She squeezed her eyes shut as the train’s two massive engines screamed past. But as the rest of the cars flew by, the sound leveled out to a steady, clacking roar, and she was able to shuffle back from the edge of the incline, kicking in the dirt till her shoulders hit the corrugated fence. She plugged her ears and watched the cars rattle by.
Why was he found way over here? This trail was nothing—it didn’t go anywhere. It ran out after a few hundred feet, and then you had to cut through the only part of the Grains that was still used anymore to get out to the road beyond.
A hundred yards back the way she’d come stood the old storage building. Inside were smooth, flat, wide-open concrete floors perfect for skateboarding, and getting in was stupid easy. After the train had passed, Evie stood and walked back toward the storehouse.
Partway down the west side of the building was a boarded-up window she knew wasn’t really boarded. She pulled the rotten wood aside and lifted herself through the gap.
The main floor was dark, and full of rats and other things Evie tried not to think about. The windows were covered to keep people from smashing them, so it was damp and moldy inside. But as she climbed the steel staircase to the second floor, sunlight poured in from above.
There were floor-to-ceiling windows on the second floor, and the sun had baked the smooth concrete, warming the whole place like an oven. Old, dusty ceiling fans stood motionless along the rafters. Paint peeled in grotesque bulges all over the ceiling. She could hear the coo of pigeons roosting, the sudden flutter of wings.
The first time she’d ever come here it had been sweet with the thrill of breaking in and the chance of getting caught. It was nighttime, black and cavernous. But Shaun had held her close, held her hand, hadn’t let her get scared. The moon and arc lights shining through the windows had lit his grin, calming her a little in the darkness.
When she’d finally seen this place in daylight, she realized how silly her fear had been. It was actually beautiful. Sunbeams marked the dusty air, and there wasn’t half as much garbage inside as there was out in the field. Shaun had cleaned it up himself. He’d wanted to build a ramp in here, maybe one day a half pipe. In the dust on the floor she could still see the faint tracks of his wheels, carving huge ellipses around the pillars. In tighter corners, his fingers had touched down too. Shaun had come here a lot.
She kept climbing all the way to the third floor, where it was dirtier, not as pretty as downstairs, and the ceiling was lower. On the side facing the tracks, a busted-out doorway punched a huge hole in the wall. A section of broken fire escape clung to the outside of the building, but its landing had long ago been kicked in, leaving a dizzying drop to the landing below.
Despite this, she’d seen Shaun use this doorway a hundred times, monkeying hand-over-hand down the rusty bars to the second floor, making the old metal sing like a tuneless guitar.
She walked to the hole in the wall and looked out over the field, the tracks. It was late afternoon now, the sun leaning long shadows through the grass. Empty beer cans littered the floor up here, gathering dust. There were fist-sized holes in the moldy walls. It was possible other kids came here too, but Evie’d never seen any. This whole building was like Shaun’s private playground.
She reached into her backpack and pulled out his cell phone. She didn’t know his passcode, and the battery was probably dead anyway, so she didn’t bother taking it out of the plastic bag.
Instead she got her own phone out and keyed in his number. She leaned against the frame of the busted-out doorway and put the phone to her ear, waiting for that phony surfer-drawl that widened out the words and bounced them against his perfect, white teeth.
“Hey, you’ve reached Shaun…”
She took a deep breath. The voice mail beeped.
“I saw your nan today,” she said. “I told her, y’know, about the baby and all. She wasn’t even mad. She told me about your mom, how she was young too. That made me feel a bit better, I guess.” Evie sighed, all her words weighing heavy on her chest. “She really misses you. We all do…”
Evie gazed over the dirty field, past Réal’s place and the cemetery, past Sunny’s, past town, out past everything beyond. She squeezed Shaun’s phone in her fist, feeling like the very worst person on earth. “I just…I want you to know how sorry I am for everything, and I—”
But she choked.
And the voice mail beeped before she could tell him why she’d really called: I think I might have this baby after all.
20
R
Five kids meant a lot of food. A lot of clothes and toys and things to spend money on. It meant bills and a mortgage on a big house. It meant that both his parents had to work, which had left Ré in charge since he was barely old enough to handle it.
His main job was feeding the kids, and he was home at the same time every day to do it, whether he himself ate or not. And lately he had not.
At least, not the meat parts. Not since Shaun.
Not since seeing his best friend’s insides scratched in the dirt of that field, sand and grass and trash all stuck to it like it was old
