Unfortunately, I was not particularly good at keeping secrets.
“Are you mad at me?” Tess said. We were waiting, en masse with the rest of the OWPALGBTQIA, to go to the haunted house at Eastern State Penitentiary, and Tess was wearing a silvery T-shirt dress with a cobwebby-looking pattern over it and dramatic, Elvira-style eyebrows. “Something about you seems weird.”
I shivered. The walls were menacingly high and made of charred-looking stones, with actual screams echoing off them. Tall Zach’s big holiday surprise couldn’t have been candy corn or a hayride. It had to be getting the crap scared out of us by local actors in striped prisoner outfits.
“No,” I said automatically.
I wasn’t, not really. Mostly I was wondering why Sebastian could respond to my first message almost instantaneously and then take a full day and a half to answer my second. Not that he’d answered yet, of course.
Tess wasn’t buying it.
“You look like you’re a little pissed. Or worried. Are you worried about the dance? Because look, we have to take a breather sometimes.” Tess inhaled emphatically. “Activism is exhausting. It’s important to relax once in a while.”
“I’m not worried, I’m cold,” I said. The only remotely Halloweeny thing I owned was an orange tank top, which I had worn even though it looked gross next to my hair and wasn’t nearly warm enough, even under a (black) hoodie.
And, okay, maybe I was worried. A little. If Sebastian had time to go out and take pictures of bridges and give interviews to websites and, like . . . perform shows or whatever, you’d think he’d have time to write one measly Pixstagram message once in a while.
Also, I hated haunted houses.
“And I hate haunted houses,” I added. “This does not count as relaxing for me.”
“Nattie, don’t be such a Halloween pooper,” Tall Zach said. He had his hair gelled up straight from his head and was wearing what looked like an orange convict jumpsuit with a giant V neck.
“I’m wearing orange,” I pointed out. It was annoying, because everyone else seemed to know exactly what to be for Halloween. I couldn’t even figure out how to dress myself normally, let alone for a costume-themed holiday.
“Orange alone does not a costume make,” Tall Zach said.
“It does for you,” I pointed out.
“Yeah. What you even supposed to be?” Alison had shown up to Eastern State wearing all black, which was pretty much how she seemed to show up anywhere.
“I’m Goku,” Tall Zach said.
No one said anything.
“From Dragon Ball Z?” He groaned. “The Super Saiyan? Ugh, you guys are the worst.”
“I knew who you were,” Endsignal said from underneath a pair of light-up devil horns.
“What are you?” Tall Zach demanded of Alison.
“We’re cats,” she said, grabbing Chihiro’s elbow and indicating the paper triangles protruding from each of their heads.
“Oh,” Tall Zach said politely. “Cute.”
“I wanted us to be demons,” Chihiro mumbled, looking longingly at Endsignal’s horns.
The line shuffled another few people forward. I could hear nervous chatter and the strains of music coming from inside the prison walls. Maybe it wouldn’t be as horrifically terrifying as I was imagining.
“Can vegans even go as animals?” Bryce’s voice was muffled by one of those whole-head rubber masks that looked like a cartoony version of Richard Nixon.
Alison gave him a look of withering cattiness.
“We don’t eat cat, Bryce.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” Tess said.
Tall Zach burst into a fit of laughter, and Tess smiled her closed-mouth smile. It was hard to tell if Bryce got the joke behind his mask.
“What’s so funny?”
Zach the Anarchist appeared next to Tess. Eastern State was downtown, pretty close to his house, so he must have walked. He was dressed completely normal, in a white T-shirt and black jeans, except for a long, rhinestone chain around his neck with a little brown bottle at the end.
“Nothing,” Tess said.
“Vulgar innuendo,” I said.
“Who are you?” Alison said.
“Duh,” Zach said, lifting the bottle at the end of his necklace. “Vanilla Ice.”
The cat twins stared at him. Tall Zach frowned. Bryce’s expression remained unknowable.
“It’s vanilla extract,” Zach the Anarchist explained. “On the end of a diamond chain. Like ice.”
“That’s not very scary,” Alison said.
“Vanilla Ice ripped off a lot of DJs,” Endsignal said.
“I think it’s funny,” Chihiro said.
Next to me, Zach the Anarchist shrugged, the edge of his T-shirt brushing my shoulder. We were almost at the entrance now, and judging by my rapidly elevating heart rate, my attempts to keep myself calm were totally futile. That, or I was about to have apoplexy.
The line lurched forward again, and a scrawny guy with sunken-eye makeup ushered us into the waiting room. I tried not to think about how this was the same threshold where actual murderers had crossed before serving actual time in prison.
“I’ll get the tickets,” Tall Zach said. “I booked all of us as a group.”
“This is dumb,” Alison said. “We should have just gone to Rocky Horror.”
Tall Zach looked put out. “We’ve gone like every year. It’s a cliché at this point. Besides, Rocky Horror’s not even scary! Don’t you want to be scared on Halloween?”
“No,” I answered, not that anyone listened.
“Hey, shouldn’t we be saving money for the dance and stuff?” Bryce scratched the back of his head. “I thought that was our, like, number one perodidtive.”
Zach the Anarchist and I exchanged a look, and I mouthed don’t bother at him, which made him smile. Which was nice.
Tall Zach sighed. “One, this thing sells out every year, so we’re lucky we got to go at all, and two, you paid for your own ticket, remember?” He held up a twenty as evidence. “So we’re going, and we’re going to enjoy ourselves, okay? I’m going to the box office.”
“Wait,” I said, suddenly desperate to stall. “Is everyone here?”
“I think so?” Tall Zach said. “You can count if you want to, but I told everyone to get here at nine thirty sharp. Snooze, lose, and so forth.”
I looked back at the assembled group of OWPALGBTQIA-ers, which was somewhere between ten and twelve people total, depending on if the knot of girls were actually with us or just trying to get a better look at Tall Zach’s sliver of bare chest. The scene would have been totally creeptastic if it weren’t for the weirdly upbeat music playing over the PA system. Probably to lure us into a false sense of security.
Apparently Endsignal had the same thought.
“Is this Avicii?” he said, frowning.
“Hey, yeah. Can’t we at least hear the ‘Monster Mash’ or something?” Bryce said in the direction of the college-aged zombie girl manning the door.
“We played that for the first two nights,” she said. “Then it started to drive us crazy.”
The song faded out, replaced the nasal sound of some Top 40 DJ wishing everyone a spooky-ass Halloween.
Endsignal looked pained, as if to say and that doesn’t? The zombie girl didn’t notice.
“Okay!” Tall Zach had returned from the ticket window with all of our passes and started to hand them out. My hands felt distinctly clammy.
“You okay?”
I whirled around. Zach the Anarchist nodded at me.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Are you sure?” Goku-Zach asked. “You’re white as a sheet. Or a ghost. A sheet-ghost.”
I nodded, but before I could vocally insist I was fine, he had distributed all the tickets and the zombie girl was ushering us forward.
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all genders!” Tall Zach crowed. “Are you ready to have the pants scared off of you
?”
A cheer went up, and the zombie opened the gate.
“Yeah,” I said again. “I’m fine.”
For about half an hour, I tried to take in as little as possible. There were definitely ghosts, and screams, and very low lighting. But the next clear thing I was aware of was a rummy, sweet smell and the sound of my own name. The world was very blurry.
“Nattie!”
I blinked. I was lying down, and Goku-Zach was crouched in front of me, waving something in front of my face. Somehow, even though I vaguely remembered walking past the zombie into the courtyard beyond the gate, I hadn’t actually left the room with the ticket window.
“Zach?” I blinked again. My blood felt electrified and unstable as it coursed into my head, but I managed to sit up okay.
“You fainted,” he explained. “Just inside the last cell block. But apparently the hook-hand guy with the rotting eyeball is also in charge of taking care of people when they freak out, so he helped us get you back here.”
The rotten-eyeball guy. I sort of remembered that. Gross.
“Us?” I said.
“Yeah. Other Zach went to get you some water.” Goku-Zach rocked back onto his heels. “And he lent me his vanilla to wake you up.”
“I see,” I said.
“More like you smell,” he said. “I thought it would be like in those old-timey movies, when they waved stuff under people’s noses or whatever. I figured this was close.”
“Did that even work?” It was Zach the Anarchist, holding a bottle of water in one hand and his Vanilla Ice chain in the other.
“I think so,” he said. “I mean, Nattie’s awake now.”
“It does have a very distinct smell,” I said. I pressed a hand to my forehead, where things seemed to be slowly recombobulating.
“I’ve never even fainted before,” I said.
“And yet you did it like a pro,” Goku-Zach said.
“How long was I out?”
He shrugged. “Not that long. Maybe half a minute or so?”
“Half a minute?” I yelped.
“Hey, guys.” The zombie girl had come over from the gate. “Your group’s almost through. She feeling better?”
“More or less,” I answered, even though she hadn’t actually addressed me directly.
“Happens all the time,” she said.
“Really?” I said.
“Yeah. Last night we had a ten-year-old pee his pants.”
“Oh, great,” I said.
“Do you want some candy?” she offered.
“Yes!” Goku-Zach handed me the vanilla and followed her back to the gate. Wordlessly, Zach the Anarchist gave me the bottle of water. I put the vanilla in my pocket and twisted open the water. My head was still pounding a little, a fact not helped by the incessant drum line playing over the speakers, and I rubbed my temples.
“Mumford and Sons gives me that feeling, too,” Zach the Anarchist said.
“What?” I chugged another gulp of water.
“Never mind.”
“Here,” Goku-Zach said, pressing a candy into my hand. “Starburst. Your fave.”
“Thanks,” I said. Sugar would probably help, I reasoned. But before I could unwrap it, Zach the Anarchist bent down and took it from me.
“Hey,” I said. “I wanted that.”
“No, you didn’t,” he said. “That one was strawberry. Here.” He dropped a yellow square into my palm.
“Oh.” I chewed my lip. “Thanks.” I barely had a chance to stick the nondeadly candy into my mouth when I heard my name again.
“Nattie!”
It was Tess this time, rushing in through the zombie girl’s gate.
“Are you okay?” She looked a little pale herself under her smoky eye makeup, but maybe that was intentional. “I turned around halfway through and you were gone, but we’d already gone around the corner and I couldn’t get back. . . .”
“She looks pasty.” Alison came in after Tess and sounded much less concerned. “Maybe a vampire got her.”
“My aunt’s hypoglycemic,” Chihiro piped up. “She faints all the time when her blood sugar drops.”
“I gave her a Starburst,” Goku-Zach said, who was midway through unwrapping one or three for himself.
“It’s not blood sugar,” I said. “I just . . . got creeped out.”
Alison snorted. Tess glared at her, then softened her gaze on me and gave me a little pat on the head.
“Sorry, Nattie,” she said. “We probably shouldn’t have forced you in there if you were so scared.”
“No, it’s fine,” I said with a glance at Tall Zach. “I mean, I wanted to go in there. Kind of.”
“Nattie, don’t lie. You would have hated the rest of it,” Tess said. “Although it was awesome. They had this whole section that was done up like a creepy hospital, and just as you’re halfway across the operating room, the lights just go completely out. . . .”
She went on to describe the haunted house in literally gory detail as the rest of the OWPALGBTQIA group reassembled in the foyer. I swallowed the sticky mass of Starburst and felt slightly better, especially now that the kick-drum-heavy song was over. Alison, Chihiro, and Bryce, now sans mask, were discussing whether they could make it to South Street before their curfews were over. A freshman girl with curly hair was asking around to see if anyone could give her a ride. Endsignal was pressing on his horns and getting them to blink in different patterns.
I got to my feet as the noise level rose and found myself facing Zach the Anarchist.
“Sorry you had to miss the haunted house,” I said. I was about to reach for the vanilla in my pocket to give it back when Tess’s voice jolted me.
“People!” she yelled above the din of chatting and music. “Let’s start to move out!”
Everyone ignored her.
“Whatever,” Zach said. “I go every year. They don’t really change it much.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, maybe I’ll give it—”
My name rang out in the little room again.
“Natalie?”
I whirled around. It was Chihiro, looking confused, and then embarrassed.
“Sorry,” she said. “I just thought I heard your name on the radio, but—”
I froze.
“No, that’s totally Natalie,” Alison agreed. “Listen.”
I did, because I couldn’t not listen, and there it was, invisible and everywhere for everyone to hear.
“Natalie
So fiery from the start
Natalie
Why’d you break my heart, heart, heart?”
“Weird,” Bryce said.
“I like it,” Chihiro said.
“I love it.” Tess’s eyes were gleaming.
“She looks like she’s going to faint again,” Alison said.
I shook my head.
“I’m not. I’m fine. Let’s just go, everyone.”
It wasn’t until Tess dropped me off at home that I realized Zach’s vanilla was still in my pocket.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I spent the time between the haunted house and Monday afternoon fixated on not being fixated on hearing the song. The whole fainting incident provided a really convenient cover for my freaked-out-ness in the moment, but the closer I got to my next baking session with Zach the Anarchist, the more I felt a new anxiety welling up in my chest. Because he’d been there, too. He’d definitely heard it; the music was cranked super loud. Despite my best efforts of compartmentalizing, ignoring, and occasionally, debatably lying about stuff, things were starting to overlap.
But, I reasoned, maybe hearing something wasn’t the same as listening to it. Plus, I realized with a bone-melting relief, he had no way to know it was the Young Lungs. There hadn’t been any DJ announcing who it was or anything. As far as Zach the Anarchist knew, it was just a weird coincidence, a song that happened to have my name in it that happened to come on while I was in the vicinity of a pair of speakers. And he still had no idea that Sebastia
n and I were messaging.
So when Monday afternoon rolled around, I decided to channel my nervous energy into baking, which by virtue of requiring so much precision would require a lot of concentration, and Latin, which . . . pretty much the same. Failing that, I would distract myself with something pleasant like ingesting enough raw cookie dough to ensure salmonella.
Also, I kind of needed help balancing the budget.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Zach said, “but you’re better at making cookies than you are at keeping financial records.”
“Thanks?” I took the scoop and started to plop out rounds of snickerdoodle dough in neat rows of four.
“I mean, you’re doing okay right now. Keep those farther apart or else they’ll spread into each other.” He looked down at my notes again. Underneath him, Bacon yawned a languid doggy yawn and sprawled over Zach’s stocking feet, belly in the air.
“You know you can set up spreadsheets so they tabulate things automatically, right? Like enter x number of quarters and multiply it out to see how many dollars you have.”
“I don’t use spreadsheets. I just type everything up in word processing and add it up on my phone.”
Zach looked at me like I’d just admitted to using an abacus. I stopped scooping.
“What?”
Zach said nothing, just shook his head, which made me even more irritated.
“It’s not, like, inexact or anything,” I said. “The numbers are there, right? And you can read them?”
“Yeah, but if you use a spreadsheet, you can have it update live and save yourself the trouble of retyping everything each week. And you can make graphs.”
“Graphs of what?”
Zach didn’t answer. I snuck a look at my phone, where, to my horror, my Pixstagram inbox had a tiny 15 on top of it. And all seemed to be from Sebastian. I surreptitiously tapped the first one.
To: nmccullz
california is so fake
its beautiful dont get me wrong
but its all so NEW
“I can’t believe you haven’t added the bake sale money to the rest of the money,” Zach said. “Addition is literally the first thing you ever learn in math.”
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