Page 20 of My Unscripted Life

“Ugh, no way. Team Auden,” I reply. I prefer the tall, dark ghost hunter.

She laughs and shakes her head. “Always with the bad boys.”

As soon as I hear their tires pull out of the driveway, I leap off my bed and fling open my closet doors, pulling out my favorite butter-yellow top, gauzy with little ties at the shoulders. After I’ve thrown on a pair of worn cutoffs, cuffed just above the knee, and my gray leather sandals, I study myself in the full-length mirror on the back of my closet door. It’s too hot for my favorite jeans, the ones I imagined wearing when I pictured our first date back at Naz’s house, but I think the outfit is a good mix of fancy and relaxed.

Not that this is a date, of course. Just two new friends hanging out. No big deal. No need for my skin to feel cool and tingly. No reason for my heart to be pounding out a heavy bass rhythm. No reason for the manic grin that keeps trying to take up residence on my face.

Ugh, those damn heat-seeking missiles.

I spend a moment reminding myself about the Internet commenters and the telephoto lenses and Milo’s broken heart, which helps calm the tingles and the pounding, though there’s nothing to be done about the grin. He’s not even here yet, and already my cheeks ache.

When Milo arrives to pick me up, his tiny black sports car has been replaced by a big, shiny black pickup truck. It’s like his baby car finally grew up into a big-boy car. The truck is one of those giant diesel numbers, and thechug-chug-chugging of the engine makes it sound like you could hitch our whole house to the back and haul it up to Atlanta with minimal effort.

“Where’s the Audi?” I ask as I skip down the path toward the truck. I hope I don’t sound too snobby, because I really couldn’t care less about cars. All I care about is that it has four wheels and an air conditioner, and really the four wheels are negotiable. It’s my parents who have made me take a blood oath never to get on the back of a motorcycle.

“This is way more practical,” he replies. He opens the passenger door for me, and I climb in. The door slams behind me, then Milo makes his way around the front of the truck to the driver’s side.

“For all those major construction projects you’ve got lined up? Camping trips up the summit of K2?”

“And to blend in a bit,” he says. “The Audi was way too easy to spot.”

Milo turns on some music, a singer-songwriter I’ve never heard before, but I hear only a few notes before the music fades away. We drive with the windows down, sneaking smiles at each other, the roar of the wind covering the music and preventing a whole lot of conversation, which is pretty fine with me. When I’m done giving him directions to the two-lane country highway, I settle in for the drive, leaning slightly over the center console. I can smell the earthy, sweet scent of his cologne, or maybe just his detergent in the thundering wind that swirls through the truck’s cab.

“You gonna tell me where we’re going?” he calls over the rush of the wind.

“Just keep driving,” I reply. I tuck a strand of hair that’s escaped from my ponytail back behind my ear and watch the rolling hills and grassy fields rush by as we cruise down the two-lane country highway.

His eyes fixate on the road in front of him, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. “I like the sound of that.”

We drive for just over an hour, but the minutes fly by. I’m tempted to give him bad directions so we can get lost for a while, because I can’t think of much better than just sitting beside him. But when I spot the mile marker that signals our turn is coming up, I direct him to slow down and take a left at a crumbling brick gate flanking a dirt driveway. The truck bounces over long-worn ruts in the road, off to the side of which is an ocean of pecan trees in perfect staggered rows as far as the eye can see. They’re ancient, with wide trunks and long branches creating a canopy over the land. The temperature drops slightly as we’re shaded from the beating sun, and the breeze feels even more heavenly. By August, it’ll be unbearable out even in the shade of the trees, but in early June it’s the perfect summer oasis.

Farther down the road, massive live oaks, growing since before the Civil War, line the way and overtake the ordered view of the grove. The branches twist and gnarl and lean over the road as if weighed down by the gray tangles of Spanish moss that drip from the branches. At the end of the dirt road, the trees part for an overgrown lawn and a hulking behemoth of a ramshackle old mansion.

Milo pulls the car around on what was once a circular driveway, throwing the truck into park at the front entrance. He leans his head out the window, taking in the sagging veranda, the shutters hanging crooked by rusty bolts, and the front door with the stained glass panel, now dusty and cracked and sporting one tiny bullet hole in the top left corner.

“Whatisthis place?” There’s a bit of awe in his voice, which is carried away on the breeze. It’s how I felt when I first found this place—how Istillfeel every time I see it.

“This is Westfell Grove. It dates back to before the Civil War, and once upon a time it was rumored to be a stop on the Underground Railroad.”

“It looks like it should be a museum.”

“It should, or at least a historic site, but the guy who owns it is a crook or maybe just a jerk. Either way, he’s decided it’s too expensive to restore, so he’s letting it rot.” The long-since-forgotten property hasn’t had a tenant in at least fifty years, and the house shows it. The white planks of the siding have grown gray with mildew and moss. The bottom-floor windows are all blacked out with plywood so old it’s actually starting to peel off the house, and several of the second-story windows have been broken by pecans or rocks or worse, sent flying by roving vandals. The whole house has settled over the years, but unevenly, so the porch sags on either end, making the house look like it’s frowning.

“Wait, this is private property?” Milo ducks his head to peer through the windshield, looking for some security guard or homeowner with a gun to come screaming up to us, but none does. “Aren’t we trespassing, then?”

“Yeah, but the owner lives up in Atlanta. I don’t think he’s been down since he bought the place. He’s just waiting for it to fall down so he can avoid the hassle of paying to have it demolished. He’s probablyhopingwe’ll vandalize it.” I’ve heard my dad go on and on about the tragedy of demolition by neglect, especially when it comes to historic sites. That’s how I first found Westfell. I was in middle school, and Dad and I were playing one of our epic games of Which Way Does This Road Go? Our only rule is to obey all No Trespassing signs (Those people have guns,Dad always said), but this place didn’t have any. Which meant not only did we drive right up to the front door, but on later trips we even discovered a place where the plywood was falling off and crawled inside to do some exploring. It was Dad who discovered the rumor about the Underground Railroad, and he’s spent part of his summer research every year trying to substantiate it.

If I can find proof, I can save this place,he always says, wistful but determined, like some sort of historic-preservation superhero. I want it saved, too, but there’s also something about the way it looks now, almost sagging under the weight of its history, that I like.

“Maybe we should trespass and do some guerrilla maintenance,” Milo says.

“A noble thought, but this old girl needs way more work than a hammer could do. Basically it needs to be gutted, reinforced, and top-to-bottom restored.” Now I’m pretty much quoting my dad word for word. I make a mental note to thank him for dragging me along on these trips, even when I was an unwilling participant (in my defense, sometimes a twelve-year-old would rather stay home and find out who’s getting told to pack their things and go on whatever iteration of bad reality TV competition happens to be on at the time).

Milo’s eyes rove over the bones of the house. “It’s so sad. You can just barely tell what it used to be. It’s almost too far gone to imagine.”

I pull out my sketchbook from my bag. I’m still carrying it around out of habit, but now it’s going to be of use. I flip a few pages. “You don’t have to imagine. Here it is.” I visited the county archives in the basement of Wilder City Hall last summer with Dad to find the picture. Ever since I first saw it, even in grainy sepia, I couldn’t stop drawing it. And that was when I started coming out here by myself whenever I could convince my parents to let me borrow a car. It became my secret place, my muse, and I have a whole stack of sketchbooks back inmy room with more drawings of the property. Sometimes I’d bring Naz with me, and she’d settle onto one of the low tree branches and watch a game or study for an exam. But I haven’t been out here since I stopped sketching. Standing here in front of the house feels like visiting a friend you’ve been neglecting. I’m excited to see it, but sad that it’s been so long, embarrassed that I dropped the ball.

Milo flips the page to where I’ve done a pencil sketch. On the left side of the paper, the house as it was: shutters straight, sun glinting off the glossy paint, blooming azaleas lining the wide porch, which has all its spindles lined up straight like tin soldiers. But as Milo’s eyes move across the page, the house deteriorates into the leaning, hulking structure in front of us, like someone is wiping away the past.

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