Splendor (9 page)

But the inside of the house was nothing compared with the outside. In the front yard we went for the traditional graveyard scene: tall headstones, an open casket off to one side with a full-sized mannequin corpse resting in it, and black lanterns, each with a candle, lining the path to the door. We taped black-paper silhouettes of spooky figures in each of the upstairs windows and left the lights on so they’d really stand out. In one window was the outline of a hanging body, in another was an arched-back cat. On either side of the front door perched an ominous gargoyle.

The backyard was the pièce de résistance. Right outside the back door, Jack set up a witch’s cauldron full of dry ice, and on Halloween night it released a steady flow of slowly spreading smoky fog that hovered just above the ground. Jack really got into the decorating, and with the twins’ help he strung long thin ropes back and forth across one corner of the veranda to form a massive spiderweb. In its heart they placed a giant, red-eyed, fanged spider bigger than my head.

The boys had a great time making ghosts; they wrapped foam balls in white gossamer fabric to form the ghosts’ heads and then trailed yards of it to make the bodies. Jack hung them in the trees.

And he left the lights on in the pool to showcase the body in it. Dressed in a pair of Jack’s old trousers and a jacket, it was made from foam so that it wouldn’t sink. Lily staple-gunned a ratty old wig on its head. Floating facedown, it made a creepily convincing body.

Lily put up a pretty strong fight against my costume choice, but finally she gave in. Being an owl just sounded like too much fun to let Lily talk me out of it.

“Fine,” she said at last, “if you insist. But you have to let me help you design it.”

Of course this was code for “make the costume more slutty,” but okay, whatever, if it made her happy. And I had to admit, it turned out pretty amazing. We dyed one of her old ballet leotards brown (“I can’t fit the girls in it anymore, anyway, but you won’t have that problem, Scar”), and then whipstitched yards of feather boas—brown, black, white, and creamy yellow—around and around it. She let me wear brown tights under a pair of feather-wrapped leg warmers that she had me pull just above my knees (“Some owls have feathers on their legs, isn’t that cool?”), and she fashioned a pair of talons out of strips of leather glue-gunned to ballet slippers. I don’t know why she thought it was owlish, but she French-braided my hair and wound it around my head, pinning the braids at the nape of my neck. Then she went to work with loose feathers, bobby-pinning them in my hair, concentrating on forming two points on the top. (“You’re a great horned owl,” she informed me.)

The face paint was last. Mostly she focused on the eye makeup, brushing on dark feathery lines close to my lashes, then yellow a little farther out, and finally white.

“Okay,” she said. “Close your eyes. I have a surprise.”

Groaning, I obeyed. I felt her affixing something to my eyelids and silently gave thanks that she seemed to have nothing more bizarre in mind than fake eyelashes.

“There,” she said, in her particularly satisfied Lily way. “Open your eyes and look.”

She was holding a mirror. It took me a minute to understand what I was seeing. Above each of my eyelashes was a row of tiny, delicate feathers, black and white and brown and gold. They were beautiful.

“Lily, I think I am the sexiest owl ever,” I said.

“Damn straight,” she said. “There was no way I was going to let you look lame at your own party.”

I loved Lily. The party was
her
idea, at
her
house, populated largely by
her
friends—I’d never felt really close to anyone since I’d disappeared the year before—but still, Lily called it my party, too.

“So, what are
you
going to be? Will you tell me yet?”

“Nope. You know I work solo. Go downstairs and try not to screw up your makeup. I’ll be ready soon.”

Downstairs I took a couple of pictures of myself and texted them to Will.

He replied almost at once—
I’ll be your prey anytime!
—and then a couple of minutes later—
Be careful.

Lily’s brothers were skeletons in matching black long-sleeved shirts and pants that Lily had painted with glow-in-the-dark paint. She’d done their faces, too, and they were having fun shining a flashlight in each other’s faces and then closing themselves inside the closet to see their bone paint glow.

Of course Lily’s first choice had been no parents or brothers at her party, but she’d finally relented; as long as they stayed in the kitchen, they could refill trays and platters. Jack rolled his eyes but bit back his comment and promised to stay well hidden. Even so, he and Laura were fully costumed—Jack as a dead butler, his face painted white and his throat slashed across with red, and Laura as a raccoon, complete with ears and a fluffy tail.

Finally Lily came down the wide Tiffany-blue staircase. My mouth fell open, literally. My first thought was,
Damn.
My very next thought was,
There’s no way Jack’s letting her wear that.

She was dressed in what I can only assume was modified lingerie; the milky domes of her breasts crested fabulously from a tight black corset cinched over a diaphanous black skirt that reached less than a third of the way down her thighs. Her legs were poured into shimmery black fishnets and shoes she must have bought off a fetish website: mid-calf, black patent leather or maybe vinyl, with silver grommets all the way up the front and steampunk-inspired metal casings over the three-inch heels.

“Well?” she said when she reached the bottom of the stairs, and then turned around to show me the rear view. A pair of iridescent black wings splayed across her back, and her impossibly short skirt was bustled up even shorter to reveal something that took me a minute to wrap my mind around: her ass, glowing yellow. She had somehow attached rows of tiny LED lights across her panties.

“What do you think?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at me, grinning. Then I noticed she was wearing a pair of glittery yellow antennae; her face was dusted with shimmer and her eyelashes were two inches long and gold.

“You’re a firefly,” I said, impressed.

“Bingo.”

Jack and Laura came out of the kitchen. For a second, as I watched Jack’s whitened face turn a murky shade of red, I thought maybe he would go into cardiac arrest. But then Laura laid her hand on his arm and whispered something in his ear, and gradually the pounding vein in his forehead receded.

“Wow, you girls look fabulous!” Laura said.

“Won’t you be…cold in that, Lily?” asked Jack.

“Nope. I run hot,” she said.

I choked back a laugh.

Mercifully, the doorbell rang. And then the party started.

I had to hand it to them; the teenage population of Catalina Island brought their best game that night. The first bunch of guests included Jane Maple, whom I’d always liked, looking really pretty in a white Grecian gown and lace-up sandals, carrying a bow and arrows as Artemis, goddess of the hunt and the moon. With her were Kaitlyn Meyers—a predictable, if undeniably adorable, black cat, whiskers and all—and Katie Ellis dressed as a gray mouse.

Just after we got them drinks, and while they were still admiring the decorations, a bunch of other kids poured in, loud and boisterous. Andy led the pack, of course, dressed as a werewolf, his teeth gleaming like a canine’s when he smiled.

“You sure look good, Scar,” he said.

I thanked him but didn’t return the compliment and scanned the rest of the group. “Where’s Connell?” It was rare to see one of them without the other.

Andy shrugged. “I don’t know. He’ll get here when he gets here.”

He sounded irritated, but I didn’t think about it for long. Not my problem.

“Hey, Lily, could you back that thing up over here?” called Josh Riddell, the guy she’d dated briefly last year after winter formal. He was a bat; he wore a black long-sleeved tee and tight black jeans, and he’d made a pretty tricky pair of wings out of a dismantled and repurposed umbrella. “I’m having trouble reading this label.…”

Gamely, Lily aimed her rear near Josh’s hand; he was holding a bottle and pretending to make out the words printed on it.

By eleven, the party had moved outside onto the back patio. The music was thrumming loudly. Occasionally, Jack appeared to turn it down, but as soon as he’d gone back inside, someone would crank it up again.

Of course Lily’s parents’ intent had been to host a dry party, and there were plenty of nonalcoholic choices—tubs full of sodas and water bottles, along with the disgusting-looking punch inside—but they sat largely untouched after Mike Ryan, dressed as Frankenstein’s monster, replete with stitches and screws in his neck, arrived with several cases of beer and a few bottles of something stronger.

“We can’t let those kids drink at our house,” I heard Jack telling Laura in the kitchen when I headed inside for more chips.

“Oh, Jack,” she said, “don’t be such a hypocrite. We both know how much you drank in high school.”

“Well, you weren’t exactly captain of the sobriety club yourself,” he shot back at her.

“I didn’t say I was. But come on, Jack, you know it’s better to let them drink here than to send them off to party who knows where. And it’s not like they’ll be
driving
anywhere.”

I backed away from the door without the chips, not wanting to hear them fight.
I
wasn’t drinking, and I kept diluting whatever was in Lily’s glass with soda every chance I got.

The party got louder and louder, and the dancing got more and more questionable. At the center of the crush of bodies was Lily, Josh Riddell’s bat wings extended around her, and someone else—a green horned goblin in a red-and-black striped tee and an open vest. Even painted green, Connell’s thick neck was recognizable. Lily tilted her head back, making the long line of her throat even longer, the slope from her chin to her breasts hypnotizing. As she raised her hands above her head, all eyes were on the black lace of her corset, and everyone seemed to be wondering if it would slip low enough to reveal her nipples.

I shook my head and turned away. Even though I was already outside, I needed some air. Along the back of the Adamses’ yard was a row of palm trees, each tree lit from below, casting their long shadows, spear-like, across the grass. I headed in that direction, taking a few steps away from the music and the bodies.

There was a smell—something spicy, smoky. I didn’t know where it was coming from. And then, from the shadow of the farthest palm, stepped a figure. A guy.

A plume of smoke rose from his hand as he brought his cigarette to his lips. In the glow of its ember, I saw his lips—full, somehow giving the impression of a smile even as he smoked. A clove cigarette; it glowed more brightly as he sucked, and I inhaled too.

I stepped closer. He was dressed in black, head to foot—a silk collared shirt, open at the neck, and black slacks pleated down the front of each thigh. He wore black wing tips, not tennis shoes or flip-flops, but grown-up shoes, freshly shined.

He was tall. His hair, longish, dark blond, was brushed back from his forehead, glistening with pomade. As he stepped toward me, I saw his eyes—the right one was light blue, like a piece of sky; the left green and brown, mottled like a marble.

“What are you?” I asked.

He took the cigarette from his lips and tapped ash on the grass. “Do you mean what, or who?” His voice was clipped, British.

“Who, of course,” I said, but I wasn’t completely sure.

“Gunner Montgomery-Valentine, at your service,” he said with an ironic little bow.

“Where did you come from?”

“No introduction in return?”

Dropping his cigarette, he ground it out. The smell of cloves still wafted around him. When I didn’t answer, he shrugged. “I came from the ferryboat. And before that, a taxi. Before that, two airplanes, with an uncomfortable layover in Houston. If you want to go all the way back, I suppose you could say I came from a twinkle in my father’s eye.” He stepped forward again, so close that I could see exactly where the brown met the green in his left eye. Then he held out his hand.

I shook it. His fingers were long and smooth, and when I pulled away I knew my hand would smell like his cigarette.

“I’m Scarlett,” I said. “Pleased to meet you.”

“The pleasure is mine, I’m sure.”

“Hey, Red Hot!” Connell came bounding toward us like an oversized goblin-dog. “You met Gunn.”

Ah, so this was Connell’s exchange student. I’d heard his family was hosting one this year. “You’re from England,” I said.

Gunner smirked at me. “Just so.”

“Why didn’t you come at the beginning of the school year?”

“Full of questions, isn’t she?” Gunner said to Connell. Then, to me, “There was a holdup with my passport. But I’m here now. Anything else you’d care to know?”

I shook my head.

“Then maybe you could introduce me to your friends.”

“I’ll introduce you,” Connell offered.

“We’ll all go,” Gunner said, linking his arm through mine. “By the way, you make a lovely owl.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You didn’t wear a costume.”

“Not really my thing.”

A slow song was playing, and pretty much everyone was paired off. The dry ice released a steady flow of misty fog. Lily was dancing with Josh, again; his chin rested in her curls and his hands around her waist crept a little lower than I knew Jack would approve of.

“Um…they look busy,” I said. “Do you want a drink or something?”

“I could use a cup of coffee,” Gunner said. “Jet lag, you know.”

“Oh. Well, I’m sure we could find something in the kitchen.”

I didn’t know exactly how I’d become the official tour guide for Connell’s guest, but Lily had said this was my party, too, and seeing as she was otherwise engaged, I figured the responsibility fell to me, especially as Connell had been pulled into the crush of dancers.

“Should we go inside?” Gunner asked.

I felt a flash of something, like a warning, a tingling up my spine. The hairs on my neck prickled. But I looked around, and everything seemed fine. “Sure,” I said, pulling open the French door to the kitchen. A finger of dry-ice fog swirled inside. “Come on in.”