High Wire by Melanie Jackson

Chapter One
    The thin black line stretched out in front of me.
    I stood on the ledge. The spotlight was fixed on me, hot, white and bright. I couldn’t see the opposite ledge. I couldn’t see the crowd below, watching to see if I’d make it across.
    All I saw was that thin black line going from the spotlight into darkness. The line was all that mattered to me.
    I inhaled deeply. I set my shoulders back. I flexed my arm and chest muscles. I extended my arms sideways to transfer my weight away from my chest, my center of being. The secret to high-wire walking is to place your weight at your sides. It takes a lot of practice and many falls into the safety net to get it right. By nature, people bend their weight forward when they move.
    I stepped on the wire. I placed each leather-slippered foot sideways, penguin style. I curved each sole to fit the line.
    The audience was dead quiet. Without realizing it, people suck in their breath during a risk act. It’s instinctive. They’re afraid of making the slightest noise. Of disturbing the walker.
    They don’t get that nothing else exists when you’re on the line. It’s just you above the world. You make your deal with gravity, and you and the air are one.
    I thought of Philippe Petit, the most famous wire walker in history. New York City, 1974, Petit crossed a steel cable stretched between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, a quarter of a mile up. For forty-five minutes, he walked that wire back and forth eight times .
    As I walked forward, I imagined how Petit must have felt. The sun above, the sky all around. The clean, sweet air. For the minutes it took him to cross, he’d been alone, hassle-free.
    That was the appeal of high wire for me. I liked being on my own.
    A couple of years ago, my folks died in a plane crash. I moved from our ranch in Alberta to Maple Ridge, near Vancouver, to live with my Aunt Ellie. My aunt wasn’t used to having a kid around. She thought I needed fussing over. I knew she meant well, but it got annoying.
    Luckily, she was busy much of the time running her organic-foods store.
    I hung around the community center. I’d always been into fitness, anyway. I liked pressing weights and pacing the treadmill.
    I noticed there was a juggling class. I had nothing better to do, so I signed up.
    The teacher, a retired circus performer named Shecky, grunted at my balance, my self-control. It took me a while to realize grunting was Shecky’s way of showing wild enthusiasm.
    One day he fastened a wire, three feet off the ground, between two metal height-adjustable ladders.
    If you can juggle, you can walk the line. A lot of high-wire walkers start out as jugglers. Philippe Petit did.
    That got my attention. Philippe who?
    Shecky grunted and loaned me a DVD about Petit’s Twin Tower walk. Shecky explained, You’ll see that he uses the same principles of balance on the wire as in juggling: weight to the sides.
    At first, every time I walked the wire, Shecky danced around me, making weird faces and waving his arms. He wanted to see if he could distract me. He even did cartwheels.
    But he never got to me. Huh , he grunted.
    After a while he gave up and just kept raising the wire.
    One day he told me Circus Sorelli, the summer youth troupe, was looking for a new wire walker. I auditioned, and I got the job.
    And now, here I was, seventy-five feet above the ground, on my first night as a Circus Sorelli performer.
    Someday I’d be a quarter mile up, like Philippe Petit.
    Because nothing got to me. I never wavered. I had complete self-control. It was just me and the line.
    The spotlight tracked me across the high wire. I heard people letting their breaths out. They realized I knew what I was doing. They sensed I was comfortable on the wire.
    The spotlight crept to the opposite ledge. Five more steps and I’d be there.
    This was the most dangerous part of a high-wire walk. You see the opposite ledge, your