48. Chapter Forty-Eight #2
I am — black on black, the way I always am.
I pull the mask down over my face, take up the bowl, open the door, and the little cluster of kids on the step gasp and grab at each other’s arms. I hold the bowl down low and let them take as much as their hands can carry, because it’s Halloween and no child should be rationed on Halloween.
Then I lower myself onto the top step with the bowl in my lap, and I stay there.
The guys drift out after a while. The sun’s going down orange behind the houses, and the fog machine Stanley couldn’t help himself over is chugging away across the lawn, laying a low white river down over the grass that a couple of the trick-or-treaters can’t resist tearing straight through, shrieking.
Then an Uber slows at the curb. When the doors open, six girls in angel costumes spill out onto the sidewalk.
Three in white, three in black, wings and all.
And one of them is Penelope. Every bit of air leaves my lungs at once, because I’m back in June.
A morning, the light coming in gold, her half asleep on my chest and me saying she was heaven-sent, and her mumbling like an angel?
and me saying yeah. Like an angel. A nothing exchange.
A thing I said into her hair on a lazy morning and never thought of again.
She thought of it. She’s standing on the sidewalk in front of my house in white wings, and she wore my word for her.
In a group costume, tucked in where nobody would ever know, where it means nothing to any of the five girls around her and everything to me.
She did this for me. And now she’s right in front of me, and I can’t even do a single thing about it.
Melly crouches down to offer some kid a treat off her tray. Benson drops to one knee on the walk in front of Lucy like he’s proposing, saying baby, baby, baby so many times in a minute I lose count, and Gianna shoves Benson’s head as she goes. Lucy’s gone pink and pleased in the middle of it all.
And I don’t really watch a second of it, because I’ve only got eyes for the one angel that matters — the one in white, standing a little apart at the back of the group the way she always does.
I tip my head at her. Just barely. Our sign, from the summer.
She looks straight through me like I’m made of the same fog rolling across the yard.
Benson gets to his feet and wishes them all a Happy Halloween — warm and easy, out loud, the way a man’s allowed to be when he’s got nothing to hide.
Penelope climbs the steps past me and stops at the top, arms folded over her wings, watching our friends rib each other down on the lawn.
Gianna storms up after her, annoyed at her brother over the whole baby and kneeling thing.
Then the girls and Benson file inside, the door swings shut behind them, and it’s just me and Blue left out here in the falling dark with a bowl of candy between us.
I stay out past the point of any good reason. Even after the last of the candy’s gone and the street’s emptied of kids, I sit there on the cold step until Rowan leans out and hauls me in for a Jell-O shot.
Inside, I go quiet again. Back to the version of me that doesn’t talk. I knock the shot back and find my book and take it to the corner chair I always end up in, because my head won’t quit — it keeps wandering out into the crowd hunting a girl in a white angel costume whether I want it to or not.
I can’t name the exact thing that’s wrong with me.
But when Blue sets his hands on Melly’s waist and starts moving with her in the middle of the room, a heat goes through me that’s hard to hold down.
He’s gone for her. Anybody with eyes can see he’s gone for her, and he’s not hiding one second of it.
Benson’s down on his knees on the front walk for Lucy. Blue’s spending the whole back half of the night wrapped around Penelope’s roommate, in plain sight, in front of everyone, and nobody’s world is ending.
So what in the hell did I trade Penelope away for?
I put my eyes back on the book, because I can’t stand to put them on Penelope.
She’s quiet tonight — quieter than the whole loud room.
I catch that she’s keeping a wide berth around Theo Marsh all night, and I hate how much better that one small thing makes me feel.
I hate that I’ll take a scrap that size and be grateful for it.
When I can’t stand one more minute of it, I slip out the side door and let it close the noise off behind me. Nobody’s out here tonight.
It’s cold for Halloween, cold in a way I don’t have any memory of it ever being.
Or maybe it’s not the night that changed.
Maybe I spent all these years being warm that I’m only now, sitting out here on my own, learning what cold even is.
Learning that I’m shedding my old self and have become this. Privileged. Thanks to Hawthorne.
The door opens behind me. A pair of white wings comes through it, and Penelope lowers herself onto the step beside me — close but not touching.
I look at her, then I look back out at the dark yard. “Angel, huh.”
“Devil,” she whispers, looking at the mask on my knee.
“Stanley’s idea.”
“It was supposed to be just me.” She pulls her wings a little tighter around herself against the cold.
“The angel. I decided weeks ago.” She tilts her head.
“Then the girls asked what I was being, and I said an angel, and they all thought it was such a good idea that they went and ordered the same thing.” She lifts one shoulder and lets it drop.
“So now it’s six of us. And it doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s just a group costume.”
But it means something to me. It’s the only thing in this whole loud night that means anything to me at all. She did it for me.
I turn my head and look at her properly now, the streetlight catching all that white. “Do I get to take it off you later?”
“Depends.” She doesn’t look at me. “I don’t think your house is clearing out anytime soon.”
“I think your roommate’s in love with mine.”
She nods once. “Maybe.”
“So.” I keep my voice careful, the old careful. “If your apartment’s empty tonight,” I say, inhaling. I pause for a moment. “Text me.”
She doesn’t reply to that. She just sits with her hands clamped together between her knees, staring out at nothing, and when she finally speaks, her voice has gone somewhere far off.
“It’s sad, isn’t it?”
I don’t know what she means, so I wait.
“That Benson gets the girl.” She’s still not looking at me. “Blue gets the girl. And you’re just — what, Percy?”
I don’t say anything. There’s nothing in my whole useless vocabulary for me to reach for.
She whispers, “Still following rules that never even existed?”
My skin crawls when I watch her face drop the composure for one second, and I witness the pain underneath. It’s the same hurt coursing through me when I watched Blue with her roommate.
She stands and brushes off the back of her costume like she’s unbothered.
“I’ll see you at my place,” she says. And she walks back inside.
I drop my elbows onto my knees and pinch the bridge of my nose hard enough to hurt.
Fuck.