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48
In the days leading up to Hallowe’en, the air in Lochkelvin grows fraught with a kind of all-around irritability similar to the kind in the forest. Scuffles break out, students increasingly snark back at teachers, and Luke is on absolutely everyone’s shit-list to the point that I wonder if Rory hadn’t been pretending. That maybe thereissomething defective and therefore meaningful about the ritual, as the time toward Hallowe’en stretches impossibly far, one hour feeling like two, as though some vengeful god is out there, swindling everyone to bring more pain and misery than they’d bargained for. It brings to mind the connection between the full moon and so-calledlunacy.
Luke comes down to dinner the night before Hallowe’en, nursing the curve of his shoulder blade. Fresh from his stint in the medical wing, Callum felt it necessary to demonstrate his political allegiance by slamming a chair across Luke’s back. According to Danny, who’d been there at the time, the jumped-up little shit had screamed, “Here’s a fucking throne for you,” before colliding the chair against Luke’s bones.Andhe’d been cheered on.
“It feels odd. Not dislocated or broken, but… fuzzy.” Luke smooths his hand across the side of his neck and down to the top of his shoulder. I’m aware of the entire school watching us again, their gazes as heady and hateful as poison. Luke pretends not to see. “It could have been much worse, considering.” At Luke’s words, I notice Rory casually sliding his blazer sleeve down his wrist and frown.
“Considerin’?” Finlay asks.
“How keen he is to kill me,” Luke answers mildly, and my stomach flips. I meet Finlay’s gaze across the table, both of us filled with disquiet.
I venture to bed that evening with a strange sense of relief, because if rituals are true and, as Rory believes, they really do work, then Hallowe’en is in less than one day and all this pent-up madness will come to a head and soon be over.
Unlike last year, there is no package wrapped in brown paper waiting for me to peel open. There’s no patronizing lamb costume I’ll be forced to wear. Tomorrow night, I’ll be serving detention, but at least I’ll get to be myself.
Or so I think. It’s naive, of course, because in my relief to be far away from the strangeness of that night, I’d forgotten one aspect of Hallowe’en: all Lochkelvin teachers take part.
“What?” I say the following breakfast, when Danny tells me about the costume that had been laid out on his bed. “But we have detention—”
“No’ the night, we dinnae,” Finlay points out, still looking exhausted. “It’s secret Lochkelvin fun times tonight.”
“There must be some mistake,” I say in a practical tone. “Idon’t have a costume. So I must still have detention—”
“Sassenach,” Finlay says in a patient tone, “detentions have never been held on Hallowe’en. A’ the teachers take part so naebody can look after the poor unfortunate souls wi’ detention.”
“You mean we’ll all be at Hallowe’en?” I whisper, because the closer that date has become, like figures on a mechanical clock notching ever closer, the sicker the feeling in my stomach has grown. Detention, ironically enough, had been my one reprieve: that I wouldn’t be picked upon and chosen again, to enter that forest and see my worst nightmares in slick, vivid color.
Finlay gives me a soft look. He knows. He knows what I endured last Hallowe’en. I’d spilled every last painful detail as he’d held me between his arms. “Ye’re stronger than ye were back then,” he murmurs kindly. “If ye’re chosen, ye know whit tae dae noo.”
I don’t feel stronger at all. Even the thought of being inside that forest the other day with Rory and Finlay had almost been overbearing. I can’t believe I used to dance down there, back when I’d been unaware of its immense power over me. “And what’s the likelihood of being chosen a second time?”
Finlay scratches the side of his face, looking deep in thought. “Well, it’s never been done before,” he says, adding with a bright smile, “but then ye have a habit o’ makin’ the impossible happen.”
Despite Finlay’s sunny smile, I feel it deep in my bones: if I’m to be there tonight, there’s no way I’ll not be chosen. It seems preordained in the same wild, mystical ways that, when I’m momentarily ungrounded by reality and cast away, makes me believe in whatever Rory does about Lochkelvin.
I fret about it in class all afternoon, and I even consider the simple act of just not turning up. What can they do?Forceme to attend a Hallowe’en party? Back at Greenvale, I was the quiet girl who never got invited to any kind of party, so the idea of being forced by the entire school to attend one strikes me as downright crazy. But then they do things differently here, so very different…
My eyes are glued to all clock faces as hour after hour slides by. I’m trembling with nervous energy, unable to concentrate on classwork, all my focus warped by Hallowe’en and what I’ll be expected to do.
Finally, classes end — as does an achingly slow dinner, in which the majority of students are too busy getting ready to turn up — until I’m upstairs trying to figure out what I’m going to do. I lack a costume. I lack the necessary energy to cope with tonight. But what I don’t lack is my damned curiosity, and with that I know I won’t allow myself to hide in my room until October ends and November blessedly consumes it.
There’s a knock at my door, and I’m so familiar with their different patterns that I identify it as Danny in a heartbeat. Just like last year, he enters one paw after the other, until I’m snorting at the ridiculousness of his large, fluffy costume.
“Still angering the gods?” I ask with a smirk as Danny enters my room wearing the full costume of a squirrel.
“I’d thoughtmaybeI’d have evolved,” he grouches, slumping onto my bed. He isn’t wearing his buck teeth, which have been shoved into his front pocket. In an adamant tone, he declares, “I’m not the same as I was last year. Right?”
“Right. You never lost at chess against me back then.”
Danny screws up his shiny nose, looking unamused.
“I’vechanged,” he states petulantly. “I’m way cooler now. I’m achief. I haveyou. So why am I still dressed as a bloody squirrel?”
“I like it,” I say with a smile, because despite his tough-acting words, I like that Danny’s dependably adorable. I like that his costume reflects the way I think of him: cute and innocent and sweet.
I’m smiling even as I approach him, because something about his costume makes me feel calm and happy, that with Danny in the world we may just be okay after all. He’s an illustration from a children’s book come to life, with the same soothing properties. When I raise my mouth to his, he scoops me between two large fluffy paws and holds me into place. As our kiss deepens, his bushy tail swishes lightly behind him and I burst out laughing.
“Aren’t you getting ready?” His words caress my lips.
