I was reading a comic in the living room, reclined on the couch, when Celeste approached me.

“Want to go exploring?”

I lowered my comic and saw that instead of her pajamas, she was wearing a bright yellow sundress. Her hair was combed and she was even wearing makeup. I had never seen her like this before.

“What?” I asked.

“Want to go exploring? Like, downtown or something? There are lots of abandoned buildings there.”

I didn’t completely understand what she meant, but it was someone asking to spend time with me, so I wasn’t about to object.

She led me to the garage, where it turned out the second car belonged to her. She drove us downtown, but avoided parking near the rows of stores and restaurants, instead taking us downhill and parking near an old building with shattered windows. She hopped out of the car and I followed her as she eagerly peeked through one of the windows.

Joining her at the window, I looked inside to see emptiness spread before me. The building’s bottom floor had no interior walls, forming one big room with a staircase leading up and a single wooden chair fallen on the dusty floor.

“What do you think they used this building for?” she asked.

“A warehouse?” I guessed.

She laughed. “There aren’t any of those big rolling doors to back in trucks. There’s no way it was a warehouse. Come on, let’s go inside.”

Before I could object, she was already moving, checking a door and finding it unlocked.

“Wait, isn’t this illegal?” I asked.

“Come on, doesn’t it drive you mad?” she replied. “When you see a building like this, don’t you want to know what secrets it hides?”

“I mean, yeah, it would be kind of fun wandering around a place like this, but not if it gets us arrested.”

“We’re not going to get arrested,” she groaned. Without waiting any further, she stepped through the door.

I trailed in after her as she danced and twirled across the dusty floor, her skirt flaring out around her.

“I used to explore all the time when I was a kid,” she said. “A bunch of us would. Usually we’d just find cool stuff. Weird old garbage we could make up stories about. Like, one time we found a teacup with pictures of elephants on it in the middle of the woods. So we made up this story about how it belonged to a family of bears and how they’d gotten it during their vacation to China. Because the teacup said ‘Made in China.’ But what we were really looking for—what I was really looking for, was secrets.”

She paused at the stairs, waiting for me to catch up.

I picked up my pace. “What do you mean?”

She sighed in frustration. I felt like I was trailing behind her mentally as well as physically. “Secrets! Like, when you have a route you walk every day, and there’s this weird alley you can see from one side of the block, but when you walk around to the other side, it’s not there. And you always wonder where you’ll end up if you walk down that alley. Or maybe there’s a strange stone door and you wonder if it was there before because surely you never would have missed something like that in the hundred times you’ve walked past it and you’re left wondering what’s behind it. Well, I would explore stuff like that. This building’s like that.”

I wasn’t following what she meant, so I just smiled. She seemed satisfied with that response.

“Come on, let’s see what’s upstairs.”

“Wait, are you sure the second floor is sturdy?” I asked.

She gestured to the room around us. “Nothing’s collapsed, has it?”

I felt like a piece of debris, caught up in her wake, but I followed her up the stairs. There was a certain excitement in it, knowing that whatever happened, even if we were arrested or injured, it would happen to the two of us together. Perhaps that was why she had wanted my companionship.

The upstairs was separated into several rooms, one connecting to another with no central hall. Most contained only dust and grit, though a few were adorned with odd leftovers of the building’s former life, like an empty plant pot or a collection of folding chairs. The occasional piece of graffiti informed us that we weren’t the first to explore this building.

Celeste trotted from room to room, examining each. “We could make an ARG here,” she said from somewhere around a corner. “Anise could come up with a creepy story and Bliss could make a bunch of special effects for disturbing videos and you and I could act. You want to do that sometime?”

“Sure,” I said with uncertainty. Was she talking about making a movie? She talked so quickly that it was impossible to follow.

“Ah-ha,” she said triumphantly.

Following her voice, I found what had excited her.

“A window?”

“An unbroken window,” she explained. “And look, it slides open. The others weren’t made to open.”

I tried to picture the other windows, but I hadn’t taken note of that detail. “They weren’t?”

She nodded. “You have to be observant. Notice details. Find inconsistencies.”

As I puzzled over what she was talking about, she unlocked the window and slid it open, leaning out and looking from left to right.

“Nothing,” she said, leaning back in. “Let’s head to the roof.”

Without waiting for my answer, she marched back to the stairs. We climbed up and found the door was unlocked, so we stepped out onto the building’s roof. Nothing about it seemed remarkable to me, but Celeste ran directly to the edge to peek over.

“It’s so cool seeing everything from this angle.” She danced her way back over to me. “You should take a video of me.”

Before I could respond, she had locked eyes onto something else. This building was attached to the next building over. A set of rusty rungs attached to the wall formed a ladder leading from this building’s roof to the next one’s fourth floor balcony. This time, I already knew what Celeste was thinking.

“That doesn’t look sturdy.”

“It’s fine,” said Celeste, running over to the ladder. “I hardly weigh anything.”

She scrambled up with a nimbleness I never could have imagined from the normally sluggish girl. I sighed to myself. If it was strong enough for her, it was likely strong enough for me. I climbed up after her, taking significantly more time. At the top, I found her staring with wonder at an impressive garden. Ivy-covered fences obscured the roof’s size by creating rows and paths. From this angle, with the view of the city blocked, it looked like its own world of brightly colored flowers and vegetables.

“I found it,” Celeste whispered.

“We can’t be here,” I whispered back. “This is someone’s apartment.”

But once again Celeste ignored me. She ran into the garden in a sudden frenzy and turned a corner. I ran after her, rounding the corner with her and nearly running into her as I discovered her, staring frozen through the glass doors into an apartment, a large man staring back at her.

“We need to go now.” I hesitated a moment, then took her wrist. She didn’t resist as I briskly led her away, breaking into a run as we rounded the corner. I climbed down the ladder first, but lost patience halfway down and jumped, landing roughly on the roof and sending a jolt of pain through my ankles. I looked up to see Celeste following me down.

Just as she reached the point where I had jumped, the rung she was putting her weight on broke. She flailed in the air as her foot struck the run below and slipped off. Her knee was next to strike the rung. Then she was on the ground, clutching at her knee and wailing with pain.

I hesitated, reached out for her arm, then hesitated again.

“Here, let me help,” I said, finally. She held out her elbow and I took her, helping her onto her uninjured foot. With me supporting her weight, the two of us hobbled to the stairs. It was agonizingly slow and I struggled with my skinny frame, but we eventually made it back to the car. I helped her into the passenger seat and, taking her keys, got in the driver’s side to make our escape. Thankfully, although it had been years since I last drove, I found I still remembered how. And soon we were speeding away.

We drove in silence for a few minutes before Celeste finally broke it.

“It’s not fair. You all get to stay part of the Hidden World. But I’m stuck, knowing it’s there but not being able to touch it. It’s not even about her. I just want magic back in my life.”