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Marnie, people say, is beautiful. This embarrasses her and she doesn’t like to show her legs, her squared knees. She covers them in corduroys. Her house is smaller. Evil’s parents call it quaint. They call it unselfconscious. They smile in tight, polite lines.

Evil and Marnie both love the Velvet Underground and light brown M&Ms. Years ago, they learned to dance to the nervous music of a jack-in-the-box in Evil’s bedroom in the eaves. They both have those dreams sometimes where your legs are broken and you can’t run. Usually, something is chasing them. They are both seventeen.

Tonight is the first night of the summer, coldish for early June. They have dared each other to spend the entire night inside the tuberculosis hospital, and if they lose, they have to shave their eyebrows off and draw them on again in magic marker. If they win, they get to eat butter and Nutella sandwiches for breakfast and then they get the summer, long and green and secret.

The hospital is shadowy and outside there are wheelchairs scattered like chess pieces about the dead grass. People have littered here. There are empty liquor bottles and candy bar wrappers and plastic red circles that used to hold gunpowder for toy guns.

Evil says, I can’t do it.

You can, says Marnie.

I’m not so attached to my eyebrows, anyway, Evil says, and she sits down on a dirty tire.

Marnie pulls a cigarette out of her soft pack with her teeth and lights it, then she sits down beside Evil. This is how it goes: A hand on Evil’s back, moving in circles. A small song, hummed in a way that makes Marnie’s nostrils vibrate. They share the cigarette until the song ends. Marnie likes an excuse to put her hands on Evil’s skin.

We’ll catch tuberculosis, Evil says, from the ghosts.

But they go inside anyway, Marnie first. The ground floor is boarded up, sealed tight with unfinished wood that people have spray-painted with curse words and swastikas. To get inside, you have to climb up the rope in the back that leads to the second floor, where there is a broken window.

The dare was aimed specifically at the basement, where the morgue is. The yellow circle from their flashlight nods across the wall of the rotting staircases leading downward.

An elevator in my stomach just plunged to the basement, Marnie says. And then it went straight to hell.

But she only pretends to believe in ghosts, because ghosts scare Evil in a pleasant way. This is a small gift. Evil’s arms will go goosepimply and Marnie will rub them until they are warm and Evil will sigh with a theatrical shudder. It makes Marnie feel useful. This is a large gift, something entirely else.

In the basement, the girls sit down on a rust-colored filing cabinet. Marnie lights another cigarette. She asks, You smell that?

Skunk spray? Evil asks. Decomposing skin?

Marnie smiles. Hear that?

Train drumfire? Evil asks. Zombie pillow talk?

Are you afraid? Marnie asks. Here, she says, patting her chest. Put your head here and breathe the same as me.

The night is like a slow explosion: at its center, there is a new story calmly splitting like a cell. After the summer, Marnie will go away to a college called Wellesley two freeways from here. There, she will live in a room with two beds, the other bed belonging to a stranger. Evil will stay.

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