Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Idrag them out of the house mid-morning like we’re boarding the last lifeboat on the Titanic. My hair is still damp from the shower, eyeliner already smudged, sweater reading Gourd Almighty. This is serious business. Religious, even. The pumpkin patch is not an outing. It’s a pilgrimage.
The fog machine is already wheezing itself to death in the living room, coughing up dragon breath over a battlefield of throw pillows and one very confused animatronic reaper.
He keeps motioning for me to come closer because the motion sensor is drunk on fog and failure.
Bonehead keeps responding to it like it’s a rival for my attention—standing nose-to-cloth hood and growling in a way that rattles my decorative skull display.
“Down, boy,” I tell both of them, patting the reaper on the scythe. “You’ll find love someday. Probably at a Spirit Halloween.”
Bonehead beams like I complimented his murder bark.
He is dressed exactly like a walking OSHA violation: ripped jeans slung dangerously low, a flannel shirt unbuttoned so far down I’m one catastrophe away from chest-hair destiny, and boots that look like they live to kick down moral boundaries.
His hair is damp from the shower because I ordered it so, and it sticks up in stupidly loveable cowlicks.
He smells like my apple shampoo and the kind of violence you scream about in therapy.
Skully sprawls across the arm of the sofa pretending he isn’t deliberately posing.
He’s wearing black-on-black—black jeans, black bomber jacket, black T-shirt with a blurry band logo that might just be a moth collision—and a cigarette dangles unlit from his mouth because, “It’s a prop, sweetheart.
” He flicks the filter with his thumbnail and watches my legs like he’s judging a sports event where the rules include spreading them like a rumor.
“You do realize,” he says, voice lazy and dry, “pumpkins are just gourds that failed upwards.”
I lean over him, invade his personal space, and steal the cigarette with my teeth because I can. “And you’re a dead boy who learned eyeliner,” I say around it. “We all contain multitudes.”
Marrow appears from my bedroom already dressed like death’s most faithful lawyer.
One of his new suits clings to him in black silk with a faint bone-white pinstripe running the length like a skeleton’s shadow stitched into fabric.
The shirt beneath is blood-dark burgundy, the top buttons undone just enough to suggest he has secrets he’s dying to confess.
His cuffs gleam with tiny skull clasps. He smooths his lapel with grave dignity, like he’s about to prosecute God for negligence.
“My heart,” he murmurs, catching sight of me. “If autumn were a woman, she would petition to borrow your mouth.”
I make a strangled noise that is ninety percent pleased, ten percent feral. “Get in the car,” I say briskly, like a kindergarten teacher looking after a group of catastrophic men.
Packing is a Tetris mini-game from hell.
The trunk already contains: three folded blankets, a jumble of bungee cords, a plastic storage tote labeled RITUAL SUPPLIES where Skully keeps crossing out Ritual and writing Arts Bonehead growls back at it and wins.
Skully is in commentary mode: “Pumpkin spice is just autumn perfume. We all agree it smells like cinnamon air freshener and seasonal desperation, right?” He eyes a billboard for the patch—Hollow Hill Harvest!
Cider! Hayrides! Corn Maze! Live Bluegrass!
—and snorts. “Live bluegrass. As opposed to what, dear heart? Zombie fiddlers?”
I cut a glance at him. “Don’t be genre-ist. If a zombie wants to be first chair fiddle, let him.”
Marrow’s hand slides to the front to find my throat like it belongs there. He presses his thumb against my pulse, drawing a circle that’s either a rune or the idea of a rune. “I would listen,” he says softly, “to any dead musician who learned to make the air weep.”
“The air is already weeping,” Skully says blandly. “It’s called humidity.”
I want to bite them both. That’s probably normal.
The closer we get to the patch, the more the roadside vendors multiply: folding tables with late tomatoes; a man with a hand-painted Apples sign who looks like he would trade you a bag for a ghost story; a little girl selling friendship bracelets and making eye contact with my soul.
My chest does this weird ache thing and I want to buy all her bracelets and then pin them to my curtains like evidence that the world sometimes chooses color.
Bonehead sees the sign for Kettle Corn and makes a noise so sincere it could cure ailments. “Popcorn,” he rumbles.
“Later,” I promise. “First pumpkins, then snacks, then I sacrifice a donut to the gods of donut, then you flex at the live bluegrass so the banjo player knows his place.”
He nods, resolved.
We crest the last rise and there it is: a horizon of orange, a thousand fat suns belly-down in rows, vines curling like cursive.
The whole patch sprawls like a low city, tents and wagons and cornstalk teepees, a dusty parking lot bristling with minivans and pickup trucks.
A tractor pulls a hayride past the entrance, and children scream like they are being delighted to death.
The air smells of sugar and cinnamon with a bass note of manure—a scent I have decided is spiritual.
“Everyone be normal,” I say, parking between a dented SUV with a stick figure family sticker on the back window and a truck that would struggle to tow my bad decisions. “We’re blending.”
Bonehead peers at the crowd like he’s choosing which gladiator he would befriend. “Normal means…smash later?”
“Normal means: don’t pick up any toddlers that aren’t yours,” I say.
Skully’s grin is quick and wicked. “I cannot wait for you to get jealous over a PTA mom. It will be the theater of the season.”
“I’m not jealous,” I lie, and then immediately park aggressively enough that the seatbelts lock and Skully groans in this small involuntary way that could get me arrested.
We unfold ourselves from the car. The sun slaps my cheeks pink and I adjust my sweater so the Gourd Almighty words are centered over my tits because branding matters.
Marrow circles the car to offer me his hand, which I do not need but take because I am a slut for chivalry and bone-deep want.
When his fingers close around mine, it’s a perfect little coffin, snug and plush and lined with velvet feelings.
At the entrance, a teenage girl in a branded T-shirt and cowgirl hat is handing out wristbands with the dead stare of someone who has been asked if the hay is gluten-free. “Ride bands or field bands?” she recites.
“Field,” I say. “We’re here for serious selection. And cider. And spiritual rebirth.”