Past the cemetery, she tells me to slow down. She leans forward like she’s looking for something.
“There,” she says, pointing straight ahead. “Right over there. See the break in the weeds? There’s a dirt road.”
I turn right onto the road as instructed, and all I can see is an old, ornate iron gate.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“Do you remember when I told you about the abandoned house my friends and I would go to in high school?”
“Yeah?” I see nothing but darkness.
“This is it.”
“How do we get back there?”
“Climb the gate,” she says, as if it was no big deal.
“Isn’t this illegal?”
“Yes, but Nana knows the chief of police. It’s fine.”
My stomach is in knots as I park the car in front of the gate. I’m not sure if it’s the spooky house or being alone with Micah that makes me so nervous. Maybe it’s both.
Micah pulls two red electric lanterns from her backpack and turns them on before my headlights darken. I follow her to the fence and she hands both of them to me. She reaches a high bar on the gate and climbs over. She’s clearly done this before.
“Oof,” she says, wiping her hands on her jeans once her feet hit the ground. “I was afraid I’d gotten too fat to do that.”
My heart drops. “Don’t call yourself fat,” I say.
She rolls her eyes. “Sorry,” she says. “Force of habit.”
Micah reaches through the gate and takes the lanterns from me. I also give her my keys, wallet, and phone before scaling the gate myself. I must say, she made this look a lot easier than it is. She has to talk me through it and tell me on which bars to place my hands and feet. When I’m safely on the ground on the other side, I breathe a sigh of relief before remembering I’ll have to do it again when we leave.
“Don’t worry,” Micah says, as if reading my mind. “It’ll be easier the second time.”
I take a lantern and we walk down the long dirt driveway. I can vaguely make out a white house in the distance when the clouds finally part and the moon shines on the overgrown yard that was once a large homestead.
I gasp once it comes into view, then turn to Micah, who is absolutely beaming in the moonlight.
“It was built in the 1890s by a man in the lumber business,” she says. “If we walked past the house, we’d see the river over the hill.”
The home is gorgeous. It’s a square Victorian, complete with belvedere and a wraparound porch. It has floor-length windows, though the glass has been broken in most of them. Someone spray-painted a picture of a marijuana leaf on the door and, between two of the windows, a picture of Snoopy with red eyes. But, despite the damage, I can still get a sense of the grandeur this property once conveyed.
“The graffiti wasn’t us,” Micah says. “That’s new.”
We walk up the stairs to the porch and let ourselves in through the broken window. Beer bottles and dirty clothes are scattered around the floor, but the home retains a lot of its original charm. The stairs have the original balusters, which are hand-carved with a magnolia design on each spindle. The house is a four-square layout with a single hallway running through the center. Cobwebs coat the chandelier in the foyer, which looks like it’s missing a lot of its crystals.
At first I’m surprised the wallpaper isn’t peeling off, then I realize it’s not paper; the plaster was painted by hand. While I was disheartened by the graffiti outside when we arrived, I’m glad they spared the interior walls.
We walk through, room by room. Broken furniture is overturned and the rugs have been eaten away by time and rodents, but the floor seems solid. When we enter the back bedroom, I’m startled by my glowing, fractured reflection in a broken mirror above the fireplace in an elaborate frame as tall as I am. It looks to be original and was hung at an angle with the top a few inches away from the wall, allowing those on the floor to look up and see the full room. I haven’t seen this in a house in a very long time, and I’m surprised it’s still in place.
As we navigate the space, Micah tells me stories about her friends coming here with tarot cards and ouija boards, trying to summon the dead, when they were in high school.
“The only things we ever managed to summon were rats and the occasional opossum,” she says, laughing.
All her stories involve Sistine, Patsy, and Kendall. It’s a rare gift to have a core set of friends from grade school through decades of friendship. I can’t help but feel a sense of envy. My high school was huge, and we all scattered after graduation. I run into some of them from time to time in the city, but we aren’t close.
“Where is the kitchen?” I ask once we’ve made a complete circle around the first floor.
