I jump down the staircase like Mitch did on his way out of the house to go on his date with Lola and Brian. I totally lose it because that whole idea is so funny, Lola and Mitch and Brian all on a date together. I hyena my way back to the kitchen where the peacocks and Ally are. They’re already dancing to Ferdinand’s rapping. I flip the oven to 425 degrees and pray. I pray that the pizza will be ready right away. I had no idea that peacocks rap, but I didn’t really know any personally. I knew from listening to Mitch and Brian and Mom and Dad that assumptions can be wrong. I am the Queen of Assumptions. It’s hard not to have them, especially when you’re twelve.
Ally sighs at the sight of Mitch’s dock and swarms to my side. When I slam it down she whispers, “I can’t believe it. You know? We’re here with Adrianne. Yeah, that Adrianne, and they all gave you a present.” She smiles.
I look around the room at each and every peacock to examine their costumes. Only none of them are in costume and all look darker than normal. Gothier, not that they are ever goth at school. Not that I even know anyone who’s a goth. I mostly just read about it in magazines. And see them in movies, Edward Scissorhands is my favorite movie goth. All the peacocks have the white pasty skin and the red, red lips and the heavy-duty black eye makeup. It makes my little belly dancing outfit look so met you at the church choir-ish. So unpeacock-ish.
I smile at Ally, not wanting to say anything because I know that Adrianne will overhear because peacocks have powers of hearing that flabbergast most people. I know the longer I talk the more Adrianne will know how blown away I am that she is in my house. I cue up my technodancefantasyparty playlist and press play and my heart skips a beat. I know that this one thing––pressing play on my iPod––could make me a peacock or not. The Cure’s Lullaby is the first song in the mix. I love hearing the song. I’m getting a peacock-vibe because Ferdinand loves it. He and I dance out into the dining room then into the foyer by the spider. A bunch of the other gothic peacocks dance out there too. They all ask what the name of the song is, super into it. I have this big smile on my face.
Ally stands next to Adrianne and they mirror each other all on the edges of everything. Standing just inside the dining room glaring, all cocked heads and zombie stares. Ally doesn’t dig the world of peacocks like I do. And from the look on Adrianne’s face, I guess some peacocks don’t like when dodos evolve into peacocks. But then Hayden walks over and starts dancing with Ally. I sort of know Ally’s OK with it by the way she moves even when Hayden gets closer to Ally than she’s ever been with a boy before.
Adrianne is a much jerkier dancer. I thought peacocks didn’t make those kind of geeky moves. I thought all peacocks knew how to dance. But she’s a spaz. I hyena again knowing I’m actually better at something than a peacock. Than the peacock. Marissa and Romulus get their hands on our trick-or-treat candy and when the doorbell rings. They both run to open the door.
Christian and Evan stand just outside the door. They’re my age and live on my street and I’ve known them forever, but because they aren’t peacocks, I didn’t invite them. And when I see their ambushed eyes I feel mean. So incredibly mean.
“What’s your name?” Marissa asks them. One thing about peacocks, you are pretty much invisible unless you’re a peacock. It’s like they are blind to all other species. Note to self––is there another animal in the wild that does the same thing? Blind to the inferior?
Evan doesn’t say anything when Marissa asks his name again. Romulus reaches into the plastic pumpkin she holds and he grabs like ten Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and says, “Go for it bro. Did you know we’re eating chocolate so fast we won’t have any in twenty years? Better enjoy.”
And that’s funny because my aunt who’s like thirty-something got all bummed out about the same thing last week because she said there won’t be any chocolate when she goes through meno-something. My mom laughed her butt off. Apparently women go through this phase when they’re all grown up. This time where they can’t sleep and they drink lots of wine. I googled it but couldn’t find anything like it in wild animals.
Christian just stares at me behind his Freddy Krueger mask and then his eyes shift to my present. I know it’s Christian even though I can’t see his face because that’s how Evan and Christian are. They never go anywhere without each other, kind of like me and Ally. “Happy Birthday, Roxanne,” Christian says. And when he says my real name, not Roxie, like everyone calls me at school, it’s like it breaks some sort of spell. I hear feedback on my iPod. It rattles me.
“You know him?” Adrianne asks like peacocks should never even talk to trick-or-treaters our age. And then I get this little, awful feeling inside. When The Cure’s Why can’t I be you plays, I feel sick to my stomach. I walk to the still-open door and before I close it all the way, I watch Christian and Evan walk down my driveway and over to my neighbors. I don’t really want to be a teenager all of a sudden. I sort of want to trick-or-treat forever.
“It’s time,” Adrianne says. Hayden presses stop on my iPod and the whole house goes quiet.
And that little, awful feeling inside gets worse. The one that doesn’t want to be a teenager. I want to ask Adrianne what it’s time for but I don’t want to sound stupid, especially as I’m more and more unpeacock-like––knowing trick-or-treaters our age, with a name like Roxanne. Not wanting to be a teenager anymore.
Hayden says, “So, where can we go that’s dark. Very dark.”
“The attic,” I say unable to stop myself. I mean why would I say the attic? It’s creepy up there and I hate dark places. I really hate dark places. I still sleep with a night light on. I’ll be the only girl on the planet to lose her virginity with her night light on. For real. Not like that will happen anytime soon. But still.
“Perfect,” Hayden says. It might be the spider or the black light. It might be the fact that the black light shines this creepy whiteness on Hayden’s smile and makes him look a lot less like a peacock and more and more evil, like The Peacock from Hell. It’s the first time his hair doesn’t have that sunny-glow to it. The glow I first noticed in fifth grade. And all of a sudden I start coming down with a bad case of Pavophobia, fear of peacocks. Or, at least fear of their presents. What else could they have gotten me but something that might mess with me.
“Which way?” Adrianne says picking up the purple-and-black present. She walks one way and then another, searching the room, glancing over her shoulder. Jittery, as if she expects to find something or someone in the shadows, in the corners. Freaked out. With a million things to do and she’s only just remembered. Very star-nosed mole.
“If I were you I wouldn’t go up there,” I say sounding spooky and a lot less peacocky than ever, thinking about how cold it is up there this time of a rainy night, knowing there’s all kinds of things up there that aren’t things peacocks should see. I’ve never been in the attic at night.
“If I were you I would,” Adrianne says. She clutches my present tight and parades out of the foyer through the dining room. I follow. She puts her hand on the doorknob of the kitchen door. The door that leads to the garage. The garage that leads to the stairs that lead to the attic. She opens the kitchen door like she’s Ally and knows exactly how to get to the attic. The other peacocks follow right behind Adrianne. Ally and I are the last ones in the peacock parade.
Ally tugs on my arm, she doesn’t want to be last one up. I don’t either. We tell each other that with our eyes. Neither of us likes the creepy all-eyes-are-on-you feeling we get in the garage on our way up the green-carpeted staircase. The garage is creepy enough. There’s all this space and just a small window for light and everything echoes. Super creepy. I mean in the summer when we come home from the swimming pool and we hang our swimsuits to dry on hooks that Dad hammered in even with our height, the garage is warm and fuzzy, well as warm and fuzzy as it can be in a stainless-steel-soft-boiled-egg kind of way. But at night, before the rise of the moon, it’s creepy. I feel along the wall and turn on the one light we have above
the staircase to the attic.
I have to make sure they don’t go into the garage-side of the attic. Because that’s where all of Mom’s old wild clothes are, hanging above all Mom and Dad’s wild things. But Adrianne beat me, and she’s already inside.
“Wait, you have to be careful,” I say choking on my words, sounding like my mom. Very un-peacocky.
“This isn’t about being careful,” Adrianne says and then I think I know why they came. They want to kill me and use me as a peacock sacrifice. Wait until the full moon rises and then kill me and sacrifice me. Kill me and sacrifice me. That’s all I can think about. And I don’t know where Ally is. I can’t see or hear her. And I shiver from the cold.
“Come on. It’s your birthday. And since your birthday’s on Halloween, we thought we’d do something special. Something creepy.”
Hayden closes the door to the attic behind us and reaches into one of the side rafters beside me. “What have we here?” He holds up a bottle of something.
“No idea,” I say knowing and not-knowing who would have put a bottle like that up here. Maybe Hayden brought it with him. He twists the cap off and takes a swig from the bottle. He spits it out. One itty-bitty part of his spit hits my cheek. I want to hurl.
“It’s time to sit in the circle,” he says. I shuffle-walk over to Ally and it’s the fourteen of us. Twelve official peacocks, Ally, and me.
Adrianne lights a big, round white candle and puts it in the center of the circle. She sits right across from me. The glow from the candle haunts all of our faces. She spreads out her fingers on her right hand and holds it in front of her like we’re about to learn about the number five, so that I can see her palm, then she places her hand, her fingers still all spread out, over her heart on the left side of her body and says, “You all must swear the Oath Of Secrecy. What we do here never leaves this attic. Never.” She puts her hand in the middle of the circle and every one of us puts our fanned-out right hands on top of hers.
“Never,” we all say together.
Hayden hands the present to me. “Open it,” he says, super-serious.
Now that it’s time I rock the present in my hands, not sure how I feel about secrets. Like I’m scared of them or of the present or my own attic. I’m not scared, that’s what I tell myself. I’m not scared. It becomes my new freaking mantra and fights to replace the kill-me-and-sacrifice-me one that just went through my head before we all sat down. I keep telling myself I’m not scared, even though it’s a lie.
I rip the purple-and-black bow off the box and toss it into the circle. Ferdinand picks it up and places it over my head like my grandma used to do at Christmastime. I miss my grandma and I kind of wish my brothers were home for the first time in my life.
I tear open the black box and pry off its lid. And there, cushioned in white fluff, is a blue glass bottle, shaped kind of like a genie bottle. The glass glows in the box, in the candlelight and the more I stare at it, the more it looks like there’s some sort of light dancing inside the glass, making it brighter and bluer. The harder I focus on the tiny light inside, I can see there is something stuck there, inside the bottle. Long and white.
“Place the bottle in the middle of the circle,” Adrianne says, her skin paler and her eyes wider than before, her boobs rise and lower faster with her every breath. She said to put the bottle in the middle of the circle in that creepy-trance voice witches do in Halloween movies. I can hear the voice of the guy doing the voice over for the trailer of my life, [read: like the roach motel commercial guy meets Jason] THE PEACOCK HALLOWEEN PARTY: WHERE DODOS GO IN BUT THEY NEVER COME OUT.
So I do what Adrianne says, like the dodo I am. Chills race from my cold, barefoot belly-dancer feet to my even colder belly-dancer tummy. I suck in my stomach all of a sudden when I see Ally knife punch hers with her fingers.
Adrianne stares at the blue bottle. That’s all she does and everyone in the circle gets quiet. The more Adrianne stares, the more the bottle glows and the bluer it gets. The room gets colder and Adrianne looks paler and when the first finger of the first light of the full moon streams through the one small attic window––the one that is always propped open, no matter how cold or how hot the attic is––and casts a speck of light over the bottle, it shatters.
I mean freaking explodes from the inside out. Broken glass lays everywhere and shimmers like big and little diamonds in the moonlight that creeps in through the always-open window. Adrianne stares at what was my ex-present, the ex-bottle. And I jump two feet in the air and my heart races like Mitch and Brian caught me and Hayden kissing or something, not like that would ever happen because I would totally see them coming with my night light on.
And I get mad too. I mean, it was my birthday present and little perfect-peacock-hearty-swirly girl just blew it up. Adrianne bends over, seated in her same spot, like she’s just collapsed after running a marathon. Ferdinand grabs a long, rolled-up piece of white paper out of the pile of broken glass.
“This is for you,” he says, handing the paper to me.
And I’m like, really? If there is a heart on there I’m going to freaking kill somebody. And I lean over the pile of shattered glass to take the paper out of Ferdinand’s hands but my foot slides out from under me and pieces of glass get stuck in my foot. I yelp. Like all wounded animals do. Every wild animal except peacocks, that is. But I don’t want to look like a baby. Not in front of the peacocks. Even if they were peacocks who just exploded my birthday present.
I unroll the rolled-up paper and put it up to my face so I can read it but, it’s blank. I hold it closer and examine every inch before I flip it over to make sure I don’t miss something. My foot is hemorrhaging. For nothing. Great. I hate peacocks.
I roll my eyes and hand the paper to Ally.
“Hold it in the moonlight,” Adrianne says out of breath like I should’ve known that to begin with. Ferdinand gives me a hand, with a look in his eye like this is some kind of ritual he’s been through before.
“What the freak is going on here? Seriously. What the...” I say.
“Just, do it,” Hayden says, wincing like he’s about to open his first present on Christmas Day.
“There’s nothing on it,” I say.
Ally passes the thick paper back to me and whispers, “Why don’t you do what they say.” She pokes her stomach with her fingers again. So I walk over to the small, always-open attic window and unroll the paper, half-looking at it, half-looking at Ally and the peacocks. I hold the paper up to the moonlight. And there, on the page in front of me seven words write themselves, only they’re written in a language I don’t understand. Then a map draws itself below the words. I hiccup and drop the paper to the floor. I double over in anguished embarrassment and shiver from my pinkies to my little fingers. And as I sort of hang there all doubled-over on myself, I come face-to-face with the paper laying on the ground, in the moonlight.
“What does it say?” Ally asks.
“No idea.” I mean it’s obvious they’re pulling my leg. Trying to get a rise out of me with some trick they bought at a magic store in town somewhere. Brian was into magic when we were little. He used his whole allowance to buy this trick that turned pennies into dimes. It cost like ten whole dollars. I wonder how much this trick cost. That’s another thing about peacocks. They never worry about money.
“What do you think it says?” Adrianne says, putting her hands on her hips. But I’m not in the mood for her smuggy I-should-just-know-everything-in-her-little-peacock-world attitude. It’s my freaking birthday. I can do what I want.
I stand up straight and say, “Really, ok, it says you must think I’m an idiot for falling for some stupid magic trick.”
“It’s no trick,” Hayden says with a face so straight he should be in Mr. Post’s plays at school, not me.
“Right, and I’m stupid to think that you would just come to my birthday because you like me when you just want to mess with me,” I say, hobbling to the attic door. The glass pushes into the bottom o
f my foot, deeper and deeper, with every step I take. And I get the hiccups. I try not to think about how freakishly dodo-sounding, repulsive, OMG-how-could-a-peacock-ever-make-that-kind-of-squeak I make when I hiccup.
“We need you,” Ferdinand says.
Need. Me? Really. I stop walking and turn to face the peacocks.
“Do you think I’d be here if we didn’t?” Adrianne says.
“Need me for what? A little Techno tutorial?” I say.
“We need you to tell us what you see,” Hayden says.
Why, because you guys are blind? I hobble back to the window where the paper lays in the moonlight right under the small window that’s open no matter what time of year it is. “You tell me? It’s seven weird words, like another language, and a map with an X,” I say.
“A map? Tell me about the map. What’s on the map and where is the X?” Adrianne says.
“What are you guys like blind to mysterious messages that appear in blue glass bottles that Adrianne blows up with her mind?”
“Yes,” Adrianne says so dead-pan it’s the scariest moment of my life.
13 on Halloween (Shadow Series #1) Page 5