Chapter 3: The End of June

Before the End of August

The Friday after Zachary’s party, Devi took it upon herself to make sure that Box’s prediction didn’t come true, that Zachary’s party wasn’t the last time they ever saw each other.

She started a text chain: “Frisbee on Friday night under the lights at Calvary Field. 9 p.m. To quote Box, maybe for the last time.” 

Quoting Box was a brilliant move, and we would all miss Devi at our respective schools the next fall, knowing that as we fumbled our way through freshmen friendships, she was out there at her own school in Maine, deftly inviting everyone she knew to something unexpected, quoting the life of the party so he would come, making it all happen as the sun was setting so the opportunity to see each other in flattering evening light was unmissable. 

Of the eight people on the text chain, seven came, and four others found out and showed up too. By the end of the summer, the chain had evolved to include the eleven of us who played that first night, plus Jenna, who couldn’t come. 

“You are taking on so many extra shifts,” Lydia complained as Jenna dropped us off that night. “And you’re the best frisbee thrower among us and I wanted you on my team.” She dragged out the word team as she held Jenna’s wrist and flopped it in the air between the steering wheel and the passenger seat.

Jenna laughed and waggled her wrist around in Lydia’s grasp with a sing-song swing. “Hey, if you pay me as much as I make in one shift at the store, maybe I could come.” 

“What do you even need more money for?” Lydia pouted. “You got like a million graduation cards and gifts. You don’t need whatever else they’re giving you for a few extra hours at the store.”

Jenna pulled her hand back and put it on the steering wheel. “Come on, you know I have to work. This is hard enough.” 

I sensed Lydia bristling, Jenna pulling away. I jumped in. “I can be on your team, Lydia, but I’m pretty sure I would need to pay you, considering how bad I am at this.” 

Jenna and Lydia didn’t take the bait. They sat in stony silence for a moment before Lydia finally conceded. “Well, I guess if I have to have someone on my team…I might as well take your money and let it be you.” She swung around to face me and pushed her door open. “Thanks for the lift,” she tossed over her shoulder to Jenna.

I leaned forward. “Have a good shift. If you want to play with us, I bet I can get Devi to set something up again. Especially if I can get her on the same team as Box so they flirt all night.” Jenna laughed a little laugh and turned.

“If you want that to happen, you better keep Lydia away from him first.” Lydia was already the center of the group, counting off strategically. I jumped out, and Jenna drove off.

Devi and Box weren’t on the same team, but it worked out in the end. For every pass Box tried to catch, Devi was right there to try to snag it out of his hands or smack it out of the air. In the other end zone, I tried to guard Ralphie. Together we attempted to distract Lydia, who was the most fun to play with when she didn’t care too much about the game. 

By the end, we grew tired of counting the points. Devi made one final attempt to smack the frisbee out of the air when Box managed to snatch it at the last moment, and I turned to Ralphie. 

“Do you know the score?” 

“Nope.” 

“Are you ready to be done?” 

He nodded. 

“I think that’s ten,” I called down to the other end zone. We hadn’t agreed to stop at ten, but the trick worked, and we all converged at the corner of the field, falling down where our water bottles and sweatshirts had been discarded throughout the game. 

Lydia threw herself onto the grass, looking up at the fluorescent light over the field. “Agh, that’s blinding.” She shielded her eyes with her forearm. A moment later, the lights switched off. 

“Oh dang, do you control the lights, Lydia?” Box kicked at her feet. 

Lydia moved her arm away from her eyes and thrust both arms up into the air. “I am all-powerful!” she yelled.

“No, you’re Most Likely to Teach at Our High School,” I teased. Yearbook superlatives had come out the week before graduation. Lydia had gotten Best Laugh and Most Likely to Teach at Our School. Jenna had gotten Best Smile and Most Likely to Be on the Cover of Rolling Stone Magazine. I had gotten Third Most Likely to Succeed, which seemed more insulting than not getting anything at all. 

Devi groaned. “At least you’re not Second Most Likely to End Up in Jail. Why was that even a category?” 

Box started laughing now too. “You only got that because you literally dressed up as a bank robber for Spirit Week, the day everyone voted. Didn’t you also get Best Hair?”

“You’re right,” Devi twirled a lock of her long hair dramatically. “At least I’ll have great hair in prison.”

Ralphie was sitting next to me on the grass. He jumped in. “I dressed up as Elvis that week and no one voted to put me on the cover of Rolling Stone.”

“That’s because we’ve all heard you sing, and we know better,” I retorted. 

“Whatever Miss Successful. It didn’t say what you’d succeed in. My guess is…counting points in frisbee games? Is this the high point in your life? Is it all downhill from here?”

I kicked at him from my place on the ground. Devi reached across Box and grabbed his cell phone lying in the grass. “Hey!” he lunged for it.

“Hm, what is in here?” She flipped it open. 

“Nothing interesting.” Box opted to play it cool. 

“Good, I’ll just look through your contact list then.” He began looking a little more perturbed. “Ooh, Valerie. I don’t know a Valerie. Do any of you?” Devi waved the phone toward the rest of us, the square of green light bouncing around in the darkness. 

“Of course you don’t know her. She’s my cousin.” 

Devi held the phone over Box’s face, scrutinizing it for lies. “Your cousin? How close are you with your cousin? Call-her-at-11-p.m.-at-night close?” Her finger hovered over the call button. Box lunged for the phone. 

Devi snapped it shut and jumped up, running across the field, her black hair waving out like a flag, Box a few steps behind. 

Lydia, who had been propped up watching the whole thing, fell back into the grass.

“Well, I told Jenna that if I could give Devi a chance to flirt with Box, she’d probably rope all of us into doing this again,” I said. I glanced over at Ralphie, whose face was just visible in the light coming from the parking lot. “I’m going to guess this means it was a success.” 

Ralphie and I watched them run across the field, and Lydia flung her arm back over her eyes again. “Just tell me when they’re done.”

✷

Jenna worked every night that week. She told us she was working every night the next week too, and that meant that returning to the construction site could happen…never. I told her that and she looked mildly contrite until Lydia agreed with me. Things had been frosty between them ever since she had dropped us off at frisbee. 

One day, when I had off of work and Lydia was on a shift at the pool, I glanced out my window and saw Jenna’s car in the driveway. I ran down the hot sidewalk barefoot, hopping into the passenger seat before my feet could burn on the asphalt. 

“I didn’t know you were here,” I began, chipper, when I saw that Jenna’s face was strung with tears, both hands gripping the steering wheel. “Ohmygosh, what’s wrong?” 

Jenna didn’t look at me. “Can we drive somewhere to talk?” 

“Sure, of course.” I looked down at my bare feet, then up at the house. “Should I get my shoes?” 

Jenna glanced at the windows, at my mom’s car in the driveway, my mom, who would come running out with cookies as soon as she heard Jenna was here, who would carry us all on her friendliness until we forgot that we needed to cry or yell or just sit in silence for a while. 

“I don’t need my shoes,” I decided. “Let’s go.” 

We parked in the lot behind the elementary school, empty in the summer months except for one car, probably the janitor’s. This was the one school that had a playground in the shade. We would come here sometimes on hot days just to swing under the giant trees. When Jenna and I were little, we would beg our parents to take us to this park, farther from our homes but so novel, with the big trees standing as sentinels over the park, a smaller kids’ park and a bigger kids’ park, and an ancient set of seesaws out in the sun. 

We walked from the parking lot up to the playground, and Jenna held my hand as I avoided the woodchips by jumping up on the balance beam, making my way across the playground in my bare feet. Together, we climbed to the highest tower, a blue cylinder with a cone on top, with a spiral slide shooting out to one side. It was dark inside, and a bit hotter than the rest of the air around us, but from the parking lot or the street, someone would only have been able to spot our feet, hers in her black gym shoes, mine with my pink-painted toenails, sticking out of the tallest turret. 

I squeezed in next to Jenna and without pausing, she turned and sobbed on my shoulder. I started crying too. “What is it? What is it?” I asked, petting her hair, pulling her close. She didn’t answer and my soothing mantra switched. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” 

As I held her, I realized: I didn’t know if it would be okay. I didn’t know what was wrong. I didn’t know if I could do anything about it. I didn’t even know if she would want to tell me what had happened. 

“It’s just so stupid,” she finally muttered.

“What is?” 

“I really like someone. But he doesn’t like me. And I finally said something and now I know for sure that he doesn’t like me, and I’m just so over feeling dumb all the time.” 

“Who is it?” I didn’t want to ask, but I wanted to know. 

“He’s at my work. You don’t know him.” Jenna looked up at me sheepishly. “He works nights.” 

“So that’s why you’ve been taking all those shifts!” 

Jenna groaned and started to laugh. “Yep. I guess maybe I won’t be taking so many night shifts anymore. I talked to him last night, and do you know what he said? ‘Dang, I never thought of you like that.’ I mean, we’ve worked together for months, and I thought maybe he was waiting until I graduated, but it turns out he literally wasn’t thinking about me ever. At all.”

“That sucks, Jen, I’m so sorry.” I tried to pat her head again, but she threw herself back against the blue plastic wall. 

“It’s just so dumb. I feel so dumb.” 

“It’s not stupid to like someone.” 

“It feels stupid if they don’t like you back.”

I didn’t respond. I knew exactly what she meant. I didn’t want to know what she meant. I didn’t want to know what I meant. I didn’t want anything to move or change at all in the world; I wanted to stay in this blue plastic castle forever and lay against this wall and drop woodchips down below us just like we did when we were kids. But I was also starting to feel my sweat dripping down my back pressed against the plastic, starting to feel my wet face and my tank top strap soggy with Jenna’s tears. 

Jenna squeezed me. “Thanks for coming across the woodchips barefoot.” 

I squeezed back. “Thanks for holding my hand so I didn’t fall into them.” 

Jenna leaned away from the wall, pulling her sticky shirt off of her skin. “Wow, I feel disgusting. Should I wipe my face? Or is my make-up streaming perfectly straight down my face, and I should leave it like this for the rest of the day to scare little children?” 

I laughed. “Definitely keep it like it is.” 

“It’s perfect, a crying witch in a tower outside a school.” She wiped at her face anyway, the black rivers smudged away with her hand. 

“We would have loved that when we were kids. We were always trying to scare the other kids away from our favorite spots.” 

“Well, now we’re old enough to play the witches,” she laughed.

“Or the wizards or the trolls or the Gila Monsters, which I think were the best threat we made but definitely didn’t understand.” 

We pulled ourselves out of the blue castle and wandered over to the swings. The air outside felt cool compared to the castle, and we pumped our legs back and forth until we could almost kick a tree branch. We stayed there, swinging in the shade, until the sweat on our shirts chilled our bodies and we ran back to Jenna’s car to drive away in the afternoon sun. 

✷

Jenna stopped taking as many night shifts after that. I’m sure she told Lydia the gist because they were back on better terms again, and Lydia, normally someone who preferred aggression to affection, seemed to be working harder than normal to keep Jenna entertained, or at least she seemed to be channeling her aggression in an affectionate way. It was nearly the end of June when all the stars aligned for us to return to the construction site again. 

I had told them what I had seen online, and it made us equally interested in going and scared of doing so. Scared, but in a good way, we assured ourselves. We briefly toyed with inviting other people to go with us, but this felt personal, something that we needed to keep just to ourselves. We weren’t going to risk ruining whatever it was we found by dragging along other people who wouldn’t understand the sacredness of it, how we had been biting off our exploration in tasty pieces whenever we had time, savoring what we had seen the last time before we plunged into the next bite.

Now, we were ready for the next bite, maybe even overdue. We left as soon as we could after work and dinner, figuring that all haunted places are less haunted while the sun is still up. When we pulled off of the golf course path and made our way into the site, there was still plenty of sun around us, and we could see the houses just as well as the last time all three of us had been here. 

“Everything looks the same,” Lydia remarked. “They must not have done any more work on it.” 

Jenna walked up to the same house she had peeked in last time. “You’re right. The same tool is resting against a wall in there.” 

“I think we need to follow the main street all the way up to get to the silo.” I directed us, based on what I remembered from the aerial map online. “It’s weird,” I observed. “Online, it didn’t look like there was enough room for all of this back here.” 

Lydia shuddered. “Don’t say that kind of thing. That makes it extra creepy.” 

“I don’t know if it’s creepy so much as a little weird,” I responded. I could tell Jenna and Lydia were rolling their eyes behind me as we walked. I turned and teased them, “Like Mrs. St. James. She’s not creepy, she’s just a little weird.”

“Mrs. St. James is absolutely creepy, and if you don’t see that, I’m not sure I’m okay with you leading this expedition,” Jenna replied, shaking her head at me. 

“Let’s put it this way,” I diverted the talk away from the sinister. “All substitute teachers are weird. Not all are creepy. It’s like all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. I think: Mrs. St. James, weird but not creepy. Mr. Stellnik, weird and creepy.”

“I’m glad you at least got one of them right,” Lydia said. “But they are both creepy. Just like this neighborhood, right now, is seeming pretty creepy to me.”

We had reached the end of the main road, and if my guessing was correct, we needed to cut behind the final cul-de-sac to find the silo. “It feels like we should be able to see the silo from here, if it still exists.” 

We looked around but saw only houses, mostly just frames without walls, patches of the evening sky and shrubs peeking through from the other sides. 

“It should be back this way.” I started walking faster, not wanting us to find it in the dark. “Let’s leave our bikes here.” We left our bikes on the gravel road of the final cul-de-sac and cut through the overgrown gutter between two of the houses. 

Behind the houses, a row of trees clustered to block our view of anything beyond. Jenna started into the trees without pausing. Lydia and I followed.

On the other side of the trees, we stepped into a clearing. There it was, just up a slight slope: the rounded walls of a silo, though one that had been chopped in half, missing its top. 

“It’s actually here,” I whispered. We walked toward it, and I was grateful for the remaining sun. I scampered around one curve of the silo and looked out, spotting a clearing where there surely had been a tennis court once. “It’s all here.”

The bricks on the outside of the silo were crumbling. We circled around it, and on the far side, we found a low door still intact. “Do we go in?” Lydia whispered. I waited, unable to make this decision.

“Heck yeah we do,” Jenna answered, full volume, and she charged forward and opened the door. 

It swung open easily, almost too easily, like someone was still using it. Jenna disappeared inside. Lydia hurried after her. If something was happening to one of us, it was happening to all of us. 

I ducked inside after Lydia. The silo smelled like our crawlspace at our first house, damp and a little bit homey. My hand was still gripping the wall as I pulled myself in when, next to my palm, a black spot moved. I shrieked and jumped back. A spider lifted up and scurried away.

“What is it?” Lydia turned to me. 

“Just a spider,” I started to laugh. “Basically my worst nightmare.” I breathed heavily a couple times. Lydia laughed and patted my back.

“Look at this.” Jenna pointed to the walls, where lines criss-crossed over each other. “I think it goes all the way up.” She traced the line with a finger, as it moved brick by brick, winding its way across itself and up to the top of the wall. “Is it a drawing? Or a vine?” 

Lydia poked it with her finger. “I think it’s caulk or cement, something to repair the walls.” 

Jenna continued tracing the lines up the walls. “I bet it filled this whole thing once. I wonder when they decided to stop fixing it and tear it down instead.”

“And at some point they even decided to stop tearing it down,” Lydia observed, reaching up toward the top edge of the silo.  

We all followed her finger, her fingernail half-painted silver pointing all the way up, and we each looked out at once. A perfectly round window into the sky above us, punctured only by Lydia’s finger. She dropped her hand, and we all watched the last sun fade and the stars brighten, a single shooting star flying across our view. 

Later, I would remember that moment, when we found it, and I would describe it exactly as I just did. Something beautiful, precious for all of us. Winding caulk lines of healing for Jenna, the best distraction from a still-stinging heart. The paths that Lydia would begin to trace, that would be cut off, letting stars shine through instead, even in what never came to be or what was eventually lost. And for me, the beginning of a map, of somewhere I would search for for the rest of my life.

✷