The Accident Season (15 page)

The wind picks up outside and the house shudders. Sam huffs out his breath in a rush. “Well,” he says, and he sounds a little dazed. I don’t know if it’s the hundred burning candles or the wine setting my throat on fire, but underneath my mask my face is flushed. I can’t seem to get the picture of Sam standing topless in the doorway to his room out of my head. I am careful not to look at him.

“And once you’ve spent a night with them, you’re theirs forever?” Alice says.

“Forever.”

“And there’s no way to break the spell?”

Bea laughs. “It’s not a spell, Alice. It’s something worse.”

“Something worse.” Alice’s eyes are little flames. Bea refills her jar with wine and Alice drinks like it’s water.

“Alice, hold on,” says Sam, and I put out my arm as if to stop her. She has a wild look to her that has very little to do with the tree-bark skin of her mask (although, masked and wine-drunk in the candlelight, we are all a little wild tonight). When the bottle gets passed back to me, it is empty. My head is starting to spin and I’m beginning to believe the ghosts are drinking with us. Why else would we have finished a whole bottle so fast?

“So what if you were right?” Alice says to Bea, her voice hard but serious. “What if it was real and there were wolves
with human bodies seducing human lovers and then waiting for them to drop dead before feasting on their flesh?” She laughs then, and even Bea looks worried. “Say it was true. How would you stop it? If it’s not a spell, then how do you stop it?”

For once Bea doesn’t know what to say. She reaches over to her bag and takes out her cards. She shuffles them and spreads them out on the floor in front of us. I expect Alice to roll her eyes or tell us she’s only joking, but instead she stares down at the cards with the same intense look as Bea. I glance over at Sam. He looks at me. I wonder if I look as worried as he does. I wonder how much he suspects about Nick.

Bea stares at the cards for a minute and then says, “You have to kill the wolf.” Then she shakes herself and says, “Metaphorically.” She looks over at Alice. “We are talking metaphorically here, aren’t we?”

“Are we?” Alice says. “You tell me, Miss Ghostwatcher, Miss Cardreader, Miss Witch.” She smacks her hands on the floor impatiently and then cries out. The palm of her left hand has landed on something that was caught between two floorboards. She pulls it out. It’s another big red button.

“The witch’s kiss,” Bea whispers.

Alice stares at the button and puts it in the pocket of her jeans. I think about the button I found, now sitting with the clutter on my bedside table. She reaches behind her and pulls the second bottle of wine out of my bag. She unscrews the cap and holds up the bottle.

“To the wolves!” she shouts, and she takes a sharp swig. She hands it to Bea, who takes it eagerly.

“To the ghosts!” Bea’s lips leave red stains on the mouth of the bottle and the wine leaves red stains on her lips.

I take the bottle and raise it so that the wine sloshes over the side. “To the river underneath us!” When I hand it to Sam, he just looks at me. I gesture for him to take the bottle. When he raises it to toast, he’s still staring me straight in the eye.

“To our secrets,” he says. I feel like I can’t breathe. Bea nods solemnly and Alice gives a hard little laugh. The room has become hot and airless. Outside, it sounds like a storm. Inside my head is pretty stormy too. The rain’s a bit like music. We start to sway where we sit. My palms are sweaty. I take off my coat, and then my sweater, unwind my scarf.

“Take off your shoes,” Bea says suddenly. She jumps up and kicks off her witchy boots. “Listen to the ghosts—listen to how they liked our talk of wolves.” Her bare feet stamp on the floor and the whole house groans. “Listen!” Bea shouts, and she laughs out loud. Alice stands up with her and takes off her little pumps. She knocks on the floor with her feet. The house creaks like it’s responding.

Sam and I take off our shoes as well because I don’t think it’s in our natures to disobey Bea. Not when she looks this witchy, at least. Her hair is big and tangled, and every curl sticks up at an angle under the slowly glowing scales of her
mask. Her face looks like the sea and her eyes are pearls. Her dress sticks to her body with static, and she and Alice hold hands and stomp and stamp and the whole floor shakes.

“Get up, get up!” she shouts.

Sam gets up off the floor slowly. He holds out his hand to help me up and I hesitate for half a second before taking it. But I do take it. And I keep my hand in his for a second and a half longer than is necessary, just to prove to him that everything is fine and forgotten, that everything’s back to normal. Whatever that means.

Bea gets us all to hold out our jam-jar glasses and she fills them to the brim with wine. We raise them for another toast.

“To the accident season,” Alice says breathlessly. My own breath catches in my throat. A particularly strong gust of wind blows in under the door, and suddenly the room’s filled with dancing light. Sam cries out. In the middle of the room, in the circle on the floor that’s been charred and blackened, in the dusty remains of whatever once burned there, a fire flares up.

Alice lets out a wordless shout and Bea starts to laugh and laugh like she’s possessed. Immediately I look for an explanation: I tell myself that some of the candles blew over and caught fire in the dust, but really I think we all know it’s just magic. So when Bea dances over to the fire, we follow like the Pied Piper’s children. When she starts to speak, she’s like a sleepwalker.

She recites our poem as a chant—the exquisite corpse we wrote together out in the garden. She has learned it by heart. She takes the chorus she made with one line from each of us and repeats it so that it sounds like a prayer, like a spell, like she is stitching us all together with our own words.

“
So let’s raise our glasses to the accident season,
” she says, and we move the way she moves and our feet clap the floor in the dust along with her. “
To the river beneath us where we sink our souls
.” Bea raises her glass and we toast the fire with her. My skin crawls like I’m being walked on by a million tickly legs. “
To the bruises and secrets
.” Alice raises her glass above her head and the wine falls on her hair like red rain. “
To the ghosts in the ceiling
.” The house screams. “
One more drink for the watery road
.”

The music is suddenly louder even though no one’s touched the volume. It’s playing songs I’ve never heard before, and I know Bea’s music collection pretty well. The room is huge. We dance around it like animals. The flames make stains on our skin.

We dance hard; we collide, breathless. We slip and hit off each other, and every time our bodies touch, the electric lights spark even though there’s no power in the house. We stick to each other and wind our arms around each other and we move together like that. We are all entwined limbs, but we’re somehow still dancing. We’re monstrous, magnificent. We are one enormous creature taking over the
night. We have eight legs, four beating hearts, a thousand beads of sweat on a thousand tiny hairs spread over one giant body.

And we are chanting together and the music playing is the sound of our dancing and it is all so loud that I close my eyes to drown out the noises, but then suddenly I feel something like a kiss on my eyelids and a little voice whispers, “Wake up wake up wake up,” and when I open my eyes, there’s someone else, someone breathing when I breathe, moving when I move. I look up and it’s Elsie.

I scream.

Alice trips over something and smacks into the ground and Bea screams too. Sam runs over to help Alice, but he lands badly; he kicks one foot over the fire and sparks hiss up. The house howls. I grab my school bag and throw it on the fire. It’s just big enough to cover the flames. The wind outside reaches its crescendo and the bay windows blow open and all the candles sputter and die in the rain that comes in on the wind.

We are left in darkness. The house is quiet. I crawl over to the other side of the room and find the flashlights by touch. The light is weak after all the candles and the fire, and under our masks we all look so pale. Bea is holding Alice in her arms and Sam is limping painfully up to them, shaking his head. I switch on all four flashlights—two in each hand, bumping their beams against the walls and the ceiling—and
when all of them are lit and focusing together around the bedroom I can see that we’re alone. If we were ever anything else.

I don’t know who starts it. It could be Bea, cradling Alice in her arms. It could be Alice, bruised from her fall. It could be Sam, collapsed by the pit where the fire was burning half a minute ago, one sock slightly singed and one toe swollen, maybe sprained. It could be me. It could be Elsie, although I can’t see her and therefore must assume that she isn’t here (if she ever was). Someone starts it with a little startled laugh, and then suddenly we’re all laughing. Chuckling at first, or little giggles, and then the laughter grows and becomes a sort of breathless mirth. The sound of it reverberates on the ceiling, it bounces against the walls, it trips around us until Bea is rocking on the ground, holding her sides, and Alice is almost crying from it.

It takes a long time for us to catch our breaths. Sam limps around and lights the candles again, even though I tell him I don’t think it’s a good idea.

“It’s okay, little sister,” Sam says, and he comes over to me. His eyes are dark underneath the mask.

“I’m not your sister.” My voice is hoarse and too quiet. Sam opens his mouth to say something but then closes it again with a shrug. My voice gets even quieter. “You’re supposed to say,
If you say so, petite soeur,
” I tell him. Sam smiles. I can’t tell if it’s a normal smile or a sad one; the mask hides
his face too well. I can’t tell who any of us are anymore.

Bea gets up and herds us all out of the master bedroom. She and Alice take the flashlights and Sam and I collect an armful of candles each, and we go into the bathroom where the mirror is cracked and dusty and reflects the flashlight beams and the candlelight so that the whole room glows. Bea rummages around in her bag for the big box of her mother’s stage makeup she has borrowed for the night. She sits Alice down on a stool and begins to paint her arms and legs like the bark of trees. I suggest that Sam strap his toes together so the swollen one won’t move and I start to get some painkillers from my bag, but Sam holds me back.

“It’s probably the wine,” he says, “but I don’t feel a thing.”

Alice stares at her reflection in the mirror and I stare at Alice. Her sleeves are rolled up so that Bea can paint her arms. Her bruises are a patchwork of new and fading, but there are cuts on her arms that look like cat scratches, which I tell myself must be from climbing the iron gates. Although they almost look as if they’re days, or maybe weeks, old. I blink. The world has become fuzzy at the edges. I strap up Sam’s toes and we drink our wine and Alice picks up a makeup brush and paints Bea’s legs ocean blue while Bea paints hers.

When Alice and Bea are made up, we all go back into the master bedroom to change into our costumes. Bea and Alice chat and laugh, help each other with their zips and buttons,
run out into the bathroom and back to check out their dusty reflections. Alice uses eyelash glue to stick scales onto Bea’s face, and Bea glues tiny leaves to Alice’s. They are like earth and water. They go too well together. It makes my heart hurt.

When she is dressed, Alice is that girl in the Greek myth who turned into a tree. Her skin is bark and her branchlike arms are beginning to flower. She looks like a forest that just came to life, and she has come to life dancing. How amazing it must be to have legs after so many years as a tree. Beside her, Bea is the sea. There are gills in her neck that seem to breathe when she moves, and the scales on her face and on her mask shimmer. Her hands are webbed with silk and there is coral stuck to her skin.

Beside the two of them I feel ridiculous. A child’s fantasy, all dressed up in her mother’s clothes. The top of my tutu dress is made of several silk scarves stuck together and I worry that it shows too much. I keep pulling at the edges of it, trying to cover up. I think of the pictures of Alice when she was younger, fully dressed on the beach while the rest of us ran around in shorts and bikinis. I am all hard glitter and leathery wings. My tights are too sheer and my mask is too colorful and everything’s so bright it’s surreal. The others look almost eerie; I am only cutesy and winged.

“Everyone should be here soon,” says Alice, checking the time on her phone.

Bea pulls on her good arm. “Come downstairs with me,” she says to her. “Let’s start decorating.”

I tell myself not to take it as a snub that they don’t wait for me and Sam before clattering down the rickety stairs.

Behind me, Sam clears his throat. “Can you give me a hand with this face paint?” he asks.

I turn around and let myself look at him properly. With his costume on, his skin looks flickery, like he might not be all there. He has put temporary black dye on the blue streak in his hair and he is holding out the box of Bea’s mother’s stage makeup. It was Bea’s idea to paint his skin gray, make him completely monochrome, so that he would look like he’s stepped right out of a silent film.

I dab one of Alice’s makeup brushes into the face paint and he closes his eyes. I brush the paint over his eyelids; I cover the scattered freckles on his cheeks. My heart hammers against my rib cage like it’s trying to get out. I follow the contours of Sam’s face like I’m learning it by heart: the arch of his cheekbones, the scratchy stubble across his jaw, the almost-straight line of his once-broken nose. It makes it easier that his eyes are closed. It also makes it a little bit more like a kiss.

My hand trembles when I run the brush over his lips. When I’m finished, he licks them and makes a face at the taste of the paint. He opens his eyes and smiles.

“It’s proper stage makeup,” I say, and the words come out faint, “so it won’t just rub off.”

Sam stares into my eyes. “Okay,” he whispers. “Good.”