Positively Beautiful (5 page)

Chaz pulls into a parking lot beside a church. This isn't what I was expecting. EAV is known for its funky bars, and I
was
wondering if Chaz knew a way to sneak us in. Of course, Chaz doesn't seem like the barhopping, fake-ID kind of guy, but you never know.

Church, though?

The sun is setting, shadows thickening the air, and the parking lot is empty. Across the street is an abandoned old school, brick and square. Someone has spray-painted a very lifelike grim reaper beside the front steps.

It takes me a minute, then I get it.

“Your shirt,” I say to Michael. “That's the building on your shirt!”

“I started this group,” Chaz says, after Trina glances at Michael's shirt and makes the connection to the decrepit building across the street. “We call ourselves, uh, the Excaps, Explorers of Creepy-Ass Places. We're urban explorers, and there's a bunch of people doing this all over the country. So, the Excaps, we basically explore abandoned landmarks around Atlanta and take pictures. Extreme pictures. Ones that most people would never see if we didn't do it. It's exciting. Sometimes we even have to run from the police.” He's all proud. Big, bad Chaz, the rebel. “I thought you'd like to see one of our favorite buildings.”

I look over at Michael, but he doesn't seem like he's paying any attention.

Chaz sees me, though. “Michael isn't really part of Excaps, he just likes …” He trails off.

Michael looks around, an amused tilt to his mouth. “Michael likes creepy-ass places,” he says.

Chaz looks at Trina, and you can tell it's important she understand. She does, of course. It's right up her alley.

“Awesome,” she breathes. “How cool is that? Are we going in?”

“I thought we would. Do you want to? Really?”

“Yes!”

I knew she would say that. And, oh no, what do I do? I don't want to go inside the building. It's boarded up, it looks dark and dangerous, and it's
got
to be illegal. It's not my thing,
at all.
But they are getting out, and how big a dweeb will I look like if I say I want to stay in the car?

So I get out and hug my elbows in the brisk breeze, wishing I'd thought to bring a jacket. I trail behind as they wait for a couple of cars to pass, and then cross the road to the sidewalk in front of the school. It looks old, a sturdy brick building sheltered by trees, with a few rickety steps leading up to the front doors. There are a ton of boarded-up windows, tall and narrow, and white skinny letters spell out OHN B. GORDON SCHOOL above the small triangular overhang.

Dusk throws thick, charcoal shadows into the secret places of the building. I shiver. I don't like this.

Chaz, however, is like a kid in a candy store. “Come around here, that's where we get in.”

He leads us around the building to a door and pushes it open with a slam of his palm. Even though I can still hear cars passing out front, somehow the air feels quiet here, muffled. There's a feeling of stagnant time, a bubble of the past here in the present.

I hate horror movies. They always end badly. You're always
yelling at the screen,
No, don't go in there!
Did no one else hear the little voices screaming,
No, you idiot, don't go inside!

Apparently not. One by one, they slip through the door, right past the NO TRESPASSING sign, as if it's written in Sanskrit. I stare at it and Michael looks back at me.

“If you don't look at it,” he says, “it's not really there.”

“What, is it like one of those tree-falls-in-the-forest kind of things?” But I squeeze through after them anyway.

Inside, we're in a hallway, tall and narrow with crumbled plaster and trash littered across the floor. At some point, kids were running down this hall to make the bell. Now it looks like a bomb went off. Above us, ceiling tiles hang precariously from thin strands of metal. Rectangles of dim light spill through the doorless openings onto the floor, a parade of sunshine boxes marching down the hallway.

“This is the John B. Gordon School,” Chaz says. “It was built in 1909, and they used it all the way up until the nineties. Then they closed the doors.”

“It looks like they up and walked away,” I say. “Why did they leave all this stuff?” Schoolbooks lie on the floor, and a bulletin board on the wall advertises a Christmas program dated 1995.

“Seems strange, huh?” Chaz busts out three flashlights from his backpack and hands them to us. He pulls a strap over his head that holds a light like a big Cyclops eye in the middle of his forehead. I stifle the urge to giggle, because he looks real serious about the whole thing.

“Just in case,” Chaz says, and I don't feel like giggling anymore. I clutch my flashlight so hard my fingers hurt.

He pulls out a camera. I wish I'd brought mine. I always feel safer with a camera between me and everything else. I dig out my phone; though the camera on it pretty much blows, at least it's something.

“All we take away is pictures,” Chaz says solemnly. “No souvenirs. Don't change anything. The point is to leave this place exactly the same for the next people to find.”

As graffiti covers the walls (are those
gang signs
? Really?), and the place frankly looks like a demolition crew already went through it once, it seems a little pointless, but Trina and I nod. Michael looks bored.

Chaz grabs Trina's hand, and they disappear into one of the open doorways. Michael looks at me and shrugs. He starts off down the hall and I follow.

It's hard to see anything to like about this place. It's decrepit and abandoned, full of dust and broken pipes and rusted fluorescent lights drooping toward the floor. The paint is flaking off the walls, and the floor is littered with pieces of ceiling tiles and garbage. A doll rests facedown on the bottom step of the stairs leading to the second floor. What little girl left that and never came back? Ivy drapes over the urinals in the boys' bathroom, and I shudder because somehow the green vines seem greedy and grasping.

Michael and I are quiet as we move through the echoing hallways. In one classroom, a neat row of small coat hooks line the wall, and a name tag next to one reads DERRICK. It seems strange to think that twenty years ago a kid named Derrick hung his coat in this room. In one room the chalkboard is a pristine green, as if just waiting for a teacher to pick up a
piece of chalk and start writing equations. Colorful squares and triangles line the walls of the stairwells, and a collage of animal pictures hangs beside a tree growing in the middle of a classroom.

Weeds rustle in the auditorium and glass crackles under our feet. One end of the big room is open to the sky, and heavy lights dangle from wires, looking like some sort of bizarre wind chimes swaying in the breeze.

“You don't take pictures?” I ask Michael after a while. “I thought that was the whole point of this.”

“Not for me,” he says and starts walking again without saying
what
the point is for him.

We end up in a room with a few rusted desks and a humongous teddy bear in the corner, covered with plaster dust and slowly moldering. Fading light the color of dried blood pours thickly through a window with no glass, and the wind whistles and moans through the cracks of the building. It's getting darker and I flick the flashlight on and off again. Just to make sure it works.

Michael sits with his back against a wall and studies the bear. I stand awkwardly. No way am I sitting on the floor.

Michael hasn't spoken much and basically, I suck at talking to guys. I don't have a lot of experience and it always shows.

I cough a little dust out of my throat. “Uh … what's with the teddy bear?”

Michael shrugs. “No clue. It's been here ever since we started coming.”

“Oh.”

Think, Erin, think!
“So, you want to be an architect, huh?”

He doesn't say anything for a minute. Then, “Yeah. My dad was an architect.”

I, of all people, should have realized what that meant. Instead, I go, “What does he do now?”

“He's dead,” he says flatly.

“Oh.” I back up until I hit one of the little rusted desks. I lean against it, a balancing act between my butt and the desk to keep us both from crashing to the floor. “Mine too.”

He looks at me, the first time I think he really has the whole night. It's like I was some sort of paper doll to him before and now all of a sudden I became a real person.

“When did he die?” he asks after a moment.

“When I was six. I don't remember him much. He flew fighter jets, and then was some sort of National Aerobatic Champion. He liked country-western music and sappy poetry, and he died in a motorcycle accident.” It was a quick sum-up of a man's whole life. I didn't know much more, not really, just vague, warm memories. What if one day I had to sum up Mom's life?

She was a good mom and she liked helping the world in her lab. The thing she loved best was to sit at home with me and watch corny movies. She died of breast cancer.

I take off my glasses, fighting back the tears.

“Hey,” he says from across the room, “you should do that more often.”

“What?” I turn to look at him.

“Take off your glasses. You have nice eyes. I noticed them … before. Blue, but they kind of have a purple tint to them, like grapes.”

“My eyes look like grapes?” But what I was thinking was,
You noticed me before? When?

He gets up and comes toward me, but I'll never know what he was going to do or say because we hear Chaz's voice and running footsteps in the hall.

“Guys,” Chaz says. “There's someone else here. Probably bums. I think we should go.”

Michael looks around. “I'll go check it out.”

We wait five minutes and then Michael is back, moving quicker. “They're here for the night. We need to go. One of them is talking to his hand.”

We leave quickly, back the way we came into the chilly night air. I notice that Michael isn't wearing his jacket anymore, and I wonder about that.

Voices, the smell of smoke, and crazy laughter follow us out.

Mom looks up from
Sixteen Candles
as Trina and I come in.

“How was it, girls?”

“Chaz brought
Michael Lundstrom
, Ms. B. Hottest guy in school? And I think he likes Erin! At least he talked to her more than he talked to anybody this year.” Trina flops down at my mom's feet. I sit on the couch beside her and Mom pats my knee.

“Why wouldn't he like Erin?” Mom's sweet but she's delusional.

“Chaz definitely likes Trina,” I say. “They were holding hands.”

Trina blushes, which is rare. She jumps to her feet. “I am
hungry.
Feed me, Erin, or lose me forever!” She drags me to my feet and into the kitchen.

“Wait a minute, didn't they take you to dinner while you were out?” Mom calls after us, but we let the door swing shut behind us like we didn't hear her.

“I got the scoop,” Trina whispers as I pull out the leftover spaghetti and pop it into the microwave.

“What?”

Trina sits cross-legged on a kitchen chair. “Michael. Didn't you wonder about his story?”

I shrug. I figured he had a story, just like the rest of us.

“His dad
killed
himself, the summer before our sophomore year. That's why he changed so much. Chaz met him on an urban explorer website, and when they met up at one of their abandoned buildings, Chaz said he almost fell out when he saw it was Michael. But Michael was cool, didn't make a big deal about being popular, not that he is anymore. Chaz said when they met, Michael talked about death a lot. I guess he's better now but he's still all …
melancholy
.”

“That's terrible,” I say. “I guess some people's stories are sadder than others.”

“But they all end the same, right?” Trina jumps up to get the spaghetti out of the microwave, then turns back to look at me, her face stricken. “Aw, man, Erin, I'm sorry. I didn't mean …” She trails off while I keep my face blank.

Yes, the stories all end the same way. Every one of them, but some sooner than others, like a good book where someone has torn out the last pages.

Monday morning, Dr. Chu is drawing with a felt-tip marker on my mom's breast.

“Erin, you're welcome to go on out to the waiting room if
you want.” Mom looks scared, but like she is trying real hard to
keep it together for the kid
.

I smile, and try to look like it is the most natural thing in the world for my mom to be sitting on the edge of the bed with her hospital gown around her waist and a nurse and doctor practically drawing smiley faces on her boob.

“Wouldn't want to take the wrong one off,” the nurse quips and I debate smacking her.

“We wouldn't want that,” I say. “Maybe you should write ‘excess baggage' across the one you're taking off.”