For some reason, Jessy hadn't been able to work on the Halloween story. Her original idea had dwindled away, and she started writing a story about Johnny the Hangman. It would have a lot of characters in it, and her friends always wanted her to put their names into her stories. So she'd written a scene where a girl named Allison went to the cemetery, to visit a grave, and Johnny followed her home, and killed her.
When she looked over it again, she realized that all her friends' characters were going to get killed, and that would probably freak them out. She'd just been thinking of it as a story. So even though she thought it was starting out pretty scary, at least enough for a TV movie, she gave that up and started over again, with the sister becoming a rock star.
So now, sitting up in her room, fiddling with her notebook, Jessy tried to think of a way to get Moonies into a story. At this rate, she was never going to get anything finished by Halloween. She could barely get through her description of the little sister’s bedroom, which was all hung with white sheets of paper, spiders and owls and cauldrons drawn on them in fluorescent crayons.
Maybe there could be a poltergeist, she thought. She and Karma had read all the books in the public library about real-life ghost sightings, so she knew that poltergeists tended to hang around teenage girls. Just like Twyla, she thought. She didn’t know why that would be, but it seemed to be a fact.
She tried to imagine what it would have been like, when the sister disappeared. Even if she left a note, that wouldn’t stop people from worrying. Jessy tried to imagine if Twyla really ran away. She could hear her parents fighting, blaming each other. Each time the phone rang, they’d get their hopes up that it was good news. Or be afraid of bad news.
So maybe the big sister ran away because the house was haunted, and the poltergeist bothered her, but nobody believed it. And the ghost was still in the house, waiting for the little sister to get old enough to trigger it again. Jessy thought that was actually a good idea, but making it happen all seemed really complicated.
Cupcake was asleep in her room, nose buried deep in a sweater thrown over the desk chair. Jessy ran a hand thoughtfully along her spine, and the cat adjusted her curl a little bit, hugging herself just slightly more, a paw shifted over one ear.
It suddenly occurred to Jessy that she didn’t know how you’d drive ghosts out of your house. She kept thinking of holy water, but that was vampires. And vampires couldn't hide in a house for years, not without someone getting suspicious.
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The Jack-o-Lantern Box Page 28
