Leaves turned gold and orange and red. The air was crisp. All over the Mills, people started to prepare for Halloween. Candy appeared in stores, cheesecloth ghosts hung from trees, and scarecrows stood sentry in front yards. The pumpkin patch was open for picking, and you could get apple cider there, fresh from the press.
The thing about October is that it makes everyone want to believe in magic. Sure, it’s the spooky kind of magic, but it’s better than nothing. And with everyone planning their costumes, it was one of the few times a year I felt like I fit in. I wasn’t the only one who wanted to be someone else.
I guess Christmas is a magical time too, maybe even more magical, but it comes with all kinds of pressure. You have to be cheerful and jolly and spend time with your family. And then there’s Christmas shopping. Not only is the act itself torture, but in the end, you have to come up with a super awesome present that’ll wow the recipient, and I’ve always been really bad at that. Like the time I got Rush a video called Overcoming Illiteracy, which I thought was really considerate. He disagreed. But it was better than what he got me that year, which was nothing at all.
Halloween doesn’t have any strings attached. It’s a holiday for hanging out and eating candy and playing pretend. It was the kind of holiday I could get behind.
My mom claimed she celebrated Samhain, not Halloween. It was some kind of Celtic harvest festival or something.
“Halloween started as Samhain, Hawthorn,” my mom said in early October as she put out decorations.
I raised my eyebrows. “So plastic skeletons were part of Samhain?”
“I have to make do with what’s available,” she said.
As much as my mom wanted to keep up her New Age facade, the truth was, she loved the Halloween season as much as I did. And if she wanted to call it Samhain, I didn’t mind. It was actually pretty cool—the night the boundary between the worlds gets thinner. I was certainly on board with that.
I was also on board with my mom’s pumpkin pies. They were made with soy milk, of course, but you almost couldn’t tell. I was just happy to have sweets in the house that I didn’t have to smuggle in.
The hippies didn’t celebrate Halloween or Samhain, but they also didn’t turn down the pie I took out to their bonfire. I sat down with them and tried to get them to tell ghost stories while they ate. They made an effort but always brought it back to astral projection or past lives, which was not really in the spirit of the season. I wanted stories about vengeful ghosts and witches who ate little kids and creatures that lurked in the dark—the kind of stories that scared me so much, they couldn’t help but make me feel alive.
“Tell scarier stories,” I urged the hippies.
“Why this fascination with darkness?” Sundog asked.
I shrugged. “The world is dark.”
“The world is whatever you want it to be.”
? ? ?
“Tell me a scary story,” I said to Enzo.
“Real or fake?”
“Real.”
It was just before dusk, and we were walking through the woods. It was cold and windy and felt like the start of a horror movie. I loved it.
“Have you ever heard of the brazen bull?” Enzo asked.
“No. But it doesn’t sound scary.”
“Give me a chance, kid.” He stopped to light a cigarette, using his body to block the wind. “It was invented in ancient Greece. A hollow bull, made out of bronze. For kicks, they’d lock people inside and light a fire under them. The person would roast to death, obviously. The creepiest part is, there were tubes inside that turned the person’s screams into bull sounds. So these rich assholes would be gathered at a party, and there’d be this bull statue making noises, and everyone would act like it was entertainment, not the sound of someone being tortured.”
“OK, you win. That’s terrifying.”
“Wanna know something else?” Enzo grinned. “The guy who invented it was the first person roasted inside.”
“My mom would call that karma,” I said.
? ? ?
There were no more official searches for Lizzie, just small ones organized by her family. There were no more articles in the paper. No one at school whispered theories about where she’d gone.
“Why’d you stop caring about Lizzie?” I asked Rush.
He was standing at the counter, eating a bowl of cereal. The spoon stopped halfway to his mouth. He seemed thrown by the question, which made me wonder if maybe he hadn’t realized he’d stopped caring.
“What? I still care.”
“Not like you did when she first went missing.”
Rush finished taking his bite and chewed for a long time. “I care. There’s just not much to talk about anymore. There’s no news. Nothing is changing.”
“So out of sight, out of mind?”
“What do you want me to say, Hawthorn? That you were right? That I was upset over a girl I didn’t know anymore, then realized I was stupid to care so much?”
“Is that what happened?”
“No. I just got over it.”
It was so easy for Rush. Everything had always been easy for him.
I wasn’t ready to get over Lizzie. Neither was Enzo. Everyone else might have given up hope, but we kept searching for her. We combed the woods and clipped articles from the newspaper and made lists of any information that might be relevant to the case.
Pretty much, we spent all our free time together.