The Veil by Cory Putman Oakes Read Free Book Online

Ghirardelli Square. How odd.

3
    ——

Bonfire
     
    O KAY, SO YESTERDAY WAS WEIRD .
    But it was over now. It was the beginning of a brand new day, and there was absolutely no reason to think anything remotely strange was going to happen to me today.
    Now, if I could just muster the courage to get out of bed.
    The clock on my bedside table said eleven. This meant I’d slept in later this morning than I had in years. It also meant that if I did not get up soon, I would miss rehearsal. And Olivia would kill me.
    And yet I stayed there, huddled under the covers with my favorite blue blanket pulled up to my chin long after I’d woken up, trying very hard to stop all of the strange things I’d seen yesterday from replaying themselves, over and over again, inside my head.
    The frog. The giant silver cougar. Lucas Stratton. Ghirardelli Square.
    It’s Saturday,
I told myself, chasing the disturbing images from my mind.
Nothing bad ever happens on a Saturday.
    But I still felt no inclination to crawl out from beneath my nice, warm covers and face the world.
    In the end, the cats got me up. More particularly, their outraged yowling at my having missed their usual breakfast time was what finally motivated me to throw on a robe and stumble downstairs. After I fed them, I trudged back upstairs and locked myself in the bathroom.
    I took the longest shower our hot water supply would allow, twisted my hair into a bun without drying it, and threw on jeans. I added an ancient yellow T-shirt and a black button-down sweater, then headed downstairs.
    Gran was waiting for me in the dining room. The bottom drawer of the china cabinet was open, and she held a plastic bag away from her body as though it was emitting some sort of foul odor.
    I cringed.
    I’d hidden the bag in the china cabinet last week, thinking Gran would never look there because we never had company that required using the good china. And contrary to her expression of revulsion, the bag contained nothing smelly at all—only two bags of Halloween candy and a plastic bowl with a witch’s face on the bottom.
    I cringed again when she looked over at me, but the look on her face was more sad than accusatory. This was not, after all, the first October I’d tried to sneak trick-or-treater supplies into the house.
    “I don’t know why you bother with this,” she said, handing the bowl and the candy to me. “You know no one ever makes it to the front door.”
    “Maybe this year there’s someone new to the area,” I said hopefully, knowing even as I spoke that any kid who might’ve just moved into our neighborhood would probably be even more terrified of our house than the kids who’d lived here their whole lives. I guess that’s what I get for living in a house that always looked like it should be a shoe-in to win “Best Haunted House,” even though we never did any decorating.
    Gran shook her head. “I suppose it’s my fault. We never celebrated this ridiculous holiday when you were little, so now thatyou’re old enough to think for yourself, you can’t get enough of it.”
    Gran and I had spent our first Christmas together less than a month after my parents died. Neither of us had felt much like celebrating that year. And somehow, over the years,
not
celebrating the holidays had become a tradition with us. I was totally onboard with our boycott when it came to Christmas—celebrating that particular time of year had never felt right to me either—but I was not quite as willing as Gran to forgo
all
major holidays.
    Still, I understood why she felt the way she did, so I tried not to flaunt my enthusiasm for Halloween, Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day, and every other day you could buy a Hallmark card to commemorate.
    Halloween was not until Monday, so I had to keep the contraband out of Gran’s sight for another couple of days. I ran back upstairs; by the time I stashed the candy and the bowl in my room, in a drawer where the cats wouldn’t be able to get to them,