“There’s a movie on I want to watch tonight,” Jessy said. She was glad she'd put off negotiating with her mom about TV rights. There was no point getting into it with her if Twyla was going to be in charge.
“Anything good?” Twyla opened the fridge and stared into it, completely uninterested in either Jessy or its contents.
“It’s a vampire movie.”
“Oh, no.” She stood up, straightened, her face stern and disapproving. She looked exactly like their mom.
“It’s an old movie. Black and white.”
Their TV was black and white, but they both knew what she meant.
“I won’t get scared, I promise.”
“The whole point of a movie like that is to get scared,” Twyla said. “You better not get scared and then not be able to sleep. I’m in enough trouble.”
“I won’t get scared,” Jessy insisted. Twyla just stared at her, and her resolve started to wilt.
“I promise, if I do get scared, if I can’t sleep, I won’t tell Mom and Dad. Cross my heart.”
“Okay then.”
A lot of times, around Halloween, one of the local stations would play a spooky movie every day after school. Then when it got to be November, the show would disappear again. Jessy and Twyla would watch the movies, and then Jessy had nightmares. One year, she watched a movie called The Blob all by herself, and it was the scariest thing she'd ever seen. She had a terrible fear that something was going to just … absorb her.
Ever since then, her mom tried to forbid her from watching scary movies, but that just made her want to watch them even more.
Twyla got out the box of pizza mix. She made Jessy help with the crust, which was always the hardest job. They poured flour from the wax packet into a metal mixing bowl, and put in the water. At first it was pasty, then it got gluey, and eventually started to harden, about the time Jessy’s wrist hurt from stirring. Twyla scraped it out of the bowl with a wooden spoon and plopped it down onto a rectangular cookie sheet. She smoothed it out, trying to make the dough even. There were always spots where the dough almost wore thin, and you could see the metal underneath it, but that was better than biting into clumps where it was too soft, when it was done.
Then Twyla opened the can of tomato sauce that came in the box. She poured it onto the center of the sheet, and let Jessy smooth that out with the back of a spoon until the dough was covered. There was a little plastic packet of oregano, too, that they scattered on top like it was glittery confetti, and then the packet of shredded cheese.
“I wish we could eat pizza every day,” Jessy said.
“Maybe we'd get sick of it,” Twyla said. But they agreed that didn’t seem very likely.
Jessy wiped the fine floury residue onto her pant legs.
“Mom’s really mad at you,” she said, while Twyla was putting the pizza in the oven.
“She can’t just do things like that at the last minute,” Twyla said, stubborn. “I have my own life.”
“I know.”
Jessy tore open a little package of wet cat food for Cupcake, who'd been hanging around their feet. It seemed like she deserved a treat too.
“I had to go out,” Twyla said. “I had a guitar lesson. And he already thinks I’m not taking it seriously, just because I’m a girl.” She had the scowl she gave when someone went into her room, just before she socked them.
“What about being a girl?”
“He says that Suzi Quatro proves that even when girls can play technically well, they just can’t rock. And I said, even if that were true, which I don’t know, does Barry Manilow prove that guys can’t rock? We got in a big fight about it, but he’s still giving me the lessons. I couldn’t have not shown up.”
Jessy had no idea who Suzi Quatro was, but she definitely agreed that Barry Manilow didn’t rock.
“He sounds like a jerk,” she said.
“Of course he’s a jerk. He’s a guy.”
“Why should that make him a jerk?”
Twyla looked at her like she was an idiot.
“All guys are jerks,” she said. “They just are.”
“I have lots of friends who are guys,” Jessy insisted. “They’re not jerks.”
“Sooner or later, they’ll turn into jerks. They always do.”
That didn’t make any sense at all. She knew guys who were jerks already, and girls who were too.
“I think my friends are going to stay my friends,” she said.
“I hope you're right about that. But things are going to get weird when people start dating.”
“Some people are already dating.”
Twyla laughed. “Mom would love to hear that.”
The phone rang, and Twyla hurried to answer it.
“Hey,” she said, and listened for a minute. “No, I wish I could. I have to babysit.”
Silence on her end.
“I know. They just about died.” She laughed.
“So now I have to work up some points again. No, she’ll forget about it by the end of the week, she always does. It’s a drag, though.” She laughed again at whatever they were saying.
“I’m not going to miss that. No, that’s okay. If you come over, they’ll come back early -- yeah, I’m sick of everything -- no kidding. I don’t know, I’ve thought about it. I don’t really have any money.”
The stove timer started to buzz, so Twyla got off the phone. She cut the pizza into slices, mock-dramatically, and they ate the pieces right off the cookie sheet, hovering over the stovetop.
When they were done, they washed the pizza pan, and left the metal mixing bowl to soak a while in the sink. They knew that their mom would expect the dishes to be done, even though it didn’t seem that leaving them overnight would do any harm. But like Twyla said, there’d been enough trouble.
“Can we make popcorn for the movie?” Jessy asked.
“Why not? We're living it up.”
They got the big, heavy black iron skillet from the low shelf by the fridge. The popcorn was in a big, heavy glass jar. Twyla put the skillet on the burner, and poured oil into the circle. She twisted it expertly, so the oil rolled evenly all along the bottom, and scattered kernels out of the jar into the skillet, like she was throwing chicken feed. Then she turned on the burner, and the flame floomped into a burst of blue.
At first, the skillet wasn’t hot enough that she needed a pot holder for the protruding metal handle. She let it heat up, shaking the skillet occasionally, so the popcorn snaked around on the surface. Finally, the first kernel popped into a white blossom. She started shaking harder, and with the other hand, she reached out and grabbed the metal cover that fit on top of the skillet.
Before long it was popping and shaking and rattling, the bottom of it scraping the burner. By then, Twyla had grabbed a pot holder off the hook and wrapped it around the handle. The metal cover started to strain above the pressure of all the kernels, and it separated, so it didn’t actually fit on the rim anymore, but had a noticeable gap. A flurry or two of popcorn escaped out the side and spat onto the stove top.
The noise grew more infrequent, just an occasional random, deflated-sounding pop, so she lifted the pan, heavier now, and settled it onto one of the unused burners. When she took off the cover, the skillet was full of bulbous white corn.
Jessy had already gotten a small saucepan ready and cut into a stick of butter. She used the knife to pry off a chunk and dump it into the pan. That had been heating up, slowly, at a low temperature, on the other side of the stove. She had stirred and stirred while it melted and slowly browned. Twyla shook the skillet around some more, like she was tossing a salad, to keep the kernels from burning as they cooled. Moving the saucepan the whole time, to coat the popcorn evenly, she poured the butter over the top, and stirred it all around.
For the finale, Twyla went to the fridge and took out the big green shaker of Parmesan cheese that they used for spaghetti. She shook cheese all around on the popcorn, and stirred it up again and shook some more, so the che
ese stuck to the butter that stuck to the corn.
While Twyla rinsed out the saucepan, Jessy went to the cupboard and took out the box of cocoa, pulled out a packet, and smacked it against her palm. Then she picked up the tea kettle and jerked it up and down, testing how much water was in it, before flaring up the burner again.
Once the cocoa was ready, she took a single piece of puffed popcorn daintily in her fingers and dipped into her mug. As soon as it touched the hot liquid, it began to shrink and shrivel, so she had to rush it to her mouth before it collapsed. Delicious. Twyla poured a cup too, and they both did that for a while, a kernel occasionally shriveling too fast and dropping right into the cocoa. The disintegrated remains were so small, it was hard to fish them out.
Then they poured the rest of the popcorn into one of the biggest metal mixing bowls, and carried it into the living room, along with a whole roll of paper towels.
By the time the movie started, her fingers still slathered in butter and cheese, Jessy realized she was in fact perfectly willing to be scared. That probably meant she was going to get scared. But she wasn’t going to admit that was any kind of problem.
The movie was great. It was set in a small town, that reminded Jessy of their own street somehow, like when they walked downtown, from the movie theater, at night. Not a city, like most of the TV shows she watched, but a normal street, with trees and houses just like their house. It was somehow scarier to think of scary things happening in a place that looked like where she lived.
“That was really corny,” Twyla said, when it was over. “It would never hack it at the drive-in.” She had taken over the Big Chair, the recliner that stared right into the TV.
“It was black and white,” Jessy said. “It’s old.”
“Did I ever tell you about Don’t Look in the Basement?” she asked.
Just the title gave Jessy the immediate creeps.
“No.”
“It played at the drive-in last summer. Now, that was scary.”
“What was it about?”
“This girl gets a job working at this hospital, and it’s a spooky building, in the middle of nowhere. And everything about it just seems a little bit -- off. Things aren’t the way they should be, but you can’t really put your finger on why. She’s supposed to meet with the doctor, but the doctor doesn’t seem to be there. And then it turns out, it’s not really just a hospital.”
Jessy took refuge in the popcorn bowl, distracting herself. By now the popcorn had cooled, which made the butter congeal on the buds, and the cheese specks stood out in the waxy coating. That’s when she liked it best. There’d be a pool of hardening butter on the bottom of the bowl, and she scraped the kernels in it, covering them.
“It’s a mental hospital, so all the patients are crazy. And you know that some of them are dangerous.”
“Have they killed people?” Jessy asked.
“She tries to figure out what’s happened to the doctor, but then people start getting killed.”
“So, what’s in the basement?”
“I’m not telling you that!” Twyla laughed.
“That’s not fair! You have to tell me.”
“You’re going to have to see it for yourself.”
“I’m never going to be able to go to the drive-in,” Jessy protested.
Twyla just kept laughing at her. “What do you think is in the basement?”
“Is there a dead body in the basement? A skeleton?” She tried to think what it could possibly be. What could be worse than a whole houseful of crazy people, some of them killers? How could the secret be any scarier than what she already knew? She wiped her hands on the sheaf of paper towel, and then she picked up a small pillow from the couch and whacked Twyla with it. Twyla whacked her back, and they both laughed.
“Maybe they’ll start showing more scary movies again this year,” Twyla said. “We’ll have to check the paper on Sunday. As long as you don’t have trouble sleeping tonight.”
“I’m fine,” Jessy said, sullen. “It wasn’t even really scary.”
“We better wash the rest of the dishes,” Twyla said.
“I’ll wash,” Jessy said.
“Really?”
“I don’t like drying,” she said. “It’s more boring.”
“I don’t know if I could choose which is boringer,” Twyla said. “When I leave home, I’m never going to wash dishes again.”
“How will you eat?”
“I’ll just use paper plates, until I become a rock star and start making lots of money. Then I can hire a maid to do it.”
“Mom always says she wouldn’t want to have a maid come in and mess up her things.” This came up one day when the neighbor ladies were over. Someone they knew had hired a housecleaner, and everyone was disapproving.
“Yeah, right. If Dad would pay for it, she’d get a maid. And anyway, you don’t think David Bowie does his own dishes, do you?”
“I guess not.” The thought made Jessy giggle.
Shortly before their parents were supposed to be home, Twyla ordered Jessy to put on her pajamas.
“I want you to be ready at a moment’s notice,” she said. That was a good idea. The outside door always stuck when it was unlocked, making a horrible ratchety noise, so when they heard their parents elbowing it open, Jessy had plenty of time to run up the stairs and jump into bed. She heard Twyla tell them, sulkily, that it had been an uneventful evening. In a little while, her mom came up the stairs and peeked in Jessy’s partly-open doorway, where she looked asleep under the covers.
Jessy lay awake until she heard Twyla come up the stairs and into her room, and then their parents came upstairs and went down their part of the hallway, to settle in for the night. Twyla put a record on, the sound down low. Jessy couldn’t quite make out the song through the wall, but it was nice to hear anyway. Finally, after a long time, someone came down the hall, trying to be really quiet, and switched off the hall light.
Slowly, Jessy’s room seemed to grow darker, even as her eyes adjusted to the light. Her white curtains and the pair of window shades behind them seemed to glow a little. She began to wonder if she was safer leaving the door partway open, or if it would be better to shut it, as much as she could.
It depended on where the scary thing was going to come from. If it was in her closet, or came in through the window, she needed easier access to escape into the hall, so she’d want to leave the door open. If the threat was somewhere in the rest of the house, then it would have to come in through the door. Even though there wasn’t a lock on it or anything, somehow leaving the door wide open seemed like an invitation. I’m here! Kill me!
The house gave a faint creak, from somewhere distant, maybe the roof. Her dad always said it was just an old house, settling. It sounded for a second like its stomach was rumbling. Or maybe it was a faint footstep on one of the many creaky boards.
Not that ghosts had footsteps. So that ruled them out, at least for the moment, from the forefront of her worries.
She had just seen a movie about vampires, and vampires had bodies, and weight, and would definitely make a sound when they stepped on a vulnerable spot on a wood floor. Twyla would say that the movie was a little too scary for her. It hadn’t seemed too scary at the time she was watching it, though, and you’d think she’d have noticed. You’d think it would be scarier when it was actually happening, and not hours later, when the details were already starting to fade.
Jessy knew she'd better get some sleep, or her parents would pay more attention to what she was watching. She couldn’t have that, not so close to Halloween.
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The Jack-o-Lantern Box Page 15
