Eager to Love by Sadie Romero

Chapter 1
     
    Huey P. Long was a decaying shell of a
building situated right in the middle of Louisiana State
University’s campus like a dead tooth set in a jaw of
milk-fortified pearly whites. They’d built the place—a swimming
pool and rec center—back during the great depression, but they
boarded it up in the nineties and everyone somehow forgot about it.
It was never demolished, never repurposed. Now, weeds burst from
the concrete, blackened mold oozed from red rooftop shingles, and
algae crept up the pale sides of the outdoor swimming pool, which
stayed half-filled with stagnant rainwater. Like the secret Subway
under Foster Hall, most people didn’t even know Huey P. Long
existed.
    “LSU,” Jeffery whispered, pulling back the
broken flap of chain-link, “has many secrets.”
    “I see that,” I whispered back, crawling
through the fence. “My question is: how is it you seem to know so
many of them?”
    Jeffery grinned, his teeth white by my
cellphone’s makeshift flashlight. “I know people.”
    “Of course you do,” I said.
    Jeff scrambled through the fence much more
gracefully than I had. “You would too,” he said, “if you’d get out
of the apartment once in a while, Introvert Lynn.”
    “I’m out now, aren’t I?”
    “Yeah, only because exploring an abandoned
building in the middle of the night means we’re almost guaranteed
not to run into people.” He pulled out his own phone light and
shone it at a rusty ladder on the side of the building.
    “Baby steps, Jeff,” I said. “Up to the roof?
I thought we were going inside.”
    “You’ll see,” he said, taking to the ladder
first.
    I followed, not minding the view. Jeffery had
a great ass, even in the dark.
    At the top of the ladder, we climbed over an
ornate chest-high-wall and found ourselves on a second-story
open-air track that encircled the derelict pool like a second-story
theater balcony. It was very dark. The slimy water in the pool
below reflected moonlight wherever it wasn’t patched over with
matte films of algae, these darker spots looking like fissures to
some cold, black hell in which not even stars could shine.
    Crickets and cicadas frazzled the night air
with their usual buzz, and the ever-present hum of Baton Rouge’s
traffic continued, but Huey P. Long worked a dulling effect on
these familiar noises. It was as if the building existed in a
bubble force-field from one of Jeffery’s science-fiction novels,
and sounds filtering through it became hollow echoes of their
former selves. Addition-like cross symbols dominated the
architecture and tile work, and the motif made the place feel even
more like a graveyard.
    “‘What are the roots that clutch?’” Jeffery
whispered with drama, quoting something. “‘What branches grow out
of this stony rubbish? Son of man, you cannot say, or guess, for
you know only a heap of broken images.’”
    I shoved him. “Stop it, Shakespeare. It’s
creepy enough.”
    “Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you the best
part.”
    We walked the loop of the track by moonlight.
The rubbery polyurethane that had once coated the running surface
now existed in only a few stray stubbles, the rest pulled up and
hauled away to show naked concrete underneath. Our footsteps
sounded loud.
    Eventually, Jeffery stopped us in front of a
series of black, rectangular pits over the edge of a low guardrail.
Thick, heavy walls barricaded the pits from each other, and when I
shone my light down into them, I saw strange markings and graffiti
over the walls and the floors.
    “Racquetball courts,” Jeff said.
    “Are we going down into them?” I asked. My
stomach felt cold at the thought of it.
    “Naturally,” said Jeffery. “That’s where all
the cool stuff is.” For a smile like that, I figured I could take
the risk.
    Besides, there wasn’t really any
danger, right? We were in the middle of a college campus, for
crying out loud.
    We walked down an old brick stairwell and
through doorways with