“Costumes encouraged.” I shrugged, tried for a smile. “I can text you the address. It’s kind of a weird place, but I think you’ll dig it. The whole thing goes down at nine.”
“I’ll be there.” Madeline sucked her cheeks in, furrowed her brows. Gave me a nod. “Yeah, I’ll be there. Thanks for this, by the way. Been too damn long since I went out with a hot girl, you feel? Anyway, I gotta jet. I’ve got basketball practice in twenty minutes and Coach will split me if I’m late again. But thanks. Seriously.”
“Yeah.” My cheeks flashed, and I nodded, sat up a little straighter in my chair. My pulse hammered in my temples. “Yeah. We should do it again sometime.”
Madeline paused for a moment. I watched her throat move as she swallowed. “Sure,” she said. She stood up, threw her bag over her shoulder. Then something flashed across her face—she flushed, eyes hazy, teeth against her lower lip—and she leaned across the table. Her hair swooshed down on either side of her face and she brought herself nearer. Brushed her lips against my cheek.
Madeline smelled like matches. Matches and patchouli and a sharp edge of sweetness, something I couldn’t place. She stood upright and gave me a crooked little smile. I sat there like she’d taken a pipe wrench to my rib cage. My heart splattered against my spine. My whole body tingled, and she pulled her hair back into a ponytail, tied it up, gave me a nod.
“Tomorrow at nine,” she said.
“Yeah.” My eyes fell half-shut. “Tomorrow at nine.”
Her lipstick had left a deep purple stain on my cheekbone. It glistened like a cut. I stared at my reflection in my blackened phone screen, marveling at its redness, its sparkle. She’d barely kissed me. The whole thing had lasted five seconds, max, but I pulled the moment apart, made it last a millennium in my mind. Her hair and her skin and her nearness, her electric nearness. The cool, slick sensation her mouth made when it touched me. I worked myself into a fit over it. Thought about it on repeat. Madeline Kline, who played basketball and liked witchcraft and girls. Liked me. Liked me enough to agree to a second date. The impracticality of it made my mind shake. Madeline, Madeline—damn, did I even know a single thing about basketball? I didn’t, but now I had a burning desire to see her play. Wanted to see her run around in ill-fitting polyester, being a warrior, slaughtering another team. Wanted to know if she smiled when she won. Was she good? She must be. I couldn’t imagine anything else. What were Madeline’s friends like? If I went to one of her games, would they mind me screaming encouragement alongside them? If East High played West High, would I be crucified for cheering on the wrong team? If I was, the public execution would be worth it. Madeline could bring popcorn. Enjoy the show.
I made a point of not looking under my sleeves at whatever weirdness Mr. Scratch was on about. I didn’t know him, so he didn’t get a say. What did he know, anyway? He’s been stuck in a vase for God knows how long.
The hood was down, so the wind threw my curls around my face. Stung my neck and my shoulders. Jing had said very little thus far. She’d picked me up, and now we were sailing back home toward Rothschild & Pike. We listened to her music so loud the car shook. We received nasty looks from moms in minivans. People I didn’t recognize shouted and waved.
“You look shaken.” It wasn’t a question. Jing’s blond braids ruffled, glittered in the dying light. “Did you screw her?”
“Where would I have screwed her? The bathroom?”
“Sure.” Jing shrugged.
The world outside her convertible looked candied. Scarlet leaves rushed over top of pastel homesteads. Chain-link fences lined the hopscotched sidewalks. Boxed pansies hung under windows. Fake ghosts dangled from the limbs of trees. Skeletons peered out of windows and over porches. A kid roller skated in circles. The air was gummy worms and fire. Sycamore Gorge glowed, and I was glowing, too, and time moved slower than it ought to.
“Nah,” I said. “She asked me to make her a sigil.” I leaned my head back, looked up at the sky as it churned past. Sheep clouds, dreamy clouds. Suburban paradise, some shit like that. Pollution made the sky damn pretty. I heaved in a breath through my teeth. “She said she’d be there tomorrow.”
“She better be.” Jing snickered, took a turn. Main Street bloomed on either side of us. Jing turned the music down a touch, but not enough that pedestrians wouldn’t hear the filth that poured out of her speakers. “If she plays you, I’ll have her blood.”
“Nah,” I said. I breathed in slow. The air was crisp in my throat. “No need. I have a good feeling about this, Jing. About her. She’s kinda spooky, you know?”
“Jesus Christ, only you would say some shit like that about a girl you have a crush on.” Jing crinkled her nose. “You win the spooky contest, if we’re having a spooky contest. Just saying.”
“She listened like none other, alright.” My heartbeat hummed in my fingertips. I pressed them against my cheekbone, against the lipstick gash. My nails scraped. My eyes fluttered back. “Is it normal to feel this stupid after someone kisses you?”
“Fucking no. I’ve kissed a lot of boys in my life, Sideways. It’s like watching nail polish dry.”
“Ever kissed a girl?”
“Not yet.” She pulled up next to Rothschild & Pike, stopped the car. “But even if I did, I don’t think I’d act all dopey after the fact. You’re lame, Sideways. You get any more Disney about this and I’ll shove your ass in a locker, you hear?”
“As if my ass would fit in a locker.”
“Bite me.”
I arched my back, knotted my fingers in my snarly curls, pressed the toes of my boots into the cheetah-print carpeting. “How exactly am I supposed to wait until tomorrow? School’s gonna kill me, Jing.”
“You’ll live. You’re a big kid.” Jing adjusted her bangs in the rearview mirror. “I’m confident in your abilities to buck up and take it. Just over twenty-four hours, babe.”
Just inside the shop, Mr. Scratch found it in him to speak. He nestled his wet body against the back of my hair at the place where my curls met my collar. “I don’t think you should talk to that Madeline anymore. I don’t think that she is a safe person to talk to.”
“She’s the only girl who’s been interested in me, ever. I don’t see why you’d get a fucking say, Scratch.”
“Sideways,” he said faintly. “Sigils like that aren’t any good. They’re—”
“If you’re going to be a nag, you can hop off me right now. I’m not carrying you around anymore.” I curled my lip and whirled around, but he wasn’t behind me, of course. He was too close for me to see. “Leave me alone. Live in my room for all I care, but don’t follow me, and don’t butt in.”
“Are you sure?”
“People don’t just like me. People never just like me. Don’t go ruining it for me when they do.” I shoved my forehead against a wall. “I don’t even know you. I mean, what are you? How can you be a burned book and a devil? How does that square, huh?”
“I’m called a devil, and I was a book,” he said. His voice was high, not just in pitch, but in tone. Windy and brittle. “It’s not safe for baby witches to run about without a book to aid them, Sideways. I just want—”
“I’m not a baby, and you’re not a book. You’re a lump of ink in my hair. Just. Just go, okay?”
Mr. Scratch didn’t say anything else. I felt him drip off my body and pool around my boots, and watched his dark form as it oozed between the cracks in the floorboards.
NINETEEN
A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC
I drew Madeline’s mark on every piece of paper I touched. It overlapped ill-conceived equations, bounced in Frankenstein’s margins, bloomed on the edges of the French Revolution. I drew her symbol on my thigh, where my skin peeked between the rips. I drew it on the inner crook of my elbow, on my ankle, on the bones of my wrist. All of school was devoted to sigil drawing, and I ignored the rest of the world. Classes rolled by seamlessly, dull and throbbing, without distinguishing detail. I didn’t talk all that much, unless it
was about the party. The party was starting to find press, though. I wasn’t sure how, but people spoke about it just out of sight. I heard whispers in the hallways. Saw people nod at the Scapegracer girls, make notes about what was to come. Mickey-Dick and Ashleigh made a huge show of cringing whenever we walked by. Most people seemed chill, though, or at least the people who weren’t awful to me as a rule. Alexis made a point of telling me she was pumped, even if she refused to DJ after our last party broke her speakers. I told her that Jing was handling it, because as far as I knew, she was.
Madeline’s sigil was damn pretty. Even when I briefly got distracted, I came back to it, tracing and retracing it over and over again. Madeline had been right. The X did make it better. Even without an incantation, it made my skin prickle, and I hyped myself up, revved for magic to come.
The final bell rang, and I was unshackled at last.
Daisy, as one might guess, had a football game that night. The game would run from six until about eight, which meant that Yates and Jing and I were responsible for all the preparations. Jing and Yates picked me up at seven and we drove to a seedier stretch of town, where the less-favored restaurant chains and drug dealers loitered around hoping for business. We ordered quick, ate salty drive-through french fries in the back of a sleazy lot, watched the sun phase out of the sky overhead. We took turns cursing classes and braiding each other’s hair. Discussed what would’ve happened if the Ghastly movie had gone differently, how much cooler it’d be if the sisterhood had won.
“Is it true that you locked Natalie Crouching in a closet last year, Sideways? Like, with magic?” Yates dipped one of her french fries in her chocolate shake. “Because I’ve been hearing people say that she called you ugly, and you were so pissed that you shoved her in a closet and hexed the door shut behind her. No lights in there or anything. She didn’t have her phone on her, so she had to wait three hours for a janitor to finally open the door.”
“Bullshit,” said Jing before I could. She had her seat fully reclined and lay back with her arms behind her head, her feet propped up, her mouth twisted in a lazy purple scowl. “Natalie Crouching’s in the closet of her own goddamned accord.”
“You think so?” I raised a brow, shredded a chicken nugget with my nails. Wasn’t appetizing, but that was fine. Least it gave me something to do.
“Sure as death,” said Jing. She closed her eyes, raked her fringe out of her face. “No girl who kisses other girls at parties that much is straight. Unless she’s an asshole who gets all of her happiness from performing porny fake lesbian shit for the worst kind of guys. There’s always that possibility.”
Hadn’t Natalie and Daisy done that once?
We passed around a bottle of Coke and the conversation wandered. The sky above our heads tinged black.
In the back of Jing’s car were backpacks full of battery-powered lanterns and strobes, bottles of water, speakers for our music. Jing had considered Halloween deco, but had ultimately decided against it. It was tacky, she explained. Overkill. Our raggedy house was already a murder palace, and suiting it up with ghosts and ghouls would be a mark of disrespect. Like slapping a BEWARE OF DOG sign on an obviously lycanthropic household, constant howling, bellowing at the slightest intruder. BEWARE OF DOG. Like, fucking obviously.
We headed over at eight. It was dark enough for our headlights to bleach the red leaves pink. Our music echoed off the black bark, bounced back around our heads. I focused on the music, on Jing’s hair flashing around her face, on the glow of lights in Yates’ curls. This was not the Chantry car, I reminded myself, but I still closed my eyes through most of the ride. The gravel made the car grind, and it flipped my stomach. I sucked in a breath through my teeth. “Can you turn up the music?”
Yates cranked it even louder.
I rubbed Madeline’s sigil where it still showed faintly on my elbow, and I rubbed her sigil on my thigh. Taking stuff back, was that it? Reclaiming power, or something like that? How about my cool? I’d like that back, thanks. Madeline’s scribbles, give me strength. Let me stress less about country roads at night.
We arrived at our destination before my prayers could take hold, but that was fine by me. The gravel crunch stopped, and my stomach stayed inside my body. I made myself open my eyes.
The three of us hopped out of the car. Yates and I went around back, started heaving bags of supplies over our shoulders, and Jing went on ahead. She reached into one of her pockets and withdrew skinny, unsnapped glow sticks, which she proceeded to rip in half. She held them at arm’s length and they gushed. Jing walked down the path toward the house with oozing glow sticks outstretched, and droplets of neon light drizzled along the handrail. Blue and pick splotches glared through the dark.
Yates and I followed her down. Between the two of us, we managed to carry everything we needed. My arms screamed under the weight. The rickety steps groaned under our feet, but they didn’t break, didn’t pitch us down into the darkness.
Our dead house looked sicker by moonlight. Jing broke a fresh set of glow sticks and smeared them all over the front door, mixing pink and blue and violent violet together into a psychedelic blur. It shone holographic, like ectoplasm or Wonderland. Made a beacon for us to aim for.
Jing held the door for us and we carried the bags inside. It was crushingly dark in the house, smotheringly silent. It was like stepping into outer space. I wasn’t confident that my boots would find floor with every step—my foot might fall through and I’d tumble forward, bags flying, into the shapeless black.
Something grabbed me by the shirt collar.
“Fuck!” I jerked away from the grip, but it tightened, held me in place.
“Jesus, relax. Hold still. The lanterns are in that bag.” Jing’s voice. I could almost hear her smirk. Her hand slid lower, toward one of the bags on my shoulder, where she fumbled with a zipper. I felt her rummage around, then she let go of me and something clicked.
My shadow fell across the floor. Everything was amber, and the gutted furniture looked jagged and weary, like the light had just woken it up. Jing walked around me, lanterns swinging from her fingertips, and hung them on our makeshift hooks.
REIGN OF SCAPEGRACE
We put down our bags.
Jing and Yates attacked the speakers. They tucked them in the corners, where they stood like robot sentinels, and stuck them full of wires which they attached to Jing’s laptop. They hooked the laptop up to an external battery, one of three or four they’d brought. The air hummed with static.
The front door opened behind me.
Jing and Yates snapped to attention. I spun on my heels, my heart hammering in my teeth.
Quicksilver haunted the doorway. Liquid, rippling fabric tumbled off skinny shoulders, sparkled like crushed glass and starlight, swished with every click of high heeled shoes. Manicured fingers stretched out from the sleeves and flew up to yank back the hood with lacquered, knife-shaped nails, revealing a flash of glittered eyes, a button nose, a savage grin. “Good evening, gashes.”
I broke into a grin.
Yates clapped, Jing wolf whistled, and Daisy—lovely, hooded Daisy—flipped her hair over her shoulder, gave us a wink. She swept up beside me and pulled a satchel off her shoulder, clawed inside of it, and withdrew a bundle of faded red fabric. She tossed the bundle at my head, and I caught it onehanded. The fabric was buttery soft.
Jing and Yates pulled on their robes, and I locked my attention on the fabric in my fist. I loosened my grip and it unfurled. The color was ghostly, a hazy, bruisy red. Pink wasn’t right—no, it was eerier, shimmering in shades of crimson and maroon. Looked like something that a figure in a tarot card might wear. Like a violent daydream. I shouldered off my jacket and slipped it over my head, and the robe spilled around me, fluttered to my ankles.
Yates was baby blue across the room, and Jing fiddled with her glistening lavender hood. The two of them looked like they’d waltzed out of a fairytale. Jing cracked her knuckles, looked us over.
Somet
hing crashed over my head, something that wasn’t real but felt very cold. Chills. My body ached like it’d been whip-cracked, and all the meat on me hung limp off the bone. Head swam, stomach corkscrewed, guts tangled and kicked high.
It felt like magic breaking.
I looked at the three of them, and all of us, a little shivery and pale now, peered at one another.
“Must be the fucking mold,” said Jing. “Don’t think about it. No worries.”
“Mold,” said Yates. “I hate this place.”
“Just mold,” I repeated. The word didn’t seem real anymore, but I told myself it was plausible. The four of us all felt nauseous at the same time because it was kind of poisonous in here. No other reason. Nothing to worry about.
“Adds to the mood,” Daisy said.
“Right,” said Jing. “Now, someone fucking help me set the music up, yeah?”
The bass made the floorboards throb. I’d guess around sixty people tangled in the living room, but it could have been more. They all blurred together into one hydra-shaped monster. The bodies knotted up and pulsated, and our frozen, hollow, murder house found a new circulatory system in their twisting, ecstatic jamming. A girl with a four-jawed rubber mask hooked her body around someone with a plastic knife in their temple, and they grinded against zombie princesses, classic slashers, generic spooky people-eaters. Michael Myers made out with Vampira. Someone in a wolf mask and a flannel leered from a corner. The room wasn’t cold anymore. Heat shimmered off the bodies in waves, thick and salty and metallic. Naked limbs drifted in the air, clawed at nothing, flashed in the seizing lights.
I was nervous enough to wreck something. I stood in the center of our sigil, and the trinity took up three of the four points on the circle. Jing was drinking, Daisy looked ravenous, and Yates kept wiggling her fingertips, straightening her cloak, looking around for our missing point. Madeline hadn’t shown. In all the writhing bodies at our party, Madeline’s face was nowhere to be seen, not even in the farthest corners of the dance floor. We were an hour in, and she wasn’t here. She wasn’t fucking here.
The Scapegracers Page 26
