“It’s got to work,” Cassie said. “We’re going in.”
I peered in the window. We stood outside a big common room, with fancy moldings on the ceiling and wainscoting waist high. The plaster was crumbling and in places mold bloomed, giant flower paintings along the walls. A dozen folding chairs stood stacked in rows against the far wall and old paint cans rusted in piles next to a swing door. The air in the gloom was hazed with dust, and the floor—once fancy parquet, the kind you might find in a ballroom—was strewn with debris, with plaster crumbs and plastic bottles and what looked like a layer of dried mud. From the ceiling hung two wagon-wheel chandeliers, ugly, clunky things surely acquired cheaply to replace whatever had originally been in the house. A long buffet bar extended along the far wall next to the chairs: the dining hall.
Cupping my eyes against the window, I could almost see the institutional room with its stacks of damp fake-wood trays, and stringy-haired, shiftless girls barely older than me lined up before steaming vats of baked beans and soggy broccoli, some hideous perversion of summer camp, where you didn’t get any care packages and nobody came to take you home.
I could see too the parquet sparkling beneath the crystal chandeliers that once had hung from their sunburst moldings, and the flickering wall sconces along the walls, this diffuse and inconstant light illuminating, again, the faces of girls—and boys—not so much older than me, but in a different life, one of spangled baubles and velvet dresses, the young men in dinner jackets, a jazz band installed in the room’s back right corner where, I could swear, a dais had been placed precisely for them. Instead of the plastic-paneled buffet bar with its red heat lamps, long, cloth-covered tables bore silver tureens of punch, and pyramids of petits fours and chocolate strawberries, and behind these stood a quiet row of young men and women in dark uniforms—the staff, attending to every whim of the North Shore’s gilded youth.
Just a big abandoned room, almost empty, but like Cassie, I understood now that we had to go in. I suggested breaking the windowpane above the broken one. That would put the window latch firmly in my fingers.
We knew we were crossing a line. This went further than trying a joint with Devon Macintyre down in the cemetery at Luna’s end-of-school party back in June; or than Cassie filching a twenty from her mother’s wallet to buy a jumbo bag of Skittles and Big Gulps of Coke at the multiplex, when Bev had expressly forbidden us to. This was law-breaking: the sign on the gate out at the road did say NO TRESPASSING: TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, and we were already trespassing and were about not just to enter but to break and enter. But it felt necessary, like we didn’t really have a choice.
I made Cassie stand far back while I broke the window, because I didn’t want any glass to bounce up and hit her, and I didn’t want any fragments to get in her bandage. She stood by with the otherworldly look she’d worn when we crossed the field. A look, if you like, of destiny.
WHEN WE’D CLIMBED through the opened window Cassie whooped—a testing sort of whoop, louder at the end, that echoed in the hollow room. Then she spun in circles, arms outstretched, leaving swirling marks along the dusty floor, whooping the whole time. I fussed about a glass cut along my elbow—not deep, but I squeezed out a little rivulet of blood that I wiped with my finger and sucked. My mother always told me that if you don’t have disinfectant, you want to make sure the cut bleeds cleanly, to wash the germs out. So that’s what I did first.
We pushed the swinging door to check out the kitchens: two big rectangular rooms, laid end to end, with black-and-white checkerboard flooring like at my house, but miles of it, like something out of Alice in Wonderland; and rows of stainless-steel counters dulled by years of filth. Cassie tried the taps at one of the industrial sinks, but nothing came out, which was just as well, as it would have flushed the complex spider’s web spun across the sink itself. We opened some cabinet doors—not metal but painted wood, or once-painted wood, and when we left them open the doors dangled drunkenly on their hinges—but found nothing except a clutch of stiffened paintbrushes and an ancient empty gallon plastic Coke bottle.
“People have been here.” Cassie pointed to some sticky rings in the dust on one of the countertops. “Before us.”
“Not for a long time.”
“Do you think the Coke is from when they moved everything out, twenty years ago? Or from last year, when, say, DeLouis Runyon was hiding out here?” DeLouis Runyon was a high school junior from Worcester, famous because he beat up his math teacher, also his hockey coach, and ran away before the cops got him. He was missing for seventy-two hours and then turned himself in. Nobody knew where he’d been exactly, or they weren’t saying. But he hadn’t been at the Bonnybrook—we were too far from Worcester. Most likely he’d been in his girlfriend’s garage.
“Last year? I doubt it. But maybe not so long as twenty years. Remember the chains on the doors at the back? They’re newer than that. So maybe they had a problem with people, you know, coming in a while back, like five years or ten, and put the locks on then.”
We both considered the crazy number of days in which this building had stood empty, how on any one of them—far more days than either of us had been alive, though not quite as many as all of our days put together—in this house anything could have happened; and most strangely of all, how on most of those days, even almost all of those days, nothing had. Sure, kids like us had broken in before, and hung out drinking on the patio, and maybe a few times some nut had spent a night here. Maybe even half a dozen nights. Imagine someone had even lived in the Bonnybrook for a month: that would still leave seventeen years and eleven months, well over six thousand days and nights of total silence, a once-human habitation uninhabited, given over instead to spiders and chipmunks and robins and potentially the occasional fox. It overwhelmed, in the way the night sky overwhelms when you lie on your back in the grass and stare at it, at all the tiny points of light, and imagine the unimaginable distances between those stars and Earth, and how long even the light has taken to get to your eye, so long that maybe the star that emitted that light is already, in actuality, long gone.
“I vote we see upstairs first,” Cassie said.