Now

Leaves still cling to the wavering oak trees, but they’ll drift down soon in their slow, graceful deaths. I’ll watch them fall with a cup of hot tea in my gloved hands, warmth inside me instead of surrounding me. Then they’ll crunch underneath my shoes, creating a red and golden path to walk in a windy world that will no longer resemble this one.

But not yet.

The dwindling summer sun still beats down hard on us, causing Lark to flick down her visor in order to see the road before us. “Almost there,” she says. For a moment, her soft hazel eyes meet mine in the small strip of mirror and she winks at me before looking back at the road. I feel myself starting to grin and look away, out of the spotted window that’s open by just a crack, releasing a warm breeze that smells like pine trees. Lemon-colored hills sprinkled with greenery whir by us; they have more trees than can be counted. Dry dirt roads fly past us, multitudes of different paths, and the posts of fences melt into one another, uniting every aspect of the world outside of the car. I feel whole in this moment, but I don’t say it out loud. It’s not one of those things you say out loud.

Lark drums her nails against the steering wheel and says, “I still can’t believe we’re finally doing this.”

Leo yawns loudly, lifting his head up from where he rested it on my shoulder. “Yeah, I think that Joan and I first talked about the house back when we were still pissing our pants in school.”

I laugh and look at him. “Oh, come on. You were the pisser, Leo.”

He smiles sleepily and nods, running his hands through his messy blond hair. “Sure, whatever you say, Princess Pissy Pants. But I will never unsee the way you looked when you saw Robin Fisher holding his pet snake in show and tell. The sheer fear in your eyes, and that growing stain on your bedazzled jeans—”

“Okay, okay. One time. But you? You were the King of Pissland. Making puddles on the daily.” I scoff. “I don’t know who you think you are, calling me Princess Pissy Pants.” “Not on the daily, but whatever. You can totally refer to me as royalty, though.” “I’ll be sure to.”

Eve turns her head from the passenger seat to look at us and laugh. “Anyway, the house.” “Ah, yes!” Leo snaps his bony fingers together in recollection. “All the teenagers I knew talked about the house—all my brother’s stupid friends—but they were all too chicken to actually go visit it. So I told Joan that me and her were gonna do it ourselves someday.” “Were your pants wet when you told her?” teases Eve.

He kicks the back of her seat gently in his gray socks, a hole displaying his pale heel. “No. As a matter of fact, they were not. And they won’t be today either. I can’t say the same for you, though.”

Eve’s cheeks go crimson, nearly the same shade as her vibrant red tank top. “I’m not afraid of the house.”

“But you’re scared of the ghosts in it! Ooooh!” Leo wiggles his fingers in the air and makes spooky noises.

Lark gives Eve’s arm a reassuring pat. “It’s a valid fear.”

“It’s not just that.” Eve twists a piece of jet black hair in her fingers and sighs in frustration. “We’re also breaking and entering, you know. You do know that, right, Leo?”

He rolls his eyes and pulls at a pale loose thread of his ripped jeans. “I’m aware. And we aren’t gonna get caught. Nobody ever gets caught.”

Eve turns and squints at him. “Never. Not once, in the history of the world, has anyone ever been caught breaking and entering.”

He drops the thread and looks up at her, deadpan. “Correct.”

“Thank you for the pure facts, Leo,” Lark says as she parks the car on an empty road, right next to an old wooden fence, most of its off-white paint chipped away with time.

“You’re extremely welcome.”

We all get out of the car except Leo, who is busy tying his sneakers. I walk over to his side and open the door for him, bowing ceremoniously. “Your majesty, you may now get the fuck out.”

We throw on backpacks filled with beer cans, snacks, and flashlights and make our way to the tall yellow field that

Fiction London March

Livermore, California, USA

surrounds the abandoned house. I walk behind Lark and watch her caramel hair sway back and forth in its ponytail as she moves, hypnotizing me. Her bare shoulder blades are dark from the sun. An array of tan lines decorate her skin, and I imagine tracing over them with my finger, soft as a whisper. I’m so entranced by her back that I don’t notice when she stops moving, and I bump into her like an idiot. Up close, she smells like a vanilla-flavored heaven.

“Shit, I’m sorry.”

She waves her hand, the black polish on her nails glistening in the sun. “It’s all good, Joan. Guess you’re just super excited to get to the house.” She shoots me a smile, cherry lips turning upwards mischievously. “As am I!” She flings her tattered bag off her shoulder and throws it on a patch of dirt before she hunts through it for a thin blanket. She unfolds it and begins spreading it across the dry grass, and I grab another end to help smooth it out with her. A ladybug lands on my forearm, tickling my skin as it travels. I let it stay.

“Speaking of the house . . . Are we not doing that anymore?” Eve bites her nails with a hopeful voice. She crinkles a bag of chips in her other hand without realizing it. Lark snorts and gestures to the house in the distance. “Do you really think we just drove over an hour to have a picnic near the haunted house we’ve been talking about exploring for years?”

I gently pull cans out of my backpack and take a seat on the blanket, careful not to disturb my tiny red friend. Lark and Leo join me. “Does beer and chips even qualify as a picnic?” I ask. Leo licks salt off his fingers as he says, “What a ridiculous question. Of course they do.” Eve crosses her arms and shuffles her feet around awkwardly. “But it’s gonna get dark if we don’t go soon.”

“It’s almost like that’s the whole point.” Leo wiggles his fingers again and Eve glares at him.

“Ah, come on, Eve. It’ll be okay. Also you better stop frowning because I brought Uno and nobody is allowed to play Uno and frown. It’s highly illegal.”

She holds her frown and asks, “Is it the double-sided version or regular?” “Double-sided.” He pauses and raises an eyebrow. “Does that actually matter to you?” She breaks into a cheeky smile, then takes a seat next to him. “I start.”

We play until the sun goes down and the night air grows cool against our skin and the moon starts glowing big and bright, and I feel so small underneath it, almost microscopic next to the huge, abandoned house that’s nearly swallowed by towering trees and their long black shadows. And I feel small sitting next to Lark, like I could be washed away by the sound of her laugh any minute now.

I can feel how small the moment is, smaller than the ladybug that’s long since flown away. I’ve been alive for eighteen long, full, fleeting years, brimming with all these moments, and this is just another one of them, one of the many. We’ve only been together a few hours today, and we’ll only be together a few more, and then we will part, not knowing when, or if, we will see each other again. Everyone will break apart starting tomorrow, off to new colleges and people and fields, scattering across the world into different pieces. This is just a small moment in all of our vast lives, but it’s so big at the same time, bigger than the moon, bigger than everything we’ve ever touched.

Starlight gleams in Lark’s endless eyes, which are drowsy and smiling. I wonder if she knows that she holds pieces of the galaxy inside of herself. And I figure she should know this, but I cling to an edge of the silky blanket like the words cling to my tongue.

“I want to remember this,” she says, pulling a camera out of her bag, not a phone, but one of those bulky, professional-looking gray ones. She points it at us and Leo throws his arms around me and Eve. We smile for her and she gives us modeling commands, telling us when to tilt our heads or make a certain silly or dramatic face. We don’t listen very well, but she snaps the pictures anyway, and her face is serious yet radiant.

After a few minutes, I can’t take it anymore. “You are way too pretty to be the photographer,” I say. She looks at me in surprise and I quickly add, “But Leo’s not.” “It was nice of you to think of such a pleasant way to ask,” he snaps. He ruffles my hair a little too harshly. “But you’re right.” He takes the camera from Lark and she moves over, right next to me, our knees touching and setting off something inside my chest. I watch her out of the corner of my eye at first, and then fully, both of my eyes on her, drinking her all in. She looks at me too and her smile becomes something else, still a smile, but with another tone to it than for the one she gives to the camera. It’s for me, for right now, this very second. She’s almost too overwhelming to look at, too beautiful, but I keep my eyes on her and she does the same until Leo stands and announces that it’s time, it’s time for us to go, to move on to more moments

that will slip out from under us before we can ever have enough of them, and it takes everything in me to let go of her gaze.

We pull out our flashlights but don’t turn them on yet, as the moon gives us enough light to see the open field. But when we enter the shadows of the trees, we all click ours on. Lark and I are tailing right behind Leo and Eve, and we are almost on the steps when Eve grabs his hand in fear. He shoots me a glance, eyes wide with shock, and a massive grin growing on his face. I shoot him a thumbs up. Lark pokes me in the side and I look at her.

I’m scared, she mouths. But she’s not. She’s smirking and not afraid of anything; she holds her steady hand out and I take it the second she does. She runs her thumb over the back of my hand and I shiver. Everything feels like so much more than it was before she took my hand.

The house is much more ominous in the light of just a flashlight. Ivy hugs the walls, creeping into the house through a shattered window. The paint has been bleached by the sun and the years, once stark white and now graying. The side of the house is missing chunks of panels, some of them crooked and falling, or completely gone. A section of the grimy roof is caving in, and so are some of the steps leading up to the porch, which are home to a bunch of spiders and their intricate webs. Needless to say, the house is a piece of shit. I turn to Lark to see if she’s unsettled now, but she’s just as unafraid as before.

“Cool,” she says, smiling excitedly.

Leo’s face twists in disgust and he shrinks back, away from the house. “Not a fan of the spiders,” he squeaks.

Eve takes a deep breath. “You guys sure you aren’t satisfied by that picnic? It was really nice. I think it was worth the drive. Man, I feel so satisfied by it. Don’t you guys? Huh?”

Lark adjusts her shirt, tucking it into her baggy jeans absentmindedly as she says, “We’ve already come this far.”

Eve nods quickly. “And that’s so far! Far enough! Awesome! Time to go back!” she cheers.

“No, no. We gotta do this,” Leo says. He flashes a smile at me. “For the little pissers.” I speak as seriously as I possibly can. “For the little pissers.” I stick my flashlight in my mouth and fist bump him before setting my hand on the doorknob. “Three.” “Two,” says Lark.

“One!” says Leo.

I rattle the doorknob. “It’s fucking locked.”

They all start laughing, and I do too. “Window it is,” Lark says. She pulls away from me and takes out her old flannel from her bag, carefully setting it over the broken glass at the bottom. She climbs in without another word, disappearing into the blackness of the house. My heart beats rapidly and I follow her just as fast.

I hadn’t ever pictured the inside of the house like this, so human, but it’s filled with furniture. An old green floral sofa with brown mystery stains is in the middle of the room, seat torn open and adorned with cobwebs and eager springs. There’s a table next to it with a maroon lamp covered in the thickest layer of dust I’ve ever seen, and an empty pack of cigarettes lounges beside it. There’s a faint smell of smoke in the house, but it’s overpowered by musty mildew. I shine my flashlight onto the crumbling walls, uncovering framed black and white photos of people who are probably dead now. Family members to whoever lived here, memories of them never taken down. They’re dusty too, but they’re there. Even if they are dead, they’re still not really gone; they’re here, hanging up inside of this house, still able to be new people to someone. These are their eternities. One of the frames has a girl in it, her face serious but with a slight upturn of her lips, just barely there, like she knows that she will not be forgotten until everyone who cares enough to look is gone. And this will not be for a long time.

“Do not tell me that’s a motherfucking cockroach. Do not. Do not.”

“Leo!” I turn to face him and he’s clamming up, his hands trembling against his chest. “Hi,” he says, his voice high like a cartoon character. If he were one, he’d probably jump into the air and then bolt out of the room, leaving a cloud of dust behind him with a quick, goofy noise.

“You okay?” I ask.

He gulps. “I imagined this place lots of times. I imagined ghosts and dead bodies and homeless people and graffiti and used condoms on the ground. But I did not imagine bugs.” “It’s a little strange that you thought you’d see dead bodies before you’d see bugs. Bugs are literally everywhere.”

“And dead bodies can be literally anywhere. But I guess I see your point.” He looks around, tugging on the neck of his t-shirt uncomfortably. “Hey, do you know where Lark went? Is she still an alive body?”

“Lark!” I call out.

“Up here!” she replies, just a voice echoing in the dark. “I went up the stairs!”

I take a step towards the stairs and Leo grabs my arm. “Fuck old stairs,” he says, shaking his head. “That shit’ll fall down right beneath your feet, and then you’re kersplat and then some kids will come break in here to gawk at your bloodstain. Do you really want that to be your legacy, Joan?”

“I can’t let her be a kersplat all alone. True friends go splat together.”

“Well, then I better find Eve.” He lets go of my arm. “Eve! What are you doing?” Her anxious, breathy voice comes from outside. “I could hear you guys talking about the bugs! No thank you!”

Leo approaches the broken window. “Hey, if I’m doing this, you can do this. Please. Come on, hold my hand again before I start crying.”

I find my way to the staircase on a creaky and unsteady path, doing everything I can to avoid the holes in the floorboards. I sneeze again and again, all thanks to the mountains of dust in every room.

“Bless you!” shouts Lark, her voice coming from up high.

I feel hot as I stand before the bottom of the staircase, sweat dampening my tank top. “Leo kinda freaked me out about this,” I say.

“Well, I lived,” she says.

“Yeah, but maybe you were its last functional user.”

“It wasn’t even that functional. It sounded like some of the boards were cracking beneath me.”

“What?”

“I’m just kidding! You’ll be okay, Joan. Just come up here. I want to show you something.”

I scratch my neck for a moment before saying fuck it and grabbing the rails. I fight the urge to walk slowly, instead racing upstairs like my life depends on it. And maybe it does, I don’t know.

At the top of the stairs is a skinny hallway which leads to a gigantic opening in the roof that isn’t supposed to be there; that’s where Lark must be. Someone must’ve smashed it open, maybe with a hatchet. I peek my head through the hole to see Lark sitting on the roof, hugging her knees to her chest. Her flashlight is off and she is fully illuminated by the moon, her whole body caressed by its light.

“Thanks for joining me,” she says, patting the area next to her for me to come sit. I haul myself up onto the roof with my hands, trying not to wince at the sharpness of some of the tiles.

“I’d join you anywhere,” I say, crossing my legs next to her. “Even the roof of a rickety, abandoned haunted house.”

“Honestly, I think it’s only haunted by bugs.”

“That still counts to me. If I see a spider, at any second, I’m liable to jump off.” I look down at the dark world below us and shudder.

“Oh, please. You wouldn’t. Now, Leo, on the other hand…” She trails off and I laugh, and she laughs, and we are happy in this moment, and it’s worth everything in the world. I feel a sharp and unexpected pang of disappointment at the fact that there was once a time in my life when I wanted to die, when I nearly threw away the opportunity to laugh on the roof of an abandoned house with this girl in the moonlight.

“I want to remember this. Forever,” she says. She moves her freckled face closer to mine than it’s ever been before, so close that we’re nearly touching. “I want that too.”

We stay like this, holding one another’s gaze precariously, and it feels similar to when you’re about to jump off of a cliff into the icy blue water below. There is this moment before you jump, this moment in which you recognize that you can either play it safe and say screw this and go get back in your car to start working on trying to feel content with watching life from afar, or you can choose to take your feet off the ground and plummet. How terrifying it is, how rewarding when I finally rest my hand on her cheek. And how it feels like I’m coming up for air when she presses her lips to mine.

I trace her soft jawline with my thumb, and she gently drags her hand from my face to my chest, to my heart. I can feel her smiling. I put my hand to hers, and we feel each other beat, our fingers sensing the pulses of the different rhythms.

I pull away and grin at her. “You have a good heart,” I say.

She smiles still, but her voice has a tinge of sadness. “I’m going to miss yours.”

And I don’t say it, because I don’t need to, but I’ll miss hers too. It makes me sad to think of missing it, though it’s unavoidable, because I will, and it will hurt. I will think of her for many nights to come and wish I could feel it again, and maybe I will, but I probably won’t. She’s going to move away and attract so many people, especially with a smile like that. And I’m going to move away too, onto different houses and people and roofs. But I push all of this aside for now, every bit of it, and I kiss her again.

We pull apart again just in time for Leo’s entrance. “Hey, guess who went crazy enough to climb those godforsaken stairs!