“No,” Katie said, turning around. “You’re a great friend, just one who misses the forest for the trees. I mean, I never thought I would see you again, Banana, and look at us now, we’re inseparable again.”
I wanted to reach out and touch her, but that was impossible. If I tried, I would just stumble through her down the aisle. Still, I held my hand out, and watched Katie place hers on top of mine. I felt a slight chill on my fingers from hers.
“I missed you so much.”
Katie smiled. “I missed you too. I missed you so much that I…” she trailed off. “Never mind.”
“No, tell me.”
“I’m ashamed to admit it.”
“Please,” I said with a smile. “For me.”
“I missed you so much, I’m afraid that I tore open the hole to the Dark Place.”
“What? That’s crazy.”
“I don’t know,” Katie said. “The hole opened right next to me. It could have opened anywhere, but it ripped open right next to me, just when I was thinking about you really hard.”
“We’re going to fix this,” I said. “I promise.”
Katie smiled. “Then we better get started.”
Chapter 21
“Excuse me,” I said, walking up to the butcher. “Do you have any of the gross parts of the chicken here?”
The butcher turned away from his meat slicer toward the counter. He had a hair net holding his long beard like a bib, and thick glasses that made his eyes beady and dark.
“Like what?” he asked with a thick Canadian accent.
“Like organs and junk.” I looked down at the recipe. “Specifically, the heart, kidneys, and liver.”
“You know, those aren’t the disgusting parts. They’re actually really tasty, and good for you.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m sure they’re great, but they look disgusting. This really isn’t a semantics lesson. Do you have any or not?”
“You know, most butchers don’t,” the butcher, said walking behind a partition. “Luckily, we’re not most butchers. We get the whole animal fresh from the slaughterhouse and carve it up, so yeah, I have plenty. How many do you need?” I looked at Katie, who gave a bewildered stare.
“Like, a handful maybe?”
“Two pounds,” Samantha said over my shoulder. “Can I really not trust you to handle a simple task?”
“I was doing it!” I said to her.
The butcher came out from behind the partition a couple seconds later with a bag full of chicken hearts, livers, and lungs. He slapped a price tag on the bag and handed them to me.
“There you go,” he said with a smile.
“How can you do that?” I looked at the disgusting bag of organs in my hand. “How can you smile when you’re handing me this bag of guts?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just love it is all.”
“That’s awesome,” Samantha said, smiling. “Find a thing you love and do it until you die, right?”
He nodded. “I’m trying.”
We paid for our “food” and drove away. Mom was already at work, which meant my house would be empty for hours, so it was the best place to make the pie.
“Are you a cook?” Samantha asked me as we walked into my kitchen.
I pulled out a pan from under the stove. “I am not. Katie wanted to be a chef, but she…”
“I died before I could go to culinary school,” Katie said flatly.
Samantha set the bag of innards down on the table. “Do you think it needs to taste good in order for goblins to eat it?”
I took a bowl from the cupboard. “Good to us or good to them?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never done anything like this before.” Samantha pulled the recipe out of her back pocket and read it. “The most I’ve done is cook a pie for my elementary school’s bake sale.”
“We’ve never cooked for a magical creature either,” Katie said. “I say we just follow the instructions and hope for the best.”
“These instructions never did Frank any good,” Samantha said.
“Yeah,” Katie said. “But we have something he didn’t.”
“And what’s that?” Samantha asked.
“Hope.”
“Ugh,” I said. “Make me retch.”
I had no interest in cooking, but I also had no interest in dying from a giant hole in the universe gobbling us up, so Samantha and I dug in while Katie guided us through the recipe.
Two hours later we had what looked vaguely like a pie, though it stunk to high heaven. “You’re lucky you can’t smell this, Katie.”
“For once,” Katie said, “my death has been a benefit for something.”
We placed the pie into Frank’s enchanted cage and headed out into the woods at the end of my block. The instructions under the recipe were very specific to bring the cage to an opening in the woods and wait for the goblin to appear.
“Is here good?” Samantha asked. She set the cage down in the center of the clearing several hundred yards away from the Dark Place. It had doubled in size since the last time I saw it. Soon, it would devour the whole woods and everything around it.
“I don’t know,” Katie said. “Seems as good as anywhere.”
“Open the cage and get over here,” I called to Samantha.
She opened the latch on the cage and walked back to where I was standing at the edge of the clearing. There was nothing to do but wait and hope that goblins liked our disgusting pie.
Chapter 22
After two hours of waiting without capturing a goblin, we figured we had either been suckered or duped. Either way, we knew there were no goblins coming to eat our pie, and so we walked back to my house, defeated.
“Well, that was waste of time,” Samantha said as she slammed the cage on the kitchen counter. “I’m going to punch that guy right in the face tomorrow.”
“It’s not his fault,” I replied. “He’s just an idiot. We’re the ones that believed him. The real blame is on us.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Katie said. “We only tried it one time. If we try again tomorrow, maybe in a different
