Gianna scoffs and turns away from him. She looks at me, Mila, and Penelope.
“Will you girls be my wing ladies tonight?”
The three of us nod.
I look around the room. Mara is already gone. She’s already three feet deep into a conversation with two boys I don’t know, gesturing at her wings, throwing her head back at something one of them just said.
Lucy looks at Benson. “Can I hand out candy with you?”
He looks at her like she has just suggested they fly to Paris together. “You sure?”
She nods.
“Okay.”
They both go back out the front door, hand in hand. Benson puts his mask back on as he steps onto the porch. Lucy, costume and all, sits down on the porch swing with the candy bowl in her lap and waves to a kid in a witch hat coming up the walk.
We have lost two angels in under five minutes.
Gianna, Mila, Penelope, and I relocate to the kitchen island.
Mila gives us each another Jell-O shot — black this time, the strongest one she made. Rowan and Percy appear at the island with us and take one.
Penelope coughs again.
I start picking food off the dining table.
“Do not let me puke tonight,” I say to Mila.
“Same,” she says back, eating one of my pretzels. “These are good, by the way. You committed to the eyes.”
“I committed to the eyes.”
“It shows.”
A song changes from something spooky to something upbeat.
Mara comes back out of nowhere and grabs us by the wrists, both hands, two of us at a time, and drags us into the living room.
The press of bodies in the living room has thickened. Lucy is back from the porch. She’s dancing with a girl dressed as a deer, the two of them laughing into each other’s shoulders. Bensonis in the doorway arguing with Stanley about something I can’t hear. There are people everywhere.
We dance.
Mara hands each of us a red Solo cup that she has filled from thefunpunch bowl. Mila keeps coming back with Jell-O shots, feeding me like a mama bird. I laugh so hard at Mila trying to moonwalk in nylons that I have to sit down on the arm of the couch and catch my breath. Mara and Mila scream the lyrics of the next song at each other across two feet of space. Penelope, against every instinct I would have had about her two weeks ago, is dancing — actually dancing, not just shifting her weight politely — and her hair has come a little loose from the knot at the back of her head, and she is beautiful. She doesn’t know it, and I have one of those moments — the kind I am realizing I am going to keep having — where I look at the people in my life and feel almost dizzy with the gift of them.
Gianna re-clips my left wing without me asking.
A new song comes on.
Mila throws her head back and screams along to it, having the time of her life.
It is just us girls in the middle of the floor. The rest of the crowd is in clumps around the walls, talking, drinking, laughing.
I’m sweating through the bodysuit. I wonder if I should take a two-minute break to go outside and cool down. I glance around the room, trying to figure out which way I should go. Out the front means dealing with the straggling trick-or-treaters. Out the back —
I notice the cluster of hockey players by the kitchen doorway.
They have taken their masks off.
