Chapter 9 #2
I race through a shower and blow drying my hair, leaving it wild.
In the mirror, I brush my teeth with my bloody toothpaste.
Past my normal friend Tiffany, my reflection looks exactly like me and also like some other feral girl is joyriding behind my eyes.
Bruises decorate my skin in three distinctive sizes and shapes from my chest down and there’s a hickey blooming low on my throat in the shape of a confession.
I draw a tiny bat over it in eyeliner like a stamp that says I did this on purpose.
I look fucking happy.
I mix my eyes. Black liner sharp enough to cut a ghost. Lashes like spidery curtains for crimes.
Lipstick: red that reads as wicked even in a power outage.
I tug on a cropped sweater with a smug ghost, a micro skirt that would inspire petitions, ripped fishnet tights, and boots I could stab someone with—just hypothetically, Your Honor.
Perfume for the day: smoke, sugar, and a whisper that says run if you’re boring.
When I step out, the house inhales. They turn in unison. It’s less a movement than a phenomenon—tide turning, candles gusting. For one ridiculous half-second, all three just look, and I swear I could stand in that stare and photosynthesize.
Bonehead breaks first and lifts me again because he doesn’t believe in gravity when it comes to me. “Pretty October,” he says, awed. He will never stop saying it, and I will never be immune.
Skully’s thumb smudges the edge of my lipstick to look messy and recently kissed. He makes a sound like he’s trying not to praise me. Marrow takes my wrist and kisses the inside where my pulse hammers like I’m late to my own parade.
“All right,” I say, because if I don’t break the spell, we’re going to end up right back in that circle, which would be charming but I really do have to be responsible every once in a while. “Field trip.”
They’re all in the same crappy outfits I had them in yesterday, so I know I was right to insist on shopping as our first order of business. I want to be able to do all my Halloween traditions with them.
Outside, the day is the color of a bruise that hasn’t decided how purple it wants to be.
My half-built yard haunt sulks like a teenager who got caught smoking incense.
The twelve-foot skeleton watches us with the judgment of a bony God.
The neighbor’s blinds do a little twitch-twitch thing that reads tattletale in Morse code. I blow them a kiss.
We pile into my hearse-black convertible and the seats greet me like an old accomplice.
Bonehead demands shotgun by simply being too large not to occupy it.
Skully folds himself into the back with an unnecessary sigh and immediately hooks two fingers in the back of my belt loop like he’s affixing a leash to me.
Marrow sits behind Bonehead and arranges my hair over the center console like draping a reliquary.
At the first red light, I catch us in the rearview: Bonehead grinning like a murder that went well; Skully watching me and pretending not to; Marrow looking at the world as if it’s borrowing me and owes interest. It hits, then—like a candied apple cracking under tooth: I did this.
I asked the dark for something ridiculous and that bitch said yes.
“Question time,” I declare, because I want to hear the music they make when they talk to me. “Speed round. Favorite thing you ate when you were alive.”
Bonehead answers immediately. “Meat pie,” he says, then narrows his eyes, thinking. “And…hard bread you need teeth for. With soup. Big soup.” He beams as if he remembered a friend’s name.
Skully snorts. “Gas-station burritos.” He waits for my gasp. “Don’t make that face. It’s called cuisine. Also pizza from a place that used to fail its inspections twice a year and we loved her for it.”
“Blood oranges,” Marrow says softly. “Their perfume made winter bearable. And pomegranates—” he pauses, his smile tilting “—blasphemously symbolic, but the seeds stain the mouth like a vow.”
I almost drive us into a florist. “God, you’re all such problems,” I say, delighted. “New rule: no one speaks in metaphors before noon.”
“That leaves you mute,” Skully mutters on a pout, like he’s absurdly protective of my brand.
I love him so much.
The mall’s automatic doors exhale cool air and cinnamon. The atrium wears Halloween like it finally learned what seasons are for. Cobwebs drape railings; bat cutouts dangle and wobble as if they’re trying to fly just for me; a giant inflatable pumpkin grins like we’re both in on a joke. We are.
“Rule one,” I say, as we ride the escalator up. Bonehead tries to surf it. I pin him with a look and he obediently steps behind me so close I feel his breath through my woolen top. “Stay close.”
Skully’s mouth crooks. “Try to stop me.”
“Rule two,” I add. “If someone stares too long, you may stare back. No touching unless I say boo.”
Bonehead’s shoulders hitch like he’s storing thunder. “Boo,” he repeats, hungry.
“Later,” I promise, and he subsides, if you can call a lighthouse dimming subtle.
“Tell me about shopping back then,” I prompt as we glide upward. “What did you wear?”
“Rope,” Bonehead says, untroubled, and then frowns. “Not pretty rope. Work. Barrels. Boxes. Falling.”
I file that in my heart under hurt and my project. “So we upgrade,” I say. “We get you soft things.”
“Soft,” he announces, pleased like he just invented it.
Skully inhales as if he’s about to say something caustic and then decides against it. “Thrift stores,” he settles on. “We stole each other’s jackets and pretended we didn’t. If you had eyeliner, you were rich.”
“You’re rich now,” I say, and he looks so affronted by the compliment I almost bite him.
“Tailors,” Marrow says, nostalgia winced into it. “Stiff collars. Stiffer expectations.” He touches his throat. “I never chose anything because I wanted it.” His eyes meet mine. “Until now.”
I fan myself.
“Not this way,” I tell them when the escalator spits us into a hall lined with neon signs and food-court grease.
“You don’t deserve cheap polyester and bad zippers.
You deserve real clothes. Nice things. Suits that make mannequins jealous.
Sweaters that smell like they cost too much.
Shit that looks so good, people trip over themselves to thank me for dressing you. ”
Bonehead blinks at me like I just offered to carve him a throne. “Pretty for October,” he repeats, fist to chest, voice thick with pride.
Skully sneers—reflex, not conviction—but his ears are pink. “Sure, princess. Let’s go bankrupt for aesthetics.”
“You’re already dead,” I remind him. “Can’t get more bankrupt than that.”
Marrow’s smile tilts, solemn as always. “If it pleases you, I will wear crowns made of cinders.”
“Crowns later,” I say, dragging them into a store so pristine it smells like money laundering. Rows of tailored jackets, silk shirts on silver hangers, leather shoes lined up like soldiers. Every mannequin looks like it was born rich and mean. Perfect.
Bonehead immediately grabs the nearest black dress shirt and holds it up like a trophy. It looks toddler-sized against his chest. “Soft.” He grins, already in love.
The sales clerk approaches—young, perky, professionally dead-eyed—until she actually sees the three of them circling me like guard dogs in heat. Her pupils dilate. Her clipboard trembles. She opens her mouth to recite a script, then shuts it again, wisely.
“Dressing rooms,” I chirp, steering Bonehead toward the back. “We’re about to make your commission look like witchcraft.”
I start with Bonehead because softness is an emergency.
I strip a table of cashmere like I’m looting a monastery.
Oatmeal, charcoal, forest, a sinful wine color I don’t even try to justify.
Then I raid denim: one in every shade with a slight stretch that will make his thighs and ass look like a zoning violation.
“Arms,” I say. He holds them out. I slide a charcoal crewneck over his head and—holy cemetery bells—the sweater decides it loves him.
It clings where it should and forgives where it must. He blinks down at himself as if the fabric is purring.
“Soft,” he whispers, awe-drunk, rubbing his cheek against his shoulder like a gigantic cat.
“Again.” I pull the forest green over the charcoal to judge color crimes. He looks like a Christmas tree that learned lust. “Yes,” I decree, and toss two more into the keep pile. “Jeans next.”
He obeys, vanishing into a curtain and emerging in dark denim that hugs the obscene parts and salutes the rest. He bounces once, testing the give, then grins when nothing complains. “Run in them,” he reports, delighted.
“You are not running in them,” I say, and then, because I am a menace, “unless I’m watching.”
Skully drifts by, pretending he’s not paying attention. “You’re turning a murder weapon into a marshmallow,” he says, and then I catch him stroking a stack of heavy tees that feel like sin on Sunday.
“Here,” I say, and press a stack into his arms: weighty cotton tees in washed black, smoke gray, the exact off-white that will make him look like a crime scene photo.
Two pairs of premium denim—one raw, one faded like it’s lived five lives better than yours—and the leather jacket that breathed my name from across the room.
Not glossy; not biker cosplay. Buttery, broken-in, the sort of jacket that slides when you touch it and doesn’t squeak.
He shrugs into the jacket like it owes him money and it settles.
The collar sits just so; the hem hits that wicked place on his hips; the sleeves push up and catch on his forearms like a secret handshake.
He glances at the mirror, then pointedly away, and finds my eyes instead.
“Too much?” he asks, already braced to hate liking things.