The Boy with Words for Skin

Chapter 17: The Halloween Party

On Halloween, I woke up to Kit shaking me by the shoulder. Before I could speak, she covered my mouth with her hand and held a finger up to her smile.

My first thought—Are we really doing this?

My second thought—Why isn't The Headless Dog barking?

I looked across the room to my brother's bed and found it empty. The sheets were missing. My head spun from tiredness, but it all came back to me. He'd been sleeping in the upstairs bathroom the past few days. We hadn't talked at all.

Sleeping in the bathtub where his sister killed herself couldn't be a good idea. From a logical point of view, it didn't seem sane. From a practical point of view, it couldn't be comfortable. I tried to think of ways to talk to him about it, but they always ended with me yelling and him crying and The Headless Dog barking at my ankles.

"Come on, Words," Kit said. "Let's get going."

I pushed myself into a sitting position. The metal frame of the bed creaked loudly and Kit's eyes nearly popped out of her head. She threw a look over at Rope's bed.

"He can sleep through anything," I whispered. I swung my legs down, and the bed creaked. I stood up, and the bed creaked even louder.

"Oh." Her eyes darted from Rope to me. She nodded. "Well, be quiet anyway."

I figured it was about three-thirty as I pulled on my hoodie. Hopefully that'd be enough time to set everything up. There were a lot of things to take care of.

We got started as soon as we made it to the main floor. We taped the black and orange streamers to the walls in big, droopy spirals. We stretched cobwebs over the stairs banister and the doorframes and the dining room table and chairs. I took yard bags that looked like giant pumpkins outside and filled them up with leaves and brought them back inside. Construction paper, markers, scissors, glue, and yarn were put on the emptied clothing tables in the parlor. The Pin the Wart on the Witch Game was taped to a wall. Apples were added to a bucket of water. Then it was time to start on the food.

We had tons of store-bought candy that we spread around the main floor, but we made a lot of stuff, too. We dyed Rice Krispie treats green and molded them into brain shapes. We chopped up grapes, mixed them with yogurt, and stirred in red dye to make bloody, chunky vomit. We cut up marshmallows and rolled them into maggots. The list went on and on.

Kit zoomed all over the place. It wouldn't have surprised me to find out there were actually two or three of her running around that morning. It would've been easy for her to get stressed out over everything that needed to get done, but she smiled wider and wider as we worked. She kept telling me what a great job I was doing and thanking me for my help. Each time she did, it made my chest feel like it was filled with sparklers.

My final task was to carve away the rind of a watermelon to make it look like a brain. She told me what to do and then left me to it. Turns out carving a watermelon's a lot harder than you'd expect. It was a miracle I didn't lose a finger with how much the knife kept slipping.

I know I wasn't moving as quickly as she would've hoped, but when I finished with the watermelon brain and turned around, I was shocked. She'd somehow baked several batches of cupcakes and cookies and turned them into witch hats, Frankenstein monsters, spiders, and bloodshot eyeballs.

It was almost six-thirty by then, time to start on breakfast. A gallon of milk was turned into brown sludge. Pumpkin chocolate chip pancake batter was poured into cookie cutters to make silhouettes of witches riding brooms and hissing black cats. The cauldron was filled with chunky muck that tasted like orange juice. Scrambled eggs were transformed into hunks of green mold.