School Days

School Days

"Here it is!"

I picked my way carefully among chunks of drywall. The floor tiles were loose as well. It was one thing to do a little trespassing to take a picture for a friend, but breaking a leg was another.

I looked through the doorway that his voice had come from.

"This was my old classroom," Jake said. "This is so cool. I've never done this in a building that I knew before it was abandoned."

He was looking around with wonder in his eyes. I looked around with nothing more than mild interest. There was still a blackboard, half hanging off the wall, and a few overturned desks. Otherwise the room was mostly empty. Many of the windows were broken, with vines and tree branches poking through. If I'd had more imagination I'm sure I could have entertained myself by thinking of the many generations of children who'd gazed out these windows. Instead the main thing I had in common with them is that I was pretty bored.

"So this is where you want the picture?" I prompted. Let's do it and get out of here, I thought.

"Yeah."

He stood in front of the blackboard, wearing his special purple jacket. This was his thing, collecting pictures of himself in the jacket on all his adventures. In the past I'd only seen the resulting photos. But all his urban-exploration friends were off on a trip to an abandoned amusement park when he heard that the demolition of our old elementary school would start on Monday.

"Great," I said after clicking the shutter a few times.

"Let me have it," he said. "We should take some more. It's the last record of the place."

I gave up the camera. I should have seen this coming, of course, even if just from seeing the dozens of photos of decaying factories, hospitals and whatnot. He'd made it sound like this would be a quick trip, but it had been foolish of me to believe him.

Jake had disappeared out the door, clicking the camera at everything he passed. I followed without enthusiasm. Returning to our old school didn't thrill me nearly as much as it did him. Not only was I uninterested in decaying buildings, I had no fond memories of grade school.

He was far down the hall when I smelled something. Something like burning.

"Jake?" I called. OK, this really crossed the line. I had not signed on for dying in a fire. They wouldn't think to look for anyone to rescue, because there shouldn't be anyone in here.

He had disappeared into another doorway. I walked after him faster, slipping on the loose tiles. Dammit, this wasn't funny anymore.

I glanced in the classroom doors as I passed, more peeling paint, more half-mast blackboards. The smell was getting stronger.

"Jake!" I said to his back, just inside the door of the last room in the hallway.

He didn't turn, and I saw what he was looking at. A man – a hobo, you might even say – was sitting by the window. He'd built a fire, and he was cutting the last of a potato into a dented pot hanging over the fire.

I'd have thought it was a ghost or a hallucination, if the man hadn't spoken to us. And if I hadn't recognized his voice.

"Have a seat. This should be done in twenty minutes or so," he gestured at the pot.

"Mr Dell?" Jake said, before I found my voice.

The man peered at us as we walked closer.

"Jake Carter. Oh, and Roy Griffin."

I was sure his tone had changed when he said my name. But surely he couldn't remember me that well. He'd tormented plenty of children in his years as a teacher. I wasn't anything special.

"Yeah," Jake said. "Wow." To him, this was obviously the coolest thing. Almost as good as really seeing a ghost.

"Well, fancy meeting you boys here," Mr Dell said.

I supposed that to him we were still boys. Jake remembered it all so well, he might as well have been. He was off and running, reminiscing about elementary school, about a trip we'd taken to a historic recreation site of some kind, another to some museum, all the kinds of old buildings he'd grown up to be crazy about. I just watched. Mr Dell hadn't shaved or washed in a long time. I wanted to know what had happened that he was homeless, living in an abandoned building, cooking over a fire like a hobo. But Jake had taken hold of the conversation, and he was more interested in the distant past.

After a while Jake ran out of breath and paused for a second. Mr Dell said to me, "So I guess you don't remember so much about second grade, Roy."

"Oh, sure," I said. "Like that time you gave me an F for drawing those birds."

Stupid thing to pop into my mind. Stupider to mention it. No way he could remember the lesson where we were supposed to show we knew our numbers by drawing one bird, two birds, three birds. He'd drawn the birds as those abstract curved W shapes. I'd drawn whole birds with feet and wings and heads. I liked to draw, and the assignment was less boring that way. He didn't even give me a chance to redo it.

"Those fancy birds, with patterns on the wings," he said.

I stared at him. He remembered? Impossible. It was just that plenty of children had been given Fs for doing the same thing, I thought. But did they all draw patterns on the wings?

"Yeah," I said. "Boy, I felt terrible about that."

I meant for it to sound casual. How could I still hold a grudge about something so stupid?

I waited for him to apologize. To say that now he realized that that was no way to treat small children. That he'd been too hard on them, and he was sorry.

"Well, it's important to learn to follow instructions carefully," he said.

"Oh no," Jake interrupted. "I have to go. I have a job to get to."

Right. This was why Jake hadn't gone off to see the abandoned amusement park on the Jersey shore with his friends. He was a photographer, and he had a wedding to get to. And he couldn't go in those dirty clothes and that purple jacket.

"Cool to see you," Jake called over his shoulder as he turned to leave.

He trotted down the hall, as fast as you could with all the debris scattered around. I struggled to keep up. I wondered, did Mr Dell know he only had another day to live in his old school building? That the wreckers were coming on Monday?

As we squeezed out the gap between the chained-together exit doors, Jake stopped and turned to me.

"Wait," he said. "Do you think he knows that the building's coming down?"

"He must," I said.

"We should go back and make sure," he said, uncertainly.

"You don't have time."

He looked at his watch again. "Oh god, you're right. You go?"

"OK," I said. "Go ahead."

"Oh, that's great. I really have to go. Thanks for coming. I'll show you the pictures tomorrow," he said as he pushed his way through the overgrown weeds and grass to the gap in the chain-link fence around the site.

I watched till he disappeared down the street. Then I pulled the doors shut behind me and headed home.