The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett(48)

“OK,” I said. It wasn’t OK though. It was one of the most un-OK things that had ever happened to me.

Emily hugged me and walked back to her seat next to Logan. I left the cafeteria and pretty much decided I never wanted to go back there.

? ? ?

After school, I knocked on the door to Enzo’s apartment and shifted back and forth, waiting for him to answer. I started to think he wasn’t home, but then the door swung open.

“Hawthorn. Hey.”

“Can I come in?”

A record was playing loudly. A man with a deep voice sang about love tearing people apart. Enzo turned the music down, and the lyrics became a whisper.

My eyes went from him to an easel that was set up in the corner. It was turned so I couldn’t see the canvas.

“Are you painting again?” I asked.

“Trying.”

“Can I look?”

“Not until it’s done.” Enzo pulled his tobacco from his pocket and rolled a cigarette. I wandered over to the bed and sat down.

“Were you ever going to call me again?”

“What?” Enzo asked with a half laugh.

“You ditched me at the party. It annoyed me. So I decided not to call you.”

“What are you doing here then?”

“Don’t tease me.” I pulled my legs up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. “I needed a friend and didn’t want to wait for you to call me. Which is why I’m wondering if you ever would have.”

Enzo took a deep drag from his cigarette and exhaled smoke toward the ceiling. “Don’t make our friendship like that. There don’t need to be rules.”

“Can I have a cigarette?” I’d never smoked before, but at that moment, I wanted to feel like someone other than me.

Enzo raised his eyebrows and passed me his cigarette instead. I took a drag. I could feel the burn all the way down my throat, like inhaling sandpaper. But I didn’t cough, so that was something.

Enzo sat on the bed and put an ashtray between us. “I would have called.”

“Good.”

We passed the cigarette back and forth in silence. I listened to the music. A new song started, just as depressing as the last.

“Saturday was the full moon,” I told Enzo.

“I know,” he said.

“We should probably check the woods. There might be some new clues.”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

And just like that, we were OK again.





Chapter 21


Welcome, October

Leaves turned gold and orange and red. The air was crisp. All over the Mills, people started to prepare for Halloween. Candy appeared in stores, cheesecloth ghosts hung from trees, and scarecrows stood sentry in front yards. The pumpkin patch was open for picking, and you could get apple cider there, fresh from the press.

The thing about October is that it makes everyone want to believe in magic. Sure, it’s the spooky kind of magic, but it’s better than nothing. And with everyone planning their costumes, it was one of the few times a year I felt like I fit in. I wasn’t the only one who wanted to be someone else.

I guess Christmas is a magical time too, maybe even more magical, but it comes with all kinds of pressure. You have to be cheerful and jolly and spend time with your family. And then there’s Christmas shopping. Not only is the act itself torture, but in the end, you have to come up with a super awesome present that’ll wow the recipient, and I’ve always been really bad at that. Like the time I got Rush a video called Overcoming Illiteracy, which I thought was really considerate. He disagreed. But it was better than what he got me that year, which was nothing at all.

Halloween doesn’t have any strings attached. It’s a holiday for hanging out and eating candy and playing pretend. It was the kind of holiday I could get behind.

My mom claimed she celebrated Samhain, not Halloween. It was some kind of Celtic harvest festival or something.

“Halloween started as Samhain, Hawthorn,” my mom said in early October as she put out decorations.

I raised my eyebrows. “So plastic skeletons were part of Samhain?”

“I have to make do with what’s available,” she said.

As much as my mom wanted to keep up her New Age facade, the truth was, she loved the Halloween season as much as I did. And if she wanted to call it Samhain, I didn’t mind. It was actually pretty cool—the night the boundary between the worlds gets thinner. I was certainly on board with that.

I was also on board with my mom’s pumpkin pies. They were made with soy milk, of course, but you almost couldn’t tell. I was just happy to have sweets in the house that I didn’t have to smuggle in.

The hippies didn’t celebrate Halloween or Samhain, but they also didn’t turn down the pie I took out to their bonfire. I sat down with them and tried to get them to tell ghost stories while they ate. They made an effort but always brought it back to astral projection or past lives, which was not really in the spirit of the season. I wanted stories about vengeful ghosts and witches who ate little kids and creatures that lurked in the dark—the kind of stories that scared me so much, they couldn’t help but make me feel alive.

“Tell scarier stories,” I urged the hippies.

“Why this fascination with darkness?” Sundog asked.