“Scary Spice was the best,” Wyatt confirms, then shrugs at the confused look I give him. “I have an older sister.Anyway, do you guys need anything in here, or are you good?”
“We’re good,” Madeline says cheerfully. “Thanks for the confidence boost.”
Wyatt grins and rolls his eyes. “Yeah, anytime. Glad I could help.”
He heads off, and Madeline tosses the chainsaw into the air, letting it flip end over end before she catches it again with so much ease you’d never know she wasn’t a chainsaw juggler.
It is, god help me, fucking hot.
“You still willing to do my makeup?” she asks.
I’mone of the tour guides, so after the haunted house opens, I only see Madeline when she’s a chainsaw-wielding maniac, covered in fake blood. By the end of the night, she’s pretty into it; when I take the last group through her room, she shouts “I’ll use your bones as fertilizer!” when they leave.
“Bones as fertilizer?” I ask later, when we’re grabbing our stuff and heading out, both of us still in full costume.
“It’s good for plants,” she says. “Um, inMinecraftanyway. If you put bone meal on a tree it’ll grow faster.”
“Dork,” I tease as we walk into the parking lot. It’s deep autumn here in the mountains, chilly out, winter close at hand.
“You like it.”
“Yeah,” I say and take her hand as we walk to my car.
When we getto Wells and Josie’s house, the first thing we see is Bart in full Halloween regalia. This year he’s in Grim Reaper garb, complete with a black cloak, a scythe in one hand, and a decapitated zombie head dangling by the hair from the other. Gravestones adorn the rest of the front lawn, along with skeleton arms breaking through the earth. Jack-o’-lanterns line the front porch.
There’s a group of people gathered in front of it, all looking and pointing up at the roof, where there seems to be a very small fire.
“I don’t think this is responsible homeownership,” I say to Wells, who’s standing there with his arms crossed. He’s wearing a…Hamburglar outfit? With green hair?
“You’d be surprised,” he says, still looking up at the roof. On closer inspection, it turns out that the very small fire is actually a candle, somehow still burning amid the wreckage of a jack-o’-lantern.
“Is that supposed to be up there?” Madeline asks.
It’s a legitimate question, given Wells’s decoration proclivities.
“No. Teenagers,” says Gideon, who’s also standing there. “This was the only one they got, luckily.”
“Dickheads,” mutters Wells.
“I think it was supposed to roll off and smash,” Josie says. “That’s what I would’ve…uh, meant to happen. At least they didn’t toilet-paper Bart.”
“Do people really do that?” Gideon asks. He grew up in the country, so he looks surprised when everyone answers yes.
“It’s really annoying to get out of trees, and if it rains before you can pull it down, it’s a lost cause,” I explain. “It turns into paper sludge that sticks to everything, so it’s basically there forever.”
“We did it once to the vice principal’s front yard,” Josie reminisces. “And we were gonna egg our math teacher’s car, but Diane Beaufort was working the corner store that night and she wouldn’t sell us any.”
“Did you get caught?” Madeline asks, half-thrilled and half-scandalized.
“Not that time,” Josie answers, giving us a reckless little grin.
“We put a bunch of lawn flamingos in the principal’s front yard as our senior prank,” Madeline offers. “Well,Ididn’t. I wasn’t cool enough to get invited to senior pranks. But some people did.”
“Where’s your ladder?” Gideon asks, getting us back on track.
Wells sighs. “I lent it to someone. Best I can do tonight is a stepladder.”
“I bet we could put a stepladder on a chair or something—” I start, but Gideon gives me an incredulouslookthat cuts me off. “Or we could definitely not do something that dangerous.”
