Chapter 1
The music reached them before the house did. A slow beat rolled down the driveway, past forty jack-o'-lanterns lined up in a row like little guards. Somebody had carved every one of them with the same crooked, gap-toothed grin. It was just a stencil, reused forty times. Scott wouldn't think twice about that until much later.
"Tell me again why we're doing this," Mason said from the back seat, arms crossed, looking like a man being driven somewhere against his will.
"Biggest party of the year," Ryan said, already unbuckling. "Free pool, free candy, a hundred girls who won't remember our names by Monday. Which honestly works in our favor. Get out of the car."
"That's not an argument. That's a wish list."
"It's both. Get out of the car, Mason."
They got out of the car.
The Halloway place swallowed sound the way big houses do when they're built for exactly this. A fog machine breathed sweet, thick smoke across the lawn. Strings of orange bulbs flashed through the mist. A hundred voices stacked together into one long roar, no single word left in it by the time it reached the street. Somebody cannonballed. Somebody else screamed, happy, not scared yet. Near the pool gate a girl dressed as a paramedic argued with a guy dressed as a corpse about whether his face paint would survive the deep end. He kept insisting it was waterproof. She kept telling him that wasn't how waterproof worked.
For the first forty minutes, it was just a party. A nice one. The kind of house where somebody's parents clearly had money, but there was still a junk drawer in the kitchen and a dog bed by the back door. Nothing about it looked built to hide anything. That plain, normal feeling would turn out to matter more than anything else about the house. Nobody told Scott that yet. He wouldn't have believed them if they had.
Derek found them at the pool gate, red cup in hand, wearing the easy grin of a boy who'd been born knowing how to host a room. "You made it," he said, clapping Scott's shoulder hard enough to rock him forward. "Food's in the kitchen. Punch is stronger than advertised. Try not to drown, my mom will actually kill me."
Then he was gone, pulled into some crisis about a pool float. Scott lost him in the crowd almost right away. It didn't matter. He'd already found the one person he'd actually come looking for, even if he hadn't admitted that to himself in the car.
Emma stood near the sliding door in a plain black dress, a pair of cat ears pushed up into her hair like she'd forgotten she was wearing them at all. She was laughing at something a friend had said, head tipped back, and for exactly one second her eyes found his across thirty feet of costumed strangers.
She smiled. Every word Scott had ever learned left his head at once.
"Go talk to her," Ryan said, not even looking away from the pool, like he had some built-in sense for exactly when Scott needed telling.
"And say what?"
"Doesn't matter what. Nobody remembers what you said. They remember that you said something."
"That's the worst advice I've ever been given."
"It's not advice. It's a fact. Ask literally anyone."
By the time Scott worked up the nerve, Emma had been pulled into the kitchen crowd, and the moment went with her. Quietly. Without asking his permission first.
Next time, he thought, and reached for a cup of punch that turned out to be a lot stronger than advertised.
The party did what big parties do. It swallowed them whole for a while, and Scott let it.
He lost Mason to a card game that had started on a garage table clearly not meant for cards, which stopped no one. Ryan attached himself to a cluster of underclassmen who found his improvised zombie-referee bit, complete with a whistle and a flag thrown at random, the funniest thing they'd seen all night. Scott drifted on his own, which suited him fine. He'd always been better at watching a room than performing in one, a habit two years of reading a football field had sharpened without his ever noticing it happen.
He caught things without meaning to. A girl by the cooler kept touching her own collarbone, checking that a necklace was still there, except there was no necklace. A guy in a pirate costume laughed a half-second behind every joke told near him, the way you laugh when you're translating something instead of actually finding it funny. None of it meant anything yet. It was Halloween. People got strange on purpose and called it fun.
Ryan found him by the drinks table a little after ten, two fresh cups in hand and a look on his face that didn't sit right.
"Weird thing," he said.
"What."
"Some guy just called me Ry-Ry."
Scott looked at him properly. "So?"
"Nobody calls me Ry-Ry. My grandma calls me Ry-Ry. My mom, when she's genuinely mad at me. That's the entire list." Ryan glanced back toward the crowd near the cooler. "Big mask, covered basically his whole face. Not a cheap one either, more like one of those smooth doll masks. Said it like we grew up on the same street and walked off before I could even ask who he was."
"You know everybody who'd know that nickname."
"Mostly. It's a small town. Everybody's somebody's cousin eventually." Ryan said it light, already reaching for the joke that would let him stop thinking about it, the thing he always did when something actually bothered him. "Forget it. Probably a cousin."
"What'd you say back?"
"Nothing smart. Just laughed along, called him man, something like that." Ryan shrugged. "He looked kind of pleased about it, actually. Like he'd been hoping I would."
Scott let it go. A nickname, a mask, a stranger swallowed back into a hundred others before anyone got a second look. There was nothing yet to hold onto. He wouldn't think about it again for almost an hour.
