The Last Supper

Ruth asked if I wanted to go spelunking, and she meant going back to the house we had lived in the past year to explore it, but we were worried about bats and ceilings caving in, so it sounded pretty accurate. We still lived in the same city in new summer apartments with degrees on paper and jobs that weren’t what we thought our internships would net us, and very little money for gas, so we walked most places, and our thighs got sticky like we had spilled a can of Coke on our laps. The house had been condemned by the city, but it still looked the same because we had been the ones to put boards over the windows after that one time a homeless man broke in, and the landlord never responded to our emails, so Nick took some wood he found on the side of a construction site and nail-gunned them to the windows. The nail gun was from the props department, and he borrowed it casually for that project and a few others. Most of senior year, he was high on something, but he was an actor, not a props guy, and those types could afford to be more far gone. Ruth was a costumer, and she had lots of talent for draping things, like a scarf, to make us look like bandits when we entered the house through the same boarded-up window. The thing about condemned houses is that the wood is failing, much like the foundation, and we pried the handiwork away easily, almost like foil from a Pringles can, and slid in noisily, our footsteps crunching leaves, like chips, breaking, and entering.

The Last Supper painting was still on the living room wall. My sister had painted it, the roommates as apostles. Jesus was still Jesus because someone in the group believed in something. I guess there was no reason to paint over it because the city was going to tear the house down anyway. Trash littered the floor, but it didn’t reek of our mess. Maybe the landlord wanted to get their money's worth from demolition and had added garbage that didn’t fit in the dumpster to the hallways as decoration. We weren’t scared of falling through the floorboards, maybe a little bit of being arrested; we didn’t have the pull of youthfulness on our side. Something happens in a college town when you stop being part of the college and become a townie. There's a seriousness, a severity, especially if you don’t work at the university. Ruth did. I worked for Panera. Ruth went downstairs to her room, and I went upstairs to mine. The bay window looked crooked, like it was smiling all wrong, and I lay on the floor staring at the ceiling, trying to remember who I had sex with and why it was never Brian. An empty house holds a lot of regrets because it has the space to remember.

We got bored fast. The house smelled of neglect, maybe slightly of vomit, and still no one had cleaned up the pumpkin guts in the laundry room from that one time we pranked Ben. The police never came because no one cared about the house on Ohio Street in the summer, when 13 people hosting theatre parties had scattered like mice into the real world. Ruth and I were wearing black, and we looked more like baristas than bandits. I think we were trying to be risky in a way that said we would be young forever. I think we wanted to immortalize the adventure of it all: living with 13 people and 1.5 bathrooms in a soon-to-be-condemned-house with a Sweeney Todd asylum gate between the dormer windows. Nick had placed the DDTM letters in faux Greek right in front of it, scaring the sorority girls as they walked by, confused by our place in it all. Coming back made me remember I was still confused; maybe Ruth was, too. We let ourselves out through the front door and walked our separate ways home.