I bike a roundabout way to school that morning, wanting to put off the inevitable as long as possible despite the gentle, half-hearted rain that mists down in a chilly cloud. I’m listening to the same Earth album I’ve been playing for weeks, the sludgy wall of guitar soothing me as I pedal, like a metalhead version of those tapes of whale songs and crashing waves that are supposed to help you fall asleep. I smoke a joint in the morning now, on the days I go to school, and another one at lunch, until I’m so stoned I’m moving around in my own impermeable bubble, my thoughts stilled into silence.Aurora and I love Halloween best of all the holidays. I always pretend to be lazy and disinclined to find a costume, and she makes a great fuss about it and berates me for my indifference; but of course secretly I love the ritual of her convincing me every year, and she knows it. Aurora’s a magnificent scavenger, a holy terror in thrift stores and secondhand shops, with a magpie’s eye for glitter and an unerring instinct for hidden treasure buried among the detritus of molting down jackets and dog-eared paperbacks.
