The crack of bones echoed through my head growing to a loud unbearable climax. It kept me up that night tossing and turning while my thoughts stuck on the same recurring scene playing over and over again, taunting and mocking. I knew it was a bad idea. I knew we shouldn’t have been there. But it seemed like fun at first, sneaking into the old, abandoned house at the end of Dunn Street.
Jack brought two girls, one for him and one for me, and some others who had wanted to tag along. I never considered him a close friend of mine, but we hung out sometimes. None of us had ever been inside before. As we walked closer to the house, we saw the carvings and graffiti that covered the rotting red French doors, initialing the presence of past trespassers. The doorknobs were missing and on the ground lay a rusty padlock severed long ago. The copper knocker on the door took the shape of a lion bearing sharp teeth, oxidized green with age. The eyes resembled dull emeralds, mirroring the miserable state of the inside.
The height of the ceilings was such that you could imagine chandeliers hanging there, but the house was stripped barren. A few times a year we’d hear about the police being called to remove a bum that had taken residence. They came by about a week ago, so we knew the house was empty. Jack and I lead them up the creaking steps of the stairs circling above the foyer until we reached the second floor. Like the doors, some of the wooden floorboards had rotted and I carefully zigzagged my way to the balcony, with Jack and the others trailing behind.
Everyone grabbed for the bottle I pulled out of my pocket, each taking a swig of the golden liquid. I never liked the taste of tequila, the way it coated my tongue and burnt my throat as it seeped down, settling heavily in the bottom of my stomach. The girls’ faces scrunched up as they passed the flask between them and back to us.
We sat down onto the cool concrete of the balcony as the wind picked up and rattled the branches of the trees. The floor lay unleveled, fractured into two halves. One half sat a few inches lower than the other as if it beckoned by some supernatural force to seep lower into the ceiling of the first floor. Jack moved closer to one of the girls, slipping his arm around her shoulders. She squirmed under him while he tried whispering in her ear. Looking uncomfortable with how close Jack was, her eyes frantically darted for a means of escape. She called to another girl that had just arrived before moving out from underneath him. With a puzzled look, Jack stood up, pulled a joint from his pocket, and lit it with the lighter in his other hand. He had tried to act nonchalant about the girl’s reaction, but it took his shaky hands three times before the joint stayed lit. He practiced rings of smoke as the rest of us talked, and more people, uninvited, but welcome, arrived.
Jack asked for the flask again, taking gulps at a time it dribbled down his neck. I told him to save some for the rest of us, so he passed it back to me with only a meager portion left behind. Jack staggered over from girl to girl, receiving the same result from each, a shove over to next victim, who pushed him away in his drunken state. I grabbed Jack’s arm and told him to relax. He stood there staring blank-eyed back at me, his heavy, staggered breath reeking of alcohol. I could tell he hadn’t heard a word.
But I wasn’t his babysitter. I wasn’t responsible for him. It wasn’t my fault when Jack climbed onto the wooden ladder that snaked up the side of the house. I called out to him. Doesn’t that mean anything? Jack continued up until he gripped a rung that looked like any other, but had long ago rotted. The weight of his body snapped it in half, leaving his hands nothing to grasp but the air. I watched as Jack’s eyes widened, and his face turned pale. He swung his arms, trying to keep his balance, but fell backwards, legs flailing and hands still trying to grasp at something not there. Jack fell to the driveway below, cracking his head on the hard cobblestone.
I watched him from the balcony above, stunned by the blood pooling around his head, yet unable to look away from the friend I had just lost. Someone else, someone more responsible, called an ambulance. What was the point? I knew he was dead, so I left. I walked home from Dunn Street trying not to blink, trying not think, because every time I closed my eyes I saw Jack’s face in those few seconds before his head smacked the pavement.