I was still grinning when I spun my locker’s dial to the combination on my slip: 38 - 17 - 24.
Then I opened the door and was immediately hit in the face with a tidal wave of ooze.
11
I shrieked and staggered back, clawing at the foul-smelling goo that now coated my face. When I cleared my eyes and held up my hands, I saw orange pulp and white seeds.
Someone had rigged my locker to spray pumpkin pulp at me when I opened it.
On cue, I heard someone laughing. Most of the students had already gone to homeroom. The few that remained gawked at my gunk-covered cheeks and clothes.
Tall, gangly Charlie Slade stood to the side, laughing so hard he was clutching his stomach.
“Don’t worry,” he said between guffaws. “That’s fresh pumpkin from my farm. I wasn’t coldhearted enough to use the rotting pulp from your pathetic fields.”
My first instinct was to cry. I could already feel the tears welling in my eyes. The pulp was soaking into my hair. I would be lucky if it didn’t dye my bangs tangerine.
I looked around at the other students who were still staring at me, waiting for me to react. Whatever I did now would be their first impression of me for years to come.
So I blinked back the tears. I walked calmly over to Charlie. I ran my fingers through my hair, until I had collected an entire handful of pulp.
Then I smeared it across the front of Charlie’s denim overalls.
A loud “oooooohhhh” echoed from the crowd around us.
Charlie’s mouth hung open. Speechless, he looked at the trail of pulp across his chest and he balled his hands into fists.
“That was a waste of perfectly good pumpkin,” I told him. “Next time just bake me a pie.”
The hall erupted in laughter and applause. Charlie’s cheeks turned a bright shade of red.
He leaned down and wagged a finger in my face. “This isn’t over, Kayla Dung.” Then he stormed off down the hallway and out of sight.
An African American girl walked up and high-fived me. “Charlie Slade has had that coming for a long time, so thank you for that,” she said. “I’m Yvonne, by the way.”
I shook her hand. “Kayla,” I said.
Yvonne took the schedule from my hands and examined it. “Looks like we have the same first-period biology class. I’ll walk you there.” She took a second look at my face and cringed. “On second thought, let’s stop by the bathroom and try to get you cleaned up first. Cool?”
I nodded and followed her. “I wouldn’t want to look like a pumpkin monster on the first day of class!”
12
I left school that day with a new friend, a grin on my face, and a pile of books from the library on proper pumpkin care. I needed all the help I could get if I wanted to crush Charlie’s dreams at the big fair.
The day only got better when I came home to a miracle.
I filled up the dented watering can and walked dutifully out to the pumpkin patch. I refused to give up just because the seeds were not the magical variety I thought they were.
What I saw made me stop in my tracks.
Green. Lots of green.
Somehow, during the six hours I had spent in class, the seeds had sprouted. These weren’t just tiny shoots emerging from the ground, either. Vines had already started to form, erupting with broad leaves bigger than my hands. I touched one of the tendrils in wonder.
Abel hadn’t been lying about these plants growing quickly.
As I circled the patch, I found an intruder. A rabbit was nibbling on one of the pumpkin buds. I knew from the gardening books I had been reading that the pumpkins eventually grew out of the female flowers. The last thing I needed was a bunny feasting on them for lunch.
“Hey!” I snapped at the animal. “Get away from my vines!”
The rabbit froze, trembled, and then sped off across the field. It disappeared into a hole, down into its burrow.
I immediately felt ashamed for scaring such a defenseless creature. It’s not like it had many other options for food out here among all these dead crops. I would leave some strawberries outside for it later.
Before I went inside, I placed a series of wooden stakes in the ground in the path of the vines. One of my guidebooks had said that the tendrils would wrap around anything in their path, as if they had a mind of their own. They could even crawl up a fence, defying gravity.
That night at dinner, I was in such a good mood that I didn’t groan when my parents discussed which cheesy pun to print on the labels for Dunn Farms Jams. I even volunteered to go out with a sponge and a bucket to scrub the paint off our sign, until it no longer spelled “Doom.”
I was nervous at school the next day. What if Charlie had another prank in store for me?
Fortunately, I made it through the entire day without a Charlie sighting. His pumpkin pulp trick must have backfired enough that he had decided to leave me alone—at least for now. When school was over, I invited my new friend Yvonne back to the house to show her the pumpkin patch.
The vines had grown at an incredible rate over the last twenty-four hours. They had snaked through the dirt, wrapping around the sticks I had left, just as the gardening books said they would.
The plants also seemed to be reaching out to each other. They had formed lines between the mounds I had dug, making the triangle look even more like some weird alien symbol.
“Wow!” Yvonne said. She bent down to touch one of the shimmering blue flowers that had blossomed overnight. “Pumpkins are so funny looking. I never expected them to come from such a beautiful plant.”
“The flowers are supposed to be orange, but this is a special variety,” I explained. I pointed to one of the blossoms, where a lump the size of a golf ball was already growing beneath the petals. “The pumpkins themselves grow after the flowers have been pollinated. When the pumpkin gets big enough, the flowers fall away.”
I was about to explain more when I heard an odd sound. Something was whimpering near us. When I listened more closely, I realized the noise was coming from the pumpkin patch itself.
“Do you hear that?” I asked Yvonne. She nodded. The pumpkin leaves were so thick it was hard to see the ground beneath. I followed the noise to the largest plant, in the center of the triangle.
When I pulled aside a dense group of leaves, my breath caught in my throat.
The rabbit that had been nibbling on my plants yesterday had returned.
That had been a deadly mistake.
Because today, the pumpkin vines had coiled completely around its white, furry body.
It continued to whimper and try to wriggle free, but the tendrils held it tight, flattening its floppy ears to its back. The end of the vine had even begun to wrap around the poor creature’s throat. I wondered how long it had been trapped here.
I got down on my knees and carefully untangled the vine. The rabbit quivered beneath my hands as I freed it.
Finally, I untied the last coil, which had looped around one of the creature’s hind legs. The rabbit gave an angry hiss at the plant. Then it scampered off, sprinting as fast and far away as it could.
If I had known what the next few weeks would bring, I would have run, too.
13
On the third day, the first pumpkins began to grow. There were four of them, one for each vine. I should have been overjoyed, but I immediately knew something was wrong.
These pumpkins were all blue.
At first, I thought that maybe they would ripen into a normal shade of orange. After all, my guidebook told me that they usually started out green until the sun warmed them over time.
Instead, as the pumpkins grew larger each day, the blue became more vivid, the color of tropical ocean waters.
Soon they were as tall as my waist. Dark purple veins spread through their bumpy rinds like spider webs.
What could I have done wrong? I had been following Abel’s instructions exactly the way he had written. I watered and fertilized them every day.
&nb
sp; I imagined bringing blue pumpkins to the Jack-o’-lantern Festival. Charlie would mock me for sure if I showed up with these. “The city girl is so dumb she doesn’t even know what color a pumpkin is supposed to be!” he would say between laughs.
That Saturday, I pedaled my bike through town and down the narrow lane to Abel’s seed shop. Maybe the gardener would know what to do with his creations to make them look normal.
An older woman with gray hair was sweeping the shop’s porch. She peered at me through her bifocals as I pulled up on my bike. “Well, I’ll be!” she said. A friendly smile spread across her face. “You must be little Jimmy Dunn’s daughter.”
“How did you know?” I asked, taken aback. I glanced at her name tag, which read “ANNABELLE” in capital letters.
“I was one of your father’s teachers way back when he was your age, before I retired to tend this shop full-time,” she explained. “I’d heard he moved back to town with his daughter, and I’d recognize that nose of his anywhere.”
I touched my nose self-consciously. “I hope that’s a good thing.”
The woman leaned her broom against the wall and gestured for me to follow her into the shop. “What can I do for you today, puddin’? Some petunia seeds? Maybe some spicy chili peppers if you’re feeling brave?”
I shook my head. “I got some pumpkin seeds here last Sunday, and I just had some questions about how to properly care for them. They’re turning out a little bit … strange.”
Annabelle stopped in her tracks. She squinted at me in confusion. “Are you sure you’re at the right shop? I never open for business on Sundays, and I definitely would have remembered you coming to visit. It’s a small town.”
I shook my head. “No, it must have been your son running the shop that day. Abel was very nice, and he gave me the seeds for free—”
“I don’t have a son,” Annabelle interrupted me. “And since my husband passed away last year, I’ve been the only person who runs this store. I can’t afford to hire any help.”
An unsettling feeling knotted my stomach. Something wasn’t right. Now that I was paying more attention, even the shop looked different than it had just a week ago. The weird glass specimen jars had disappeared from the shelves.
Annabelle was starting to look concerned. “Honey, are you feeling okay? Your face is white as a ghost. Why don’t you sit down and I’ll get you a cup of tea from the pot I just boiled.”
I didn’t want to sit down. I had just noticed something odd on Annabelle’s name tag. There was a sticky residue on either side of her name.
It looked like there had been tape on it recently to cover some of the letters.
And when you crossed off the beginning and end of “ANNABELLE” …
… You were left with “ABEL.”
The room spun around me. If Abel wasn’t a shopkeeper, who was the man I had met with the previous week?
Then I had an even more terrifying thought:
What if he was still here?
I needed to know. I staggered through the rows of shelves, heading for the back of the shop. I heard Annabelle distantly call my name.
When I reached the back door, I took a deep breath and threw it open, expecting to find the stranger lurking in the greenhouse of bizarre plants.
Instead, I found myself staring at an empty backyard with a few lemon trees growing in it. A light breeze whisked around me.
Just like the man who had called himself Abel, the greenhouse had vanished off the face of the earth.
II
THE DAY OF THE JACK-O’-LANTERN FESTIVAL
14
My parents stood to either side of me next to the pumpkin patch.
My mom whistled. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “These are officially the biggest pumpkins I have ever seen.”
She wasn’t kidding. Over the last few weeks, the pumpkins had all grown monstrously large. Three of them had nearly reached my height.
The fourth pumpkin in the center of the patch had grown faster than the others. When it rained, it would absorb the water right out of the soil, leaving the patch completely dry almost as soon as the raindrops landed. It must have sucked up all the nutrients too, because the grass in the surrounding area had withered and died.
Now the pumpkin was twice my height and heavier than a car. It looked like a gigantic blue meteorite had fallen from the sky.
My father beamed with pride. “It’s finally happening. After forty years, I’m finally going to beat Zeke Slade at the pumpkin competition.”
My mother cleared her throat and glared at him.
Dad grinned sheepishly. “I mean, Kayla is going to beat him. What matters is that the Dunn family name will finally get engraved on that trophy.”
“I’m really proud of you,” Mom said. She ruffled my hair. “I know moving away from your friends must have been hard, but you really poured your heart and soul into this pumpkin patch. When I start growing my own fruits for Dunn Farms Jams, you’re going to have to give me some gardening pointers!”
I couldn’t help but smile, too. The memory of Abel and the vanishing greenhouse seemed like a distant dream at this point. In a way, he had been my guardian angel.
“One thing is for sure,” I said. “Dunn Farms Jams might have to branch out into pies, because we are going to have a lot of pumpkin to eat.”
“I have just the recipe for the occasion!” Mom replied.
Something honked behind us. A forklift drove around the corner of the house. My father’s friend waved from behind the wheel. The largest pumpkin was so massive that we needed heavy machinery to transport it to the Jack-o’-Lantern Festival.
While Dad and his friend began to load the gigantic pumpkin, I drove into town with Mom. I had agreed to help her set up our farm’s booth for the first day of the festival. She had been slaving over vats of boiling jam for the last two weeks to prepare for her “grand opening,” so I figured the least I could do was help.
The Festival was even bigger than I had imagined. The town hosted it each year in the sprawling apple orchard and the celebration lasted an entire weekend. Farmers and craftsmen came from miles around to decorate their booths, which formed a small city under the apple trees. As we walked through the fair, I watched carpenters setting up a large stage and rows of chairs. My pumpkin would be weighed in this theater tomorrow, along with all its competitors. It was hard to imagine Charlie having a pumpkin bigger than the monster my dad was currently driving here with the forklift.
By the time we finished setting up the booth, we had stacked a wall of jam jars so high that I had to stand on my tiptoes to peer over it. A few early customers approached the booth to chat with my mom and spread samples on the homemade biscuits we had baked. As the crowd grew, Mom gave me her blessing to wander off and explore the fair.
I found Yvonne helping her father ladle out his cinnamon apple cider into sample cups. As soon as she spotted me, she dropped the spoon back into the steel vat. “Come on!” she said excitedly, grabbing my hand and dragging me away. “If this is your first time at the festival, you have to see the Cannonball.”
“Cannonball?” I echoed as she tugged me through the maze of booths. “Where are you taking me, a pirate ship?”
Yvonne smirked at me. “You have so much to learn, new girl.”
Eventually the booths thinned out and we reached the river that snaked through the orchard. We followed it until we arrived at the waterfall. Since my last visit, someone had anchored a wooden platform out in the rapids. It floated just a few lengths before the water disappeared over the edge.
I gulped as Yvonne jumped fearlessly onto the raft. I was still terrified of the waterfall, but I couldn’t let my new friend think I was a total wuss.
I tried to keep my expression calm as I took a nervous step onto the platform. It rocked beneath me and I grabbed the railing so hard that my knuckles turned white.
In the middle of the raft was an enormous pumpkin. It wasn’t quite as large as the one I
had grown, but it was still as tall as I was, and at least it was the proper color.
“Touch it,” Yvonne instructed me.
I looked at her in confusion. Then I cautiously placed my hands against the pumpkin. The moment my skin made contact with the orange rind, I shivered and pulled away.
It was ice cold to the touch.
“After each festival, the town takes the winning pumpkin and stores it in a freezer for an entire year,” Yvonne explained. She pointed to the puddle forming beneath it. “Then they defrost it at the next year’s festival, carve it into a gigantic jack-o’-lantern, and light a big fire inside of it.”
“Why do they call it the Cannonball, though?” I asked.
“Good question!” Yvonne led me over to the edge of the platform. Someone had built a wide chute, like a water slide—only if you slid down it, you would be swept right over the falls. I shuddered.
Yvonne touched a wooden lever. “For the festival’s finale, everyone gathers in the valley below. Up here, they load the burning jack-o’-lantern into the chute. After the crowd counts down from ten to zero, the mayor pulls this lever. The lever lowers the chute’s safety bar, and the jack-o’-lantern tumbles into the water—then floats right over the falls.” With her hands, she mimicked the pumpkin falling and then a splat motion. “The moment the burning pumpkin hits the pool below, a massive splash soaks the crowd and everyone yells ‘Cannonball!’”
That did sound awesome. I also felt like I would appreciate the waterfall a lot more if I was standing safely at the bottom, instead of the top.
When I turned back to Yvonne, I noticed that she was staring over my shoulder. Her eyes had gone wide and she was trembling.
“What’s the matter?” I asked her.
I spun around—
—and came face to face with a tall masked man wielding a chainsaw.
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