Page 78 of Devils' Day Party
“We're going to have weekly luncheons, huh?” I say, lifting a dark brow in response. My natural hair is a blue-black, very similar to Calix's, which makes it a huge pain in the ass to dye. I had to bleach it four times to get my hair the color it is now. “Where we will all live? I was thinking … New York.”
“New Orleans, duh,” Luke says, glancing my way with a smile. “You'll be the artist in residence, Karma; I'll either be a manga artist or studying engineering at the university, probably both. April and Thad will move down there after they both turn eighteen, and we'll help raise the baby—like a proper village.”
“Thad is deathly afraid of alligators, but I bet I could convince him with uh, the sexual act.”
“The sexual act?!” Luke howls, throwing her head back with a laugh. My heart pings strangely in my chest and my lips part in surprise. This is a completely different circumstance to day one, but yet, an eerily similar echo. “I thought I was the only person that called it that.”
“I don't know why I said that,” April laughs, clutching her belly as she chuckles. “I swear, I've never used that term before. That's the term my parents used when they caught me and Thad together. Fucking, that's what I should've said. Fucking.”
“You're such a goof,” Luke says, rolling her brown eyes and moving over to her closet. She takes out the sequin dress shirt I saw her wear the first day, with a strange bow tie made of sticks and dried flowers that I didn’t notice before. “Hey, question about the Devils' Day Party tonight … do we even want to go?”
“What do you mean?” I ask, thinking about Barron and his sketchbook. He most definitely had it with him on some of the nights I was there. What thing is it that I do that triggers him to bring the sketchbook or not, I can't figure, but my plan is to steal it. I feel like to understand him, I have to see what's inside.
“I mean, let's just stay here. We'll order in food. Karma and I can smoke weed, April you can OD on sugar, and we can … I don't know, what do girls do on sleepovers? Paint their nails?”
I roll my eyes at her. She's been to plenty of sleepovers with me.
“You know better than that: we either paint our nails or fuck shit up.” I grin and Luke grins back, probably recalling that time in ninth grade when we snuck out of the moms' house in the middle of the night, pedaled our bikes to the twenty-four hour convenience store, and stole some beers under the guise of buying powdered donuts.
“The donuts do not make us rebels of any sort or breed,” Luke says with total confidence. “So don't even bring that up. But if you're talking about the tiger thing …”
“Can you two stop with the bromance and explain both the donut and the tiger thing to me, please?”
“Luke and I once climbed into a tiger's cage at the wildcat refuge outside of Eureka Springs. The damn cat was even awake and watching us. Fortunately, it was one of the nice ones …”
April shoves up from her chair and turns to face both me and Luke simultaneously, throwing her arms out to either side.
“You can't tell me stuff like that and expect me to stay home on Devils' Day. This is my first Devils' Day Party; I have to go. Especially if you might climb into a tiger cage or … I dunno, kill one of the Knight Crew with a package of powdered donuts.”
“I'm going to try to steal Barron's sketchbook tonight,” I offer up, and Luke howls with laughter.
“Okay, okay,” she relents, shaking her suit out and lifting it higher with a grin. “This, I have to see.”When we get to the party, the guard at the gate—wearing a grinning white fox mask—takes our phones and lets us through. We park Luke's convertible next to Raz's Shelby Cobra and my heart cracks a little in the middle.
“I'm going to sneak in,” I tell the girls as they climb out. I've switched up not only my mask today—trading it out for one of my moms’—but also my makeup, my outfit … and my hair. I've dyed it half-bloodred and half-black. Pretty sure I've just bleached it to death, but if my assumptions are right, when I wake up, I'll be back to my purple hair. After all, if I can die here and wake up without any injuries beyond what I got in the initial car crash, then I must not be ageing. My nails don't seem to have grown out, nor the roots of my hair.
Time is quite literally standing still for me.
