Halloween was on a Wednesday that year, and Golden Fig Middle School had a costume party on the Friday before. Wunder wasn’t planning on going, but Faye had insisted.
“Listen, Wundie. We have to go,” she’d said. “I have the best costume, but you’re the only one who will get it. So if you’re not there, no one will get it. Which I’m used to, but it would be nice to have someone get it. For once in my life.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll go. I’ll get it,” Wunder had said. “But I’m not wearing a costume this year.”
“Mine will be supernaturally spectacular enough for both of us,” Faye had assured him.
And when she walked into the school gym that Friday night, Wunder had to admit, her costume was pretty supernaturally spectacular. And he had to agree: No one else would get it.
Faye wore a white dress. Around her arms, torso, and waist, she had wrapped white cloth napkins, a white bandanna, and even white toilet paper. She had a wig of long black hair, and her face was covered in painted-on lines—lines from her nose to her mouth, lines around her eyes, lines across her forehead. Wrinkle lines. She was carrying a stack of envelopes in her hand.
Wunder laughed. “Everyone probably thinks you’re a mummy,” he said.
“With this hair?” Faye tossed her inky-black locks back. “Not a chance.”
“What’s in the envelopes?” he asked.
She opened one. It was empty.
“I couldn’t think what to write, even to pretend,” she said.
They walked around the gym, getting candy from the plastic cauldrons set up here and there. Everyone was in costume except for Wunder, but even in masks and face paint and wigs, he recognized each kid there. By now, he had delivered letters to dozens of their family members: to Charlotte Atkins’s mother and to Ivo Reis’s grandfather and to Mason Nash’s uncle. And if he kept delivering letters, Wunder realized that eventually, at some point in their lives, every single one of his classmates would get their own. Each person in this room would experience a miracle, maybe many miracles. And each, he knew, would experience a terrible, terrible loss.
“Oh, hey, Wunder.”
Wunder turned from faces he recognized to one of the faces he knew best of all. Davy was wearing a trash bag filled with crumpled-up paper. It was, Wunder realized, the same costume he’d worn last year.
Davy was rock.
Last year, Wunder had been paper. Tomás had been scissors.
“I know it was probably dumb to wear this costume,” Davy said. “No one knows what I am without scissors and paper. But I couldn’t think of anything else. You usually plan our costumes.”
Suddenly, Wunder felt guilt, hard and knotted, in the pit of his stomach. Davy was his friend. Davy had been his friend for his whole life. And he had yelled at him and ignored him, and now here he was wearing a costume meant for three all by himself.
“It’s not dumb,” Wunder told him.
“You look like a bag of trash,” Faye said. “Is that what you’re supposed to be, David? A bag of trash?”
“No,” Davy said. He sounded miserable. “Rock. I’m a rock.”
“You haven’t been very nice to Wundie,” Faye said, holding up a white-gloved finger. “He’s had some hard times. Some extremely hard times. And what did his friends do? They turned their backs on him, abandoned him, left him no choice but to become friends with me, et cetera.”
“I don’t know if that’s how it happened,” Wunder said.
But Davy was gnawing on his lip and gripping the sides of his trash bag. “It’s true!” he cried. “I’ve been a terrible friend. I know it and you know it! When my mom was sick, you always talked to me about her, Wunder. But I was—you know I get nervous. I didn’t know what to say. I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay, Davy,” Wunder said. “I guess I didn’t know what to say either.” It felt, as he said this, like the gym grew a little brighter. He glanced around. “Where’s Tomás? I haven’t seen him.”
Davy shrugged. “Tomás doesn’t hang out with me anymore. Did you know he made the soccer team? He’s got a lot of new friends.”
Wunder felt the knot of guilt return. Davy had lost both of his best friends at once. “I’m really sorry, Davy,” he said.
Davy shrugged again. “I kind of saw that one coming,” he said.
“Me too,” Wunder said.
They headed over to the refreshment table. Vice Principal Jefferson was there, serving punch with floating eyeballs. He was dressed as a vampire, including a long red cape.
“Nice mummy costume, Miss Lee!” he called to Faye.
“Nice cape-not-cloak, Mr. Jefferson,” Faye said. “But I’m not a mummy. I’m a witch.”
Davy gripped a skeleton-print paper plate and gawked at Faye as if he were seeing her for the first time. “A witch? Are you the DoorWay House witch?”
Faye smiled smugly at Wunder. “See? Everyone thinks she’s a witch.”
“What have you two been doing over there?” Davy’s voice was shaky. “That place always gave me the heebie-jeebies, even before she showed up. And then she started asking about Wunder—”
“Asking about me?” Wunder said, confused.
“I’ve been trying to tell you—I deliver her paper. She’s always out on her porch. I keep trying to go earlier and earlier so I don’t have to see her. Today I went at 5:00 a.m., but she was already out there! I mean, it was dark and everything!”
“Get to the point, David,” Faye said.
“She—she asked about Wunder,” Davy said. “The day the obituary—after your sister was in the paper, Wunder. She asked me if I was your friend, and she asked if you believed in miracles. And then she had me bring an envelope to the town hall. I don’t know what it was.”
“For the memorial stone!” Faye shrieked.
Wunder was trying to understand what Davy was telling him, but ghosts and angels and demons and goblins were running all around him and the gym was so loud and suddenly darker again.
“You deliver the paper there?” he asked. “Since when?”
“Maybe a month,” Davy said.
“When exactly?” Faye demanded.
Davy looked uncomfortable. “The day after—after Wunder’s sister—after she … died.”
“She showed up the day after Wundie’s sister died?” Faye shouted.
“I—I guess so,” Davy said, bewildered. “That’s the first day I delivered her paper, anyway. And since then, she’s had me deliver a million letters. And look”—he pulled an envelope out of the pocket of his gray sweatpants—“when I brought her the paper this morning, she gave me this one. It’s for my mother.”
It was a cream-colored envelope with a black wax seal. And scrawled across the front: Tabitha Baum.
For weeks, Wunder and Faye had delivered letters that they had not opened. They had waited for their own. For his part, Wunder had been afraid to know what was inside, afraid to solve the mystery, and it seemed like Faye must have felt that way too, because she hadn’t pushed him.
But this new information from Davy seemed to be her tipping point.
“Open it!” she screamed.
Davy was so startled that he fell backward into the punch-and-snack table. His paper-filled trash bag suit crinkled and crunched. Faye snatched the envelope.
“That’s my mother’s!” Davy protested, knocking over a bowl of chips in his effort to right himself. But Faye was already ripping it open.
Inside was a piece of the same worn paper folded into thirds that everyone else had received. Wunder and Davy gathered around Faye as she unfolded it. There, in the same sprawling black handwriting, were the words:
“Behold! I tell you a miracle. We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.”
And under it:
Come to the highest point of Branch Hill Cemetery at sunrise on the second of November. In this place of remembrance and love, we will experience miracles, and we will all be changed. Together.
“The cemetery?” Davy asked. “What does it have to do with my mom?”
Wunder shook his head, eyes on the letter. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess because she’s a miracle.”
“A miracle? You mean the cancer? Because she got better? But why—”
“The time for wondering is over!” Faye tossed a scrap of white cloth over her shoulder. “We’re going to the DoorWay House. Now!”