Eight

IT’S WILD NIGHT, Thirsty Thursday, and the drinking starts as soon as we get to the skate park, tiny fifty-milliliter bottles of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky sold at a slight markup from Trace’s brown bag in exchange for crumpled ones and fives. Bottles vanish into pockets, cup easily inside hands, the bloodred demon on the label breathing flame down everyone’s throats but mine, so I’m digging in my backpack for change even though I know I’ve got supper with Dad in a few hours. Just want to blend, and it’s not like I’m planning on getting sloshed or anything.

Bree gets two bottles on the house for her badassery with the pumpkins. Trace makes the story huge, larger than life, while Bree bites back a smile and shakes her head. We’re notorious, trumping the girlfriends and their bench; everybody can get behind bashing the Perfects on Prefect Street.

Kincaid is here, doing his pendulum thing on the half-pipe, hair and baggy jeans and wallet chain rising and slapping like sailcloth. He slows to listen to our story, then hops off his board, waiting until the rest of the crowd has bought their demons to get one for himself.

Kincaid looks at Bree. “You stole pumpkins?” Sheer delight sounds so cornball, but his voice is full of it. Bree reddens and glances down. “Can I see?”

Trace opens his car door, showing him the backseat. When Kincaid straightens up from the cab, he’s wiping his mouth on his hand, post−Fireball nip. “How the hell did you carry all those?”

Bree shrugs. “Wasn’t that hard.” At least this time she lets her expression warm a little, like a smile could happen. I don’t get it; when Kincaid’s around, my insides throw a holiday, big-city Chinatown-style, all swirling colors and lights and firecrackers. I can’t even hide it. At this point, her crush must be nearly dead inside that killing jar, twitching. Going dark.

I slap my pile of coins into Trace’s hand. “One, please.”

He gives a mock-solemn shake of his head. “Weak, Clarabelle. So weak.” I feel like an ass, but at least the focus has shifted my way instead of hovering between Bree and Kincaid, who’s probably wondering why the Pumpkin Thief hates him so much.

I glance at the street, then crack the seal on my bottle, hoping no one will be able to tell that I’ve only ever tried sips of my parents’ beer and wine before. I’ve overheard so much party bragging at the schools I’ve gone to—who got wasted, who got laid, whose parents don’t have the slightest clue—that it feels like about damn time I make a story of my own. The first swallow leaves a trail of fire down my throat, a taste like Red Hots and rubbing alcohol. I wince, but nobody’s looking—the boys are unloading the pumpkins, lining them up on the car roof according to size.

Trace takes out his folding clip knife, opens the serrated blade. “This sucker’s mine.” Thok, drives it up to the hilt in the biggest pumpkin, splattering juice.

They’re hack-and-slash jobs, the five jack-o’-lanterns staring back at us. Eight of us went into the trees to carve, with only two knives between us—Trace’s and Moon’s—so a lot was done by hand, cringing as we tossed away slimy, stringy guts, clearing gristle and seeds from eye sockets and gap-toothed grins until they leer or wink or make O’s of surprise.

We’re all buzzed, and it’s nice. Nobody’s reeling around, barfing, like so many of these stories end. I drained my bottle, even though it was gross, and now I’m wrapped in a warm, cinnamon-hazy quilt, layers of downy filler insulating my brain against things like awkwardness and worry—making this possibly the most fun I’ve ever had in my life. Giggling with Bree and Sage, flicking seeds at the boys, whispering about Kincaid, how cute it is that he takes his pumpkin carving so seriously, making a way better face than any of us, full of character, with a nose and eyebrows and everything, smoothing the edges with his fingertips.

Trace snaps a slim branch off an oak and whittles one end into a point, stabbing it through the bottom of a jack-o’-lantern, hefting it over his head. “Check it out. Vlad the Impaler, Vegetable Edition.”

Kincaid grins slowly. “Staked on the castle gate as a warning to other gourds.”

“Obey or—be carved with a kitty-cat face? Holy lameness, Ivy.” Trace aims a kick at her creation, whiffing just a few inches shy. “That’s not scary.”

“So?” She cradles it to her, stroking the lid. “Black cats are totally Halloween-y.”

Kincaid stands. “We need candles.” Is it me, or do his hand gestures get even more floaty and trippy when he’s been drinking? He takes nips when I’m not looking, always slipping the bottle away just as I turn. “We’ll need light on our pilgrimage.”

Pilgrimage? Bree, Sage, and I burst out laughing, Sage flops onto her back in the dead leaves to catch her breath, saying, “Where are we going?”

Kincaid’s watching me. And like that, I know.

We wait until around five thirty—twilight—to start our journey. Almost everybody from the skate park joins us. One of the holdout girlfriends, abandoned on her bench, calls, “It’s too early for jack-o’-lanterns,” but we ignore her.

Because the boys are coming with us.

The last bit of orange sunset peeks through knotted tree branches as Trace leads the way with Sage and the Jack on a Stick, its mouth glowing with a key-chain flashlight I had in my backpack. The rest of the jack-o’-lanterns are dark, cradled in our arms, grinning secretively down at the path.

“Call him,” Bree says to me, almost done with her second demon. She drinks like you’d expect, fast, direct, swallowing like it’s an assignment. “You won’t have reception in a second. Tell him you’re hanging with Sage and me and you’ll be a little late.”

My phone feels heavy in my pocket. “Well, I’m supposed to make supper tonight. My mom’s working.” Given that Dad always gets out late, I’ve got maybe half an hour before I need to be home. Kincaid said it takes a while to reach the railroad bridge, like over twenty minutes.

“You want to go home smelling like alcohol?” She finishes the bottle, flips it into the bushes, her face angled away from me. “He’s an adult, isn’t he? I think he can cook his own frozen pizza.” Feels my look, relaxes her tone a bit. “I mean, right?”

I make the call, the boy in front of me giving me this dirty look, like I’m the only one here with parents who expect them to check in sometimes. Dad’s voice mail saves me, his message crackly and distant, barely reaching me out here, like I’m launching off in a lunar probe or something. I keep my voice as low as I can, hoping he won’t pick up on my buzz. “So, I’ll be home by nine . . . hope that’s okay”—pause, feel Bree listening—“love you, see ya.” End call. We always say I love you—on the phone, before bed; Ma’s really big on that. I don’t care how babyish Mr. Staring Problem thinks it is.

Bree looks straight ahead as I tuck my phone away, holding our jack-o’-lantern in my other arm. My hands still radiate that gone-over-pumpkin stink, no matter how many times I wipe them on the grass. “Do you know how to make GIFs?” Maybe not the best icebreaker ever, but I need to say something to melt whatever’s frozen into the space between us just now. “Because we need one of Kincaid’s smile. The eye-crinkle thing? So we can watch it on repeat.”

The corner of her mouth moves. We’re okay. I think.

Our group passes through the marsh, where the sky opens up to our right, the horizon streaked with lavender and flame. The giant Mumbler mural—Fear Him—lies in wait, fingers lashing across the rock, face a maddening blank. The path slopes down, growing wetter, muckier, shoulder-high cattails everywhere, flower spikes gone to seed like heavy lumps of brownish wool.

It takes fifteen minutes of following the footpath along the circumference of the marsh, hopping puddles, skirting places where the salt tide rises over the trail, until we’re hiking, up, up, into the trees, people complaining about tired legs and sore feet, spitting out their cigarettes or Juicy Fruit.

Then the bridge is there, three arches in silhouette against the vibrant sky.

I follow the rest of them over the rusty railroad tracks leading to it, where the ties have crumbled into loose chunks. The bridge is made of stone—I didn’t expect that—big granite blocks spanning a seventy-foot space between landmasses, where water streams through the dark arch tunnels, churning yellow foam.

There’s a steel guardrail along either side, a small concession to anybody crossing on foot. The gaps between posts are so wide anybody but maybe Trace would tumble right through if they lost their footing.

It’s more than a bridge, though: it’s a shrine. Candles have been burned all down the length of the stone ledge on either side, streaks of wax hardened into shiny pools that splinter at the pressure of a foot. Broken beer-bottle glass here and there, and lots of candy wrappers, some stuck in the wax, others scattering in the breeze. The graffiti here is different—sexual, ultra-graphic. Guy parts, girl parts, scrawled requests for things, one picture that looks like it was drawn by a fourth grader copying from Hustler. I ask, “When was the last time a train ran through here?” just so nobody catches me blushing.

Kincaid tucks his pumpkin under one arm and leans on the railing. “Maybe twenty years ago. Before the state turned this into protected land. People used it as an excuse for what happened to Ricky, so it must’ve been running back then.”

Trace lays his pike down and sweeps Sage off her feet, spinning her, making her shriek. “Time to check out the ol’ swimming hole!”

When he sets her down, she smacks him across the chest. “Dick! Don’t do that!”

“Come on, like I’d really let go.”

“Uh, yeah, you really would.”

He palms the top of her head, pulling her against him in a hug. “I’m not going to throw you down there with the ghost of Ricky Sartain, all gutted and ripped up—” He laughs as she beats him; then he calls in a falsetto, “Helll-ooo, Mumbler? Hungry, dawg? Got something for you—” With his free hand, he grabs Moon by the back of the neck, mimes heaving him over the side. Both boys bust up laughing, throwing punches at each other, shoving.

Ignoring all of it, Kincaid balances his jack-o’-lantern on the railing and takes a couple slow steps back, his face totally still, studying how it looks against the dusky backdrop. He still has a cold—I can see it in the glassiness of his eyes, hear him sniff now and then; skating around outside all the time probably makes it tough to shake. After a minute, everybody notices him and follows suit, the laughter dying down to a few stray giggles, staggering their jack-o’-lanterns along the railing so that the carved faces stare back at us in a row. I’m aware of Kincaid’s gaze on me, and the humiliating word for a girl part spray-painted just beneath my jack-o’-lantern, which I didn’t notice until right now. My face gets even hotter.

“Make the offering, guys,” Kincaid says quietly. Everybody reaches into their pockets like they knew this was coming, and I think of the candy wrappers hardened into the wax, evidence of other supplicants, other pilgrimages.

Bree produces some Jolly Ranchers, a half-pack of gum; Landon and Ivy have caramel creams, Starlight mints; a girl whose name I don’t know has a travel-size tube of Tylenol, cold sore treatment. It all goes into the pumpkins, stuffed under the lids, pushed in through the mouths so that wrappers poke out through uneven teeth.

Kincaid surveys the scene, says again, softly, “There should be candles.”

I’ve got nothing in my pockets but the dust of some long-ago cough drop. A second of panic, then Kincaid is there, pressing something into my palm without drawing attention. A plastic spider ring, the kind you get from a treat bag at a little kid’s Halloween party. I take it, still warm from his hand, and push it through my pumpkin’s eye socket.

“They’re just going to rot.” Bree hugs herself, sounding a little wistful. “They never last once you carve them.”

“Then you can steal us some more.” Kincaid smiles, and I’m pretty sure her night’s just been made.

Trace and Sage start it, the separating. People pairing off, splitting from the group like gauzy tissue caught in the wind. Footsteps moving over stone; hands slide down arms to link fingers. I see Landon and Ivy slip through the trees at the opposite end of the bridge, a few other shadows moving together in the same direction. Bree and I turn back, the way we came, slow footsteps speeding up, turning to a run.

Tonight, it’s hide-and-seek instead of chase, a silent, creeping game. I think I’ll be okay even when Bree chooses her own path; I can do this myself. Everybody except maybe Kincaid must feel lost out here. I crouch for a while behind a thicket, listening to other sneaking footsteps moving around me, a cry and a wild giggle as somebody gets pounced on.

I hide until I’m stiff and chilled, then turn on my phone flashlight and move on, half hoping Bree will find me even though I think it’s every woman for herself in this. I keep going, following the slope of the forest floor, hiding behind a tree here and there.

When I finally stop, I’m not sure where the path is. I’ve lost track of time. Maybe nobody’s looking for me, or they think I gave up, went back to the park on my own.

It hits me then, wandering alone in these dead-kid woods. My Fireball bravado fades to cold, damp, the feeling of sulfurous mud sucking at my shoes. I’ve strayed too far down the slope—this is turning into salt flats—and I start to run, wishing I could text where r u guys, but it wouldn’t send, and what could they even say? In woods. U?

Shadow trees, brambles, my hair snagging on a branch and ripping loose, sticky with pitch. I see my clueless face in grainy newsprint, maybe sophomore year’s school picture, caught in a permanent blink, A junior at Pender District High School, Morrison was last seen in a nearby salt marsh captioned beneath, just another footnote in the news anchor’s nightly spiel. I could scream for help; the couples who crossed the bridge might hear. Or call Sage’s phone, interrupting her make-out session with Trace so I can whimper about being lost? I’d rather sleep in the mud.

I crash into a clearing so suddenly it scatters all thought.

I’ve reached the banks, the water so close and so wide that all I can do is stare at the tiny ripples threading the surface, the steely color it takes on in the twilight, something so separate and industrious about it, this living thing that doesn’t give a damn about me or my problems. To my left, I can see the bridge, quite a distance away now, three black arches crowned by the silhouettes of our jack-o’-lanterns.

I’m surrounded by cattails. They jog the memory of the egret, tall and reed-thin. Something not quite right about those spindly legs, the curved beak tucked to its breast, the eyes like beads of volcanic glass.

I turn slightly, and it’s there: tall, dark egret shape, the head cocked in study of me. I jolt, flashes of thought (egret—Mumbler—run) slamming through me, but my feet are rooted, and I nearly fall.

“It’s okay.” Kincaid’s voice. Couldn’t mistake it for anyone else’s. The egret-thing comes over, long legs, slow steps. Adrenaline won’t quite let me believe it’s really him yet. “Did I jump you?” He doesn’t sound sorry.

“Yeah.” My heartbeat’s still in my ears.

“Everybody else went that way.” He gestures vaguely down shore in the direction of town.

“I kinda figured.” He doesn’t speak for a moment, and I shift my feet, or try to, sunken in the mud up to my shoelaces, wanting to dislodge myself without being obvious. “Did you come looking for me?” Something in me leaps at that, but I hate the thought of him witnessing my crazy lab-rat-in-a-maze route through the trees.

A shrug. “It can get dangerous out here, if you don’t know where you’re going. You know how to swim, right?”

“Doggy paddle.”

“That works. But everything looks the same. You can get turned around pretty easy, and if you panic, and end up in the water . . .” Soft laugh. “Glub, glub.”

I force a laugh, too, managing to get a foot free and step back. “Sounds like the trick is, don’t fall in.” Never mind how close I came to doing that. “I’m surprised a true believer like you even comes out here. Isn’t this tempting the Mumbler? All this kid flesh in one place?” No answer. I tug the other foot free with an embarrassing squelch, saying in a stage whisper, “Do you think he’s watching us right now?”

“He’s out there.” Mildly, like I’d asked him the direction of the sky. “He’s basically nocturnal. You’re probably okay if you come here during the day, but at night, you’re rare steak on two legs. And you left the herd. Went off on your own.” He shakes his head. “Practically culled yourself.”

“Then why aren’t you more scared?”

He stares at the opposite bank. “When you’re scared so much, it gets to be part of you. You know? You wake up, it’s there. You go to sleep, it’s there. Sometimes, it’s better to look it in the face. Know where you’re at.” His voice is like an echo of his kid-self, hiding under the covers, holding his breath, listening for monster sounds, the skitter of clawed feet over his bedroom floor.

I follow his gaze across the water again, to those reeds, the woods beyond. “Do you see something?” My voice is sharp, almost sounding like Ma when she’s mad at me, but it’s freaking me out, his not moving.

“Don’t you?” He points. “There. In that shadowy place, by the fallen-down tree. You look hard enough, you can see him.”

“Look hard enough and you can see anything.” But I hold my phone up higher, trying to shine the light to that distant bank. Too far to make out much.

“Then close your eyes.” His fingers circle my wrist and he draws me to him, tucking my arm under his. I’ve never been held quite like this before. Gentle enough, I could pull away—but I don’t want to lose this sense of being linked together, side by side, his hand on my wrist, my fingers outstretched, as if straining to touch something just out of reach. “You can feel him.” I’m still looking, spotting the fallen tree, the reeds broken and crushed into a hollow around it, where there could be anything, any hidden thing. “Go ahead, close ’em. He’s just standing there.”

I shut my eyes. Kincaid sounds hushed, close to my ear, words running together like they do when he’s excited. “You can make out his head right there, under those branches, and his shoulders . . . Jesus, he’s huge. It’s like he’s ready to charge us, but he’s not moving.” A pause. “That long, scraggly stuff like moss, or willow leaves? That’s his hair. See it?”

In my mind’s eye, I do. A memory, imprinted seconds ago, of something blowing softly in the wind, barely visible in the darkness. I stiffen slightly.

“You can’t see his face. You can never see his face. Not until he’s on top of you. The last thing you ever see.” His grip shifts on my wrist, and I feel my fingers move on their own, stroking a texture that isn’t there. “One look would probably drive you crazy, anyhow.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s something that shouldn’t be. What our brains say can’t be real. When you have to believe—when you have no choice because he’s there, in front of you—” He breaks off, and I wait, listening, straining for what comes next. “I can hear him breathing. All the way over here. Listen. All whistle-y and dry, like—”

Cornstalks. Dead leaves over a sidewalk. I suck air through my teeth, then hold my breath, eyes squeezed shut. “It’s the wind.”

“Then open your eyes.”

“I don’t want to.” My arm in the warm hollow under his, the only thing keeping me from running. “I don’t want to see.”

“He sees you. He smells you. Us.” Kincaid’s grip tightens, but his voice is soft. “I wonder what he’s waiting for.”

“Clarabelle!” The call echoes down through the trees, and my eyes snap open, faced with the hollow of darkness across from us—a tree, some reeds, some shadows—then I’m leaving, crunching back through the overgrowth in the direction of the voice, my skin alive with gooseflesh, feeling the nighttime chill all at once now that I’m unlocked from him.

I don’t wait to make sure Kincaid is following, but I hear his footsteps, behind me, to the right, like he’s only there to see that I don’t get lost again. Like he would’ve stayed on that bank alone, staring down his made-up monster in the darkness. A fresh wave of gooseflesh washes over me, and I walk even faster, calling, “Here! Coming!” the next time the searchers shout my name.