Not Cardboard

The ladder is longer than it looked. At the top you hold on with one hand. The roof of the school is below you, and the bees are going in for the night.

The top row is not cardboard. You flick one with a fingernail and it does not sound like paper. Inside each, a small cube hangs by eight strings. They cross in pairs, four X's in the gap between the cubes. You lay a palm on one. It is warm, and the sun is off the wall. None of them has a lamp. The bees go in and out of every cube but these.

Below, the lamps come on, one and then six and then the whole wall, a block of lit windows. Far off, the walls of other schools come on, and so do the cubes on a bus shelter.

The boy calls up to ask who the top row belongs to. You tell him you don't know. He says all right. You watch him write it down.