Chapter 3
SALEM
N athan’s been gone so long Miles has started timing my eye rolls like it’s an Olympic event.
Twenty-three minutes on the clock.
I flick my phone screen on for the tenth time and shove it in his face. “Receipts,” I say.
Miles leans his shoulder into mine, sucks air through his teeth like a bad referee. “Ooo, he’s on thin ice. Want me to text him a picture of me crying? Works every time. Manipulation one-o-one.”
“Text him your Venmo,” I shoot back. “Charge him for wasting my youth.”
Jamie—Miles’s date, jawline sharp enough to carve a pumpkin, snorts into his cider. “We could invoice him for emotional damages. Add interest.”
“Perfect,” I say. “Bill him in pumpkin spice. Seasonal, overpriced, and not that good.”
Miles nearly chokes. “You’re gonna get murdered for that opinion.”
“Better than dying of boredom,” I mutter, shoving my phone back in my pocket.
We’re squashed along the split-rail fence with the rest of the hayride crowd, pumpkins leering up at us like drunks, mist crawling in over the fields.
The air smells like cider and sugar, sticky-sweet, but the kind that chills your teeth.
Kids in Party City masks tear around screaming, scarecrows sag like hung men, and orange lights buzz overhead like dying bees.
Cute, the way everyone keeps pretending death is cozy.
My phone stays stubbornly blank.
Me
where are you
line’s moving
don’t make me be social
No reply.
“This is why straight boys shouldn’t be allowed to say ‘brb,’” Miles mutters, scrolling. “It’s never actually ‘brb.’ It’s ‘I saw my reflection and had to admire it for twenty minutes.’”
“Or he lost his phone again,” Jamie says, rolling his eyes. “Which, based on the three hours I’ve known him, feels on brand.”
“Extremely on brand,” I agree, stuffing my hands into my jacket so no one sees how they’re shaking.
Miles bumps my shoulder, grin sharp. “Don’t stress. Worst case we ditch him and offer the scarecrow a human sacrifice. You in?”
“Bold of you to assume the scarecrow’s animatronic,” I shoot back. “Pretty sure he’s just a drunk uncle with hay in his pants.”
Jamie chokes on his cider. “If that thing moves, I’m out. No questions asked.”
“Babe,” Miles says, dead serious. “If it moves, we all run. You’re on your own with your cider though.”
The tractor grinds to life. The wagon ahead of us rattles, hay bales squealing against the rails. A woman dressed as a banshee shrieks from the shadows, then laughs sheepishly when her radio squawks and ruins the moment. The fog eats both sounds.
“C’mon,” Jamie says, hooking his arm through Miles’s. “Let’s ride. Nathan wouldn’t want you to miss it.”
“Yeah,” Miles adds, waggling his brows. “And if he shows up we’ll send his bitch ass for more cider for making us wait so damn long.”
I almost smile. “Fine,” I sigh, “but I’m picking the corner with the best escape route. If I get ax-murdered by a guy in a Party City mask, I swear I’ll haunt you both. I’m petty as hell. Like, swapping your sugar for salt and making sure you can never find the matching sock to your favorite pair.”
Jamie and Miles both gasp so dramatically half the line turns to stare. Jamie clutches his chest like I stabbed him, Miles clutches Jamie like he’s next, and together they look at me like I just admitted to burning Gucci.
“You wouldn’t dare ,” Jamie stage-whispers, eyes wide but sparkling.
“Oh my god, she totally would,” Miles says, shaking his head, curls bouncing, already grinning. “She’s evil like that.”
I sip my cider slow, deadpan. “Guess you’ll just have to live in fear.”
Their scandalized shrieking is so over the top it drowns out the hayride tractor, and by the time they’re done, I’m laughing too hard to keep a straight face.
We climb up on to the tractor once it stops.
The hay scratches the backs of my thighs through my dress, and the boards under me are cold and rough.
Everyone’s breath drifts white in the air, puff after puff, like smoke from a dozen tiny chimneys.
The wagon jolts forward, iron wheels clattering on gravel before sinking into the softer thud of packed dirt.
The tractor spits smoke that hangs low around us, wrapping the night in a haze.
Halloween is everywhere. Lanterns swinging from fence posts. Corn shocks tied in bunches. A string of fake bones swaying between maples. Someone’s Bluetooth speaker wheezes out a looped moan from the trees, cheap and more sultry than scary. The crowd obliges anyway, shrieking, and laughing.
I’m not laughing.
The farm presses right up against the forest I grew up in.
The real woods, not this staged carnival of props.
The old trees crouch beyond the fields, black silhouettes against a darker sky.
I know where the earth dips, where it sinks like a trapdoor.
I know the taste of the air right before the veil is at its thinnest, and he crosses over, metallic, like blood in your mouth.
I know the difference between the way crows sound when they’re birds, and when they’re something else.
The wagon creaks over the property line, and the air changes. Subtle, but sharp. Like someone leaned in and blew cold air against the back of my neck. My skin prickles down my spine, every hair standing like it’s waiting for a hand that hasn’t touched me yet.
“Talk to me,” Miles says, reading the change in my breathing like sheet music. “Favorite candy. Go.”
“Reese’s bats,” I say automatically. “And Twix. Always Twix.”
Jamie shakes his head. “Twix is mid. Everyone knows KitKats win.”
“KitKats taste like cardboard in a tuxedo,” I retort.
Miles claps dramatically. “She did not just drag KitKats like that. Savage.”
The wagon rattles past a scarecrow propped on a cross. Straw guts spill from its chest; its burlap face is painted with a stitched grin. Someone behind us squeals. I don’t flinch. It’s the wrong kind of fear to make me move.
It’s cheap. Friendly.
Real fear is quieter. Heavy.
We dip into a fold of the field where the fog pools thicker and the lights thin out.
The corn whispers in dry tongues. My heart ticks faster because the path from here looks like another one, the old trail that split right and left behind the prayer house.
Right went to the pond. Left went to the chapel.
Finn kissed me on the chapel floor once, a laugh like blasphemy in his mouth.
His hands were cold from the water; he touched me like heat was a spell he could teach me.
Later, at the pond, with frogs sawing the night in half, he’d crowded me up against a birch and turned me into a lit fuse.
Bark bit my palms. His breath steamed in the dark.
He set a rhythm in my hips that I swear my heart still keeps when I’m not looking.
My thighs press together now on reflex, a tiny, vicious ache sparking low. I hate my body for remembering before my mind permits it. I hate that the memory makes the fog feel warmer, makes the hayride bench feel too hard under me and the air too thin.
“Salem?” Miles’s voice again, less joking. “Girl, where did you go just now?”
“Nowhere,” I say, aiming for bored and landing on frayed. “My brain is being dramatic. Halloween’s fault.”
“You’re shivering, want my hoodie?” Jamie offers, tugging at his sleeve. He’s sweet, too sweet, the kind of sweet that tastes like frosting and makes your teeth ache.
“I’m good,” I lie. “Thanks.”
The tractor turns toward the barns. The lights thicken. The Halloween actors do their best final pop-outs and the wagon erupts in one last set of screams, relieved and performative. We roll to a stop behind the cider wagon. Everyone claps for themselves for surviving fun.
I stand too fast and the night tilts. Miles steadies me automatically, palm warm at my elbow. “Text him again?” he asks.
“I have dignity,” I say, unlocking my phone anyway. The screen glare cuts the dark, making a little box where I can breathe. Nothing from Nathan.
Me
seriously?
Three dots. None. Blank.
“Okay,” Jamie says, decisive. “He’s either in line, in a bathroom, or dead in a ditch. Either way, we’re not wasting prime haunted attraction time. Haunted house next?”
Miles perks up like someone offered him drugs. “Yes. Absolutely yes. I need to scream at plastic skeletons and bad strobe lighting.” He looks at me, eyes sparkling. “Also, I have an incredible scream. Like, Tony Award level.”
“You’ve screamed in my kitchen because of a moth,” I remind him.
“A vicious moth,” he corrects, dead serious.
Jamie snorts into his cider. “Then it’s settled. Haunted house. We’ll scream, you’ll judge, and Nathan will eventually crawl back out of whatever corn hell swallowed him.”
I shake my head, tugging my jacket tighter. “You two go. I’m heading home.”
Both of them spin toward me like synchronized swimmers. “What?” Miles gasps. “Alone? At night? In this economy?”
Jamie clutches his chest like I stabbed him. “Absolutely not. You’ll be abducted by a scarecrow in the parking lot.”
“I can walk it,” I say. “Ten minutes to the road, twelve to Main, another ten to my building. I’ll text you when I get there.”
Miles squints at the fog like he could make it less. “Let us drop you?”
“You and your date are going to hold hands and share a donut and talk about how Twix are better than KitKats,” I say. “Do not make me third wheel my own abandonment, please.”
He bites his lip, losing. “Fine. But if you’re not home in forty, I call the FBI, the CIA, and the local Girl Scouts.”
“Great,” I say. “They’re the most dangerous.”
Jamie leans in, warm cider breath at my cheek. “Text. Every block.”
“Yes, Mom,” I say, “I’ll be fine.”
I won’t be. But fine is a thing you say because it’s a spell. Sometimes it works.