Page 33 of No Bones About It

“He is not just a plastic skeleton,” I explode. I spin in a circle until I see Lois slumped over her steering wheel. I point an accusatory finger and scream, “She murdered him!”

Sirens wail in the distance, and although I wish they were for BJ, desperately wish that there was a magical hospital for twelve-foot sentient skeletons and broken hearts, I know they aren’t. I know there is nothing that can fix this.

The officers exchange a worried look, and Dawn slides her arms around me. “Tori, I’m so sorry.”

I let her pull me into a hug, but all I can see is the wreckage of BJ behind her. His arm and leg bones are still wrapped around the rib cage, broken and bent where they took the full force of the car.

Hot tears continue to track down my face, destroying my carefully applied makeup. But it doesn't matter. Sally is nothing without Jack.

I catalog each injury, each broken part where once there had been life and love. When my eyes drift upward, searching for the familiar glow of his LEDs, my stomach drops.

His head is gone. It’s fucking gone.

Panic surges through me as my gaze sweeps the yard. It catches first on the Jack mask smiling up at the moon from where it landed in the grass before racing onward.

There.

His skull has rolled halfway across the yard, lying on its side with the vampire teeth we had left in pointed toward me.

But it’s seeing his LED eyes, dark and lifeless, that breaks me.

A sob tears free of my throat, great heaving breaths that can't contain the pain threatening to splinter my own ribs wrack my frame. My knees buckle, and I sink to the ground.

Dawn follows me down, trying to gather me up against her, but I break away, crawling over the pieces of my shattered heart that lie like broken glass in the grass to the mess that is left.

I grab the closest bone fragment, but I can’t even tell which one it is anymore. It feels different in my hand now. No electric buzz, no vibrations of laughter, no trembling of desire. Nothing but cold, impersonal injection molded plastic meets my fingertips.

“Mr. Bonejangles?” I whisper to the shard cradled in my hand. My shaking voice sounds small even to my ears.

He’s gone.

I sit there, staring at the wreckage of Lois’s wrath, and try to understand why something so harmless to anyone could inspire so much hate.

Somewhere in the background, my brain clocks the sounds of Lois getting arrested. I hear the murmur of the crowd that has gathered on the street. In the distance, kids are still laughing. I can picture them running home to empty their buckets, sorting through their piles to see what the magic of Halloween brought them this year.

I didn’t need to dump out a bucket to know that it had brought me the best magic of all. But maybe Halloween magic isn’t meant to last past this day. Maybe this is all I was meant to have. Just one magical month.

My hand tightens around the cold plastic in my hand until the sharp edges press into my skin. A cold breeze ghosts over my skin, threatening the coming of November tomorrow, and with it, winter. Which is just fine with me. I don’t know that I can survive another Fall night without him. And although all I want to do is sit here in my grief, the world doesn’t stop turning around us.

My only relief is the sound of Dawn’s steady voice managing the disaster, because I don’t think I could string two coherent words together right now.

The insistent EMTs check me for injuries, but I can barely follow their directions. Everything seems so very far away.

Dawn promises them she will keep an eye on me when I absolutely refuse to go to the hospital, and they finally leave me alone.

I’m tired of the lights and the voices. All I want to do is crawl back inside that rib cage and fall apart while BJ holds me the only way he can now. The same way he saved me.

“Tori,” Dawn calls, probably not for the first time. “One of the last trick or treaters recorded everything on their phone. They said you were so nice to them, they wanted to help. We’ll prosecute the shit out of Lois, and then we can get you another skeleton.”

I finally force my eyes away from the visible remnants of not just my heart or my relationship, but of my whole world, to look at her. All I manage to whisper is, “No.”

Her eyes flick over the skeleton and then back to me. She gives me a tight smile and says, “I watched the video. It really is a miracle how that skeleton just happened to fall on top of you to save you from being hit by that car.”

I nod weakly, hot tears flooding my eyes once more.

“Especially since the ribcage appeared to fall perfectly around you and then the arms and legs folded in to protect you before the car ever even hit it,” she says, voice even.

I look up to meet her gaze and say, “Yeah. That is strange.”