I was pissed-off, so I tossed the costume I’d bought with Susan at the mall and dressed as a s’more. It was easy—Sandra had most of the supplies already. My hair was teased and spray-painted red and orange, with about a gallon of gold glitter in it, so it looked like fire.
“You’ve got a pillow around your waist,” Susan said when I got there. She was wearing a sexy Little Bo-Peep outfit, and her entire torso was exposed, even though it was only forty-five degrees.
“So?”
“A pillow,” she said again, shaking her head.
Standing on Heather’s porch, I heard a loud screech coming from somewhere else in Arrowhead, near the woods. Susan heard it too. I followed the sound with my eyes. By the edge of the clearing, close to the one house with a gigantic three-car garage, where a trash can had been overturned in the driveway. I saw a raccoon trying to carry an entire package of bologna up a tree. He kept dropping it, but he wouldn’t give up.
I felt like that raccoon. Like, I wanted the entire package of bologna and I wanted it at the top of the tree.
“Ew!” Susan said, squirming and gripping my arm. “Look at that raccoon!”
The hairs on my arms stood when she touched me, and I wished we could just go home together.
“Raccoons shouldn’t be eating bologna,” I said absently, watching him try to carry it up the trunk again.
Susan spotted a group of lacrosse players and started tugging me toward them, but I pulled away.
“Where’s the keg?” I asked.
Susan pointed toward the back porch.
The living room was full of people, and already a vase had been broken, the jagged pieces of it forgotten on the rug. Through the sliding glass door that led to the manicured yard, I saw kids in slutty costumes crowded around the keg, laughing, holding each other around their waists, slapping each other on the back, stepping in Mrs. Flynn’s garden. I went to school with a bunch of kids who got great pleasure out of destroying things.
I headed for the porch.
“Taylor!” someone called. “Come do a shot with us!”
I ignored whoever it was.
It was hard, weaving through a crowd while wearing giant cardboard graham crackers, but at least I wasn’t cold. I got a Solo cup and left the porch immediately. All the people made me nervous. When I got back inside, I sat on the couch next to Heather, who was dressed as a sexy French maid.
“A pillow?” Heather said, with a frustrated look on her face. “What exactly are you trying to hide?”
“It’s the wrong weather for those costumes,” I said. “You think you look sexy, but you just look cold.”
Looking around, I saw that every single guy was dressed like Eminem: white guys in white tank tops, white hats, too-baggy jeans.
“God,” I said to Heather. “Those costumes.”
She smirked. Tonight, her blond hair was curled and her lipstick was blood red. Heather’s makeup was perfect. She was especially talented with eyebrows. She crossed one long leg over the other and touched her bottom lip suggestively.
“Who’s the real Slim Shady, do you think?” she asked, looking out at the room.
“Where’s Brad?” I asked Heather. I tried to seem interested, like I wanted to see him, but really I wondered if I would have to make out with him. The cardboard graham crackers were partially to make that more difficult.
“He has strep throat. Didn’t you know?”
“Oh,” I said.
Brad and I still hadn’t spoken properly since I told him we could be together. So far, we’d smiled at each other in the hallway and that was it. Actually, we were talking less than usual. I knew what was expected of me, and I wasn’t sure I could go through with it.
Scottie danced his way over and put one arm around each of us. His eyelids were at half-mast, and he reeked of whiskey.
“Taylor’s here,” he said. “Now the party can actually get started.”
Halloween could have been the best holiday, where you would get to smear fake blood all over yourself and bob for apples, and everything felt a little bit scary, and ghosts were definitely real. Instead, everyone wanted to show off their bodies and play beer pong.
“Yeah, you guys are lame, just sitting around like this,” I said, squeezing out from under Scottie’s arm.
A terrible song was playing, and everyone sat in clusters. I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted, “Why aren’t any of you assholes dancing?”
Being Taylor Garland meant you always had to be the first to dance.
Even if you didn’t feel like dancing.
Even if you just wanted to go home.
I danced as crazy as I could, flapping my arms and shaking my ass, and everyone followed me. I got really into it, and eventually I was so sweaty that I almost forgot about Brad and Susan, and Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.
I found Susan and pulled her into the middle of the crowd. She held my hands while she danced with me, and I let myself enjoy it. I almost wished I didn’t have the pillow around my stomach.
Even though Heather glared at me all night—maybe because she was jealous that I was Brad’s girlfriend—I knew she was glad I was there, if only because I got people moving.
I reached out and touched Susan’s dark hair, and when I put an arm around her waist, she didn’t move away.
* * *
—
On the way home, I slowed down in front of Corvis’s house and stopped just far away enough so that no one could see me from inside. I turned off my headlights and looked through Corvis’s bedroom window on the first floor.
Scream played on her television—it was the very beginning, where Drew Barrymore ran around the house, gripping the telephone. The only light in Corvis’s room came from a neon-pink lava lamp. Kristen was there, too, and they were dancing their faces off and eating giant Pixy Stix. There was no beer pong for Corvis and Kristen. They danced like they weren’t hiding.
If I stayed home on Halloween with my best friend, the world would stop turning. My phone would ring and ring until I finally showed up, so I wouldn’t be able to enjoy any of it. Plus, Susan would never stay home with me in the first place.
Then I heard the cars crunching over gravel. Drunk, stupid voices.
“Hey, it’s Taylor’s car!” someone shouted. “Guess she thought of it first!”
Scottie’s pickup truck pulled in next to my ancient Volvo, screeching to a stop. I saw Heather’s face through the glass of the shotgun window, and PJ’s face in the back seat. Then another car pulled in, and another.