Where I End and You Begin (15 page)

We move carefully, and I’m glad Daniel thought to bring masks, because all I can think about his how many toxic chemicals are floating in the air. Some things break down into their components, harmless, but some things get more poisonous over time.

Like memories,
I think. Some of them fade away into vague impressions, but some gather emotions around them, warping the brain, spreading cancer across the soul. Being in a high school again gives me the creeps, and stirs my own memories.

I don’t want to think about high school. I remember waking up in the mornings, telling myself to get out of bed, over and over again until I did. I did it because I knew I had to get out of my mother’s house, and graduating from high school and going to college was the best way to do it.

I remember walking down halls like this one, sitting in cold classrooms and forcing myself to pay attention when all I wanted to do was sleep. My counselor and therapists said it was a symptom of depression. My mother said it was the demon of laziness.

I poke through debris, shoving away the memories, but I feel them at the edges, pressing in as we walk the dark maze of hallways, know they are waiting at the center of the labyrinth, a pitiable monster.

“What was high school like for you?” I blurt. I can’t stand the quiet any more, the rustling of detritus under our feet. It sounds too much like whispers.

“Me?” Daniel says. His voice is loud in the hallway. He’s ahead of me, lighting the way. “Pretty boring. Went to an all-boy’s Catholic school.”

I’m glad he’s facing away from me so he can’t see the face I make. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. It was a really old building, too. You know, built in the mid-1800s. That place was always cold in the winter.”

“Did you get your ass beat when you stepped out of line?” I ask.

He laughs at that. “What makes you think I’d step out of line?” he says.

I have to laugh, too. The idea of Daniel doing something deserving of corporal punishment is pretty silly.

“Besides,” he says, “there were no beatings at our school. It was Jesuit-run. They’re pretty forward thinking.”

Then we turn the corner and the space around us opens up.

“Whoah,” Daniel says.

I have to agree. In front of us is an open area in the middle of the school, two storied, and in the middle is a cafeteria, butted up against a stage. The kind of place they liked to call the “cafetorium” when I was in elementary school. What it really means is the district is too small or too poor to build a proper auditorium. Whenever something happened on a stage we’d all have to sit at those terrible long-benched lunch tables, our backs hurting while we watched some dumb evangelist group of strongmen hopped up on steroids rip phone books in half and tell us about the dangers of drugs.

In the dim light of the torch, however, the place is eerie. The curtains had been closed on the stage, presumably at the same time the school was, but now they’re starting to fray and unravel, come apart. One of them is only half connected to the rod high above, revealing a blackness behind it.

I stare at that black hole in the stage. A dark place. What sort of things were left behind in it? I don’t want to know, and yet it draws me in.

Daniel seems as fascinated by the stage as I am. Together we move forward, edging around bits of fallen ceiling and some discarded tables and into the cafeteria.

I look up, but it’s dark in here. No one thought to put skylights in this dismal cave of a school. I suppose that’s for the best, though, since it means the place hasn’t been flooded and completely ruined yet.

Our footsteps echo.

We walk to the stage and Daniel hands the torch to me.

“Could you hold this, please?” he asks me.

I nod and take it, and he snaps off a few pictures of the ruined stage. Then, without a word, he puts his hands up on the side of the stage and hauls himself over the edge.

“Daniel!” I’m shocked and irritated. “That could be rotten, you dumbass. What would you do if you fell through the fucking floorboards?”

“Whine at you for help?” he says.

“I wouldn’t,” I say. “I’d just tell you that you deserved it.”

“You’re not a very sympathetic assistant.”

I raise my brows. “You paying me?”

“In life experience.” He holds his hand out. “The bat?”

I pass the bat to him.

“You coming up?”

“Hell no,” I say. There’s something about the stage that gives me the willies more so than any other place we’ve been.

There are a lot of stories about theater ghosts. Actors and actresses are a dramatic bunch, and you’re not supposed to recite Macbeth unless it’s during a rehearsal, and at my high school I remember they had a tradition called the Ghost Hammer. Before a show started, some actor or actress or techie—usually one of the graduating seniors or the lead in the show—would take a hammer and smash it against the stage three times to banish the ghosts of shows past.

I can believe the ghosts of old shows linger. The darkness beyond the curtain seems to breathe, a sinister presence, waiting for us to make the mistake of believing everything is fine.

And suddenly I think: nothing is fine. It’s never fine. It’s always an illusion. Happy smiles, assurances, jokes, laughter—there’s no way to tell if it is real, or a mask. There’s always something terrible hurtling toward you, something that will destroy all that you love and alter your life forever. You may not know it, but it’s coming and there’s nothing you can do. No amount of hammering, or holy water, or screaming will change that.

You can scream
no,
and
stop,
and
please,
you can reach out and try to bend fate to your will with your own two hands, but it has already been decided.

In every moment, a thousand accidents wait to happen, already in place and poised to strike, and we don’t even know it.

“Don’t go back there,” I blurt.

Daniel, who had been testing the stage with the bat to see if it would hold his weight, turns and looks at me in surprise. “What?” he says.

“Don’t go behind the curtain,” I tell him. “Please.”

He frowns. “Are you sure? I bet there’d be something really cool back there like an old set or something—”

By the pricking of my thumbs,
I think,
something wicked this way comes...

Does thinking Macbeth do it?

“Please,” I say. “I don’t like it. It could be rotten all the way through, and I’m not strong enough to pull you out of a hole in a wooden stage.”

He looks at me. “You want to try going upstairs, then?”

And suddenly I don’t. I don’t like this place. I don’t like knowing so many people probably spent some of the most miserable years of their lives here. Someone was always struggling, someone was always getting shoved into a locker, someone was always ostracized. This one came from a broken home, and that one was raped by her brother. This one had no money, and that one couldn’t stop crawling into a pipe. Misery and boredom permeate the walls, a ghost of all the teenage angst left behind, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.

I wrap my arms around myself. I don’t want to be a killjoy. “Yeah, let’s go upstairs,” I say.

But my suggestions that the stage might be unstable have left their impression on Daniel. He gets off the stage and we keep exploring the lower level of the school.

It’s weird, but you can usually tell if someone knows about ghosts or not by how little they think about death, and how close we are to it at all times. Just walking in this unstable building is now giving me the willies, making my hands sweat and my heart beat faster. At any point, any at all, the roof could come crumbling down on us, and we probably wouldn’t die right away, we’d just be broken, speared through or with our spines crushed, bleeding out into the dust—

“The light isn’t good in here,” Daniel says after another thirty minutes. We’re in the old library, and it’s nothing special—lots of empty shelves shoved off to the side and wide open space. But it’s pitch black wherever we go, because the school was built back when windowless prisons were acceptable places for school kids to go. “The torch is good, but there’s only so much I can do with that kind of light. I’d have to drag a whole bunch of other stuff in here to get good photos.”

He sighs and turns to me. “Is it okay with you if we leave?”

I try not to nod vigorously, giving my anxiety away, but Daniel doesn’t seem to notice. He just sighs and turns back, and the journey back to the gym seems infinitely shorter than the journey away from the light of the outside world.

But when we reach the gym, with its windows letting cool light in, Daniel looks over to the bathrooms by the office. “Do you think there’s windows in there?” he wonders.

I shake my head. “I have no idea,” I say.

“Want to find out?”

My feet itch, my brain is crawling, but I nod. There’s no reason not to look. I doubt there are windows, and when there aren’t we can get out of here.

We walk over and open the women’s door. The harsh light of the fluorescent torch floods the insides, and shadows flee.

It’s a locker room, except all the lockers are gone, leaving a huge, wide open space in the middle of a tiled room. On one side there are toilets, at the end stand the showers, and on the other side is a line of sinks. A huge mirror stretches over the sinks, cracked in places, and some previous explorer has spray painted over the glass, thick black strokes doubling in the reflection.

I look back at Daniel, and he’s staring at the strokes. Without a word he pushes past me and wanders toward it, holding the torch high over his head so that it fills the room with diffuse illumination. His footsteps crackle on the floor.

I don’t want to be alone, so I follow him, staring at the spray painted mirror. The strokes resolve into words as I move into the center of the room.

The lonely ghosts of summer sink down to the darkness underground.

My heart grows heavy and I walk backwards.

I think of Persephone, trapped in the underworld, and I suddenly want to get out of there, but I’m too scared to tell Daniel. I see his face in the mirror, slashed with black as he frowns at the words.

“What do you think this means?” he asks.

I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

He keeps staring, then blinks. “Think a ghost left this behind?” he says, his mouth quirking into a little smile.

My skin is cold despite the layers of cloth swaddling me. “I know a ghost story about mirrors,” I say.

“Tell me.”

I lick my lips. “There was this girl and she lived with her family in a little two bedroom, one bathroom house. Her dad had to get up early to go to work so she never saw him in the mornings, but they had this little ritual where they’d write messages to each other on the bathroom mirror so they could see it when it fogged up after their showers.

“Well, her dad was in the reserves, and when the Iraq war started he got called up to go. He’s gone for months and months, and one morning she takes her shower and she steps out of the tub and on the mirror, in her dad’s handwriting, are the words,
‘I’m sorry.’“

I swallow. “Then her mom comes into the bathroom, and she’s been crying, and she tells her that her father blew his brains out in his bunk, over in Iraq.”

My words fall to the ground between us. Daniel’s warm, brown eyes are watching me closely, and I meet them.

“Where’d you hear that one?”

“I don’t remember.” A lie.

“You know a lot of depressing stories,” he tells me.

I smile at him. “It comes with the territory when you read ghost stories. But I think they’re kind of comforting.”

“Comforting?”

“Way more comforting than thinking your loved ones are in heaven or hell.”

He blinks. “Why?”

“Because it’s proof. Proof that they still exist.” I shrug. “Every church I ever went to was convinced that suicides go to hell. I like thinking they become ghosts instead, since that’s better than burning forever in a fiery lake of torment and getting sodomized by red-hot pokers. Ghost animals, too. All those stupid churches said animals don’t have souls. I don’t think that’s true.”

My eyes are still on his, and I have to wonder about him. “What about you?”

He holds my gaze. “What about me?”

“Do you think suicides and animals are doomed? That they can never get into heaven?”

A muscle leaps in his jaw, far easier to see in the harsh light of the torch. “I don’t know,” he says at last.

“They didn’t teach you that stuff in priest school?”

“I’m not going to priest school right now,” he tells me, and then he turns away. “Come here and hold the torch. I want to try to get a picture of this.”

I cross the floor and take the torch from his hand. It’s warm from the electricity running through it, and I hold it as high as I can, but I’m a lot shorter than Daniel. In the end we’re both standing on toilets across from the mirror, straddling the bowls, our feet bracing us, keeping us from falling into the dirty porcelain depths. There’s no water in them, but dust has gathered inside, leaving streaks of grime along the once-white surfaces.

Daniel snaps his pictures until my arms ache, and finally he lowers the camera.

“Got it,” he says.

“I’m going to want prints of these at some point,” I tell him.

He smiles. “No problem, will do.” He steps down from the toilet, then comes over to me. First he takes the battery, then puts out his hand. I realize that he is offering to help me down.

I put my hand in his. It’s warm and dry. Soft. Gentle. But strong. I put my weight on it, and he lowers me steadily to the floor, smooth and without faltering.

I alight on the floor next to him, the light falling to my side. He’s standing inches from me and I can smell him, a thick, sweet, spicy smell, like autumn. I don’t dare look into his face.

Stop thinking these things. You’re safe with him.

But do I want to be?

He clears his throat and steps away, and I hand him the light. Together we exit and head back into the gym, and from there we return to the world.

It’s so strange to walk down the streets that are still being used. My mind is not prepared for the shift in the world required, not ready to deal with the suddenness of the air, the immediate pressure of living human beings going about their lives. The first person I see as we walk toward Daniel’s car I have to look twice at, wondering if my eyes are playing tricks on me.