The Replacement | страница 43

“Emma.” I leaned my forehead against her door, then when she didn’t answer, I pushed it open. “Emma, what is this stuff? It’s amazing.”

But Emma wasn’t in her room or anywhere I could find her.

For the first time since my encounter with the guitar player the night before, the voice in my head had faded. Maybe dying wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Maybe there was a way to have a real, actual life, to be normal. Something in me didn’t really believe it. That small piece of me stood apart and watched with deep suspicion as I studied a tiny bottle that was too good to be true. But the rest of me didn’t care. There was too much pleasure in feeling free.

When I heard Roswell’s car in the driveway, I bolted downstairs. On the front porch, I was hit by a barrage of smells: the raw vegetable reek of carved pumpkins, and the scorched smell of burning leaves, and faint but there, the swampy odor of the dry lake bed out on County Road 12. The night was deep and vibrant and ferociously alive.

Three blocks away, I heard Mrs. Carson-Scott calling her cat inside and that was normal. Then I heard the faint jangle of the bell on its collar and the rustle as it crept through the bushes. Even the cars on Benthaven sounded like they were right there in front of me.

Forget Tate. Forget dead kids and bloody lockers and the deep, pulsing ache I got whenever I thought about my family or my future. This was my life, right here.

And I wanted it.

At Stephanie Beecham’s, the street was full of car doors slamming. The noise of voices was steady as people filed up to the house and around back. They were mostly in costumes, even though Halloween wasn’t until Tuesday.

The whole neighborhood was decorated for the season. There were paper skeletons in the windows and jack-o’lanterns on all the porches. The rain had settled down to a steady drizzle. In Stephanie’s front yard, someone had staked a burlap scarecrow of Gentry’s own monster of legend, the Dirt Witch. Its hair was made of wire and twine, and someone had drawn a snarling face on the burlap in marker. It loomed off to the side of the porch looking huge and sinister.

Roswell and I walked up the driveway without talking. He didn’t have a costume exactly, but he was wearing a pair of pointy plastic teeth that fitted over his real ones. He kept giving me strange sideways looks.

“What? Why are you looking at me like that?”