“You’re like some weird welcoming committee, aren’t you?” I asked, sitting down opposite him. “Well, mission accomplished: I am sufficiently welcomed. Thanks for helping me freak out my aunt and uncle and for not asking me about my dead parents. I got it covered from here.”
I kicked my legs up on the nearest shelf and rested my head against the back of my seat, closing my eyes. Adrian seemed intent on making a spectacle of the two of us, and I figured it was to keep up the appearance of his being straight. Maybe he sensed that I knew his secret. He’d keep me company if I was cool with making it look like we were interested in each other. I could deal with that.
“Do you want me to ask?” he said unexpectedly.
I was already half asleep, and didn’t bother to open my eyes. “About what?”
There was a heavy silence. “About your parents.”
I thought about it for a second—really thought about it, and had to swallow a couple times to get past the sudden, infuriating lump in my throat.
“No,” I said finally. I risked a glance at him. “But thank you, for asking. No one’s done that, yet. They assume that I do or don’t want to talk about it, but they don’t ask.”
He nodded at me, as if he understood. As he went back to his homework, I leaned my head back and thought about my mom.
I missed her. It was simple, really.
I missed her so much, and it hurt. It just didn’t stop hurting.
4
WEIRD WORLD
The barn was massive, easily dwarfing the meager horse stalls we had back at the ranch. The little hoedown I’d been imagining was apparently a raging kegger, and the clearing around the barn was packed with trucks as far as I could see. It was ten thirty and pitch-black except for the pulsing, multicolored lights that seeped from the upper windows and through cracks in the massive barn doors. The road here was more dirt and gravel than pavement, and luxuries like streetlamps, sidewalks, and speed limits were not to be found for miles in any direction. I took a deep breath and Trish patted my shoulder.
“You’ll be fine, Mystic. It’s just a party. It’ll be a hoot.”
I snorted my disbelief and opened the passenger door. Stepping down, the slit in my knee-length dress rode halfway up my thigh. I covered it quickly with my cloak and muttered, “Shit.”
This was going to be ridiculous.
“Come on!”
I’d gone straight home with Trish after school on the pretext that I was spending the night—which I suppose I was, but not until we’d made it through this party. I wobbled after her in the three-inch stilettos I’d splurged on after I’d gotten asked to prom the year before, as a sophomore. They were the only shoes that even remotely went with my admittedly half-assed costume. For now, they were extremely difficult to navigate across the pock-marked, improvised parking lot. When I finally caught up, Trish opened the barn doors and ushered me inside. I took one step and stopped dead.
Holy Halloween.
The place was packed. I recognized most of the juniors and seniors from my school, plus what must have been every other junior and senior in Warren County. There were hundreds of people. Someone had rigged up an intense lighting system that pierced the barn with shards of rainbow light. Three-quarters of the bottom floor had been turned into a haunted maze. Trish—who’d come as a Valkyrie—pulled on my arm.
“I just saw Meghan go into the maze. Let’s scare the crap out of her.”
And before I could protest, I was pulled into WEIRD WORLD—that was the sign above the maze, anyway. Glow-in-the-dark handprints were smeared down the cardboard walls, providing the only light, while fake spiders and cobwebs hung from the cardboard ceiling. With groups of other kids rushing past, giggling and screaming, it took all of ten seconds for Trish and me to get separated. Squinting in the darkness, I picked a corridor, which branched off in three directions, and headed right. Which seemed to be a really bad idea, because it was absolutely pitch-black.
I groped my way down the walls and slowly turned a corner, patting the toe of my heels blindly on the floor to preidentify things I would like to avoid stepping in. My feet must have activated a motion sensor, because a strobe light flashed on suddenly, blinding me. I was so startled I screamed and jumped back—and what I backed up into wasn’t a wall.
A hand clamped down over my mouth and a muscled arm pinned my elbows to my side. A fun-house mirror reflected the intermittent strobe light, briefly illuminating the person who was holding me. He looked up through a curtain of dark, wavy hair, grinning.
It was Adrian, thank God, and not some random creeper—though I still wanted to punch him in the face for scaring me. Without Trish I felt strangely vulnerable.
“I’m a pirate,” he explained, as if I couldn’t tell from his costume. “Apparently we kidnap people.”
I wriggled free and punched him in the arm, then immediately wished I hadn’t because it hurt like hell.
“You scared the crap out of me,” I said, shaking my hand to dilute the pain. “I could have stabbed you in your manly bits with my heel.”