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“Pastries,” Molly said.

“What kind?”

“Joseph’s.”

“That’s not...”

“They’re very good,” Molly said. “Have one.”

She had one. It tasted like woodsmoke and something sweet and something underneath that she couldn’t locate, something that moved through her like a feeling rather than a flavor. She stood at the counter holding her coffee and thought, for a moment, about nothing at all, which was unusual for her, and then the moment passed and she was just standing at the counter holding her coffee.

“What do those do?” she asked Molly.

Molly smiled the way she smiled when she was choosing not to answer. “They’re pastries,” she said again, pleasantly.

Allison looked at the basket.

She bought two more for Lauren and went to school.

* * *

She had not, since the festival, spoken to Shane Colter.

This was not by design, or rather, it was by design in the way things were by design when you had not decided anything consciously but your feet kept taking you on slightly different routes and your eyes kept going to different things and you woke up at four in the morning thinking about the way a man had said your name in firelight and then lay there being extremely annoyed at yourself about it.

She had not been to Colter Hardware.

She had walked past it. She had glanced at the sign, Est. 1958, and kept walking, which took approximately twice as much effort as walking past anything should require.

She had told Lauren, over lunch on Monday, that nothing had happened at the festival.

Lauren had looked at her with the honest face that saw everything and said, with the gentleness of a friend who knew when not to push: “Okay.”

She had been very grateful for that okay.

She had also been unable to stop thinking about Allison, said in a voice at the edge of a bonfire, for the six days since.

* * *

The Halloween parade happened on the thirty first, at three in the afternoon, when school let out and the kids came pouring into Main Street in their costumes and the whole town appeared, as the whole town appeared for things, seemingly materializing out of the air, to watch them.

She had gone full art teacher.

This was a decision she’d made in mid-October and committed to with the thoroughness she brought to creative projects: Frida Kahlo, because if you were an art teacher and you were going to dress up for Halloween you were going to do it properly and with intention.

She’d done it properly and with intention.

The dress was from a thrift shop in Missoula, deep red and embroidered, the kind of thing that was either a costume or a statement depending on who was wearing it. The flower crown she’d made herself over three evenings at the kitchen table, real dried flowers from Taylor’s shop woven into a circle that sat on her dark hair the way Frida’s always had, like it belonged there, like it had grown there. She’d done the bold brows with a careful hand, thickened and darkened, and the red lip, and the traditional jewelry, big earrings, a necklace she’d found at the back of a box she hadn’t unpacked until two weeks ago.

The red dress fit close over her breasts and her hips and flared out at the knee, and it did not hide one single curve of her, and it wasn’t trying to. She’d looked in the mirror that morning and felt, for a moment, genuinely striking, not in spite of it being a costume but because of what the costume said, because Frida Kahlo had been a woman who looked at the world with clear eyes and painted what she saw and hadn’t apologized for any of it, and there was something in that Allison wanted to wear for a day.

Lauren had taken one look at her in the teachers’ lounge and said, with great conviction and zero irony: “Shane Colter is going to have a terrible afternoon.”

She was choosing not to think about that.

* * *

Main Street was alive in the way it was alive for the festival but different, noisier, faster, more chaotic, the energy of children who had been waiting for this day for approximately three hundred and sixty-four days and were not going to waste a single minute of it. She recognized most of the costumes. Marcus was a superhero, naturally, though he’d modified the color scheme so thoroughly it had nothing to do with any existing superhero and everything to do with his developing sense of what colors should do together. Sophie was a black cat, precise and serious about it, with ears she’d clearly made herself.