Free Bleed by Laurie Faria Stolarz

I may have traveled around a bit, but I haven’t truly ever rooted, you know?”
    “Is that what you want to do? Root?”
    I have no idea what I’m saying, and I’m pretty sure she knows it, too. She giggles at my lame response, scoots herself in toward me, and rests her head on my shoulder. She smells like cheese danish topped with coffee and whipped cream. And I just want to do everything right, more than I’ve ever wanted to do anything right in my life.
    Fifteen minutes later, we’re there. The abandoned hospital sits up on the hill, looking down at us. I pull around to the back so no one will see us, wondering where all the security guys are. But the place seems completely vacant today. As soon as the truck’s in PARK, Mearl jumps out and starts running toward the cluster of brick buildings.
    “Come on!” she shouts.
    I sit there a moment, just looking at it and taking it in. It looks so different in the daytime. An abandoned hospital that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be—an asylum, a gothic church, a school, someone’s estate.
    I get out and run toward her, up to the rear entrance. But for some reason, none of this feels right. It’s different when you’re drunk and stupid, and it’s after two in the morning, and you can only see as far as your flashlight will let you. When your buddies tell you you’re gonna find some pretty cool shit. But now, in the daylight, the sun shines on everything, and I’m forced to take it all in. The broken windows from angry fists. The overgrown brush crawling up the side like an escape route out, and the rusted bars and screens that keep you in.
    She yanks on a side door, but it’s locked. “How do we get in?”
    I’m tempted to tell her I was too drunk at the time to remember, but before I can say anything, she takes my hands, kisses me on the mouth, and thanks me for bringing her here.
    “Can’t you feel it?” she whispers. “The energy? There’s so much sadness here, but you and I … we can fix it.” She smiles at me and studies my face, then kisses me again and pulls me close.
    The next thing I know, I’m climbing up that ladder of overgrowth on one of the smaller buildings.
    “Be careful!” Mearl shouts up to me.
    I peek inside one of the windows near the top. The floor is littered with broken beer bottles, cigarette butts, and snack trash from late-night parties. I hoist myself up on the roof, thinking how much harder it is this time without extra hands to help pull me up. The vent we need to enter from is over to the left. I lay the grille to the side and slide down the duct.
    It’s dark inside, but light enough to see. I run through a connecting tunnel, toward the larger building. The stench of dank and dampness makes me want to hurl. When I finally make it to the other side, I take a wrong turn and end up in one of the patients’ rooms. The walls are stained with red paint, splotched on to look like blood. And there’s a graffiti sign over it all that says the room was painted with the blood of Mary Driscoll, some patient who lived here.
    I kick through the debris. There are used condoms on the floor and pairs of dirty underwear, a whole heap. There’s a Ken doll hanging from a noose in the center of the room and naked baby doll parts strewn everywhere—some with needles poked into the eyes and scalp; others with their dirty, rubbery arms and legs all knotted and mangled.
    I look across the hallway into another room. I remember carving my initials into a wooden support beam in there, how me and Tom splashed yellow and green paint on the walls to make it look like lobotomy juice, and how me and Tammy Come-do-me, some freshman-wannabe-senior, made it all the way to third base in the hallway closet, and then to home plate in the parking lot.
    It makes me wonder how the place looked the next day, in the light. If it looked like this. If Tammy woke up feeling like a senior.
    I make my way into the hallway, hurry down a staircase to unlock a