“Hey, what are you going as?” Mia asked me out of nowhere, looking up from her desk.

It was close enough to Halloween for me to catch her meaning. 

“Nothing.” I tried to sound offhand, and not pathetically homesick at all.

“Oh, come on.” she swiveled her chair to face me. “You’re not a ‘this is my costume’ orange t-shirt type of girl, are you?”

I aggressively wasn’t, but I shrugged like those t-shirts didn’t make me gag, and kept my eyes on my book.

“There’s not much point in putting a bunch of work and money into my outfit this year,” I said. “I’m just going to be staying in and watching horror movies.”

“Uh-uh, nope,” Mia shook her head. “You’re coming with me to the Delta Epsilon party. And costumes are mandatory.”

“Yeah, no.”

“Yeah, yes.”

“Look around,” I said.

Mia humored me with a glance around the room.

“What am I looking at, exactly?” she sighed. “All the smoking hot costumes you don’t have yet? Because there’s still time to fix that.”

“No,” I said, “just the room. Look at the room.”

Mia sighed again. “It’s a room.”

“It’s a dorm room,” I put her out of her misery. “The place where I live, specifically so that I don’t have to deal with sketchy sorority nonsense.”

Mia rolled her eyes.

“It’s your room, too,” I pointed out. “Why do you want to go?”

“Um, because Delta Epsilon Halloween parties are fucking legend.”

“I’ve never heard of them.”

Mia put one hand on her hip and rocked her arm back and forth, like a bird gauging the need for imminent flight, while she selected the tone of her next retort.

“You do know that you occasionally have to talk to people in order to hear things, right?”

She said it softly. It still hurt.

“I’m talking to you,” I pointed out, feeling my shrug get a little stiffer. “So, go on, tell me a legend. Who threw up on whose gross novelty costume? Who got their stomach pumped? Who woke up somewhere upsetting with their underwear in a tree?”

“No,” Mia was shaking her head vigorously. “No, not that kind of legend at all. Well… okay, a few of them are kind of like that,” she admitted. “But any Greek house party can end that way.”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

“And that’s not what makes this one special,” Mia insisted. “We’re not talking about just another kegger with some token pumpkins lying around. Supposedly, they do a full-on demon summoning ritual every year, like, with real demons. Serious coven shit.”

“Real demons?” I raised my eyebrow in the way I’d learned to do whenever someone was obviously making fun of me.

“Yes!”

“How are real demons better than alcohol poisoning?” I asked.

“Well, people remember them, for one thing,” Mia said, unironically. “Everyone I ask about the party gets this cute glimmer in their eye and just says something like, ‘you have to experience it for yourself,’ or, ‘just go, you won’t regret it.’ That kind of stuff. You know what they don’t say?”

“What?” I asked.

“They don’t say, ‘whatshername hasn’t been seen since last year.’ They don’t say, ‘I gave birth to a horned creature with yellow eyes.’ Nothing like that. So, whatever happens there, it doesn’t seem like, you know, like a bad kind of demonic.”

“There’s a good kind?”

“Obviously,” said Mia. “Come on, I thought you didn’t believe in that stuff anyway.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I don’t believe in Bloody Mary either, but that’s no reason to say her name in the mirror.”

Mia let out a delighted cackle, and clasped her hands together over her heart.

“Oh my god, really? Sweet little Addie is too scared to even play Bloody Mary?”

“No, it’s just…” I took several breaths in a row, like I could save them up to avoid having to take one in the middle of explaining myself. “In the infinitesimal chance that she’s real, you get murdered. In the overwhelmingly likely chance that she’s not, you get nothing. Where’s the upside? Why would you take that bet?”

“For the experience, duh,” said Mia. “Same reason to do anything for Halloween.”

Something about the way she said this shoved me to the verge of tears. Maybe it was how close it sounded to my own voice in my head these days, when I lamented how much I wanted to do something, anything, for Halloween.

Mia could smell weakness. Everyone could, when it was coming from me, but Mia especially.

She put her hands on both my shoulders.

“Look me in the face and tell me you really want to stay in and watch movies on Halloween night,” she said. “And I’ll shut up about the completely bitchin demon party that’s going to be happening right down the street.”

I reached up to pinch the bridge of my nose and discreetly wipe my eyes.

Why did those have to be the two options?

Why couldn’t we just dress up as our favorite characters and go trick-or-treating, without receiving more dirty looks than candy? Why did the rules for fun suddenly have to change when your chest filled in, or when you ran out of grade years and had to switch to a new school, the kind with majors and minors and creepy cult houses marked with ancient lettering?

“Ugh, fine,” I tossed my head back. “What kind of costume do I need, exactly?”

Mia hugged me, hard.

“Thank you,” she squealed in my ear. “I really didn’t want to go by myself.”

“So comforting,” I said.

She let go of me and backed up to clap her hands.

“God, I love how easy you are to bully,” she said.

“God, I hate how you say that like it’s a joke.”

#

Mia drove right past the Spirit Halloween and took us to easily the coolest costume store I’d ever seen in my life. Lit by rows of flickering LED torches, there were mannequins in spandex super-suits, racks of princess dresses on hangers, and cases of spider earrings and pirate swords under glass. There were rainbows of makeup kits, complimentary instructional cards, and posters everywhere of stunning cosplayers, each one accompanied by a suggested shopping list to match the look.

There were even dressing rooms.

Everything about the place suggested respect for the value of its contents. For this ritual of dressing up. This store did not fancy itself a vendor of disposable gestures. It did not demand that the thought should count — and therefore command full price — regardless of how little care went into its execution. There were no torn plastic bags here, decorated with pictures of accessories they had never contained.

The neat racks held these costumes in equal regard with the “real” clothes people might buy to go about their everyday lives. And when I reached out to touch them, I felt more fabric than plastic, held together with seams that left no gaps, and zippers and buttons that would close more than two or three times without breaking.

I was almost scared, no, scratch that, I was scared to start checking price tags. When I did… I couldn’t call them cheap, exactly, but then, neither were the crummy costumes that came in clear plastic bags. It looked like we’d be paying more or less department store prices for our new outfits, which was a better deal than I would have dared hope for.

Mia could have asked me to do just about anything right then, and I would have considered it a fair exchange for learning that this shop existed. But to my relief, she didn’t insist on dressing me up like a naughty nurse, or a naughty maid, or a naughty beekeeper, or anything like that.

I picked out a full-body suit that gave a great illusion of being nothing but a glowing skeleton in dim light. It fit surprisingly well, and looking at myself in the mirror gave me a taste of that Halloween anticipation I’d been pining for all season. I skipped the mask and grabbed some glow-in-the-dark paint instead, to make my face up like a skull.

Mia did go naughty, but with a typically Mia twist. Instead of some random job uniform with an inexplicably bare midriff, she got herself a mini-toga cut so short that she could show off a pair of cardboard-brown silk shorts just by bending over.

“Pandora’s box-ers, get it?” she giggled at herself.

“I got it,” I said, mentally counting out exactly three seconds of looking at her. I couldn’t trust myself to intuit the right length of time to avoid staring, and also avoid looking like I was trying to avoid staring.

“I’d better get a name tag anyway,” Mia decided, and grabbed a blank pin-on one from the accessory display near the dressing room. “Gotta make sure if someone offers to open my boxers for me, they’ll know what they’re getting into!”

Before we even got to the register, she was writing “Pandora” on the tag with a marker from her bag.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.” I shook my head.

Of course Mia knew cool out-of-the-way shops that I’d never even think to look for. Of course she treated things like they were hers before she’d paid for them, and didn’t stress about whether her debit card would work. Of course she would go to a party in the house of a sorority she didn’t belong to, in a costume that was a classical reference and a pun and a bit of crossdressing, and not worry about what anyone would think.

She didn’t have to worry. All things were cool when you did them with Mia’s confidence. And all things were hot if they involved showing off an ass like hers.

“Are you sure it’s nothing?” she bumped her shoulder playfully against mine on our way out the door. “You look a little flushed for a skeleton girl.”

#

I don’t know what I wanted the Delta Epsilon Sigma house to look like when we got there.

What façade could possibly have made me want to go inside, more than I wanted to turn and run until I was under the covers with a bag of Snickers and the entire Child’s Play series queued up on my phone?

The place was done up nicely, with cobwebs and graves, hand-carved jack-o’-lanterns, blood-spattered cauldrons, and a row of toy bats hanging from the underside of the roof, blinking their glowing green eyes at unpredictable intervals. All things that would have drawn me in with eager awe as a trick-or-treater.

But the bucket of candy on the step wasn’t for me. That was for the neighborhood kids. I was supposed to go inside, with the strangers. And there were edgy little touches here and there that made this prospect all the more intimidating — a rival sorority’s letters on one of the tombstones, the back side of one jack-o’-lantern crushed in with a ceremonial paddle, a dummy hanging by the neck from a tree branch with a haircut so purposeful that it had to be an effigy of some real person in particular.

It wasn’t me, but the night was young.

My feet were numb as I jabbed one in front of the other up the front walk, with Mia’s hand on my shoulder.

Not everyone here was a stranger, I realized as we crossed the threshold, though it would have been better if they were. Robyn and Tori, two former classmates of mine, were greeting people at the door in a coordinated angel and devil costume. Both of their gazes passed over me without acknowledgement.

I kept my gaze moving, too.

Between the sorority and the guests, the crowd was about three quarters women.

Men were clearly permitted, although most of them were standing in tight clusters, limbs pulled close to their bodies, acting like what they were: outnumbered.

Being a computer sciences major, I could admit to feeling guiltily refreshed at seeing them that way for a change.

There were a few, however, who were strutting around, reveling in their own scarcity among all the beautiful women in skimpy costumes.

More nerve-wracking than Robyn and Tori’s glances, I could hear Nolan’s braying laugh among the strutters.

Calling Nolan my ex would be an exaggeration. We’d been on one date. But if you believed any of the jokes, rhymes, or crude sketches that had come out of Omicron house in the weeks afterward, there was no depraved act he had not performed upon me.

Purely for the sake of looking busy, I got in line for the bar, where a woman dressed as a zombified fifties girl in a torn-up poodle skirt was serving cocktails named after various monsters, killers, and candies.

“Okay, focus up, thrill-seekers!” a woman in a Pikachu minidress waved her arms and clapped her hands.

I stepped gratefully out of line, ready for a structured activity.

“I’m Kaylee,” said the Pikachu woman. “I’ll be your mistress of ceremonies for tonight. And this…” she grabbed another sister out of the crowd and pulled her into view. “This is Evelyn. She’s the expert, so, you know, be nice to her and don’t get turned into a frog!”

Evelyn was wearing a pointed witch’s hat, which I was willing to guess was the only costume piece she’d bought for the occasion. The skillful gothic makeup, the chipped black nail polish that was already several days old, and the well-worn black t-shirt, jeans, and lace-up platform boots all definitely belonged to an everyday wardrobe rotation.

She had a pair of candlesticks tucked under her arm, and she gave the crowd an obligatory nod before pulling away from Kaylee to arrange them carefully on the floor, according to a set of criteria known only to her.

“Are we having a good time so far tonight?” Kaylee asked the guests, holding her palms out and flicking her fingers upward in a clear request for loud, affirmative replies.

We obliged her.

“Yeah, I’m super happy with how it all came out this year,” said Kaylee. “Vibes, tunes, treats, I’m not ashamed of any of it. Let’s give all these ladies a big hand!”

We obliged again. The sister behind the bar waved and blushed with beauty queen modesty.

“But we all know what we’re really here for!” Kaylee interrupted, raising a finger high in the air. “You could have gone anywhere tonight, to see some fake demons pop up from inside crypts.”

I could? I thought. Where exactly could I see this, would I be welcome, and is it too late to get there?

“But you came here to Delta house, where the demons are real, and better yet, the demons are yours. So let’s get ready to give them a warm welcome, huh?”

Faintly wondering what she meant by yours, I started to offer up another round of applause, before taking note of the appropriate response from the others around me.

The crowd was starting to spread out along the walls, yielding more space for whatever Evelyn was busy setting up, and turning eerily silent for a sorority house party, even with the scattered, excitable whispers.

One of the candlesticks was now standing in a garbage can lid full of a few inches of water. The path from the lid to the other candlestick was demarcated with a line of some sweet-smelling herb, and the whole setup was encircled with an unbroken line of salt that just barely brushed the back wall.

In a finishing touch that gave me a new round of run-for-it chills, Evelyn attached a short and very real-looking chain with a cuff on one end to a bolt drilled deep into the floor.

“So, for those who don’t know, here’s how it works,” Evelyn explained, taking a long drag from a vape and testing the chain with a rough tug. “This goes around each volunteer’s ankle before the summoning. No exceptions. It’ll stop you from going too far, but also the demons don’t seem to like steel, so it’ll keep you in control of your right leg. Any time you want to stop, just kick over the candle,” she pointed to the one poking out of the water, “and the connection will break instantly. We keep the other candle out of reach of the chain, so someone else can also blow it out if there’s an emergency.”

“Or if shit gets too wild!” Kaylee added to a thunder of cheers. “Okay, but seriously, to be clear, no one has to do anything they don't want to do, and someone will step in if anything starts to look unsafe. That said, we’re here because we recognize that these demons have a purpose, right?”

More cheers.

“They guide us to places we would usually avoid,” Kaylee went on. “Places we fear. Not at random, but because there’s something valuable to be found there. For everyone to get the most out of this experience, it’s important that we don’t meet the demons with more resistance than we need to. We strongly encourage following where they lead, in all situations where you feel brave enough to do so. That goes for everyone, not just the person wearing the chain.” She pointed knowingly at a few individuals in the crowd. “So. Do I have any volunteers to go first?”

Several voices exploded out of the crowd at once. Hands shot into the air.

Kaylee waved a very buff man, definitely an athlete, forward to be shackled.

“Hello again, Craig. How many times is this?” she asked while Evelyn fiddled with the padlock on the chain.

“Four,” he answered, like he’d been counting down to it for long enough to etch the number into his brain.

“Four! So, you know the drill by now.”

Craig nodded and accepted one of two lighters from Kaylee’s hand almost as soon as she offered it.

“I, Craig, do open the veil within myself,” he recited, spinning the striker on the lighter and holding the flame to the wick of the water candle.

The candle took the flame, and so did the other one, under Kaylee’s care.

Craig hovered a hand over his candle as he finished murmuring an invocation. “…And invite the creatures it holds at bay all year to join me for a dance!”

Instantly, Craig’s whole body went rigid, then soft, and he slid down onto the floor like a boneless plush toy.

The crowd watched him in perfect, anticipatory silence.

Craig rolled onto his back, stroking his hands languidly up and down his own chest, shamelessly caressing the peaks of his nipples through the button-down shirt of his Ash Williams costume, without seeming to consider for a second the fact that he was being observed.

One hand continued up to his face and poked a few fingers into his mouth, which he sucked absently. He rocked from side to side a few times, as if for the pure joy of the movement itself, and then looked up at me.

“Would you hug me?” he asked, spreading his arms with that same languid, luxurious gentleness. “I’d really like a hug.”

I froze, staring down while he stared up. I couldn’t say no to such a soft, earnest-sounding request, but nor was I willing to bet that there was no cruel change of demeanor waiting for once I stepped within reach.

Thankfully, Craig was more interested in a hug than in a hug from me, and he moved on quickly to scan his pleading gaze across the rest of the crowd. Someone dressed as Catwoman jumped in soon enough and held him. He buried his face in her ample chest and began to sob real tears, first softly, then in unrestrained heaves.

I glanced back and forth at the other guests to see if I was supposed to look away, but no one else was.

It was just a game, of course. A performance, or some effect of the power of suggestion, but it was still startling to see that kind of expression come so willingly and publicly out of such a butch looking guy.

After several minutes, a measurement that didn’t accurately reflect how long a time it felt at all, Kaylee blew out the candle with a sharp puff.

Craig instantly sat up and wiped his eyes, looking almost like a different person for how he held himself. He shook the Catwoman’s hand a little awkwardly, and then Evelyn’s when she freed him.

“Well done as always, Craig!” Kaylee patted him on the shoulder on his way out of the circle. “Who’s next?”

She surveyed the whole clamoring room before allowing Mia’s wild gesticulations to direct her attention to me.

Kaylee smiled at me, questioning.

I knew, rationally, how absurd it was to assume that this whole party was nothing but a cruel and elaborate joke on me, specifically. And even if that turned out to be true, what difference did my suspicions make? My ankle was going to end up in that chain sooner or later. I knew it. Anyone who had marked me as easy prey knew it. I might as well just get it over with.

I stepped forward, trying to ignore the encouraging claps and whoops of the crowd, just in case they were all building me up for a harder fall.

Evelyn closed the manacle around my ankle in the manner of a busy nurse taking blood pressure, then removed her vape from between her teeth.

“What’s your name, babe?” she asked in a breath that smelled like jasmine and apples and nighttime.

“Addison,” I answered in a neutral mumble.

“Madison?”

“Addison,” I corrected a little louder.

“Okay, Addison, I need you to light the candle, and place your left hand over the flame. Not too close, it’s not about pain, you just gotta kind of feel the aura of it.”

I held the lighter to the wick, and then cautiously moved my hand into place. I was watching Evelyn and the crowd more than the flame itself, keeping myself ready to jerk my arm away, if anyone darted forward to slam my palm into the wax.

No one made any sudden moves.

“Repeat after me,” said Evelyn. “I, Addison, do open the veil within myself.”

I repeated the invocation as she fed it to me, imitating her crisp but expressionless delivery.

“And invite the creatures it holds at bay all year to join me for a dance—”

Almost before I’d finished the last line, something shifted inside me so forcefully and abruptly that it made me gasp.

The crowd gasped at my gasp.

It wasn’t like electricity, or fire and sulfur, or anything like that. It was more like the strangeness of having someone blow into your mouth while making out. There was a paradoxical feeling of being unable to breathe for a few seconds, before I realized that, if I relaxed and did nothing, the breath that I needed would enter and leave me at a comfortable, normal pace, driven by a force that was not me.

The feeling spread beyond the rise and fall of my lungs to the blinking of my eyelids, the balance of my torso, every part of my body. Every part except my right leg, that was. I wiggled my toes and bent my knee, and then called upon every ounce of restraint I possessed to keep from kicking the candle over on the spot.

It was such a strange sensation that a large part of me reflexively wanted to stop it and catch my breath. My breath. But at the same time, it actually felt pretty good. There was an undercurrent of serene euphoria that got clearer the more used to it I became.

Something bright and energetic bubbled up from inside me that I didn’t recognize as a laugh until I heard it spill out of my mouth.

“Oh, what… what the fuck?” I cackled out loud without choosing the words for myself. I would never have chosen such crude ones, but the feel of them clacking against my tongue and throat on their way out was curiously satisfying. “What have I been doing to myself?”

My head swung back and forth, wringing two loud pops out of my neck and leaving it looser than I’d known it could be.

“Robyn!” I shouted without warning.

I tried to clasp my hands over my mouth, stuff her name back into it if I could, but my hands did not currently obey my orders any more than my mouth did.

“Tori!” soon followed off my tongue.

They both shuffled to the front, carried by the shifting of the crowd more than their own feet.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know me,” I said.

Was this what Kaylee had meant by summoning our demons? Whatever was currently in control of my body certainly had a lot in common with some of the noise that lived inside my head, noise that was absolutely not allowed access to my mouth under normal circumstances.

Jeez, it sounded even more abrasive out loud.

Robyn and Tori plastered on broad, nearly matching smiles.

“Of course we know you,” Robyn took the lead as usual. “How have you been, Addie? It’s good to see you.”

“Is it?” I asked.

“Well, sure, why wouldn’t it be?” she giggled affably.

“Because it’s not good to see you,” I said. “It never has been. And you definitely know that.”

Tori took a step backward, only to hit a solid wall of bodies.

Robyn only widened her smile further. “Oh, come on, Addie. We go back.”

“We do,” I agreed.

“And the bad stuff was all so long ago.”

“Not really,” I disagreed. “And it was all bad stuff.”

“Addie….”

“Look, all I want to know is this: are you ashamed of how you treated me? Or are you proud?”

“Christ, Addie, we were just kids.”

“Ashamed, then?” my mouth asked, quick as a whip, while my mind was barely embarking on a days-long search for the perfect comeback. “That sounds like you’re ashamed. People don’t usually make excuses for things they’re proud of.”

How was I breathing so slowly, without blacking out? Every word this thing, this autopilot, this demon spoke on my behalf was reason for all-out panic. My pulse should have been racing, burning through oxygen faster than I could gulp it down, but my body felt perfectly at ease, in defiance of the storm inside my head.

I knew the smart thing to do would be to pull the plug on this rude, eerily calm imposter of myself before she could get me in any more trouble than she already had. But it wasn’t just my body that felt incredible with her behind the wheel. As well as a slow, steady, perfect flow of air, my chest was full of the sweet warmth of being stood up for.

“I’m ashamed,” Tori piped up, removing her halo headband and worrying it in her hands. “I’m sorry, Addie. Really. I’m sorry about the time we told everyone that your house had rats, and that the rats had rabies, and that you probably had rabies, so they’d be scared to go to your birthday party. I’m sorry about replacing your mascara with glue. I’m sorry about the nicknames and the stupid snotty things I said, and I’m sorry about the whole chicken soup incident. I’m not good under pressure. I’m not good at going against the flow.”

“Yeah, what she said,” Robyn mumbled, crossing her arms.

“Really, ‘what she said’?” I repeated. “This of all moments is when you’re going to let her do the talking?”

“Look, we apologized, okay?” said Robyn, more to the crowd than me.

Something had noticeably shifted in the way many of them were looking at her. Maybe this house wasn’t as much in favor of cruel power abuses as I’d assumed by the letters over the door. Or maybe they were all just tremendous hypocrites.

“No,” I said. “She apologized. For going along with you. Hey, Tori, do you even like being friends with Robyn? Or was it just better than ending up like me?”

Tori took several seconds too long to answer.

“Wow,” said Robyn. “I see how things are.”

“Do you?” I asked. “Or are you just demanding to be assured that things aren’t the way they are?”

“Look, I’m sorry, okay!” Robyn snapped. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Kiss my ass.”

Robyn scoffed, rolled her eyes, and turned to shove her way toward the bar. “See, this is why I don’t do apologies,” she muttered.

“Hey,” I barked at full volume. “That wasn’t a figure of speech. It was an answer to your question.”

Robyn turned back, mouth open as if she expected words simply to fill the space of their own accord. But she wasn’t the one in the leg chain, so no such thing happened.

“I remind you all,” Kaylee cut in, “following where the demons lead is strongly encouraged… if you’re brave enough.”

This prompted a room-wide chant of “kiss it!” to which Tori responded — how else? — by going with the flow.

She dropped to her knees and shuffled forward until she was close enough to wrap her arms around my thighs, and laid a series of kisses onto the softness of my hip in a machine gun rhythm, like a tribute of affection onto the top of an aloof cat’s head.

“Oh, yeah? That’s what you want?” Robyn said, again more to the crowd than me. “That’s how you want to see me?”

She spread her hands wide, claiming possession of the attention, no matter the type, and stepped toward me, holding eye contact for a low-speed game of chicken.

My heart continued its restful pace in my chest. Even my eyes seemed to require fewer blinks than usual. The distance ran out, and soon she was kneeling at my other side, not just kissing but fully making out with the side of my skeleton catsuit, running her tongue up and down the glow in the dark femur.

“That’s it, do it with style,” I said. “Maybe it’ll make everyone forget the substance of what you’re doing and why.”

The reality of having my ass kissed felt very different from the concept alone. The words could be used to push someone to a distance, but the act was undeniably close.

I had plenty of ass to go around, plenty of surface area that was nothing but flesh, but even so, I couldn’t help imagining what it would feel like for those two mouths to work their way a little farther back… or forward.

The moment the thought crossed my mind, the demon ran with it.

“Hey, Nolan, does this bring back memories for you?” I shouted, cupping my hand around my mouth and waving to him. “No, wait, this is just about the only position you wouldn’t brag about, isn’t it? On your knees. Worshipping at the altar of someone else’s body. You’re always the one on top in the stories you tell. Literally and figuratively. Which is already kind of suss, don’t you think? But you do know my body, don’t you, Nolan? Intimately. Inside and out. Right?”

The silence stretched out, until a guy in a cop outfit elbowed Nolan in the shoulder of his Viking furs.

“Uh, yup, yeah,” Nolan grunted.

“Let’s play a game,” I said. “It’s an easy game, part memory, part description. It starts with you telling everyone what my breasts look like in all the detail you can stand. And then, when everyone’s formed a solid mental image, we’ll see how close they all are to the real thing.”

I tried to move my hands again, to assure myself that they were mine, and that they would not suddenly undress me in front of all these people of their own accord. Again, nothing responded except my right foot, next to that candle.

“Isn’t her turn up yet?” Nolan asked.

“No way, this is way too good,” said Kaylee.

I had just taken a step back, preparing to kick. But if Nolan wanted my turn to end, that felt like a pretty compelling argument to keep it going. I shifted my weight back to center.

“Go on,” I said. “Paint us a picture.”

“I don’t know…” Nolan scratched the back of his neck. “Feels kind of ungentlemanly.”

“Aww, come on,” my voice became both cutting and sweet. “It’s a demon summoning! Besides, you’ve described them so many times already, it’s not like you’ll have to put the words together from scratch.”

Nolan sighed and slumped his shoulders slightly, seeming to realize that there was no point in changing his story now.

“Like two sweet little cupcake tops,” he repeated one of the phrases that had dogged my steps since he’d coined it. “With two perky little cherries on top, that reach out to say hi.”

Now would have been another excellent moment to kick the candle if I wanted to. But I didn’t.

I let my hands undo the hidden zippers that ran flat along the shoulders of my costume, making plenty of space for me to shimmy it down to my waist.

I unfastened my bra and gave a bouncing little flourish, before tossing it to the floor like I never needed to see it again.

The bra was a minimizer, and without it, neither my breasts nor my nipples could reasonably be compared with “little” anythings. They spilled abundantly out of my hands when I cupped them for a playful jiggle. Most tellingly, my areolas were almost palm-sized and more brown than pink, not the least reminiscent of cherries, candied or otherwise.

“Ooh, no points for that one,” I announced to a round of nervous laughter.

“I mean,” Nolan shuffled his feet, “the lighting’s different, the mood’s different… and it’s all kind of subjective, isn’t it…?”

“Hmm, yeah, I see what you mean,” the demon humored him. “Try to be more specific during round two. Objective details. Like you’re telling someone how to identify my corpse. Further down now. What do you ‘remember’ about the rest of me?”

Even more committed now, Nolan sighed and said, “I don’t know, you looked… normal. You had one of those cute landing strips last I saw, but I don’t know, you could have shaved it or grown it out since then.”

“Really hedging our bets there, aren’t we?” I teased.

He shrugged. “I don’t know what else to say.”

“Okay, then. Let’s see what’s behind door number two!”

I stripped the lower half of my costume, along with my panties, out from under Robyn and Tori’s mouths. They both paused for a moment, but when Robyn opted to keep showily making out with the bare skin of my hip, Tori followed suit.

I kicked the costume most of the way off onto the floor, though the shackle still held it to me by one ankle.

The crowd took an extra few seconds to process what they were seeing, and then broke into a louder, even more nervous laugh.

“Ouch, that’s still a zero on the board for contestant number one!” I shouted over the laughter, lengthening and intensifying it further.

On my lower abs, just above the beginnings of my pubic hair, I had a tattoo of a unicorn locked in pitched and eternal combat with an extremely cute cyborg bat.

When my cousin had come to visit for my eighteenth birthday, she’d offered to buy me my first ink as a present, so of course not getting anything would have been much too awkward to talk my way into.

I’d picked the placement to be well hidden under my usual style of dress, and the content to amuse myself.

Nolan’s mouth was working furiously in the air. “Who would ever guess that you had a reverse tramp stamp?” he objected.

Some combination of embarrassment and drink must have muddled his understanding of the rules.

“No one,” I answered. “Unless they’d seen it.”

By the general murmur of the crowd, it seemed most of them remembered the point of all this.

“My turn!” I declared brightly. “Let’s see…. Your dick is a marvel of organic miniaturization.”

There were a few hoots and shouts.

“And I’m not talking about a sweet, fun-sized, fit-it-anywhere, gentle-glide wonder. I’m talking about the sour, brittle, little green Jolly Rancher at the bottom of the bag. The kind that fits so well on a sour, brittle, little green man that everyone who sees it wonders, which came first, the dick or the dude? Which one of you infected the other with inadequacy? Or were you just born a perfect match?”

The crowd had grown a little quieter.

“That’s not memory, by the way,” I said. “Everyone’s figured that out by now, right? That we’ve never seen each other naked? It’s just a really, really safe guess. So, let’s see it, how did I do?”

Nolan reached tentatively for his loincloth, glancing around for confirmation that this was what was expected of him.

There was expectation, definitely. But unlike Robyn, he couldn’t seem to summon the necessary showmanship to take the moment for his own. His hands paused on the edge of the cloth, and then retreated from it.

In the same motion, he turned and walked right out of the house, head bowed against a chorus of drunken booing.

“Mia!” this version of me didn’t waste any time mourning Nolan’s departure. I pointed at my roommate, pushing this night along. “Mia, Mia, Mia.”

Mia looked warily back at me, waiting to be dealt her share of the untold vitriol buried inside me.

“You look incredible, Mia.” The voice in my throat softened, and so did Mia’s expression. “You always look incredible. And I love the costume. It makes me crazy insecure, because it’s just another bit of proof of how much braver you are than me. But I love it on you.”

Mia straightened her toga with a pleased grin and a ghost of a blush. “Thanks.”

I put my hands on Robyn and Tori’s foreheads and pushed them away from my naked body. They retreated easily into the crowd.

I did not cover myself.

“Mia…” her name took on a husky, reverent inflection in my throat, and this, rather than anything else I’d said or done tonight, was enough to send a measurable spike of adrenaline through my body in spite of the demon’s cool confidence. The hairs on my arms stood up.

The demon was about to shake up my life, maybe irreversibly. Not the distant outskirts of it, where people like Nolan and Robyn and Tori lived, but the center of it. The mischievous imposter in my body was encroaching upon my home, but it was giving me time to bar the door.

My toes touched the trash can lid full of water, where the candle stood.

I toyed with the prospect of choosing my own words and actions again, my own way out of the situation where I found myself. The thought was exhausting. I had no faith whatsoever that I’d do a better job of it than this demonic temp.

“Mia,” I repeated, in that same revealing tone. “I’d like to be the one to open Pandora’s boxers tonight, and I’d really like to know if you’d like that too.”

Mia’s mouth started to open.

“Don’t answer now,” I said. “I don’t want the crowded room answer. I should have asked you earlier, when we were alone. When you were showing off for me in the dressing room, and you made a joke about someone opening them… well, that was the word you used. Someone. Not some guy. And it seemed like it might be a signal, just for me, but I could have been wrong. And if I were braver and smoother, I would have sent a signal back, or just straight-up asked you, instead of driving myself nuts about it all day while pretending not to think about it. I’m sorry I had to get possessed to shoot my fucking shot.”

You could hear a Tootsie Roll drop in the room.

“That’s all,” I said.

Suddenly, in the course of about three seconds, my possessed foot lined itself up to kick the candle, I moved my un-possessed foot to stop it, and with neither of my feet in position to bear weight, I toppled over into the water.

The candle snapped against the bottom of the lid beneath me, leaving me with the splash, and the weight of my limbs, and the chore of moving them.

“Holy shit!” Kaylee exclaimed, gesturing for agreement, which she got, with some to spare. “Are we off to a great start or what?”

I started small, gathering up my clothes and fitting them back on while Evelyn unchained my leg and patted me down with a wad of napkins.

“Who’s up next?” Kaylee asked. “Don’t worry, we’ve got plenty more candles! Mia? Want to see if your demons have anything they’d like to say back?”

Mia looked to the chain with a trace of the fascination she’d arrived with, and then at me with a trace of something else I couldn’t interpret.

She shook her head. “Not right now.”

I shoved my way out of the room toward nowhere in particular. The only place I wanted to be was away from anyone who might expect an encore performance or a Q&A from the creature who had left me alone out there when the candle went out.

Every step was laborious. How did I just live like this all the time? How did everyone?

I ended up in a laundry room. It was dark, except for the streetlights streaming in through a small window near the ceiling, which suited me fine. For the sake of somewhere to sit, I tripped my way over to a plastic cemetery bench, through uncarved pumpkins, a barrel of apples, cases of unchilled drinks, and other decorations that either hadn’t made the cut for use this year, or were waiting to be brought out for some specific activity.

Mia followed, and closed the door behind me.

#

“So. That was pretty wild, right?” Mia sank down onto a case of beer next to me, and kneaded a glowstick until it gave off an aura of green light wide enough to surround us both.

“Yeah,” I said. Pushing this word out in a tone that sounded not too haunted required an unreasonable amount of muscular control.

“I mean, you really got into it up there. I’ve never seen you like that before.” Mia forced a laugh, like my whole possession was just the kind of thing that came and went at a party. Nothing to be taken seriously.

“Neither have I,” I said.

Mia pulled over a box of pumpkin-flavored hard seltzer, cracked open a can, and took a long sip, diluting the evening with more deniability, more uncertainty.

I wanted to knock the can out of her hands.

“What did it feel like?” she asked. “Do you remember—”

“I remember all of it,” I confirmed.

“Oh. That’s good.” She nodded. “I mean, it’s all about the experience, so it would suck if the person in the middle of the trick didn’t get to feel like they’d actually experienced anything.”

I wondered if she’d chosen the word “trick” on purpose, to sound dismissive. Or was it just the first word that had occurred to her? If my demon alter-ego were here, she probably would have just asked.

My gut told me the demon was trying to do me some twisted favor, by abandoning me to figure out how to do this stuff alone. But it was hard to imagine I could do that, with such a brief demonstration to go on.

“It really is like they say,” Mia sighed. “The night’s not even over, and I’m already counting down to next year’s party.”

Shakily, unusually aware of the weight of my own arm, I reached for the seltzer can. Mia surrendered it easily. I brought it to my lips, took one sip of the sweet, spicy bubbles over the smear of Mia’s lipstick on the metal, and then set it down out of reach.

I looked at her. Right at her. Before either of us could look away, I said, “I don’t want to wait for next year.”

Mia took several short breaths, without laughing, almost without sound.

“I don’t either,” she whispered.

The demon still refused me any physical assistance. I had to cross the distance all by myself, place my own hand on Mia’s cheek, and bring my lips to hers.

Mia, on the other hand, gave me plenty of assistance, once I got there. She parted her lips and drew mine in between them, first one, then the other, flooding me with the flavors of that lipstick, smooth and creamy and faintly medicinal, and behind it, the warm, savory, alive taste of her mouth itself.

My heart set off in an unbridled sprint. I couldn’t get enough air, but the act of trying was a thrill in and of itself, because it meant breathing in more of Mia.

After a long moment, she put her hands on my shoulders and pulled away, just enough for us to see each other in the dim, green light, and giggle at the transfer between her red lipstick and the black of my skull makeup.

“How long have you known you were into me?” she asked.

“Since today,” I said. “And kind of always.”

“Same,” said Mia.

She ran a finger thoughtfully up and down the side of my neck, one of the few areas of skin the skeleton suit left bare. It looked like she was working up the courage for something. Mia never needed to work up courage.

“So, was that a real offer you made me back there?” she asked finally.

It took me a moment to figure out what part of what the demon had said constituted an offer.

“Oh!” I put a hand tentatively on her thigh, and stretched my fingertips just a little way under the hem of Pandora’s boxers. “I mean yeah, yes, if you want it to be.”

Mia kissed me again, grinned, and lay back luxuriously on the rows of drink crates. I quickly reached forward to position a stuffed scarecrow under her head as a pillow, and then, since I was in the neighborhood, I kissed her again.

She helped me unfasten the brooch that held her mini-toga in place and let it fall open over a strapless nude bra.

One at a time, I scooped each breast out of its cup to hold it, stroke its smoothness, and kiss its hardening peak, before setting it back in place, so that Mia would have the option of dressing quickly, if someone decided it was time to bring the apple barrel upstairs.

I noted, with faint amusement, that Nolan would have quite liked Mia’s breasts, far more than my own, if his crude descriptions could be taken as indicators of his tastes. But I pushed the thought away. Nolan had played no role in my intimate life before tonight, and I wasn’t about to give him one now.

I worked my way down Mia’s abs with my fingers and lips, thinking with every kiss, “Mia, Mia, Mia.”

That was who I was here with.

This was her.

She was right here.

I was as close to her as a person could be.

Finally, I reached the waistband of the boxers, unfastened the single button, and opened the flap.

Mia had gone for authenticity and wore no other underwear beneath them.

I traced her inner hip joints with my thumbs, and leaned in close, breathing her in deeper.

“Mmmmm,” Mia sighed happily and spread her legs a little wider, when I exhaled warm breath back over the surface of her naked vulva.

I understood what she wanted me to do, what I wanted to do, but I was grappling with a fresh fit of awareness that I’d never done anything like this before. After coming this far, I really didn’t want to mess it up.

I started as gently as I could, touching the very tip of my tongue to the center of her folds and then dragging it forward to her clit, using barely enough pressure to maintain contact at all.

Mia took a sharp breath in and out, and I could feel goosebumps rising on her thighs underneath my hands, so I repeated the same motion again, and again.

Her legs rose up onto her tiptoes beneath me, trying to lift her hips closer, so I took that as a sign to lick a little harder on the next pass.

When I reached her clit again, she winced, and I froze.

“Softer,” she whispered. “Please.”

I went back to barely touching her, but she still seemed to want more.

“Your tongue,” she explained. “Make it softer.”

It took a few seconds of experimentation for me to realize that I could indeed do that. Once I gave up the idea of carefully controlled precision and stopped sharpening my tongue to a fine-tipped instrument, Mia practically melted into me. She stopped shifting position and lay still and open, while I lapped at her clit with a wide, soft, messy stroke.

“That’s it,” she sighed.

As inexact as that movement felt, I was able to keep repeating it, closely enough, until her legs began shifting and fidgeting in a very different way.

“Oh god, you’re going to make me scream!” she moaned, and hidden in a dark basement room of someone else’s house, I couldn’t tell if that was a compliment or a warning. But she didn’t seem to be asking to stop. In fact, her hands were clutching at the back of my head in a way that would have made it an effort to pull away, so I kept going, exactly as I had been, until her warning became a reality.

The noise that came out of her sounded the way my demon voice had felt, drawn from deep down in a place that had no concept of restraint or foresight or concern.

Thankfully, it coincided with an especially loud cheer from the demon-watchers upstairs.

Long after the scream had escaped, Mia brought a hand to her mouth, looking faintly embarrassed. I reached for both her hands and pulled her upright and into my arms.

I wasn’t sure if she’d want to, but she kissed me again, mixing the headier, tangier taste of her into the blend of mouths and makeup between us.

“Good?” I asked, as soon as she gave me room to.

“Oh my god, why did we waste so much time not doing that?” Mia moaned and moved her kisses down my neck.

Then she rested her forehead on my shoulder and groaned.

“What?”

“I feel so sappy,” she said.

“I like you too, Mia,” I said, and laughed giddily at my own boldness.

“Promise me,” Mia lightly slapped my shoulder, “next Halloween we’ll do something scary.”

“Scarier than this?” I guided her hand to my heart. “I’m terrified.”

“Still?” she laughed along. “Here. Let me help you with that.”

She reached down to brush her fingers lightly over the thin layer of black spandex between my legs, sending shivers not just up my spine but along every bone in my body.

I stripped the costume back off, trying not to move too fast or look too overeager, but when Mia snorted and called me adorable, I found I didn’t miss whatever dignity the smile on her face might have cost me.

I didn’t care how difficult it would be to cover myself quickly if we were interrupted, either.

Everyone here had seen me naked already tonight, and if they happened to stumble upon a glimpse of the best, coolest, most triumphant moment of my life so far, then so be it. Let them go to the trouble of saying “excuse me” and backing away.

Mia knelt down between my knees, still smiling like it was her best moment as well, and kissed her way slowly up and down my thighs. Just when I thought I couldn’t stand the suspense any longer, she planted her lips right around my clit and began a gentle, swirling, sucking motion that gave me no room at all to offer notes.

The shivers in my bones intensified to a single, rising tone, and I realized this was not going to take nearly as long as my own mouth’s fumbling lesson had.

As the silent, deafening pitch of sensation inside me neared a threshold, I forgave my demon, even thanked her for coming and going at exactly the moments she had, and leaving me in my body for this, with my senses dialed up to full volume.

My body was an amazing place to be.

***

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