Chapter 7 #2
Mila is sitting on the kitchen island next to my pretzel station with the most fun Tupperware of Jell-O shots I have ever seen.
Black. Orange. Red. Three colors. Forty-eight cubes.
She made them last night while I was crying about something I’m not currently willing to revisit.
I helped a little with the mixing and the pouring.
“I am going to vomit on the porch.”
“I’ll be right next to you.” She giggles. “Two angels puking at the Hawthorne House. Should we do it?”
I laugh. “No. Definitely not.”
Lucy’s at the dining room table, arranging small black bowls of candy. She’s pouring fun-size Reese’s into a bowl.
Gianna’s voice comes loudly from the bedroom, “Mara, get off the ground, I need to pee, I swear to God.”
Mara says back, “I’m trying to get this right.”
“Two seconds.”
“I don’t care if I see your coochie.”
“I don’t want you to see my coochie.”
Lucy, Mila, and I look at each other across the kitchen, and we start laughing — me into the counter, Mila almost falling off the island, Lucy snorting into her bowl of Reese’s.
Penelope says without looking up from her thesis, “There’s another bathroom in my room.”
Silence.
Gianna’s voice from the bedroom. “There’s a what?”
Penelope, eyes on her laptop, says, “Bathroom in my bedroom. You have to walk through the closet to get to it.”
Gianna appears in the doorway. She looks at Lucy. Then at me.
“Have you been keeping a second bathroom secret from us?”
She disappears down the hall. I hear a door open, and then I hear her say, “Holy shit, Pen,” in the exact tone I had five days ago when I first walked into Penelope’s bedroom and understood that the rest of this apartment, beautiful as it is, is the staff quarters.
Her room is the queen’s room. The bathroom alone is bigger than Mila’s dorm.
Mila looks at me with her eyebrows up.
I grin.
Mila hasn’t seen it yet. She opens a Jell-O shot with her teeth. “I love this apartment.”
The angel costumes come out at six. They’re sprawled across my bed in two rows.
The whites on one side — mine, Lucy’s, Penelope’s.
The blacks on the other — Gianna’s, Mara’s, Mila’s.
Matching costumes from the same link Penelope sent to the group chat on Monday.
Bodysuits. Not bikini bottoms — shorts-style, fitted, with spaghetti straps.
Wings that clip onto the back with elastic straps under the arms. Nylons.
White or black to match. A halo or a small set of horns.
They aren’t hoe-ish. It’s the cutest costume I have ever committed to for Halloween.
I’m normally something funny — last year I was a pickle, the year before I was Carmen Sandiego, the year before that I was a roll of toilet paper, and I thought I was very clever.
None of those costumes resulted in pictures I have looked at since.
We all start taking pictures of the costumes laid out. Mara takes a flat-lay. Gianna takes a wide shot. Penelope takes one careful close-up of the wings against the comforter that looks like it belongs in a magazine.
Then we start putting them on.
Mara picks up her black bodysuit. She kisses the air at it.
Gianna grabs hers.
We’re in our underwear, pulling the costumes on. The room smells like Penelope’s perfume and hairspray, and a small simmering thread of the Jell-O shot vodka.
Lucy zips Gianna. Penelope zips Lucy. I zip Mara. Mila zips me. Penelope is at the mirror in the corner, calm, finished, looking at herself with the small smile she does when she is pleased with her own work. “So good.”
We turn to look at ourselves in a row in the full-length mirror.
Six girls.
White, black, white, white, black, black.
We look good. The bodysuits fit us perfectly.
The wings are clipped. The nylons hold. Penelope’s hair is up in a smooth knot at the back of her head.
Lucy’s is down and curled. Gianna’s is in some kind of half-up tousled thing she did in twenty minutes.
Mara has a smoky eye she is very proud of.
Mila is wearing dark red lipstick. I have rosy cheeks and a halo that has decided to lean slightly to the left, no matter how many times I adjust it.
Mara screams. Then we all scream. Just a little.
Mila grabs my phone off the dresser. “Pictures.”
We do pictures. Mara has a tripod in her bag, and we trade off phones and take individual shots by the window where the light is.
We do pairs. Lucy and Gianna in matching half-up hair.
Penelope and Mara — chic and chaos. Mila and me with our cheeks pressed together.
We do the serious ones. We do the dumb ones.
We do the one where we are all biting our halos or horns.
We do the one where Gianna gives Mara a piggyback ride that ends within four seconds because Gianna’s wings collapse, and Mara hits the bed laughing.
Then Mila pulls out the Jell-O shots.
“Everyone. One each. We are pre-gaming.”
She passes them out. Six little plastic cups. Black, orange, red. I get red. Mila gets black. Penelope holds hers with the suspicion of a person who has never done a Jell-O shot before.
Gianna sets up her phone, filming us. “On three.”
“On three,” Mara agrees, swaying side to side to make her wings flap.
“One —”
“Two —”
“Three —”
We eat them.
Penelope coughs.
Mara’s eyes water. “Oh, that’s good.”
Lucy asks, “What is in this?”
“It’s so strong,” I wince.
Mila winks at Lucy. “Don’t ask.”
The Uber comes at seven. It’s already dark — October dark, the kind that starts at five-thirty and is total by seven — and there’s a thin cold wind on Linden when we pile out of the building and load ourselves into a mini van driven by a confused Uber driver named Daniel who has, by the look on his face, never had six women in matching angel costumes get into his van before.
“Hi,” Mila says.
“Hi,” Daniel says.
“We’re going three blocks. We could walk, but we didn’t want to. Sorry.”
We pay him in chocolate for the short drive. I’m in the back middle seat. Mila on my left. Lucy on my right. Mara, Penelope, and Gianna are crammed in the back.
I keep looking at my phone. I don’t know why. I have nothing to check. Chase isn’t going to text me. Chase hasn’t texted me since the breakup call on Tuesday afternoon, and there’s no way he’s going to text me, but I keep looking anyway. Mila looks over and catches me.
“Melly. Give me your phone for the night.”
I’m holding the platter of pretzels on my lap. She has the Tupperware of Jell-O shots. “Mila.”
“Give it. I’ll keep it for you. You don’t need it. You’re not going to text Chase. We agreed. You don’t need to be on your phone all night.”
Gianna leans between the seats. “We can all put them in a basket.”
“A basket?”
“My brother has a basket by the door. It’s a Hawthorne House custom. We put ours in. The boys put theirs in. No phones at the party. It’s a thing.”
“Really?”
She nods. “It’s been a thing. They don’t do it every single time, but yeah. I forgot you’re new here.”
I grin at her.
Penelope says, “It actually does help.”
Mara agrees. “It does. Phones away. You’re present. You’re with the people you are with. You don’t spend the whole night looking at your hand.”
I hand my phone over to Mila. She puts it in her purse.
“Now you don’t have to worry,” she says.
Penelope asks, “Are the boys handing out candy to the trick-or-treaters this year?”
“Yeah,” Gianna answers. “They’re set up out front.”
Lucy says, “Benson and Blue are out there right now. Stanley will rotate in. They have a system.”
Mila’s head turns slowly to me.
I don’t look back. I look out the window at the trick-or-treaters on the sidewalk. There’s a kid in a Spider-Man costume on someone’s lawn with a pillowcase. There’s a porch with a fog machine that doesn’t seem to be working but is trying.
I close my hand into a fist on top of the pretzel platter, and I take a breath.
I’m going to be fine.
That is the deal.
Daniel pulls up to the house shortly after. There are pumpkins on the porch railing. There’s a fog machine here, too, and unlike the one on the corner, this one is fully operational. Low white fog rolls down the front steps, pools at the walk, and dissipates against the cold ground.
Three guys are standing on the porch in identical devilish masks that would be terrifying for kids. One of them is leaning against a porch column. Another is sitting on the railing. The third is standing in the doorway holding a bowl of candy.
They’re handing out candy to trick-or-treaters.
“Oh my God,” Mara says. “Oh my God, oh my God.” Her voice goes up a register. Her excitement is the kind that is genuinely infectious — Mara is the most easily delighted person I have ever met, and I am realizing that being around her means I get excited too.
We pile out of Daniel’s car. Daniel tells us to be safe and drives off.
We walk up as a couple of families walk down the path away from the house.
I clutch onto my platter of pretzels for dear life.
The cold is biting at the back of my knees where the nylons are thin, and I can see my breath in front of me, and the whole front yard smells like fog machine fog and pumpkin spice candles and old leaves.
A mom passes us, looking up at our group, and her face breaks into a smile. “Look at the angels.”
Her daughter in a bumblebee costume with a tutu is staring up at me with her mouth open. She’s eyeing the platter.
“Do you want one?” I ask her. I look up at the mom. “Sorry. Is that okay?”
The mom smiles. “Of course. They look great. Thank you.”
I lift the cover off the platter, and I tilt it down so the bumblebee can reach. Her little fingers grab the closest pretzel.
“I made them myself,” I say softly. “Happy Halloween.”
She smiles at me and says, “Happy Halloween.”
They walk off down the path.
I look up.
The guy in the doorway takes his mask off in one motion. “Lucy, baby.” His voice does a thing. Half shocked. Half wrecked. “God.”
He drops down to one knee, grabbing her hand.
All of us girls gasp as a collective.
“Baby,” Benson says.