Page 39 of Exchanged

He moves to stand next to me. His arm brushes mine. He’s rolled up his shirtsleeves, uncovering the lower half of his forearms. His skin is warm.

“The speech and debate crew. I took this at state finals last year.” His voice brightens at the memory. “We’d finished our rounds and had the afternoon to just bum around the city. Lisbeth”—he points at the girl with the bleached pixie cut and combat boots—“ended up in the fountain right after this was taken. Tripped backward over some lady feeding the pigeons.”

“She seems cool.”

He smiles. “Way cooler than me, that’s for sure.

“And Corey”—his finger moves to the round-faced, hip-popping boy—“is the most amazing drama queen. He can tell a story like nobody’s business, and no one ever knows if it’s true or not.” He frowns. “Irontown doesn’t have speech and debate.”

I feel guilty about this fact, even though it’s not my fault. Lately, it’s been easy to forget that Garrett hates this town and doesn’t want to be here.

“The rest of these,” I say, changing the subject, “are incredible. So many things I would never have thought to take a picture of.”

“That’s the point, I guess.” He moves back to his bed and plops down while I hover near the photo wall. “This one time, when I was twelve, my parents took me to Paris. I brought my camera and took all these photos of the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre. I was so proud of them. And then on our last day, we stopped in this cheap souvenir shop and I found dozens of photos of those places, all of them basically the same, all of them just slightly better than anything I could do. That’s when I realized I was missing the point, you know? That I should be finding things I notice, not things everyone else does. Pretty obvious, I guess, now that I say it.”

“It’s not obvious,” I say quietly. Then, “There’s a place you should see. If you want to, anyway. It’s not the Arc de Triomphe or anything, but I think it’s cool.”

I’m tired of pretending I don’t want to spend time with him, tired of us merely coexisting in the same spaces. And I want him to feel something other than disappointment about Irontown.

He rests his hands on the edge of the mattress, eyes trained on me. “I’d like that.”

I move across the room, stopping in the doorway on my way out. “We’ll go tomorrow. Bring your camera.”

ELEVEN

We reach the end of Main Street, where the road dives beneath the barbed wire fence and into the woods. The Caving Grounds.

It’s a Saturday afternoon in mid-October, the day wet and cloudy and cool. The forest ahead of us riots in peak fall colors, crisp yellows and deep reds and earthy browns, muted by a soupy layer of mist hanging between the trees. The world is changing: I can feel the frozen stillness of winter hiding behind the curtain of this day.

But for now, there’s us. Garrett in a maroon sweatshirt and backward Falcons hat, his camera slung by a strap over his shoulder. Me, hands in the pockets of my jeans, hoping he won’t think this is lame.

I lead him along the fence line to where it dips into the woods. A rusted NO TRESPASSING sign hangs limply from a post. We walk until downtown is hidden from view.

“This is where you kill me, isn’t it?” he deadpans.

I find the spot. An old oak toppled over years ago, crushing a section of fence beneath its trunk. I pull myself onto it, take a few steps, carefully avoiding the sprays of barbed wire poking up from under the rotting wood. I jump off on the other side of the fence. Garrett follows. We tromp through a thicket of underbrush and emerge on an abandoned street.

Sidewalks run along both sides of the pavement, grasses straining upward through every weakness, every crack in the asphalt. Tree limbs stretch overhead, covered in leaves of deepest fall color, turning the street into a fiery tunnel. We walk until we reach an intersection where a dilapidated sign stands, labeling the roads as Snow Street and Jackson Avenue.

We turn onto Snow, into the remains of a neighborhood. Chest-high retaining walls butt up against the sidewalk, marking the edge of what used to be front lawns. Spaced out at regular intervals, cut into the stone, sets of stairs lead up and away from the road into the gloom of the forest. There are no houses here, not anymore, not even the skeletons of them. The trees have taken over everything, the asphalt and stone holding the only memory of what this place used to be.

It’s eerie, this empty, overgrown remnant of a neighborhood.

We walk down the middle of the street, stopping next to a wide stairway flanked with decorative stone pillars.

“What the hell is this place?” Garrett asks in a reverent whisper.

“The Caving Grounds,” I say. “This used to be the other half of Irontown. But when the mine tunneled underneath it, people’s houses started caving into the ground. So the Range Iron Ore Company paid to have all the houses and businesses in this part of town put onto trucks and moved to the other side.”

He looks at me as if he’s waiting for the punch line. “You’re making this up.”

By way of answering, I lead him to the top of a set of stairs. The ground levels off, and spread out before us is the foundation of a house, stones cutting into the earth and forming a large square depression. Grass covers the floor of what would have been the basement. Scattered saplings are interspersed with rusted pots, a rotting chest, a few broken glass bottles.

Garrett’s jaw hangs slack. He glances at me, and I can tell he no longer thinks this is an elaborate joke. He jumps down into the used-to-be-basement, unstraps his camera, and begins taking photos of the debris of someone’s forgotten life. I watch as he crouches in a corner, using the viewfinder to line up a shot of the detritus. He’s like a musician who knows how to find the music waiting in his instrument—focused, confident that there is art hidden in the ruin. He moves around, capturing the space from every possible angle while I stand on the edge of the wall.

I feel a shift in myself as I watch him, one I’m afraid to put into words. He is painfully beautiful, but there’s something more underneath, something about him that makes me feel as if part of me is breaking.

He returns to the wall and I reach down to help him, our palms locking together, our fingers curled around the back of each other’s hand. I pull him up, then let go. For a second, though, he doesn’t move. We’re close enough that I can hear his breath, and it flips my stomach on its axis. This lasts only a second, and it’s all in my head because now he’s leading the way down the stone steps.