Meet Me Here

by Bryan Bliss

  “Well, c’mon.” Her voice is soft, excited.

  I look up at the hotel. Every reason not to do this is now rising up like tiny flares.

  “It’s got a fence around it for a reason,” I say.

  “Thomas, there’s not really ghosts in there—just so you know.”

  “I’m more worried about tetanus from a nail. It’s dark as hell in there.”

  “If you get tetanus, I’ll suck the poison out of the wound for you.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “I’ll carry you to the hospital, crying, screaming out your name as I burst through the ER doors.”

  “This is all really helpful, but—”

  She rattles the fence. “But what? If you can give me one good reason not to go into the Grover, I swear to God we can leave and I’ll never speak of it again.”

  Her head cocks to the side before she turns around, not bothering to wait for my answer, and begins searching for a way into the building. From over her shoulder she says: “I’m going in. Stay out here if you want, but know that it’s weak.”

  She boosts herself on top of a Dumpster and then uses every inch of her height to push open a cracked window. She climbs up the wall and disappears into the hotel.

  I look down the street, assuring myself that I’m no longer swayed by what Mallory thinks about me. I’ll sit out here and wait on the curb until she realizes this is stupid and then—what? I don’t want to go home, not yet. But what else could we possibly do tonight?

  One minute goes by, two. When my phone goes off, I pull it out. I’m sure she’s stuck in rotting floorboards. But it’s my mom. I hesitate before putting it back in my pocket.

  “Mallory?”

  Nothing. I say her name again, but the only sound is a car somewhere in the distance. When I put my foot on the fence, I’m already cussing myself because damn it, I know better.

  When I drop into the hotel, she looks proud—of me or the fact that we’re finally standing in the Grover. She spreads her arms wide, presenting the lobby, which smells like damp paper and campfires. Its walls are tagged with graffiti; an impressive rocket ship—it might be a penis—climbs into the darkness of the stairway. What furniture remains is scattered around the room, fighting for space on the floor with a diverse collection of half-empty beer bottles.

  It’s the stairway that catches our attention, though.

  “Well, let’s do this,” she says, taking a step toward the stairs. We climb together, and it doesn’t take long for the darkness to become problematic. Even with the lights from our phones, I step on the back of Mallory’s foot and try to catch myself on a handrail that isn’t there. When I stumble against the wall, she laughs.

  “Do you need to hold my hand? We can make a train.”

  Images of elementary school, of walking hand in hand like living paper dolls, come to me in the darkness. I reach out and feel along the peeled walls of the hotel. Two turns later, a slant of moonlight appears through a dusty window one story above us. Mallory stops and glances back at me.

  “We stayed here once when our house flooded,” she says.

  “I remember,” I say. We tried to get my parents to let her stay at my house for the week, but Dad didn’t think it was appropriate having a girl share my room, even if we were nine and only interested in staying up late to talk and sneak some television.

  “We stayed on the next floor.” She continues. “My parents wouldn’t let me go anywhere alone, or I would’ve already done this.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I say. She stops, offended.

  “I would’ve gone to the fifteenth floor. Believe that.”

  She stands there, hands on hips, waiting for me to say I believe her. But hell, no. There’s no way she would’ve opened that door. That’s the whole point. That’s why we’re here right now. And besides, I have proof.

  “Fifth grade.”

  It takes a second, but the recognition comes. Suddenly she’s really interested in making it up the next eight flights of stairs.

  “Where are you going?” I ask.

  “I don’t have all night. We have to make this happen.”

  “But I thought we were having a good conversation. Reminiscing, all that.”

  “Screw you, Bennett,” she says.

  I smile and follow her up the stairs. The first time we were supposed to do this, before I ruined everything—still our fifth-grade year—she canceled. She had an excuse, of course—her mom needed her to go grocery shopping or something—but it was a high-water mark. The one time Mallory shied away from anything, at least as far as I know.

  I haven’t been counting the flights, so when we get to the landing—just the same as every other one we’ve passed, minus the actual hallways leading to the rooms—we stand there in a semi-stunned silence.

  “It’s not boarded up,” she says. “That’s weird, right? I feel like it should be boarded up.”

  I look at the door, the infamous sign. It doesn’t look ominous, just a door in a hotel. Mallory doesn’t move, almost paralyzed by being this close. Without thinking, I reach out and grab the doorknob. It swings open easily, as if it had never been locked. Neither of us moves.

  Large windows bring in plenty of light, but that’s not the problem. There’s nothing here. The whole floor, really just a big room, is almost empty. It spans the entire width and length of the hotel. Forgotten paint cans are scattered around the room, as if somebody were trying to compare a hundred different shades of beige, along with broken legs from dining room tables and a few disassembled luggage carts.

  “Oh hell no.” Mallory steps past me and into the empty room. “My whole life I was told there were ghosts or murderers—satanists, at least—living up here. And it’s just an attic?”

  “I never heard about the satanists,” I say.

  She turns around and looks at me. “Really? Hmm. Well, it doesn’t matter, obviously. Our entire childhood was a sham because look . . .” She swipes an arm around the room. In the distance I can make out something: chairs, maybe an old bed frame. We walk around the perimeter of the room, touching the walls and bending over when something glints in the moonlight. In one corner Mallory finds an old sleeping bag and an empty bottle of Boone’s Farm wine. She holds it up and says, “Satanists.”

  When we get back to the door, Mallory stops and says, “Well, this was a huge disappointment.”

  I’m looking around the room; even in the hotel’s heyday, I can’t imagine they used this to store anything exceptionally valuable. Maybe a few televisions, some minirefrigerators. So while it’s disappointing to know that all the rumors were never true, I can’t get past one thing.

  “Why the sign?” I ask.

  “Because they knew this day would come and they wanted to ruin our childhood,” Mallory says.

  “Okay, but besides that. Why in the hell would they put up a sign like that if it’s empty?”

  Mallory thinks for a second. “Right! Why not put up a sign that says EMPLOYEES ONLY?”

  “Or nothing. No sign. Then who even cares about going through that door?”

  She shakes her head angrily. “Screw this. I’m getting my memory.”

  She walks over to the door, carefully sliding her fingers underneath the edges of the sign. It’s made of sheet metal and, on better days, would be impossible to remove from the door. But now the screws are brown with rust, and she pulls it off with little effort.

  She holds it up victorious. As if we’d just solved one of life’s greatest mysteries—found Bigfoot. When she gives me the sign, the metal is weightless and cool in my hand. It’s just a sign, something an eighteen-year-old shouldn’t find captivating. But as I turn it over, I’m not sure I’ve ever missed our friendship more.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I want to rush down the stairs, refusing to let the excitement of the adventure drain out of the night. But Mallory moves without urgency, so I slow myself, trying to put my feet in the tracks she leaves in the dust, the rectangular sign g
etting warm in my hand.

  “Well, we’re officially felons,” I say.

  “Or heroes,” she says, her voice filled with an excited manic energy. “Speaking of that . . . Jake. He looked . . . rough.”

  It takes a floor before I answer her. The silence is heavy, choking me. Calling Jake rough is gracious. I swallow once and say, “They’re naming a bridge after him.”

  She stops, holding her cell phone up so I can see her face. “What? Which one?”

  “River Road. Down near Highway Ten.”

  When Jake came home, my dad said he was a little off. Off. It implied that he could be fixed by flipping a switch, that with time, he’d be back on. The old Jake again. So I covered up for him, every day and no matter what. People ask and I tell them he’s doing well. I tell them about the bridge and getting to meet the president. About the medals, even though I found them in the garbage can a few weeks after he came home. He didn’t have an answer for that, of course, so I put them in my room, under my bed, next to old video games and a forgotten baseball card collection. But he isn’t getting better. He sits there all day with that backpack, rarely talking or changing clothes. He’s a constant presence that’s not really there.

  “The Jake Bennett Bridge,” Mallory says. “That’s impressive. Seriously. I know a few guys who would give their left nut to have a bridge named after them.”

  I mumble a “yeah,” and Mallory gives me a puzzled look. I don’t want to let the air out of our accomplishment, but I can’t properly explain my feelings about the bridge. At least not without giving away everything. I hit the sign with my knuckle lightly.

  “This is pretty badass,” I say.

  She raises her eyebrows and nods, leading us down the rest of the stairs until we reach the lobby. As soon as we are off the stairs, a white light cuts through the darkness. It animates the dark lobby, bringing life to the shadows. Dust floats across the room lazily, an entire invisible world. And then a voice comes from outside, amplified by a speaker.

  “I know you’re in there. So come on out.”

  Mallory looks at the faded warnings written on the sign and then at me. “Damn. They weren’t kidding about the fifteenth floor.” She squints into the light, holding her hand above her eyes. Past the light I can see the outlines of a police car. The officer stands behind the cruiser’s door, the mic pressed to his lips.

  “C’mon now. I can see you through the glass.”

  “I say we hide,” Mallory says dramatically. “We could live inside the Grover forever. They’d never find us.”

  This is the way she always played, like we’d never get caught, no matter the scheme. She was always fantastical, and I was there to force us back to reality. Right now I wish I believed we could disappear inside this hotel and nobody would come looking. But a police officer is about as real as it gets. I can already see the newspaper tomorrow morning: LOCAL HERO’S BROTHER BARRICADES SELF IN ABANDONED HOTEL.

  When I start for the front door, Mallory doesn’t look disappointed or even surprised. “Just hold up a second,” she says as she carefully works the metal sign beneath the back of her shirt. As soon as she’s finished, she looks over her left, then right shoulder and gives me a thumbs-up.

  The officer studies our licenses and then our faces before he says, “What were you two doing in there?”

  “We just graduated,” Mallory says, acting as if she’s not hiding a sign under her shirt.

  The officer seems tired, like he’s heard this reason too many times tonight. He gives our IDs one more glance before handing Mallory’s back to her. When I reach for mine, he pulls it back.

  “Bennett. Like the kid from the papers? The soldier?”

  “That’s my brother,” I say, taking my license from him.

  “And you’re going, too, right? I read that somewhere.”

  When Jake got back, a reporter came to the house wanting to do another story. Like every other time before, Dad made Jake wear the dress blues. And of course the reporter ate it up. When he found out Dad was a bona fide hero, too, first on the ground in Desert Storm just days after Jake was born, not to mention me, headed in the same direction once I graduated, he got out a second notebook and spent the whole afternoon prying into every nook of our life. That Sunday Dad bought every copy at the gas station, smiling like we’d won the lottery.

  Back then I still wanted to go. I would’ve killed for Jake to tell me his stories, the kind Dad had told at the dinner table when we were growing up. Stories about being a part of something bigger and greater than yourself. About bravery and sacrifice. Jake lived it, just like Dad. Maybe more so. Because when he got injured saving those two soldiers, there wasn’t a question about his claim to the title hero. And all I wanted was for him to impart even the smallest bit of truth, of wisdom to me.

  “I ship tomorrow,” I say.

  He reaches for my hand, which is another thing people started doing once that article came out, pumping it up and down like I’m running for office.

  “God bless you, son. If I was younger, I would’ve enlisted myself a few years back.” He smiles, pulling me closer and forcing eye contact. “You give ’em hell for me, all right?”

  “Yes, sir,” I say.

  He makes me promise him that we’ll stay away from the Grover and gives me one last clap on the shoulder. As he drives away, Mallory looks visibly relieved. She pulls the sign out, wincing once, and then holds it for both of us to see.

  “No wonder there’s so much crime here. How did he not see this?”

  She riffs on the state of law enforcement in our town, but I’m barely there. Barely listening.

  “I’m surprised he didn’t ask for your autograph,” she says. “He was all ‘Oh, you’re a Bennett? I’m about to die from excitement.’”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  I’m trying to smile, but I can’t stop thinking about the way that police officer looked at me, like I’m doing him a personal favor by joining the army. It’s ridiculous because what he thinks shouldn’t matter. But the sense of disappointing him, this entire town, is something I can’t shake. Because who will I be if I don’t follow in the Bennett footsteps?

  “Let’s go do something else,” I say.

  Mallory does a double take and knocks on my head. “Is that you in there, Thomas? I thought you were going to turn into a pumpkin if I didn’t get you home soon.”

  “It’s graduation,” I say weakly.

  She studies me for a moment, trying to guess my angle. Here’s another chance to be straight with someone. And with such little risk. I could tell her, and poof, it’s over. But sometimes it feels like I’ve forgotten how to be real with anyone. So I force a senior picture–worthy smile and say, “Give me the notebook.”

  She pulls it out of her back pocket and hands it to me, still watching my every move. I flip through the pages, one after the other, trying to make my face upbeat and normal. But everything on the page is ambiguous now. Ten-year-olds projecting their idea of cool into the future.

  The frustration cakes my voice. “Maybe we could just drive around. I don’t know.”

  She takes the notebook when I hand it back to her, still watching me. “Yeah, Thomas. We can do that.”

  Mallory holds the notebook on her lap with one hand; the other she hangs out the window, letting the wind lift and drop it. The only sound is the rustling of the notebook’s pages, our childhood blowing in the wind.

  I’d drive until the sun came up and went down again if I thought I could get away with it, letting the radio mute whatever I was feeling. The wind would blow away all my problems. Jake, my dad, all of it would disappear if only I drove long enough. But when I hit Plateau Road, when I can see Ford High School looming in the distance, reality hits me in the gut.

  The teachers, my friends, people I’ll never meet. Everyone expects something I can’t give them, expects me to be this person that I’ve fraudulently created. The weight of all of them pushes on my chest, and I begin to panic.
/>   I need to get out of this town.

  But that means going home and taking the yelling, the shocked disbelief. It’s swallowing everything for a few more hours, once again turning the disappointment into a tank of fuel, a reason to get me on the road.

  And I don’t know if I can do that either.

  Then there’s Mallory. No matter the nostalgia, the weightlessness of being out with her, it has to end. If the past few months with Jake have taught me anything, it’s that ignoring facts does not transform them. Fact: I cannot go to the army tomorrow. Fact: I cannot tell anyone. And that leaves me with the last and final fact: The longer I’m out here with Mallory, the harder it becomes to get away.

  I can barely breathe when I make a hard right into Ford’s parking lot. Mallory curses as she grabs for the door. I stop the truck just around the corner from the football field and put it in park.

  “What the hell, Thomas!” Mallory reaches down and picks up the notebook. When she actually sees my face, she says, “Are you okay?”

  “I need to explain something to you,” I say.

  I search for the words, something that will honor what we’ve done tonight but will also make it clear that what’s happening right now has to end. If I don’t leave—and soon—I’m not sure what will happen. But I want her to know that we can build from here. When I come home, we can try this again. It just can’t be tonight.

  I try to breathe, but every breath is hard and ragged.

  Mallory stares at me waiting. But I’m afraid if I open my mouth, I’m going to have to tell another lie. And I can’t do it. Not anymore. I fall back into my seat exhausted.

  “Is this because of Jake?” she asks. I nod, and she starts to say something but stops herself. Then, quickly, she says, “He’s kind of screwed up, right? I mean, I heard things, people saying he was weird now. But people can be assholes, so—”

  I’ve gotten so good at being quiet, at keeping my emotions in check. But when she reaches over and puts her hand on mine, says my name, it’s like a river coming over the banks. The words slip from my mouth like a secret.