Page 145 of On His Mind

The distance I started drawing after the party is a real thing now, and here’s the beautiful, terrible part: the season draws it for me. I don’t have to be the one with my hand on the door. The schedule does it. Road trips eat whole weekends. Home games eat the nights on either side of them. Fuller runs us into the ground because we’re winning and winning makes him greedy for more — so I can’t come to her the way I did in September, and when I tell her that, it isn’t even a lie. That’s the worst of it. Iambusy. Iamgone. The calendar isn’t a story I made up to hide behind. It just happens to work exactly like one.

She’s got Melly in the second bedroom now, too — the roommate I told her to go and get. So there’s no more free run of the place, no more version of us with the whole apartment ours. And the handful of nights I do manage to reach her, we spend half of them sitting in a quiet that never used to be in the room with us.

She’s pulling back. I can feel it. She answers slower. She’s stopped asking when I’m coming next — and that’s the one that gets me, that she’s stopped asking. Last week I told hersoonand she told mesure, and nothing came of it, and neither of us has said a word about it since.

But she comes to the Hawthorne parties now. So even though I can’t put a hand on her, can’t say her name in the room the way I want to say it, I get to sit in the same loose circle she’s part of and catch her laughing at something across it. And even that — just that, just breathing the same warm air as her — is enough to keep me crawling back to the well. I want to be near her all the time. It’s the closest thing I have to feeling something, so I keep going back.

Lucy and Gianna come to Hawthorne to decorate for Halloween, and the whole house falls in behind them like recruits, taking their orders seriously.

“Pers,” Blue calls out. “What are you making? It smells like fucking Christmas in here.”

“Mango-free punch. Two batches. One spiked, one not. I labeled them.”

I gesture with the wooden spoon at two index cards leaning against the pitchers. One says Punch (Fun). The other says Punch (Boring).

Lucy, without looking up from her streamers, says, “Thank you, Percy.”

“You’re welcome,” I say back.

By noon the house is done, and the girls have gone off to get ready for tonight. The five of us — me, Benson, Stanley, Rowan, Blue — stand shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen doorway and take in the wreckage of it.

TheAll Tricks, No Treatssign hangs crooked on the wall. There’s black or orange stuffed into every corner of the house. The pumpkins we carved sit lined up on the sill, gap-toothed and grinning. My punch is chilling in the fridge behind its two little cards. Rowan’s vegetable tray is already out.

Benson elbows Blue in the ribs. “Better get ready for tonight, Blue.”

Blue goes red to the tips of his ears and hauls Stanley off to Spirit Halloween, the two of them swearing on the way out that they’ll come back with costumes for the whole house. Stanley’ll spend a fortune doing it, too — the man can’t walk past a thing without buying it. We all know he’s got more money to burn than the rest of us put together, and it’s one of the quiet good things about this house that nobody ever takes advantage of him.

They take off, and I head down to my room.

I pull out my phone before I’ve decided whether I should.

Me:You’re coming tonight?

Penelope:Yes.

One word. I read it about six times. I don’t write back, because my pulse has picked up the way it only ever picks up for her.

Near dinnertime the door starts going, small fists knocking, the singsong of it coming through the wood. “Trick or treat.”

Stanley lobs a mask at my chest. “Go hand out candy, Pers. You’re already dressed for it.”

I am — black on black, the way I always am. I pull the mask down over my face, take up the bowl, open the door, and the little cluster of kids on the step gasp and grab at each other’s arms. I hold the bowl down low and let them take as muchas their hands can carry, because it’s Halloween and no child should be rationed on Halloween. Then I lower myself onto the top step with the bowl in my lap, and I stay there.

The guys drift out after a while. The sun’s going down orange behind the houses, and the fog machine Stanley couldn’t help himself over is chugging away across the lawn, laying a low white river down over the grass that a couple of the trick-or-treaters can’t resist tearing straight through, shrieking.

Then an Uber slows at the curb. When the doors open, six girls in angel costumes spill out onto the sidewalk. Three in white, three in black, wings and all. And one of them is Penelope. Every bit of air leaves my lungs at once, because I’m back in June. A morning, the light coming in gold, her half asleep on my chest and me saying she was heaven-sent, and her mumbling like an angel? and me saying yeah. Like an angel. A nothing exchange. A thing I said into her hair on a lazy morning and never thought of again. She thought of it. She’s standing on the sidewalk in front of my house in white wings, and she wore my word for her. In a group costume, tucked in where nobody would ever know, where it means nothing to any of the five girls around her and everything tome. She did this for me. And now she’s right in front of me, and I can’t even do a single thing about it.

Melly crouches down to offer some kid a treat off her tray. Benson drops to one knee on the walk in front of Lucy like he’s proposing, sayingbaby, baby, babyso many times in a minute I lose count, and Gianna shoves Benson’s head as she goes. Lucy’s gone pink and pleased in the middle of it all.

And I don’t really watch a second of it, because I’ve only got eyes for the one angel that matters — the one in white, standing a little apart at the back of the group the way she always does.

I tip my head at her. Just barely. Our sign, from the summer.

She looks straight through me like I’m made of the same fog rolling across the yard.

Benson gets to his feet and wishes them all a Happy Halloween — warm and easy, out loud, the way a man’s allowed to be when he’s got nothing to hide. Penelope climbs the steps past me and stops at the top, arms folded over her wings, watching our friends rib each other down on the lawn. Gianna storms up after her, annoyed at her brother over the wholebabyand kneeling thing.

Then the girls and Benson file inside, the door swings shut behind them, and it’s just me and Blue left out here in the falling dark with a bowl of candy between us.