now ruffled. He shrugged at me as if to say he couldn’t be held accountable for the behavior of his crazy friends and slipped on a fitted black T-shirt that one of the boys tossed him.
“Are you okay, Huggie Bear?” I asked, protectively reaching up to fix his hair. I didn’t like it when his friends played rough. My attentiveness raised a few eyebrows among his friends.
“Beth.” Xavier put his hand on my shoulder. “You have got to stop calling me that in public.”
“Sorry,” I said sheepishly.
Xavier laughed. “Come on, let’s get something to drink.”
After grabbing a beer for Xavier and soda for me, we headed out to the back porch and settled down on a deep sofa that someone had dragged out. Pink-and-green paper lanterns hung from the eaves, casting the withered yard in a soft light. Beyond it, the fields stretched out to the edge of the dense, black woodland.
Aside from the rowdy antics of the partygoers inside, the night was still and tranquil. A rusty tractor stood abandoned in the high grass. I was just thinking how picturesque it looked, like a painting from a forgotten time, when a lacy undergarment floated out of the side window coming to land at our feet. I blushed deeply as I realized there was a couple inside and they weren’t engaged in deep and meaningful conversation. I quickly averted my gaze and tried to imagine what the old house might have been like in the days before the Knox family let it fall to rack and ruin. It would have been grand and beautiful back in the day when girls still had chaperones and dancing consisted of a graceful waltz played on a grand piano, nothing like the gyrating and thrusting going on inside right now. Social gatherings would have been stylish and tame compared to the havoc being wreaked upon the old house tonight. I imagined a man in coattails bowing before a woman in a flowing dress on this very same porch, although in my imagination it was polished and new and honeysuckle wound around the quaint posts. In my mind’s eye I saw a star-studded night sky, the double doors flung open so the sound of music trickled out into the night.
“Halloween sucks.” Ben Carter from my literature class broke through my reverie as he flopped down beside us. I would have answered him, but Xavier’s strong arm encircled me and made it difficult for me to concentrate on anything else. Out of the corner of my eye I could see his hand hanging loosely over my shoulder. I liked seeing the silver faith ring on him — it was a sign that he was taken, unavailable to anyone but me. It seemed oddly out of place on an eighteen-year-old boy so beautiful and so popular. Anyone else seeing him for the first time would take one look at his perfect form, his cool turquoise gaze, that charming smile, the shock of nutmeg hair falling across his forehead and know that he could have his pick of girls.
They would simply assume that like any normal teenage boy, he would be out enjoying the perks of being young and attractive. Only those close to him knew that Xavier was completely committed to me. Not only was he breathtakingly gorgeous, he was a leader, looked up to and respected by everybody. I loved and admired him, but I still couldn’t quite believe he was mine. I couldn’t fathom that I had been so lucky. Sometimes I worried he might be a dream and if I let myself lose focus, he might fade away. But he was still sitting beside me, solid and secure. He answered Ben when it became apparent that I had zoned out.
“Relax, Carter, it’s a party,” he said, laughing.
“Where’s your costume?” I asked, forcing myself back to reality.
“I don’t do dress-ups,” Ben said cynically. Ben was the sort of guy who thought everything was puerile and beneath him. He managed to maintain his contemptuously superior persona by engaging in nothing. At the same time he always turned up just in case he might miss out on something. “My God, they’re sickening.” He wrinkled his face in disgust at the lacy underwear lying on the porch. “I hope I never fall for someone so hard that I agree to have sex in a tractor.”
“I don’t know about the tractor,” I teased. “But I’m betting one day you’ll fall in love and there won’t be a thing you can do about it.”
“Not a chance.” Ben stretched out with his arms crossed over his head and shut his eyes. “I’m too bitter and jaded.”
“I could try and set you up with one of my friends,” I offered. I quite liked the idea of matchmaking and was fairly confident in my skills. “What about Abby? She’s single and pretty and wouldn’t be too demanding.”
“Dear God, please don’t,” Ben said. “That would have to be the worst match in history.”
“I beg your pardon?” Ben’s lack of confidence in my abilities was disappointing.
“Beg all you want.” Ben snorted. “My decision is final. I won’t be set up with a cooler-drinking, stiletto- wearing bimbo. We’d have nothing to say to each other except
“It’s good to know you have such a high opinion of my friends,” I said crossly. “Is that what you think of me?”
“No, but you’re different.”
“How so?”
“You’re weird.”
“I am not!” I exclaimed. “What’s so weird about me? Xavier, do you think I’m weird?”
“Calm down, babe,” Xavier said, eyes twinkling with amusement. “I’m sure Carter means
“Well, you’re weird too,” I hit back at Ben, realizing at the same time how petulant I sounded.
He chuckled and downed the rest of his beer. “Takes one to know one.”
The sound of raucous voices coming from inside drew our attention. The screen door was thrown open and a group of boys from the water-polo team appeared on the porch. It was amazing, I thought to myself, how much they reminded me of young lion cubs, jostling and tumbling over one another. Xavier shook his head in gentle admonishment as they stumbled toward us. I recognized the faces of Wesley and Lawson among them. They were easy to pick out; Wesley with his slick, dark hair and low-set brows and Lawson with his white-blond crew cut and hooded blue eyes. They were a dull blue, I noticed, they didn’t sparkle like Xavier’s. Both boys were shirtless and striped with war paint. They acknowledged my presence with a curt nod in my direction and I thought fleetingly back to a time when men would click their heels and bow in the presence of a lady. I returned their acknowledgment with a smile. I couldn’t bring myself to do what my friends called the “s’up nod”—it made me feel as if I were in one of those music videos Molly watched on MTV where men in hoods rapped about “homies” and something called “bling.”
“Come on, Woods,” the boys called. “We’re headed to the lake.”
Xavier groaned. “Here we go.”
“You know the rules,” Wesley called out. “Last one there has to skinny-dip.”
“My God, they really have discovered the pinnacle of intellectual stimulation,” muttered Ben.
Xavier got up reluctantly and I stared at him in surprise.
“You’re not going, are you?” I said.
“The race is a Bryce tradition.” He laughed. “We do it every year wherever we are. But don’t worry, I never come in last.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Lawson crowed as he leapt off the porch and pelted toward the woods at the rear of the property. “Head start advantage!” The rest of the boys followed suit, shoving one another unceremoniously as they ran. They went crashing through the overgrown shrubs and headed for the open fields like a stampede.
Once they’d disappeared, I left Ben to his philosophical brooding and went inside to find Molly. She and the girls had moved and were now huddled secretively in a little cluster by the foot of the stairs. Abigail had a supersize paper bag tucked under her arm and they all looked very serious.
“Beth!” Molly clutched my arm when I joined them. “I’m glad you’re here; we’re about to get started.”
“Get started with what?” I asked with curiosity.
“The seance, of course.”
I groaned inwardly. So they hadn’t forgotten about it. I’d hoped the plan would be abandoned once the girls started having fun.
“You guys can’t be serious?” I said, but they were looking at me with complete sincerity. I tried a different technique. “Hey, Abby, Hank Hunt is out back. He looked like he could really use some company.”
Abigail had been crazy about Hank Hunt since junior high and hadn’t stopped going on about him all term. But tonight, not even he could distract her from the plan at hand.
“Who cares about him,” Abigail scoffed. “This is heaps more important — let’s go find an empty room.”
“No,” I said firmly, shaking my head. “C’mon, guys, can’t we find something else to do?”
“But it’s Halloween,” Hallie said, pouting like a child. “We want to talk to ghosts.”
“The dead should stay that way,” I snapped. “Can’t you go and bob for apples or something?”
