You Were Here

by Cori McCarthy

  Connecting with a post-Marrakesh Bishop was turning out to be an art form, and Zach Ferris had totally failed art class. Mr. Caponi said that his self-portrait looked like the Kool-Aid man and wouldn’t buy that that was how Zach saw himself. What? Maybe he did. He certainly felt like a wrecking ball whenever he tried to join one of Natalie and Bishop’s “deep conversations.”

  “They call it ruin porn,” Bishop said. “The fascination people have with urban decay.”

  Zach snorted. “What porn?”

  Bishop turned away, looking buff in the shadowy light. A good-looking guy—that’s what Natalie called him. He’d moved to Athens freshman year, and being the son of OU’s new president as well as built and black, he’d immediately become a hot commodity. Bishop and Zach really had nothing in common except for a love of old-school Nintendo and a general hatred of sports. Natalie called them anti-teammates, which always kinda sounded like a bad thing.

  Maybe that’s why Bishop was leaving Zach. At the end of the summer, he’d be off to school in Michigan—five hours away—instead of staying in Athens and going to OU for free. Natalie’s mom worked for the university too. She could go to OU tuition free as well.

  But no, they had to leave Athens. Had to, they both said.

  Zach walked by a moldy stuffed chair and kicked it. The springs exploded through the polyester.

  “One too many beers?” Bishop asked.

  Zach growled a response. That stupid last beer had burned away, leaving him feeling distinctly unbuzzed, and he already missed the way alcohol blunted things. Natalie had thrown out that What do you want? like he should have his order ready to go. Yeah, I want two all-beef patties, special sauce…a girlfriend who acts like my girlfriend instead of my mom, and oh, how about a best friend who answers my texts?

  Zach did that thing he’d taught himself during the hellish years of his parents’ divorce. He pushed his bad thoughts outward. Animated them. Gave them pixels and sound effects until he was no longer in a dying building but down a pipe into Mario Bros.’ black-and-blue underworld. He threw on his maniac grin like a plumber’s cap and even started singing the theme song. “Do-do, do-do, do-do. Do-do, do-do, do-do…”

  Jaycee and Natalie whipped around in unison to shush him. Bishop didn’t even notice.

  Zach kept on singing quietly, to himself.

  Chapter 5

  Jaycee

  I could feel Natalie at my heels. Somewhere farther back, her boyfriend and his boyfriend were grumping at each other.

  I’d let them in, and I didn’t know why. It was nice, I supposed, not to be alone in the freaky creaky Ridges, but then Mikivikious always popped up at some point. I was never truly alone on this night; my brother’s bizarro childhood best friend made sure of that. Of course, allowing my own ex–best friend to tag along was a whole different level of weird.

  I hated Natalie.

  Well, not really, but I certainly didn’t want to be in the same room with her. Jake had died, and she’d stopped being my friend. Tandem tragedies. It still made no sense. It still burned, and boy, was that getting old. What was the statute of limitations on being angry anyway?

  I focused on the broken building around me. The years had drawn cruel illustrations on the walls, ceiling, and floor, depicting how things really return to dust. I crunched through glass shards and trespasser’s garbage: beer cans and McDonald’s wrappers. Drunken frat boys got in here sometimes, swigging their Natty Light and telling ghost stories. Mik and I had sent a host of them squealing out the window last year simply by banging around in one of the padded-walled rooms. I chuckled at the memory, and Natalie looked at me like I was a Chihuahua humping her ankle.

  On the way to the old stairwell, I was disappointed to find that OU had stripped many of the small patient rooms. I missed the rusted metal bed frames and broken ceiling fans. The cracked sinks and spiderweb-smashed mirrors. But item by item, things were being thrown out. The row of Dumpsters behind The Ridges was always overflowing with the past.

  Which made me think about Jake’s favorite sandwich. I swore that it was peanut butter and jelly and potato chips. Mom said it was peanut butter and banana, and I said that she was thinking of Elvis. Dad asked how I knew a thing about Elvis, since he died about the same time as the tyrannosaurs. And I told him he was stretching to sound cool. What I didn’t say was that they were both wrong, and now they had me wondering if I was wrong as well.

  If I was losing Jake, memory by memory.

  “This feels so spookily lived in, you know? You can really sense the history.” Natalie’s shoulders hunched toward her ears, and she kept combing through her straight dark hair as if she needed to check for creepy crawlies. “What does this place make you think about, Jayce?”

  She had to stop using my old nickname. I was liable to kick her.

  “Peanut butter,” I said.

  She gave me a motherly look. “I wish you’d just be honest with me. You don’t have to protect my feelings.”

  “I wish you’d figure out that I’m always honest,” I muttered. Brazen truth was my biggest problem. When Natalie had asked, “How do you feel?” after Jake died, I said, “I feel like someone used a pumpkin scoop to take out my insides, filled me with gasoline, and set me on fire.” Then she cried and ran home. Later, Dad gave me a lecture on answering Fine to that question because it hinted at optimism and made other people feel better about “our loss.”

  Natalie looked away first. Maybe she was losing me memory by memory. And maybe that was a good thing. I tossed the rest of my thoughts on Natalie Anna Cheng out the window and in the general direction of the crowded Dumpsters.

  After all, today wasn’t about Natalie. It was Jake’s death anniversary, and this was Jake’s favorite place on the planet. The barred windows threw shadow patterns across the stairwell as we climbed. The ironwork of hearts and diamonds cast black lines on each step, and I wondered about the people who built this place. Did they seriously think that pleasing shapes would make the bars seem less like a jail?

  We passed a room stacked high with old computer monitors.

  “Looks like OU is using these rooms for storage. That’s smart,” Natalie said.

  I cursed and hurried up. If OU was messing with the rooms, they might have touched Margaret’s room. They might have touched the windowsill. When I reached the tower room of ward twenty, I didn’t pause in the doorway and greet Margaret like usual. I rushed to the window.

  Natalie waited for the boys to enter, and then I heard Bishop swearing about the body stain, but I was too busy using the moonlight. Searching.

  “Whatcha looking for?” Zach asked, leaning over my shoulder.

  “The Holy Grail. Now move out of my way.”

  He moved back. A little. But I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t find it! I started to breathe hard, and the only thing that kept me from knocking Zach’s balls into his abdomen was that he spoke in a whisper. “What are you looking for, Strangelove?”

  “A footprint,” I said.

  “Was that so hard?” He turned to the half circle of the tower room’s windows and checked each sill. “Here,” he said, pointing.

  I rushed over. The mark was under new layers of dust and more faded than ever, but it was there: Jake’s dirty footprint. I knew it was his because my brother was the only person crazy enough to be barefoot in The Ridges. Plus Jake’s second toe popped up in a way that didn’t leave an impression. My hand hovered over the spot where Jake had been. He was here climbing on the windowsill. He was here. Remembering that was getting kind of fuzzy.

  I breathed in the foul air of this dying place and closed my eyes, not even caring that Zach was staring. I drew my brother in my thoughts, bare feet first. Then hairy legs in shorts and a baggy, ripped T-shirt. But when I got to his face, I couldn’t remember the exact angles.

  I gasped and reached out. I wound a fist up in t
he front of Zach’s shirt. “What are my eyes like?”

  “Greenish?”

  “The shape!” I whispered.

  “I dunno! Eye shaped? Oval?”

  “My brother had the same eyes,” I said, but I didn’t know that for sure all of a sudden. I let go of Zach slowly. Were Jake’s eyes a little different? Did he have my dad’s? My mom’s?

  “What are you looking at?” Natalie asked from the far side of the room, and I shifted my body in front of the footprint, blocking her gaze.

  “We’re checking the lawn for cops,” Zach invented. I squinted at him. Why would he lie for me?

  “You see cops?” Natalie asked in a rush. “Do you think they know we broke in? My parents will murder me if I get arrested.”

  “Oh, untwist your panties. No one is out there,” I said, right before something big and hard and heavy boomed several rooms away.

  Natalie screamed.

  Nope. It was Zach.

  “What was that?” Bishop said.

  “Ghosts!” Zach spun around, searching.

  “A raccoon, most likely,” I said. “There are animals all over this place.” I wasn’t going to tell them about Mikivikious. Odds were that he wouldn’t show himself anyway; Mik wasn’t crazy about people. Which also meant that I needed to get these guys on the way to their next keg stand if I wanted to see him, which I did. Especially after last year.

  I crossed the room and sat in front of the stain. Bishop was staring down at it like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  “That’s a person,” he said. “A real person. At least it was a person.”

  “Bishop, this is Margaret Schilling. Margaret, this is… What’s your real name?”

  “Eric,” he said.

  “Margaret, this is Eric Bishop and Zach Ferris and—”

  “Don’t tell it my name!” Natalie said.

  I eyed Natalie. “Margaret will be less cool if you don’t introduce yourself. Remember, years ago, her spirit followed that freshman home. Made the girl write devil runes all over the walls in her own blood and then kill herself. Or so she said in her suicide letter.”

  Everyone was staring at me now. “Sit.”

  They did.

  “Hello, Margaret,” I said sincerely. A stain in the shape of a small woman lay before me. Her story flooded my thoughts, and I let it spill out. “In 1978, a patient named Margaret Schilling was playing hide-and-seek from the nurses. She hid too far away, in the closed-down ward formerly used for infectious patients, and they forgot to go find her. A month later, a maintenance worker discovered her body, her clothes folded neatly beside her.”

  “Bodies put out some serious chemicals when they decompose. Look at how she burned herself into the concrete.” Bishop’s eyes were wide. “This is real. Not a ghost story or a television show. A real life that left an imprint on its way out of the world. Amazing.”

  “So she died from the cold or dehydration?” Natalie seemed genuinely saddened. “That’s awful. She was probably terrified up here.”

  “Wait, so this ward was used for infectious patients?” Zach asked.

  “Germs don’t stay alive that long. You’re fine,” Natalie said.

  I winced at the word. When Natalie used it, it did not hint at optimism.

  Natalie inched toward me. “What do you see when you look at her, Jaycee?”

  I glanced at each of them. Bishop’s dark-brown eyes reflected the moonlight, and Natalie’s face seemed tanner and slightly more Asian in the dark. Zach was playing with his boy band bangs, unable to look at Margaret.

  “What do I see?” I asked, turning back to the halo effect created by Margaret’s splayed hair. “It was a game. She died because she was playing a game.”

  “Just like Jake,” Natalie said.

  “Right,” I quipped, trying to mask not only my annoyance at Natalie’s psychoanalyst tone but also a flare of grief. My chest grew tight. Why wouldn’t it go away? Why did all this still buckle me to the ground? Tears burned my eyes, and I took my hair out of my ponytail. This never happened when I came here with Mik. Mik didn’t talk or prod. Mik let me be while we walked around Jake’s old haunt, wondering if he was actually haunting it.

  “My dad said that OU will raze the TB ward.” Bishop pointed out the window toward the building on the very top of the hill, by far the spookiest and most unkempt in The Ridges compound. “It’s the only fully abandoned building.”

  “Raze?” I asked, suddenly angry. “When?”

  “End of the summer, I think. My dad said it was going to cost a ton but that leaving the old building there while it was falling in is just asking for lawsuits.”

  “Jake loved the TB ward,” I said. “They haven’t stripped it down like this building.”

  “TB?” Zach asked.

  “Tuberculosis,” Natalie said.

  Bishop squinted at his friend. “TB has been one of the leading terminal diseases in society since the dawn of civilization, Zach.”

  “But it doesn’t exist anymore,” Zach said. “Like leprosy.”

  “It totally exists,” Natalie said. “And so does leprosy. Where do you learn these things?”

  “TB is still the leading cause of death for all people with HIV,” Bishop said. “But don’t worry, Zach. You won’t get it.”

  I was surprised to find Zach looking at me. “What kind of things are in there?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve never been, but I know it’s more dangerous. All the windows and doors are boarded up to keep drunk undergrads out.”

  “So there’s no way in?” Bishop asked.

  I shook my head. “Didn’t say that. Every building in The Ridges compound is connected by basement tunnels. If we get into the basement, we can get into any building.”

  We all shuffled to our feet and stood around the last portrait of Margaret Schilling.

  “I’m in,” Bishop said, and I nodded. Bishop was cool; we’d been partners for two semesters straight in woodshop. He said odd, grandiose things sometimes, but I liked him for it. Plus there was a pretty good chance that Mik would show himself with only Bishop around.

  “I’ll take you two to the exit,” I told Natalie and Zach.

  “Well, hey,” Zach said. “What if I want to come?”

  Natalie looked at him, stunned. “You want to go? What about Kolenski’s three kegs?”

  “Kolenski gets kegs every couple of weeks.” Zach shoved his hands in his pockets. He had sobered up since they’d entered The Ridges, and now he just looked worn down. Even his hair had flattened. I’d written him off years ago, but the way he’d helped me find Jake’s footprint and waylaid Natalie…maybe he wasn’t such a garden-variety “dude.”

  “Who else can say that they did this the night of graduation?” he added with a shrug.

  “So Natalie’s the loose end?” I said. “Big surprise.”

  “Wait a second. It was my idea to follow you in the first place. And I…I want to see it.”

  “Really?” Zach asked her. “Even if it’s dangerous?”

  “I’m going to minor in history. It’ll be like walking around inside of history.”

  I knew Natalie well enough to know that she was deluding herself, but when I opened my mouth to point it out, I saw something instead. Bishop did too.

  “Apple.” He pointed to the ground. “Guys. There’s an apple.”

  A shiny, green Granny Smith apple sat in the doorway. I picked it up.

  “Where the hell did that come from?” Zach asked, fear trilling his voice. “Is someone else here? That wasn’t there a few minutes ago, right? Right?”

  They all looked up and down the hall. Nothing.

  “Maybe Jake’s ghost put it there. Or Margaret’s,” I said. A thump of what could only be described as happiness resounded through my chest. It was foreign and weird,
and yet welcome.

  “You’re smiling,” Natalie said. “Why are you smiling? You never smile.”

  I rubbed the apple on my shirt and took a huge crunching bite. Natalie looked like she was going to pass out. I winked. “This way to the basement.”

  Chapter 6

  Mikivikious

  Chapter 7

  Natalie

  The moment the lights went out, Natalie was body-slammed by two guys twice her size.

  Bishop and Zach clung to her, and she was shocked enough to—briefly—believe in ghosts. But then she remembered that ghosts were stupid. Impractical. What she believed in was people. Cruel people. Dumb people. And whoever turned off the lights was a cruel, dumb, idiotic person. She was definitely going to call his or her parents.

  Then a rolling snip sounded through the dark, and a large flame danced into existence. It illuminated a tall, older boy in a trench coat. He lit a cigarette.

  “You!” Natalie crowed. She pried Bishop off her right side so that she could put her most threatening finger in the intruder’s face. “You!”

  “Is he dead?” Zach asked, trembling. “A dead guy who smokes?”

  “Oh, he’s alive,” Natalie said, her tone scorching. “Aren’t you, Mikivikious?”

  Mik waved his cigarette like a greeting. Jaycee stood there crunching. God, she was still eating that apple she’d found on the floor.

  “Mik-a-whatikous?” Zach asked.

  “He goes by Mik,” Jaycee said. “Told you I didn’t break in here alone, Natalie.”

  Natalie peeled Zach’s arms from her waist. “Mik was Jake’s best buddy when we were kids. He once poured glue in my hair,” she couldn’t stop herself from adding.

  “Elmer’s,” Jaycee threw in. “It washed out, didn’t it? Besides, don’t blame Mik. That was all Jake’s idea. You shouldn’t have tattled on him for the flaming arrow thing.”