I march back into my bedroom and hold up my hands like I do when I’m giving the puppy at the shelter treats and I run out. “All gone.”
She gives me a relieved smile. “What are you doing tomorrow night?”
“The corn maze just outside of town.”
“Oh yeah? We were thinking about scouting out that place to film the Halloween episode.”
“You should come.” I don’t even think about what I’m saying until it’s too late.
“I think I will,” she says.
And just like that I’ve got two dates on the same night. Maybe I can fly back and forth between the two. That seems like a totally responsible use of my powers, right?
15
The next morning as I lie in bed, I send a Mayday text out to Ches and Matt in the hopes that the two of them can help me juggle Johnny and Dakota.
ME: MAYDAY! MAYDAY! 911! I sort of invited Dakota on my date with Johnny.
ME: Well, it’s not officially a date.
ME: But it’s sort of a date.
MATT: It’s totally a date.
ME: There are other people going. It’s a group thing. Really, I was just expanding the group.
CHES: It’s definitely a date.
CHES: And!
CHES: This is basically an IRL love triangle.
MATT: I wish love triangles just meant that all three people live happily ever after all together forever and ever amen.
MATT: Nay, GAYMEN.
I groan and let myself levitate a little above my bed.
ME: This isn’t helping.
MATT: You’re rollin’ in the deep, girl.
CHES: Are you quoting Adele?
CHES: I can’t believe I even asked.
ME: Like I said, NOT HELPING.
I yank my phone off the charger and shuffle down the hallway. Downstairs Grandma Lou is tangled in the long, spiraled cord attached to her old phone as she curses into the receiver. “Damn phone company. Got their gosh-dang wires crossed.” She hangs up and tries again.
“Morning, Grandma Lou. You want some eggs?”
She lets out a tsk noise. “Don’t mess with that stove. I don’t want you burning yourself.”
I side-eye her. “I, uh, think I can handle turning on a stove.”
“Give me just a minute,” she says, exasperated like when I was a kid and would beg over and over again for her to make me French toast. “Let me just try your father once more.”
Her mention of Dad, like he’s just down the street right now, knocks the wind out of me. The carton of eggs slips from my fingers and immediate tears prick at the corners of my eyes. Because Dad’s dead and I don’t know exactly what’s happening, but something’s wrong with Grandma Lou. Something is very wrong.
The eggs hit the linoleum, shell and yolk everywhere. The sound of it doesn’t even startle her.
“Grandma Lou,” I say, my voice too high and chipper. “Dad’s gone, remember?”
Angrily she tries his number again before slamming the receiver down.
“Grandma Lou?” I ask again, stepping over the splattered eggs.
Fear bubbles up inside of me. Real fear. The kind of fear I felt when I was at Darlinda Green’s slumber party in eighth grade and her older brother was sleepwalking. I saw him in the kitchen on my way to the bathroom. He stood there, completely zoned out, opening and closing cabinet doors and drawers. I thought he was possessed. I ran as fast as I could to Darlinda’s bedroom and slammed the door behind me, my breath ragged as I stood with my back pressed to her door, like I might somehow hold back whatever evil lurked on the other side.
“Your brother,” I gasped. “Something’s wrong with him.”
Then Darlinda gathered us all around as she spoke of her brother’s sleepwalking like it was some kind of urban legend reserved for campfires. “And my dad says that no matter what, you can’t wake him up. He could freak out and do something really violent.”
A shiver spread among us, and we all stifled our screams as his shadow passed beneath her bedroom door and he went back to bed.
That same eerie feeling nearly strangles me now, and whatever’s wrong with Grandma Lou, I’m scared of what might happen if she snaps out of it too quickly or what might happen if she never snaps out of it at all. “Grandma Lou, are you okay?” Maybe she just woke up too fast or maybe she’s having some kind of migraine.
She sits down for a moment, looking back and forth between me and the phone and then the eggs on the floor. “I . . . was just trying to . . . the eggs,” she says. “I oughta clean that up. Let me find the mop.”
“You sit,” I tell her. “I’ve got it.”
“No, no.” She pushes past me. “You get us some toast going. I just . . . I need to clean this up.”
The house is too quiet. I prepare toast while Grandma Lou mops, and it takes only a minute or two before the silence is too much and I turn the radio on to the oldies station, thankful for the reprieve from my own thoughts. Neither of us talks about it. We just let the moment evaporate until it’s almost like it never happened at all.
That night me, Matt, and Ches all ride together to Hopper Family Farms Corn Maze. In October, the maze is open seven days a week, but on Saturday nights, it turns into a haunted maze with kids from the theater department dressed as all sorts of monsters. Last year Rasheed Hakim caught Ches off guard when he jumped out from the cornstalks, dressed as a chain-saw-wielding serial killer, and she clocked him right in the nose.
At the corn maze, we park in a dirt field. As the three of us walk to the ticket booth, I get a text from Dakota.
DAKOTA: Running late, but I’ll text as soon as I’m there <3
Well, maybe that will give me some time to spend with Johnny first, and then I can catch up with Dakota later. This doesn’t have to be awkward. There are tons of people here. I just happen to have very confusing feelings about two of them.
“You guys! Faith! Matt! Ches!” Johnny waves us over from where he stands in line with a few of his friends, Carson from journalism and a few other guys I vaguely know who start a new band every few months, recycling names and concepts faster than I can keep up. Last I checked they were an acoustic experience interspersed with the xylophone, and they called themselves Cleo’s Patra.
Johnny gives me a quick hug and squeezes my hand once before letting go. “The line’s moving pretty fast.”
“Oh good,” I say. “I think we’re meeting a few more people here later too. I hope my cell phone works in there.”
Carson cranes his head around. “Looks like they’re sending people in two at a time and we’ve already partnered up, so how about Johnny and Faith and then Ches and Matt?”
Matt looks to me, giving me a chance to object, but I don’t really see a way out of this. Of course I want to be alone with Johnny, but I was really hoping for more of a big-group-of-friends vibe when Dakota showed up and less of a stuck-in-a-dark-corn-maze-with-one-of-my-crushes vibe.
“Cool!” I shrug. “I’m sure we’ll all find each other eventually anyway.”
Carson gives us the thumbs-up before returning to his conversation.
“Are you nervous?” Johnny quietly asks.
“A little,” I admit. “Ches is more into this stuff than me.”