Keep Your Feet Dry

About this book

Pittsburgh has more public stairways than any other American city, and seventeen-year-old Mila Dudek has climbed them all her life without counting. Then, on the first day of senior year, the steps below her Polish Hill church start counting themselves inside her head. A limping city engineer and a shabby society that meets above a pierogi stand tell her she is the Tally, the one person each generation who walks the city's hundreds of flights so that its hills keep standing against the old water underneath. Her first rule is the one her mother used to say at every puddle: keep your feet dry. Then, one October dusk, a polite, dripping boy walks out of the fountain at the Point and asks her to stop. How do you keep a city standing when the boy you are falling for is the thing you were chosen to hold back?