“I’m just wondering, about my—” She gestured toward her head.
“Your prophecy?”
“Yeah.”
“What about it?”
She hesitated. “Do you … Do you know anything more about it? Why it’s there?”
Aidan smiled. “No. I just like it, that’s all. It makes you special. And don’t ask if it’s the only thing that makes you special. You know it’s not.”
“It’s just—you’ve always been so proud of it—”
“I haven’t been proud of it. I’ve been proud of you.”
She blinked. He’d cut her off so fast, almost like he was offended. “It’s just brought up a lot of questions. About everything.” Her teeth clenched. “And I don’t want you to be proud of it anymore. It’s a curse. That’s all it ever has been.” She stared at him, hard. She shouldn’t feel guilty for saying that. Even if his face looked like she’d just broken his favorite toy.
“Okay. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just promise that this is the only secret you have. You’re not also a secret agent, or married, or actually my great-great-grandfather.”
He looked into her eyes. “I promise.”
Blood coated the entire chest and collar of her shirt. It came from a gaping wound that wrapped around her neck in a grotesque second mouth. Blood spilled out from it, running in thick drops over her white button-up and down the front of the maroon waist-apron that had been part of her uniform at the Java Joint coffee house that summer.
Cassandra stared into the mirror at her dead reflection. Her face was powdered pale to the point of being tinged blue. She touched her hair and her fingers stuck to it and came away streaked with red.
“I told you I didn’t want a head wound.”
“Don’t whine,” Andie said from behind her. “It’ll dry, and it’ll all wash out.” Andie fussed at the blood and squirted more of it into Cassandra’s hair, then down the front of herself. The two-ounce squeeze bottle of FX blood was almost empty. About time too. They were already late to Sam’s annual Halloween party.
“Do my guts look okay?”
Cassandra turned. Andie wore a dark blue corseted dress. A pile of intestines and other inner organs lay across her lower midsection. She’d squirted some of the fake blood over the top of it and smeared it around so it looked sickly real. She was dressed as Mary Kelly, the last prostitute dissected by Jack the Ripper.
“I think they still look like rubber.” Andie sighed and tugged at the edges of her dress, trying to make it seem like the intestines were coming from inside, rather than lying on top.
“They look good.” Cassandra wiped blood spatters from the sink with one of the dye-stained towels they used when they tried to put highlights in their hair. Mary Kelly was supposed to have been her costume, but she didn’t have the stomach for so much intestine. It was gross, even on Andie. And all the makeup had a sour, faintly medicinal smell. It was weaker than the smell inside of a rubber mask, but worse, because you couldn’t take it off to get away for a minute.
“I don’t know why we couldn’t have just gotten the Slutty Bo Peep and Slutty Cleopatra costumes like I wanted.”
“Because Halloween is for guts. It’s not a fricken Victoria’s Secret audition.”
“This from someone whose dress is pushing her cleavage up into her chin. You’re not historically accurate, you know. I’m pretty sure when they found Mary Kelly, Jack had sliced both of her boobs off.”
Andie looked horrified. “Sick.”
“Well, yeah. He was Jack the Ripper.”
Aidan was going to the party as Jack. He and Cassandra were supposed to be a matched set, but the costume fit Andie just as well. Cassandra glanced at her friend’s corset. Truthfully, Andie had a little bit more up front to fill it out. A knock on the door preceded Henry’s head, clad in a pirate hat.
“What’s taking so long? Aidan’s downstairs already, and if we don’t leave soon we’ll have to walk for blocks.”
“What are you supposed to be?” Andie asked. Henry gave her a look, and so did the stuffed parrot on his shoulder.
“I don’t know what’s going to scare people more,” he said lightly. “Those guts, or the sight of you in a dress.” He ducked out the door just in time to avoid a spray of blood. Cassandra wiped it from the wood.
“Cheer up,” Andie said. “Sam’s Halloween parties are legendary.” Cassandra didn’t know what was so legendary about fog from dry ice and punch with spiders floating in it, but there was always a DJ and an impressive array of food that might or might not be a prank in disguise. And Andie’s expression was so hopeful. Cassandra smiled.
“You are going to surprise a few people in that dress.”
Andie tried to squirt her, but the bottle of blood was empty.
Aidan and Henry waited in the entryway, talking to Cassandra’s mother, who was dressed as an enormous yellow canary. She was Tweety Bird, complete with orange tights and huge orange feet. Her parents were going to a Halloween party of their own, something thrown by the higher-ups at her dad’s marketing firm. Somewhere in the house, a man-sized Sylvester the Cat was lurking.
“Oh.” Cassandra’s mother smiled, her face coming out of the bird’s mouth. “You girls look disgusting.”
“Thanks, Maureen,” said Andie.
“It’s my handiwork,” said Aidan. He wore a long black cape and top hat. A long-bladed fake knife was tucked into his vest.
“You kids are pretty sick,” Maureen said. “Here. Have some Snickers and Milky Ways before you go.” She reached for a Tupperware megabowl filled with fun-sized candy bars. The contents had already dwindled; most of the neighborhood kids had been through earlier that evening, ringing the doorbell in packs of witches and superheroes.
They grabbed their candy and headed for the door. On the way out, Cassandra’s mother caught her arm and whispered, “I’m glad you and Aidan made up.”
“Me too.” Cassandra smiled.
“Have fun. And be careful.” She watched them through the window until they pulled out of the driveway in Henry’s Mustang, then let the curtain drop.
“For a scrub in a stocking cap, Sam has a really nice house.” Andie whistled through her teeth. Sam’s house was a gigantic stone monstrosity that was basically a mansion. It sat at the top of a pine-covered hill, near the end of a winding street lined with similar stone beast houses. The curve of the horseshoe driveway was already packed with cars and more were parked along the curb. Henry muttered “I told you so” and hunted for an empty space. When he tried to parallel park between two SUVs, he misjudged the distance and braked hard. Andie jerked forward in the passenger seat.
“Watch it. You’re going to wrinkle my intestines.”
“If you hadn’t taken so long with those stupid things, we’d have been able to park in the driveway.”
“And if you had your eyes on the road and not on my decolletage, you wouldn’t be trying to park in a space that’s too small.”
Henry blushed. “Just don’t get any of that stupid blood on the seat.”
They found a space and walked. It was cold, and they weren’t wearing coats. The temp had dropped down below freezing and it was threatening to snow. Andie shivered as she tugged at her rubber innards, but she had to be less cold than Kjirsten Miels and Leslie Denton, who ran past dressed as some kind of risque fairies with yards of exposed skin. As they approached the house, the music pumped bass through the frozen lawn, and screams from cheap scares drifted through the brick. Andie tucked a curl of intestine behind a lobe of plastic liver and knocked on the door. Sam swung it wide, dressed as the Headless Horseman. He had a black stick horse under his arm, and the bloody stump of his neck glistened wetly above his head. He looked them over and his eyes widened.
“Boobs, Andie!”
