Chapter 22 #2
The word hits me in the kneecaps and tries to buckle me.
Nonsense. I want to laugh in her face. I want to climb her like a tree and shake sense into her branches.
I want to lay down on the floor and outline my body in chalk and make this the crime scene where optimism died.
Instead, I smile. My favorite knife. “This is my future,” I say.
“Candy. Fog machines. Three hot monsters who worship me.” I throw the boys a look like, back me up, and they do, silently and with their entire bodies—three massive, manly exclamation points.
Bonehead beams, proud. Skully’s smirk goes razor-thin; his eyes turn mean with loyalty. Marrow looks at me like I’m already sacred.
Mom’s eyes narrow. “Are they…living here?”
“Obviously,” I say. “They have toothbrushes.”
Her face does a complicated dance of disbelief, disgust, and fear.
“You’re not serious,” she says, which is the wrong thing to say to somebody built out of serious jokes.
“You’ve always been like this—flitting from one obsession to another.
You never finish anything. You play. You pretend.
You make a spectacle. I don’t even-” she stops herself, lips thinning.
“I don’t know who taught you that life is…
a holiday you can just…keep celebrating. ”
I shrug, bright and lethal. “Probably me.”
She stares. “You’re wasting your life.”
The tick-tock is in the walls. It’s in the vents. It’s in the space between us where love used to sit with decent posture. I feel it prodding, eager. I refuse to give it an inch.
“Normal,” I say sweetly, “is a house without a haunting. Boring as hell. Smells like taxes.”
Skully barks a laugh. “Put that on a shirt.”
Mom’s voice goes quiet, which is when it always hurts the most. “You think this is cute,” she says, almost to herself. “You think if you laugh hard enough nothing real will touch you.”
“I know what’s real,” I say, too fast. “You just don’t like it when what’s real looks like a graveyard party.”
“October.” She steps closer, and for a second I see what she sees: her daughter in a knife-print robe in a house that looks like Halloween moved in and stopped paying rent, messy hair, smudged eyeliner, three men radiating dangerous devotion.
Her mouth softens. For a heartbeat, I think maybe she’ll see me.
Then her words hit. “I don’t even recognize you anymore. ”
I raise my chin and grin too wide, because that’s what I do when the ice breaks.
“Good,” I say, and something vicious loves the word.
“Because I’m not her. I’m not the girl who tried to be palatable.
I’m not the daughter who took the job you liked and the boyfriend you could understand.
I’m the one who throws parties for ghosts.
I’m the one your neighbors complain about because I’m loud and bright and I say fuck in the driveway. ”
“Language,” she says automatically, which is hysterical, so I laugh. Hysterically.
“This is me,” I say, and now my hands are shaking but I hold them out anyway, stained by last night’s frosting, smelling like cider and sleep and boys. “All of this. All of me. I’ll never be normal. Or the daughter you want. And I don’t fucking want to be.”
Silence detonates. For a second the house breathes with me, the fog machine coughs once in sympathy, and even the tick-tock seems to hold its breath.
Mom’s eyes go stone cold. “This is your choice then? A life of whoring and never growing up?”
“Yes,” I say, steady as a grave. “It is.”
She fumbles the bag back up, knuckles whitening on the banana bread handle. “Keep this. I’m done with you. I should have just wiped my hands of you after what happened with your dad. I knew you would never be normal after that. It’s my fault for thinking you were better than that.”
There it is. The blow lands where it was meant to. All the sugar in my blood curdles.
Behind me, Bonehead growls so quiet it shakes the floorboards.
Skully goes very, very still—no jokes now, just a blade waiting to decide who to cut.
Marrow takes one tiny step that closes the distance between my shoulder blades and the promise of his hands.
She ignores them all and moves toward the door in that sticky, slow way people do when they’re leaving something they’ll have to pretend wasn’t important.
“Mom,” I say, because I am not a monster all the way through and because the part of me that wanted her to clap for my haunted house still exists, pathetic and dressed like a witch. “Happy Halloween.”
She stops with her hand on the knob. “Grow up,” she says, very quietly.
Then she’s gone. The door clicks shut like a lid.
I stand there. A girl in a robe with knives and blood splatters. A house full of skeletons who learned to talk and fuck and love. A ticking nobody else can hear except me. I smile. It’s awful and huge and plastic, the kind that belongs on a mannequin. It stays frozen on my face until the edges cut.
Then I start laughing.
It’s the kind of laugh that sounds like crying from a room over; the kind that makes Bonehead lunge forward with his arms out, Skully swear under his breath, Marrow says my name like a prayer.
I fold at the waist and wheeze, choking on it, eyeliner burning my eyes until it spills down my cheeks in black rivers.
I laugh and say, “Funerals are easier than family reunions," and then I’m crying, actually crying, ugly and human and loud.
Bonehead reaches me first, because of course he does.
He wraps me up from behind and I disappear into him like a coin into a muscle slot.
“Mine,” he says, low and terrified, and the terror is new.
“Mine, mine.” He turns toward the door like he’ll go collect my mother by the nape and return her to apologize. “Chase?”
“No,” I gasp, wiping my face with the back of my hand and making it worse. “No chase. No smash. She’s not the villain. She’s just…not invited.”
Skully stalks up on my other side, jaw clenched hard enough to crack a tooth.
“Say the word and I’ll haunt her for the rest of her life.
” He’s trying to be cruel—his favorite armor—but it comes out wet at the edges.
His thumb lands at my wrist again like he found his new obsession, finding my pulse, counting it, his mouth pressed in a line like he’ll fight my body if it drops a beat.
Marrow doesn’t say anything at first. He lays his palm over my heart, light enough to be permission.
His eyes are ruin-soft. When he speaks, it’s not poetry, because I forbade it when I’m cracking like this, but the bones of poetry are there, clean and earnest. “Better to be extraordinary and misunderstood than ordinary and unseen,” he says, voice even. “And you are not unloved.”
The laugh-sob lurches out of me again, but it’s smaller now, less toxic. “I know,” I say, which is both true and a spell I’m recasting because it keeps me warm.
Skully digs in his back pocket, produces a bat-printed napkin from some previous crime, and shoves it at my face. “Blow,” he orders, as if he’s scolding a cat.
I honk into it like a goose. It’s an abomination. My lipstick transfers in a black-red smear that looks like a murder confession. I let the napkin fall open in my hand and cackle at the wreckage. “Gorgeous,” I say nasally. “Frame it.”
Bonehead, relieved by any sound that isn’t me breaking, bounces once on his heels like a dog who thinks we’re playing again. “We eat banana bread?” he asks, hope pure and stupid.
“Later,” I say, flicking the corner of the napkin at his nose. “We burn it in effigy first.”
He beams. “Fire.”
Skully exhales, tension easing from his shoulders in increments, like the strings that hold him up are gradually relaxing.
“So,” he says lightly, the smirk returning like a tide, “now that we’ve alienated the matriarch, how about we go back to our regularly scheduled debauchery?
I still haven’t written Fuck the Clock on a churro. ”
I suck in a breath. The tick-tock tries to surge, opportunist that it is.
I look around at my house—the fog, the lights, the mess, the love—and I feel suddenly, fiercely defiant.
“Fuck the clock,” I echo, but quieter, meaner.
“If she won’t love me, I’ll love me. And my monsters do too.
” I plant my hands on my hips, robe gaping, dignity a myth. “Case closed. Pumpkin court adjourned.”
Bonehead throws both arms in the air like I just handed down a ruling in his favor. “Adjourned!”
Skully flicks his lighter and lets a single flame kiss the air before snapping it shut. “All rise,” he adds dryly, and bows to me with a flourish that reads: Your Honor, my favorite criminal.
Marrow bends, takes my banana-bread hand in his, and kisses the knuckles as if the moment deserves a seal. “My love,” he says simply. “Breakfast?”
“I want candy for breakfast,” I say, wiping the last of my tears with the back of my wrist. “And revenge for lunch. Celebration for dinner.”
“We can do both,” Skully promises.
Bonehead leans down like a building deciding to kneel. “Hug first.”
So we do. Right there in the wreckage. The fog machine coughs to life again like it remembered its line.
The speakers kick into a song about a heart in a graveyard.
Outside, a blue jay screams just to be included.
And inside me, the tick-tock keeps trying—muttering, measuring—but it feels small in the hug, small under the roar of our stupid, perfect noise.
I blow my nose one more time into the bat napkin and then, ceremonial as a judge, slam it onto the console table. “Exhibit A,” I say. “Evidence I survived.”
Skully taps it with the edge of his lighter. “Noted.”
Marrow’s eyes warm. “Filed.”
Bonehead squints at it, reverent. “Art.”
I laugh. It’s real this time. I kiss each of them in turn—forehead, mouth, jaw—and it’s not a goodbye to anything except the idea that I owe the world palatable grief.
The day outside the windows is gray and glittering with possibility.
The house smells like sugar and fog and the banana bread we are absolutely going to set on fire just to see if the raisins pop.
Who even puts raisins in banana bread?! It’s like an insult!
“Okay,” I say, gathering my robe around me like a cape. “Shower, then we turn the living room into a crime scene of party prep. Tonight the backyard becomes a church. Tomorrow-” the word scrapes, but I dress it in sequins and keep going- “tomorrow is Halloween.”
Skully salutes. “A holy season.”
Marrow nods. “A sacrament.”
Bonehead thumps his chest. “Smash.”
“Smash,” I agree, wicked and bright. “But artful smash.”
I head toward the bathroom, my boys moving with me like moons around a planet that refuses to wobble.
On the way, I pass the console table and the bag my mother brought.
I consider it for a beat, then flip the lid on the Tupperware and snap off a corner of the banana bread.
It’s dry and earnest. It tastes like an apology that forgot the butter.
I swallow anyway. For the history. For the girl who tried so hard to be someone she isn’t. For the mother I wish had stayed long enough to see the miracle of my mess.
Then I toss the rest of the slice into Bonehead’s open mouth—he catches it without blinking—and I keep walking. The day is younger than it has any right to be. The house hums. The door is closed. Inside, we’re monstrous and loved.
Tick-tock.
Fine. Count, then. We’re busy.
Pumpkin court adjourned.