The girl nodded with a trembling bottom lip. She still clung to her friend who, to her credit, had not left the girl’s side.
Lukas turned to me. “I’m going to escort them out. Can you hold down the fort?”
“I’m coming with,” I said. “I’ll leave behind you and turn the lights out. If you go through the next hall, there’s a door on the right. It’s hard to see but it’s there. It will lead outside so you don’t have to finish the maze.”
Lukas nodded, turned, and led the girls out. They followed hot on his heels and I waited until they were gone to turn the audio track back on and the lights. Then I hurried out after them and caught up with them along the side of the haunted house, where Lukas was smiling at the girls and speaking with them. I hung back to listen to what he told them.
“I’m not a huge fan of clowns either,” he said. “Honestly, I never understood them and why people wanted to dress up as them in the first place. But listen, they’re not that scary. They’re unemployed. And weird.”
The girls smiled at him.
“Thank you.” The frightened one’s voice trembled. “I didn’t expect to lose it like that.”
“Happens to the best of us,” Lukas said earnestly. “I had to spend the whole night sitting across from her.” He nodded at me as I hung back. “Now that’s scary.”
The girls giggled. He was charming even when wearing a creepy clown suit.
Lukas and I brought the girls to the exit where they met up with their friends, and we stood shoulder to shoulder as the group of four peeled off toward the parking lot, giggling like idiots.
“That was very nice of you,” I said.
“I thought she was going to have a stroke.”
“She might have,” I mused. “She was pretty terrified.”
Lukas got a devilish look in his eye as he peered down at me.
I frowned. “What?”
“I have a secret mission. Do you want to help?”
“A secret mission?” I asked suspiciously. I shook my head. “No, you’ve got that twinkle in your eye that I’ve only seen when we were kids and you were about to pull a prank on Lisa. I don’t want anything to do with that.”
“I’ll write you a check for a quarter of a million dollars if you help me with this.”
“A quarter of a million dollars?” I gasped.
“Yes.”
“For a prank?”
“Yes.”
I tried to hide my grin. “Let’s go.”
Lukas parked the Lykan at the curb half a block down from the duplex Lisa shared with her mother. Lisa lived on the left-side unit and her mother in the right. It was a lovely home with exposed brick on the first level and cream siding on the second. There were pumpkins on both doorsteps and autumn-themed wreaths hanging on the doors. I was struck with a sharp pang of envy that I resented as Lukas and I crept up the sidewalk in our costumes and broke off into the front yard to creep around to the back of the duplex.
I’d always dreamed of owning a place of my own one day. It would be nice to have a place that felt like home. My apartment was a messy, crowded, haphazard, and poorly decorated clusterfuck of mismatched items I’d acquired from thrift stores or friends and family who no longer needed their coffee table or bookcases. I didn’t have the time or the money to create the atmosphere I wanted but I spent a lot of time daydreaming about what my future home might look like one day.
Hopefully, the dreams wouldn’t always be dreams.
The damp grass made our footsteps silent as we rounded the back corner of the duplex and moved into the backyard.
A branch cracked under Lukas’s foot.
We froze.
A dog barked, one of Lisa’s mother’s dogs.
“Oh shit.” Lukas snickered in front of me.
I jabbed him in the shoulder. “Shh!”
He massaged the place where I’d prodded him. “Ow.”
The dogs started barking in earnest. All two of them.
Lukas swore. “I forgot about the damn dogs.”
“Do we run?”
A back-patio door slid open. Lisa poked her head out and peered out into the darkness of her yard. Lukas and I were crouched low, pressed up against the back of the house to her right.
Lisa saw us and shrieked.
Lukas bellowed at her and leapt forward. She fled inside and slammed the door behind her. The dogs in her mother’s unit went absolutely crazy and the lights in the living room flicked on.
I grabbed Lukas’s shoulder. “We have to go!”
He turned and pushed me back toward the front of the house. I took off running for the car with him hot on my heels, and before we even hit the sidewalk, I was laughing so hard my ribs hurt and tears were leaking out of my eyes. His laughter followed me, loud and free, and as I got in the passenger seat of his Lykan, he leapt over the corner of the hood and got behind the wheel.
If he hadn’t been wearing a ridiculous clown costume, the whole thing might have looked quite suave.
He slammed the car into first and peeled away as more lights were flicked on in the duplex. I kept laughing all the way through the neighborhood, my ribs aching, my head spinning, and I didn’t get the laughter under control until he pulled into an empty park overlooking the Sound.
“That was awesome,” I breathed, slumping back against the seat. “I’ve never heard Lisa scream like that.”
Lukas turned the car off and chuckled deeply. “Did you see her face? She thought we were there to cause some unholy hell or something. My sister watches too many horror movies.”
“Her poor mother.”
“A good scare keeps people on their toes.”
I turned in my seat to face him.
