In eighth grade we had a social studies project to do and Jeannie said me and Lesley and Dale could work on it at her house after school. Jeannie didn’t live in a our neighborhood, or even a neighborhood, but at the far end of town on a farm. Over a hundred acres, my father told me, but none of it producing anything. Jeannie lived with her grandmother and an uncle. She never mentioned her parents, and we speculated they were dead, but we were polite.
The house was cold inside. Messy. I remember that. The grandmother shuffled out of her room, took a look at us, and shuffled back in. Instead of the cupcakes Dale’s mother was famous for there was nothing. We worked on the project for a while, fingertips cold, stomachs rumbling. Then Jeanne asked if we wanted to go outside.
It was sunny but chilly. Windy. March, maybe? Jeannie showed us the barn, which was huge and smelled awful. You want to see the haunted house? she asked, and show me a middle-schooler who would say no to that. It was a three-story Victorian, one of those skinny ones. Careful of the holes in the floor, Jeannie said.
The air in the house was colder than the air outside. Jeannie was right about the floor. You can go upstairs, Jeannie said, but it’s not safe. Lesley and I did. The stairs were every other and the floors sagged. The mostly broken panes of the windows rattled in their casements. Die, wops, some clever trespasser spray-painted on the wall. I went into one small room with vestiges of floral wallpaper and looked down at the floor through a yawning hole into the pit of the basement. For a frozen moment I was certain that movement in any direction would end in death, but we made our way out, alive. When my mother picked me up she asked if I had a nice time, and I said yes, I had.
Why am I telling you this? Because someone asked me how I was doing yesterday and I said fine.
❤️