? ? ?
“She’s spending all her free time with him.”
I stopped in my tracks. My dad was speaking. He and my mom were in the kitchen. If I’d been able to find my keys, I’d have already been on my way to Enzo’s and wouldn’t have overheard my parent’s conversation at all. I really needed to keep better track of my keys.
“She needs a friend, James.”
I crept closer to the kitchen door, unable to stop myself from listening in, even though I didn’t think I’d like what I heard.
“There’s an entire high school of people she could be friends with” my dad said. “What happened to Emily?”
“Rush says they had a fight.”
My insides twisted with anger and embarrassment. I couldn’t believe how they were talking about my personal life. It was no one’s business but mine.
“I’m sorry, but I’m just not comfortable with their relationship. What do we even know about him? Look what happened to his last girlfriend!”
“She says they’re just friends.”
“Off in the woods all the time, looking for werewolves. This is your daughter too, Sparrow. How can you sit there like this is normal?”
Even my dad was calling me weird now.
I’d heard enough. I stomped out of the house, slamming the door behind me. I hoped they noticed.
? ? ?
As the month progressed, I knew I faced a lot of Halloween parties I wouldn’t be invited to. I hadn’t been invited to a Halloween party since kids had moved from bobbing for apples to spin the bottle—at least, based on what I’d seen in movies, that’s what I imagined they were doing.
I was also well aware that homecoming was the weekend before Halloween, which meant another chance for me to be pitifully dateless.
Despite this, I didn’t feel like I was missing out. I didn’t need loud, obnoxious parties and dances packed with people I hated. I had Enzo. I had his dark, art-filled apartment where I could let down my guard and be myself. I had walks through the woods and werewolf lore, which was worth more than any high school event.
We spent the middle of October watching werewolf movies on TV, making fun of the parts that had been badly edited to take out the gore and sex and cursing. We decided there was no such thing as a great werewolf movie. They always came out cheesy. My favorite was about a teenage girl werewolf, because it reminded me of Lizzie. Enzo’s favorite was the original The Wolf Man with Lon Chaney Jr. He thought all the old movies were better than any that had been made in the past twenty or thirty years.
“There’s a magic to the old films that new movies can’t capture. The filmmakers try to hide it with special effects, but no one really buys it.”
I disagreed. Movies were movies, whether they were old or new. They always captivated me, pulled me into worlds where anything was possible. Worlds where there were adventures and surprises, and life was never dull.
The only thing I didn’t like about movies was when the credits rolled and returned me to real life. At least, that was how I used to feel. Leaving a movie world wasn’t so painful anymore. Spending time with Enzo made me realize anything could be an adventure if you looked at it the right way.
One day, when the only horror movies playing were ones we’d already seen, Enzo let me watch a short film he’d made during his brief time in college. It was black and white and tried to imitate a French new wave film. Mostly, it depicted a little boy running through a cornfield with drums beating in the background.
“I don’t really get it,” I told him when it ended.
“That’s why I gave up film,” Enzo said. “No one ever got what I was trying to say.”
Sometimes, Enzo wrote short stories. One of them was about a man who worked in a fortune cookie factory, whose job was coming up with the fortunes to put on the little slips of paper. One day, he realizes he’s spent his whole life telling other people what to expect in their futures without ever thinking about his own. So he sets out to discover his true fortune, which can’t be found at the center of a cookie.
“What does he find?” I asked.
Enzo shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s where the story ends.”
“I hate it when you do that to me,” I said with a groan.
Enzo thought ends were disappointing. He said when you were really immersed in a story, you started to have expectations. And the end was never as great as you imagined it could have been. Even though I mostly agreed with him, I couldn’t help wanting to know everything. I was always looking for more.
“But you must know what happened next,” I said about the fortune cookie story. “Even if you didn’t write it.”
“You’ll just have to use your imagination, kid.”