By Sandy Gingras

Featured art: Position Interplay: Midnight by Samia Halaby

The building is boarded up, but we know how to get in.
It’s the end of summer and we’re seventeen. We don’t have a car
and there’s nowhere to go in this town except down

the huge hills gliding our bikes past the A&P,
the Ben Sun store where my mother buys my gym uniform, past
the funeral home and the corner bar where Eddie’s father sits

in the same chair every afternoon. The air is humid,
and the stars look stalled out in the sky. Maybe they’re waiting
for us to try something or to grow up already like my mother tells

me to do. A train goes past and faces stare out of the fluorescent lights.
My flip-flops ring on the metal stairs. Eddie puts his shoulder on
a board, and we’re through. It’s just the way it always is—

the way they left it. Eddie sweeps his flashlight across
the cables and cogs and steel beams, the stacks of papers
next to the stapler. This place is leaking

PCPs into the Hudson River, my mother says, but we don’t know
what PCPs are. All I know is, this is where my father worked
before he left my mother. Eddie and I grew up two brick houses

away from each other. Tonight we’re here to take one last look at
the muscley machines. I’m leaving for school tomorrow.
See, some things last, Eddie says to me. I don’t tell him different.

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Sandy Gingras is the author and illustrator of twenty-five gift books. She has designed stationery products for several companies and owns two of her own retail stores. Gingras lives with her husband and her golden retriever on an is- land six miles out to sea off the coast of New Jersey. She won the Crime Writers’ Association’s “Debut Dagger Award” for a mystery she wrote in 2012.