I wrote two tweets: Just effed up a chance with a guy I really like because I’m a monster. And then: Listen up interwebs, don’t be mean to anybody in school because they’ll grow up and be awesome and you’ll just be shitty.
Chapter Eleven
On Halloween night, I didn’t get up until the sun set.
A darkness slowly crept across the sky as the streetlights popped on. I couldn’t remember feeling so sad in years. I stood in the bathroom and quietly brushed my hair and teeth at the sink. My eyes were pink-rimmed and empty.
I shoved my costume and makeup into a bag to change into at work. I’d texted Tim to tell him I’d be working that night, but I needed to first be Nora Travers for a while, at least until the clock struck seven and I’d have to be someone else again.
There were some things I had to do.
Earlier in the evening, I’d gone to Brendan’s website. The post from years ago where he talked about “that witch Nora.” The comment I left there under my real name was only two words, written over and over. I hadn’t just copied and pasted, but had kept writing the words until my fingers ached and the letters looked funny.
I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry…
I left one other comment: Also I never fucked Frankenstein and we don’t have that policy at work. Everything else I told you was the truth.
He probably wouldn’t see it for a while, at least not that night since he was at that costume party, but it was the least I could do.
Outside, the air had grown noticeably colder than it’d been all month, the breeze carrying the faintest hint of woodsmoke. I walked away from my neighborhood towards downtown. There were early trick-or-treaters out already, mostly toddlers with their parents, the kids’ little chubby bodies jammed in white tights and fairy dresses or little Batman suits. I watched their excited faces, their stubby fingers squeezing tiny candy bars into misshapen clumps.
I walked straight to the small group of shops downtown. The coffee shop where the girl from middle school worked looked much the same up close as it had when I’d last visited, just decorated for the season. Black cutouts of spiders hung in the corners of the windows, stuck amidst gauzy cobwebs.
The girl was working there behind the counter. Somehow I knew she would be.
When she glanced up from her book as the door swung open, she narrowed her eyes but didn’t speak. I was the only one there.
I walked up to the counter, trying for a smile and failing.
“What do you want?” she finally asked.
I wanted to run back out the door at the hateful look in her eye. But I didn’t budge.
“I want to say I’m sorry. For the things I said to you in middle school. For the way I was. I was a bitch.” My stomach clenched. “I can’t change the past and take back what I’ve done, I know that. But I just want to say I’m sorry.”
In the long moments before she spoke, I heard the sounds of children walking by the shop, giggling and squealing.
Was she going to forgive me at that moment? Reach over the counter and hug me, the spiders and costumed kids witnessing our beautiful moment of forgiveness and redemption?
No. She simply stopped glaring for a moment to open her mouth. “Rot in hell, bitch.”
My gut clenched harder, like a fist was pulverizing it.
“I’m sorry.”
I blinked back tears as I turned and walked out of the shop.
At least there hadn’t been a coffee downpour. But.
Outside I leaned against the side of the coffeeshop, out of view, and pulled out my cell. I clicked on Brendan’s website again, the post where I’d commented I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry…
Nothing could be done. I had been right before. These people I’d hurt in the past, they didn’t want to hear my pathetic apologies. They just didn’t want to see or hear from me, period. My words, my very face—they were all awful reminders of the evil they had endured.
I couldn’t change the past, but I could do one thing: I could stay the hell away from them.
My fingers hovered over the comments I’d written on Brendan’s post a half hour ago. Then I hit delete.
***
In the bathroom at the Haunted Shack, I stripped to my panties and put a bleached white, early twentieth century gown over my head. I slowly smeared white cream all over my face in front of the tiny clouded mirror, trying to ignore the vacant look in my eyes. I added a blue satin headband to my hair and teased my mane, adding bits of some leaves I’d grabbed on the walk. I laced up the tall boots I’d found in the closet. Then I drifted to my spot in the house, feeling empty and alone.
Tim had wanted me to be a zombie again, hoping to bring back some of that magic I’d made earlier in the week. But one hint of my frail voice over the phone had told him there was only one role for me that night: ghost girl.
There I was, undead and unhappy.
The grave of the late Elizabeth Woodson lay in the mossy section of the house near the end. It was a new addition to the house just for Halloween, a makeshift small cemetery Tim had created by removing a wall and adding a few plastic tombstones and layers of turf.
The plaque at the cemetery explained Elizabeth’s story. In 1902, she had drowned at age nineteen after her groom, Charles, left her at the altar. She’d sewn heavy stones into her lovely dress and gone to take an eternal dip in the lake. It was all very poetic, and about thirty times more graceful than the way people usually died in horror movies today. She probably should’ve just gone after Charles with a hatchet, like the southern chick in Cleaver Man IV.
But Elizabeth Woodson was not really dead, of course. She was going to arise from her moss-covered hole in the ground that night with a pale grasping hand and ethereal scream.
Elizabeth in death was much as she’d been in the last few moments of life: pale, rejected, melancholy. It took almost no acting to get myself into the role.
I spent Halloween night grieving in short staccato bursts. A group would walk by me as I waited in my hidey-hole, watching through a crack in the floor at the reflections in the warped mirror on the wall. People would wait for the scare, but it wouldn’t come—not then, anyway. As they began walking to the exit, starting to imagine they were safe, I’d suddenly reach my hand up and start shrieking and clawing at the moss, forcing my way out. Ghost Elizabeth, much like the living Nora Travers, was shrill and miserable at all the things she could not change.
Tim came through one of the secret passages to whisper that I was especially creepy and doing a fantastic job.
“You’re kind of depressing everybody, though.” He rested a hand on my shoulder. “You know, I’ve come to realize, as much as it pains me to say, that there’s more to life than scaring people.” He paused. “So if you needed to leave a little early tonight to go not scare someone, I think that’d be okay with all of us.”
“I’m fine,” I said miserably.
“Think on it.”
All night there were screams, shouts, laughter, chainsaws, growls, loud buzzes, and bangs. The smell of sawdust, cigarettes, moss, and frequently alcohol. Startled pouts, scared grimaces, and delighted grins on the faces of those who walked past. The occasional fainter. The feel of cold air, my scratchy dress and tight boots, the fake moss under my nails, my barely-audible pulse. I concentrated on it all, the senses of Halloween, and tried to shut it away, board it up, from the memory of the boy whose very being was now so inextricably bound to this season. I tried and I failed.
It was close to eleven o’clock when I utterly failed and went to check his website as I sat in my dark grave. It was hard not to wonder what he was doing, what he was thinking and seeing.
I’d heard from Tim and the others that we’d placed third in the HorrorMonger rankings, so we’d all be getting a Halloween bonus. Everybody had whooped and hollered at the news before we opened, but I’d only managed a weak “hoorah” that sounded more ironic than anything.
I still hadn’t read his short review of
the Shack, and that’s what I checked, to see if it gave any clues to what he thought of me.
It was only four sentences long. After briefly describing the highlights, he’d commented that our house, though old-school and eclectic and with some weaker moments (the Bigfoot), had some “performers who went the extra mile to guarantee frights.”
My heart dropped. That was the worst part of the whole thing. Not that we’d come in third, but that he’d been objective enough to comment on my ability to scare him. That he’d been dispassionate enough to see me as separate from the girl he’d texted and kissed and exorcised from his life.
Whispers reached my grave. I squinted in the mirror to see the reflection of two young parents and two small girls. With an agonized shriek, I clawed out of the grave.
But then, before I turned around to face them, I saw my reflection in the mirror.
I expected my face to appear as it usually did washed in moonlight: ageless, unchanged. Instead I saw the thin veneer of a ghost painted over a twenty-year-old girl working at a haunted house.
I didn’t look thirteen. Because I wasn’t thirteen.
Everything seemed so clear then, distinct, in that warped mirror. Twenty-year-old me was different than depressing ghost me, which had been different than the sexy vamp and the crazy zombie I’d been. They were costumes I could take on and off. Sometimes they were shadow selves and emotions I felt, but they weren’t me.
And that witch Nora, she wasn’t me either. Not anymore. It was time I stopped pretending that I still wore that mask.
Adrenaline racing through my body, I made a quick decision.
I turned to the family, all four wide-eyed and waiting, expecting to be scared by a ghost.
“Hey, sorry,” I said to them as I dusted moss off my dress. “But are you guys driving downtown when you leave here? I could really use a ride to the bus station.”
It was time I let Brendan see the real me. Because he hadn’t met that girl yet, not face-to-face at least.
Chapter Twelve
The Halloween party was in full swing at midnight when I walked onto campus from the bus. On the ride I’d wiped all the makeup off my face and ditched the bow. Leaving the white dress and boots on, I had pulled my hair back into a ponytail because I had haunted house hair, mussed and smelling of smoke and cosmetics.
I had no problem locating the right building on campus. Loud music poured from it, punctuated by screams, shouts, and howls. Orange floodlights surrounded the space, and a guy with an axe in his stomach was taking money at the door. I recognized him as that redneck you were glad to see get chopped in half during Cleaver Man III.
The entrance let into a large multipurpose room. Inside KC & the Sunshine Band’s “I’m Your Boogie Man” was pumping across the blacklit dance floor where students wearing bloodied clothes and glow-in-the-dark paraphernalia gyrated to its beat.
I weaved my way through the throngs of dancers as I searched for Brendan.
A girl in a slashed waitress costume noticed me and raised her eyebrows. “What are you?” she shouted over the music.
“I’m a ghost,” I shouted back, trying to pass.
“Yeah, which character? I don’t recognize you.”
“Just a ghost.”
“Oh.” Her face scrunched up. “You know this is a Cleaver Man party, right? You’re supposed to come as a character from one of the movies. Everybody here is a victim from Cleaver Man. And, like, there are no ghosts in Cleaver Man.”
I looked around. She was right. He’d told me about this.
Damn.
For a girl who’d been living most of October dressed as various creatures of the night, I was suddenly the uncool weirdo at a costume party.
I passed a skinny guy who didn’t even try to hide his disdain. “What are you supposed to be?”
“Just a ghost, dude. Move on.” I’d made it two-thirds of the way across the floor, and no sign of Brendan.
Then a girl with a shiny blue prom dress and big nasty gash on her neck spun around laughing and bumped right into me, spilling her bright-red drink down the front of my dress.
“Shit!” Red drops dribbled down the white cotton and onto my boots.
“Oops, sorry,” she giggled. “I’m drunk.”
“Yeah, I kind of got that.”
She giggled again. “Who are you supposed to be?”
“Just let me—” And then I saw him.
Brendan was up on a raised lounge area at one end of the room. It was covered in couches and armchairs under a shimmering white banner with “Happy Cleaver Man Halloween” written on it. He sat on a big chair in front wearing a dark cloak and holding a long axe like a scepter. His face was mostly covered, but I’d have recognized his strong frame anywhere. Also his depiction of The Cleaver Man was geekily precise: dark cloak, axe, exact amount of five o’clock shadow, perfectly-matched brand and hue of dusty white sneakers.
He had a few friends flanked around him. To his right, his sandy-haired friend was dressed as the annoying frat guy from the latest Cleaver Man X, the one that gets his head lobbed off. To Brendan’s left, a girl wearing a slashed black nightie sat on the arm of his chair, leaning into him far too close.
If looks could kill, she would have been a bloody puddle from the moment I saw her.
I straightened up, walking to the three carpeted steps and then slowly climbing up to his seat. Brendan seemed impassive yet bored as I started climbing—cloaked head down, moving the axe from hand to hand—but as I reached the top of the steps, he suddenly froze.
I still couldn’t see his eyes, but I knew he wasn’t happy to see me by the tone of his voice when he spoke. “What do you want, Nora?”
I took a deep breath and stepped forward. “Brendan, I came—” But as I strode forward, my foot caught on something and I went down, down, down, falling on my face in front of him.
Apparently there were some spare plastic hatchets piled there. Probably the dancers had found them hard to hold while twerking. Stupid dancers.
I heard the groupie-girl laughing. “Classic. We’re at a Cleaver Man party, you got to watch for axes.”
“Thanks for the pro tip,” I mumbled into the carpet. My face flushed red and I wished I still had my white makeup on.
I tried to gracefully stand up and smooth my red-stained dress down.
Brendan had moved to the edge of his seat, but he wasn’t moving or talking. I still couldn’t see his entire face.
He was so big and strong and regal, and I was reminded of how hot he was and that I was dressed like someone from Little House on the Prairie.
The groupie-girl glanced at Brendan, then peered back at me. “What character are you, anyway?” she sneered. “FYI, this is a Cleaver Man party.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Yeah,” the murdered frat boy chimed in from Brendan’s other side. “No chicks die in the films wearing a dress like that.” He called to a group of guys at the bottom of the steps. “Guys, there are not any old pioneer girls who die in Cleaver Man, right?”
“I don’t think so…” The guys down below started conversing openly about my weirdo non-costume.
The girl joined in. “And that red stain looks more like fruit punch than blood. You should’ve really, like, gotten real fake blood or something. It looks amateur.”
Brendan stirred and leaned forward. “What do you want, Nora?” His voice had lost a bit of its edge, but he still sounded like he wanted me to leave as fast as mortally possible.
“I want…” And I hadn’t a plan coming there, no magical words to get his attention beyond the I’m sorry part, but suddenly I knew a simple apology wouldn’t cut it.
I needed something to get his attention. To surprise him. Some shock and awe.
So I did what came naturally: I dropped to my knees and screamed.
“You’re not going to kill me!” I twanged in my best southern accent. “You’re not going to kill anybody ever again!”
Stumbling to standing on legs as shaky as a newborn colt’s, I grabbed Brendan’s hatchet straight out of his hands.
“This is my town and you don’t belong!” I screamed, swinging the axe at an invisible Cleaver Man to the side.
So the southern chick who hacked off the hands of the Cleaver Man wore a plaid shirt tied below her breasts and ridiculously short denim shorts. I wasn’t dressed like her. But I sure as hell could talk like her, and I could kill like her, because, let’s face it, I could kill like anybody.
“Take that!” I shouted, moving the axe to chop off his left hand, and then gasping as she had when it’d come clean off. Someone at the party killed the music and I sensed dozens of eyes watching me from below—and behind, where Brendan sat.
“You cut my friends and now I’m going to cut you!” I swung at his torso. Missed. Cried.
I’d memorized her movements from watching the clip so many times—each swing and chop, each dodge and jump and twist.
“I’ve got your hatchet! I’ve got your hatchet!” I shook the weapon at the invisible foe, my increasingly hysterical voice splitting the air.
The Cleaver Man had lost one hand and taken a deep cut to the stomach by that point. He’d fallen to his knees, his cloak somehow still over his face.
No one said a word.
I had to make one final cut.
“No…more…killing!”
I swung the axe and, though there was never any Cleaver Man there, I felt it hit its mark. His right hand chopped off, he fell to the ground, an unnatural moan escaping from his hood.
He was dead. I mean, for that movie at least.
Breathing hard as she had, I choked on a sob. Dropped the axe. Let a shudder race through my body.
“That was for Dirk,” I whispered to the air. “That was for Mrs. Gibbons.”
I turned, but instead of a forest in front of me, it was a crowd of college students at a Halloween party, dressed in slashed and bloody clothing. Staring at me.
Then a guy in front started clapping. Then another.
A few people just rolled their eyes or folded their arms, but within a minute, I had about half the room applauding and even some whistles.
“O-kay,” I heard Brendan’s groupie-girl say behind me. “What was that?”
I fought back a smile. Girl didn’t know her Cleaver Man.