The tapping at the window excited Cooper so much that he let loose his forkful of bacon. He wiped his mouth on his bare arm, checked his appearance in the microwave, and swiveled out of the room. The tap could only mean his one true calling in life. Nobody else tapped for him.

  The attic girl tapped lightly at the fire escape. Cooper scurried over, springs in his steps. Even after all their flirting, he hadn’t found out her name. He had been too shy to ask, as if they could make a couple.

  “Sorry to bother you,” she smiled sweetly, “I was on my way to work when I couldn’t find my keys again. Maybe I locked them inside, so…”

  “No problem! I can break into your apartment again,” Cooper agreed, before she could ask.

  “Let’s go!” he sprang up the skeleton staircase.

  The two figures, the young man and young woman who couldn’t make a couple unless the city approved their cohabitation petition, spiraled up the fire escape seven levels above the street. The fa?ade fell ten stories, plus the attic capping the top. Cooper proposed to reach the sloping tile roof via the fire escape, then scrabble up the tiles to the slanted skylight, from which he could access the apartment.

  The girl had popped open her skylight to mitigate the weather meltdown. As hot as it was on his own floor, the air festered hotter on hers. That troubled him. Cooper believed in delivering her from her lofty confines.

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  He shook the notion out of his head as he wormed slowly up the roof. Wary as he was of flouting the force of the law, he wasn’t so scared of heights. Cooper wriggled towards the target, maintaining friction against the slope. A flip of the plexiglas and he rolled smoothly inside.

  “Wait!” the girl called behind him.

  “You don’t know where my keys are. They’re in…a sort of…secret place,” she hesitated, then made up her mind.

  “They’re in the refrigerator, the egg compartment in the door, in an egg cup between the eggs. Could you grab them and pass them through the window?” she pointed out the fire escape escape hatch.

  “Sure!” Cooper cranked the skylight closed.

  The girl held the terminal ladder, enthralled by his stellar success. He fantasized that she liked him a little. If so, he might make her like him still more. He pictured a ball rolling up a hill. He had to push it up, but once it hit the top, it rolled down by itself. Rolling into a trap, it might never roll out again.

  Without exception, a lockout meant an eviction from a tenement unit. Cooper zoomed to the kitchen, fridge, egg cup and back, keys in hand. He zipped in a snap to the hatch, desperate to save her for himself.

  He tossed the keys high into the air, “Got them!” he smiled gleefully.

  “Great!” the girl clapped. She clapped her little heart out.

  The latch turned excessively sticky all of a sudden. Lacking her expert touch, he couldn’t force it open. It should take her some time to skip down the fire escape and climb up the interior stairs. In that interim then, he might believe in becoming her very best and most special friend of all.

  Given permission, breaking and entering was punishable by corrective labor, but he did it as her hero. The surround sound egged him on. He didn’t presume he didn’t possess complete command and total control.