Page 14 of Bonepetal
“Talk to me,” Miles says, reading the change in my breathing like sheet music. “Favorite candy. Go.”
“Reese’s bats,” I say automatically. “And Twix. Always Twix.”
Jamie shakes his head. “Twix is mid. Everyone knows KitKats win.”
“KitKats taste like cardboard in a tuxedo,” I retort.
Miles claps dramatically. “She did not just drag KitKats like that. Savage.”
The wagon rattles past a scarecrow propped on a cross. Straw guts spill from its chest; its burlap face is painted with a stitched grin. Someone behind us squeals. I don’t flinch. It’s the wrong kind of fear to make me move.
It’s cheap. Friendly.
Real fear is quieter. Heavy.
We dip into a fold of the field where the fog pools thicker and the lights thin out. The corn whispers in dry tongues. My heart ticks faster because the path from here looks like another one, the old trail that split right and left behind the prayer house. Right went to the pond. Left went to the chapel.
Finn kissed me on the chapel floor once, a laugh like blasphemy in his mouth. His hands were cold from the water; he touched me like heat was a spell he could teach me. Later, at the pond, with frogs sawing the night in half, he’d crowded me up against a birch and turned me into a lit fuse. Bark bit my palms. His breath steamed in the dark. He set a rhythm in my hips that I swear my heart still keeps when I’m not looking.
My thighs press together now on reflex, a tiny, vicious ache sparking low. I hate my body for remembering before my mind permits it. I hate that the memory makes the fog feel warmer, makes the hayride bench feel too hard under me and the air too thin.
“Salem?” Miles’s voice again, less joking. “Girl, where did you go just now?”
“Nowhere,” I say, aiming for bored and landing on frayed. “My brain is being dramatic. Halloween’s fault.”
“You’re shivering, want my hoodie?” Jamie offers, tugging at his sleeve. He’s sweet, too sweet, the kind of sweet that tastes like frosting and makes your teeth ache.
“I’m good,” I lie. “Thanks.”
The tractor turns toward the barns. The lights thicken. The Halloween actors do their best final pop-outs and the wagon erupts in one last set of screams, relieved and performative. We roll to a stop behind the cider wagon. Everyone claps for themselves for surviving fun.
I stand too fast and the night tilts. Miles steadies me automatically, palm warm at my elbow. “Text him again?” he asks.
“I have dignity,” I say, unlocking my phone anyway. The screen glare cuts the dark, making a little box where I can breathe. Nothing from Nathan.
Me
seriously?
Three dots. None. Blank.
“Okay,” Jamie says, decisive. “He’s either in line, in a bathroom, or dead in a ditch. Either way, we’re not wasting prime haunted attraction time. Haunted house next?”
Miles perks up like someone offered him drugs. “Yes. Absolutely yes. I need to scream at plastic skeletons and bad strobe lighting.” He looks at me, eyes sparkling. “Also, I have an incredible scream. Like, Tony Award level.”
“You’ve screamed in my kitchen because of a moth,” I remind him.
“A vicious moth,” he corrects, dead serious.
Jamie snorts into his cider. “Then it’s settled. Haunted house. We’ll scream, you’ll judge, and Nathan will eventually crawl back out of whatever corn hell swallowed him.”
I shake my head, tugging my jacket tighter. “You two go. I’m heading home.”
Both of them spin toward me like synchronized swimmers. “What?” Miles gasps. “Alone? At night? Inthiseconomy?”
Jamie clutches his chest like I stabbed him. “Absolutely not. You’ll be abducted by a scarecrow in the parking lot.”
“I can walk it,” I say. “Ten minutes to the road, twelve to Main, another ten to my building. I’ll text you when I get there.”
