Positively Beautiful

by Wendy Mills

  “My dad left me a ’65 Mustang,” I say, and leave out the rest.

  “I’d like to see it sometime.” Chaz swings a long arm over the back of the seat to look at me and socks Trina in the face. “Oh, I’m sorry! Are you okay?”

  “Drive, Chaz, drive!” she says, rearranging her glasses, which have been knocked askew.

  That’s why he’s Chaz the Spaz. It’s like he’s got a motor inside him that’s herky-jerky. It goes really fast sometimes, spinning his tall, lanky frame into a frenzy, and then it stutters, leaving his long arms and legs flailing helplessly. He’s really not bad looking, though. He’s got tight golden curls cut close to his scalp, and nice cheekbones (except for the bloom of acne), and wears I’m-a-nerd-and-proud-of-it glasses. He snaps constantly to some unrhythmic song in his head, which makes you want to break his fingers. Trina, of course, thinks this is cute.

  “Seriously, though, I’d love to see it.” Snap, snap, even as he drives through the tree-lined streets. We live inside the “Perimeter,” meaning inside Interstate 285, which encircles metro Atlanta, but our city has a small-town feel, with a little bit of history thrown in. There are a few buildings that hark back to the Civil War, at least the ones that survived Sherman. Of course, a lot of people in Atlanta feel like the Civil War was maybe ten, fifteen years ago, rather than a hundred and fifty.

  “I bet Michael would too,” Chaz continues after a moment. “He’s the car man, really. He restored this baby.” He pats the dashboard affectionately. “I did the research and dug out the specs and all, but he’s the hands-on guy.”

  “Michael … ?” I say.

  “Michael Lundstrom. You know him, right?” he says all casual, but Trina shoots me a triumphant glance. She knows I’ve had a secret crush on Michael Lundstrom since he was my lab partner last year.

  “I know who he is,” I say, making a face back at Trina, who looks like she is about to do an emergency eject out of her seat. Chaz and Michael Lundstrom are friends. Who would have thought?

  “There he is. We’ll ask him,” Chaz continues as he pulls into the driveway of a picture-perfect restored Victorian and Michael comes loping down the walk.

  Trina pumps her fist and mouths “Score!” at me. Now I get all the funny, oh-so-meaningful looks. Chaz must have told her who was coming with us tonight.

  My heart starts doing the funky chicken in my chest. Michael is hands-down my desert-island boy. He could catch fish and make fires and we would have deep, dreamy conversations. Not that I’ve ever had any sort of conversation with him—other than “Hand me that test tube” and “Wow, that polymer putty sure is sticky”—but I am confident our conversations would be deep. And dreamy.

  Michael used to be one of the most popular guys in school, soccer cocaptain, smart, and cute. He and Faith Hiller were our class’s golden couple, and there was never any doubt that the two of them would go off to some great college and reign there as king and queen. But something changed. Last year, he quit the soccer team and he and Faith broke up. Now he sits by himself at lunch and walks the halls alone.

  That hasn’t changed what he looks like—hot—and if anything, his aloneness only makes him more attractive to me. I get walking the halls alone.

  “Hey, Michael,” Chaz says, “this is Trina.”

  He sounds little-boy proud, showing off his shiny new toy to a friend.

  “Hi, Michael, like the T-shirt,” Trina says. “Morbid much?”

  That’s Trina for you.

  Michael settles back into his seat and I can smell him, all musk and patchouli. He sweeps his hair out of his eyes and stares at Trina for a moment. He’s got a little dimple in the cleft of his chin. Perfect. I mean, just perfect.

  He looks down at his shirt, and I follow his gaze. It’s a black T-shirt with a crumbled building outlined in silver with a grim reaper dancing on top. Below it says, GAME OVER. There is nothing else on the shirt to indicate what it means.

  “I drew it,” he says, following the edge of the building with his long, tanned finger.

  “Michael is going to be an architect,” Chaz says. “I mean, he wants to be an architect more than I want to be a videogame designer.” His tone holds a note of awe. Michael’s level of dedication to architecture must be extreme.

  “Wow,” I say, my sole contribution to the conversation so far.

  Michael turns to look at me, his gaze smoky charcoal. He’s all straight dark hair and eyes you could just drown in. It doesn’t hurt that he’s muscular in all the right places and walks like some sort of panther, pacing down the hallway like he owns it. I’ve seen people literally get out of his way, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Hi, Michael.” I hold out my hand. “Remember me? I’m Erin.”

  My hand hangs there like I’m waiting for him to kiss it, and his brow furrows.

  “Got it,” he says, taking my hand and giving it a little shake. “Chemistry last year. You’re pretty smart.”

  I duck my head, feeling the blood burning in my cheeks.

  “She is smart,” Trina gushes. “If only all of us could make straight As.” She sighs dramatically, giving me a you-can-thank-me-later look, and then asks brightly, “How do you and Chaz know each other?”

  “We met a couple summers ago. Michael was … hanging out,” Chaz says, glancing into the rearview mirror at Michael and then back to the road as we pass the entry arch for Agnes Scott College.

  I see Trina narrow her eyes at him, but she doesn’t say anything. For now. Leave Trina alone for five minutes with a wall and she’ll know its life story. It won’t take her long to worm the details out of Chaz.

  “Me and Erin have been friends since we were six,” she says. “Best friends forever, right?” She looks back over her shoulder and grins at me.

  Six years old … me crying on the playground because my dad was dead. I didn’t really understand death yet, just that he wasn’t going to come to see me anymore. He was gone. It was different from the Mommy-and-Daddy-can’t-live-together-anymore gone that happened when I was four, though I wasn’t sure why he couldn’t visit me from heaven. Was heaven farther than Druid Hills, where he moved after the divorce? Anyway, I was pretty sure it was all my fault, this going-away-forever thing. In my six-year-old world, you did things right, and life was good. You did something wrong, and you got punished. I figured I must have done something really bad for my daddy to be taken away. I decided I would be really, really good from then on. Maybe then they wouldn’t take away Mommy too.

  There I was crying on the swing, and Trina came up to me.

  “Why’re you crying?”

  “I’m not crying.”

  “Yes you are.”

  “Are not!”

  I keep crying and she sits beside me, knee to knee.

  “My daddy died,” I say.

  She’s quiet for a while. Then, “Your daddy can play with my turtle Buddy up in heaven, okay? And you can come play with me.”

  And I did. And we’ve been friends ever since.

  “All right!” Trina says, never quiet for more than five seconds. “Can you tell us where we’re going yet?”

  “Uh … no. Don’t you like surprises?” Chaz says, looking over his shoulder at me and Michael, narrowly missing a car full of bless-your-heart grandmas turning into the Edgewood Retail District.

  I get an amused vibe from Michael, though his expression is still dark. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him smile. He’s dark and broody, like a Heathcliff/Rochester character.

  “I love surprises,” Trina says. “One time I even hid cookies from myself so it would be a surprise when I found them.”

  Chaz laughs, a delighted burble. Oh wow, he’s a goner. Good for Trina.

  Chaz and Trina chat as if Michael and I aren’t even there. Michael is staring out the window, and I do the same on my side. He never said much to me as my lab partner either.

  I wonder what Mom is doing, and then I try not to think about my mother because all it does
is make me want to cry. It’s too late, though, because now I’ve got a picture in my head of her in a coffin, looking pale and peaceful, and I can’t get rid of it.

  “What?” Michael says.

  I realize I’m shaking my head back and forth, trying to jar loose the image.

  “Ah … nothing. I’m thinking about—” My mind is not working. I don’t want to tell him about my mom. I don’t want anybody to know about my mom. It’s just too private, too personal to share.

  His eyes are a really dark brown, almost black, like velvet night as he looks at me. I think he can tell my brain-wheels are spinning like crazy but nothing’s coming out. He says, “I was thinking about this thing I heard, about a kid who went crazy and killed a bunch of people? They called him the Question Mark Kid, ’cause he would put down a question mark instead of his name.”

  “Seriously, you got any other sunny thoughts for the day? For kicks let’s talk about killing puppies,” I say without thinking.

  He doesn’t exactly smile, but his lips quirk a little. “No, I guess I just like the idea of not being anybody but a question mark. You get to define who you are, nobody else does.”

  “Of course, if being a question mark means you want to kill a bunch of innocent people, then you have to wonder whether it’s such a good thing. Can I just tell you this conversation got a little creepy?” I ask. “Should I be thinking about contacting the authorities?”

  His lips quirk again and we fall silent. But it’s more comfortable this time, strangely enough.

  We go over I-20 and we’re near EAV, East Atlanta Village. Mom and I used to go to the farmers’ market on Thursdays, but it’s been a while since we’ve gone.

  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!”

  Chapter Six

  “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 wri
ting 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.