing buzzer buttons at random. The
intercom popped, and a garbled voice queried her.
    "Delivery,"
she said loudly and clearly.
    The door buzzed. She
opened it, stuck her foot in, and waved at me impatiently to follow.
    I swallowed. This was
what I got for hanging out with an Innovator.
    But as I may have
mentioned or implied, I'm a Trendsetter. Our purpose in life is to be second in
line, to follow. I bounded up the steps and grabbed the outer door just as the
buzz came again and she pushed her way inside.
    ************************************
    At the top of the third
flight of stairs a tousle-haired man was waiting, his head sticking out his
door. He looked at us sleepily.
    "The delivery guy's
right behind us," Jen said, and kept on climbing.
    A half flight up from
the sixth floor we found the door to the roof. A cagelike contraption sealed us
off from the last flight of stairs, the usual precaution to keep people from
getting into the building from topside. Of course, the door could be opened
from the inside in case of fire, but across the push bar a big red sticker was
plastered:
    WARNING: ALARM
WILL SOUND IF OPENED
    I panted, recovering from the
climb, relieved that we couldn't go any j farther. Even if Jen was an
Innovator, breaking into an abandoned building wasn't my idea of cool. Having
thought about it for a minute, I was figuring we should call the police. Mandy must have
been mugged, her phone tossed into the derelict building.
    But where was she?
    "You know the trick to these alarms?" Jen
asked, placing one finger lightly on the push bar.
    My relief faded. "There's a trick?"
    "Yeah." She pushed, and an earsplitting
screech filled the stairway, loud enough to be heard by everyone in Chinatown.
    "They stop on their own eventually!" she
shouted above the alarm, and darted through the door.
    I covered my ears and looked back down the stairs, imagining
annoyed tenants emerging from every door. And then I followed Jen.
    The roof was tar, painted silver to keep the summer
sun from boiling the people who lived on the top floor. We pounded across it,
the alarm still shrieking like a huge and angry teakettle behind us.
    The next building over, the one we were trying to
break into (correction: that Jen was trying to break into—I was just along for the
ride), stood a bit shorter, a drop of six feet or so. She sat on the edge and
jumped, landing on black and ragged tar with a thump that sounded painful.
    I climbed partway down, clinging to the edge, falling
the least possible distance but still managing to twist my ankle.
    I scowled as I limped after Jen. It was all the
client's fault. A hundred pairs of shoes and they'd never sent me a sneaker
optimized for urban burglary.
    The roof door of the abandoned building opened with a
metal screech, hanging on one hinge like a dislocated shoulder. Behind it was a
dark staircase that smelled of dust and old garbage and something as sharp and
nasty as the time my parents' apartment had a dead rat in the wall.
    Jen looked back at me, showing a bit of hesitation for
the first time.
    She opened her mouth to speak, but at that moment the
alarm from the next building stopped, the silence hitting us like a hammer.
    Through the ringing echoes in my ears I thought I
heard an annoyed voice on the roof behind us.
    "Go on," I whispered.
    We went down into the darkness.
    ************************************
    Walking around New York, looking up, I often wonder
what goes on behind all those windows. Especially the empty ones.
    I've been to parties in squats, old buildings taken
over by enterprising homesteaders who do their own repairs. And everyone knows
that crack-heads and homeless people occupy abandoned buildings, inhabiting an
invisible reality behind the blank windows and cinder blocks. There's this
rumor that Chinatown has its own secret government, an ancient system of laws
and obligations brought over from the old country, which I'd always