"But no! I have to be here asking myself why a smart boy like you was hanging from a church steeple! Jesus God! What were you thinking?" Julie tried to calm herself. She glanced up at the steeple then back at the tear-stained, rope-burned, bruised, angry boy before her. In her admittedly grumpy opinion, he was being tended to much more carefully than he deserved.

"It did not work! It did not work!" Blaise waved a plastic ruler at her. Then he threw it on the ground and stamped on it.

"Hey! Stop that!"

"It didn't work!" Blaise shouted. Julie pulled him away from the object of his tantrum. The rest of his comments were muffled and in French; a very foul French one might not expect to hear coming from the mouth of an eleven year old. She wrapped him up in a hug.

To a casual observer it might appear that Julie was trying to suffocate the boy.

"Should I call a child protection officer?" a firefighter asked as Blaise screamed, muffled by Julie's hold on him.

Julie turned with a slow, reptilian grace that wiped the smile from the firefighter's face.

"That will be all, Gus," Julie chirped with her best brutal, violence-promising smile.

"You know…" Chief Matheny scratched his head then replaced his helmet as he looked up at the steeple then around the base. "I've seen kids do the oddest things and get themselves into situations the experts can't write about in textbooks because no one would believe the book. Gus, look around for any loose equipment."

"I'm sorry you had to go to all of this trouble, Chief Matheny." Julie sighed as Blaise Pascal, the world's greatest mathematician, sobbed and cursed in her arms.

"This beats all. Wiley Coyote couldn't have done better with two credit cards and a direct number to ACME. What's worse, the darn thing almost worked. The crossbow worked, the block and tackle worked, even the attempt to counterbalance his weight with that bag of rocks worked. The harness slipping up around his neck was a mistake anyone could have made. That definitely didn't work."