GAGE
“Boo!” Cali shrieks from behind me, jostling my shoulders and relishing in horrifying eldritch laughter when I clutch my imaginary pearls.
Frozen, I’m like a deer trapped in the line of a hunter’s bow, and it takes a few seconds for my brain to reboot and assure me that the only plausible threat in the vicinity is a threat to my manhood.
“Jesus,” I breathe, feeling my poor heart spasm underneath my fingertips. “You can’t keep doing that, Cali.”
“I wouldn’t if you weren’t so easily scared,” she says, reaching for the lollipop she stowed behind her ear and slowly peeling off the red, cellophane wrapper. She nabbed it at the first house we visited, and she’s been secretly plucking a few unsuspecting candies from the bottom of Teague’s pumpkin pail.
I fiddle with the tube on my proton pack, which matches the Ghostbusters group costume Teague has orchestrated for all of us to participate in. I never really partook in trick-or-treating when I was little, partly because the Halloween decorations scared the crap out of me, and partly because my parents never volunteered to take me and my brother. But I’m glad to be here now, with Teague and Cali, facing my irrational fears of kid-friendly jump scares and house-sized animatronics.
Teague’s a fucking trooper. He’s way less afraid than I was when I was a kid. In fact, he’s gone up to every doorstep all on his own and broke out that pageant-winning smile of his. His pail’s so full that there’s barely any room left for more candy, and we still have a few more blocks to go until we’ve cleared the neighborhood.
Teague’s walking by my side and slowly making a dent in his king-size Hershey’s bar, while Cali’s taking up the front and inadvertently torturing me with the way her ass moves in her tight-fitting uniform.
The streets are overrun with tiny, colorful bodies, and every house is so backed up that we have to maneuver through flocks of first-time parents and disinterested older siblings, all being pulled by children who’ve reached max sugar capacity. A tapestry of darkness swallows the night sky, save for the full moon that hangs above us and casts ribbons of light over sprawling asphalt. Houses are lined with glowing jack-o’-lanterns, seven-foot skeletons and blow-up black cats occupy every lawn in sight, and fog machines exhale a sinister mist over fake gravestones. The skeletal limbs of molting trees sway with the last of autumn’s leaves, causing a few runts to fall to the ground in a flurry of crimson and canary yellow. It’s chilly out tonight, and I’m glad for the coverage of my costume to keep my balls from shriveling into raisins.
When Teague stops at an impressively decorated house—complete with a walk-through scientist’s lab—we stand in a fifteen-minute line full of overstimulated kids and the occasional fussy baby. Teague, however, bounces up and down with unrestrained excitement, which is probably a byproduct of the copious amounts of sugar he’s already ingested.
The line’s stopped moving, allowing my aching feet a rest, and Cali leans against my side, having found a new method of torturing me while she sucks on her lollipop, hollowing her cheeks and flicking her tongue over the semitranslucent candy.
“You know you didn’t have to come with us, right?” Her carmine-stained lips glisten underneath the moonlight, and my saliva glands go into overdrive when I imagine myself cleaning the cherry flavor from her mouth—getting drunk on the aftertaste of a bad decision.
“I wanted to,” I respond, and to corroborate my statement, I ruck my lips up into a smile, mirroring the inflation of my heart. “There’s really nowhere else I’d rather be.”
I didn’t think I’d ever be trick-or-treating with Cali and her little brother. This feels so…serious. We’re not just hanging out. This could be a core memory for Teague. After his concussion, Cali’s family has been weighing heavier on me. The more I hang out with Teague, the more I want to be in his life. And tonight isn’t an exception.
Each time he faces his fears and goes up to a house all on his own, pride crystallizes in my veins, and I want nothing more than to pick him up in my arms and tell him how proud I am. There’s always a split second before the door opens that he looks back at me for reassurance, and a supportive thumbs-up galvanizes his confidence.
Don’t get me wrong: a part of me also wants to keep my distance. A part of me doesn’t want Teague to look up at me like I can do no wrong—because I can, and I have. I’ve convinced myself that I don’t deserve love after the mistake I made with my brother. And would Teague really look at me the same way if he knew his hero wasn’t so perfect?
Cali shoves her lollipop to one side of her cheek, puffing it out like a chipmunk’s. “He’s really happy you’re here, you know,” she whispers to me.
“I’m surprised he hasn’t gotten sick of me,” I joke, but there’s an inkling of truth in there somewhere, and it makes my stomach writhe with the intensity of a washing machine.
“Are you kidding? He’s obsessed with you. Never stops talking about you. It’s always ‘I wonder what Gage is doing today.’ ‘Can we please hang out with Gage?’ ‘Cali, did you know that Gage is the coolest person ever?’”
I smirk. “He’s right. I am the coolest person ever.”
The line shuffles forward the slightest bit, and every so often, I catch a glimpse of the two gigantic tarps over the multipurpose garage pulsing with a plethora of neon-colored lights.
“It amazes me how big your ego is,” she grumbles.
While Teague’s bucket-deep in search of his next treat, I take the stick of Cali’s lollipop between my index and middle finger, slowly easing it out from between her lips. She doesn’t say much apart from a gasp, and I push the lollipop into my own mouth. “If I remember yesterday correctly, you were a fan of something that was big.”
I can tell she wants to retaliate, but since there are little ears present, she settles for an exasperated, “Ugh.”
Chuckles dwindle into the ambience of the night, and I tip my head up to the map of stars, watching as my breath coalesces into thin, gossamer strands, eventually evaporating into the fifty-degree atmosphere. It’s just dawned on me that I’ll never be able to take Trip trick-or-treating now. And the worst part is, I’ll experience so many things with Teague, and they’ll all remind me of the experiences that were taken from my brother.
Cali must’ve descried my uneasiness because she comes to join me at our quick rest stop, leaning against the fence. “You okay?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. I’m all good.” I clear my throat in an attempt to reinstate my conviction.
She eyes me like a hawk, and she leans in just slightly, concern seasoning her tone. “Gage, there’s obviously something that’s bothering you.”
The lollipop lodged in my mouth suddenly couldn’t be less appetizing. “I was just thinking about…”
I can’t even say the words. My guilt’s giving me away like a large, conspicuous, flashing neon sign.
“About?”
“I was worried about coming out tonight,” I admit, somehow feeling claustrophobic in my own skin—feeling like no matter where or how far I run, my past always catches up to me. “I was worried that I’d think about…”
And immediately, Cali catches on to my unspoken truth. “Oh, Gage. I’m so sorry. I didn’t even think about how tonight would affect you after your brother.”
“No. It’s okay. I’m glad I get to be here with you and Teague. It, uh, it doesn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. You guys make it a lot less painful.”
“Are you sure?”
I angle my chin so I can kiss the crown of her head, smiling when her curls tickle my nose and I get a whiff of that heavenly cinnamon scent. “Yeah, I’m sure. Seeing how excited Teague is…it just reminds me of how excited Trip used to be when Halloween came around.”
She looks up at me through her lashes, and I transfer the lollipop from my mouth into hers. She jumbles it around so she can speak. “I take it he loved Halloween?”
“Big fan. Our parents never took us trick-or-treating, but Trip would always dress up,” I tell her.
“You do know your parents are on my shit list, right?”
“Oh, mine too.”
Laughter boomerangs between us, rich and rumbling like a faraway motor engine, and I feel Cali’s hands hug my arm as she lists closer to me.
“What did Trip like to dress up as?” she asks, nuzzling into me.
My hand comes up to rest over hers, which are freezing to the touch. “He loved dinosaurs. His favorite movie was The Land Before Time.”
“So one of those blow-up dinosaur costumes?”
“Yeah. One of those ridiculous, blow-up dinosaur costumes.”
It feels really good to talk about Trip without also talking about his death. It feels good to acknowledge him without grieving him. I don’t remember the last time I was able to talk about who he was, truly—the things he was interested in, the memories we made together. And talking about him with Cali gives me a sense of closure I’ve never found anywhere else.
Cali chews the rest of her lollipop before discarding the stick in Teague’s pail.
“I, um, I hope I’m not upsetting you by saying this, but…” The last of her words are swallowed by a rocky breath, and the way she looks up at me has my heart clenching around a bullet-sized hole of fear.
“But?”
Her fingers absentmindedly squeeze my bicep. “How are you so happy all the time? I mean, I know you aren’t, but you seem so put together.”
I was expecting her comment to floor me, but all it does is produce a small smile on my lips and generate a newfound warmth between our hands—one that travels all the way to my cheeks and scorches a presumable blush. “It’s not always easy,” I admit with a hollow chuckle. “When Trip died, I had a choice: either I could let his death drown me and take me under, or I could let his death strengthen me. It was then that I realized I didn’t want to live the rest of my life in sorrow. I wanted to find a reason to be happy again, and the more I presented myself that way, the more it tricked my brain into believing I was truly happy.”
“You don’t always have to put on a happy face,” Cali says quietly. “It’s okay to break down every once in a while.”
“I know that now, thanks to you. One reason I’ve always been so happy-go-lucky is because I’d suppressed Trip’s memory. I refused to revisit it or even think about it. It was easier to be blissfully ignorant than confront my past. But ever since I met Teague, he’s helped me come to the conclusion that my brother’s memory is always going to be there, no matter how hard I try to ignore it. And it would be a shame for Trip’s memory to disappear all because I was too cowardly to share it.”
Cali doesn’t say anything before she rises to her tiptoes and presses a kiss to my cheek, the stickiness of her lip gloss gluing down the faint stubble starting to crop up. “I’m so proud of you, Gage. I know you don’t talk about your brother with anyone.”
“You’re not just anyone, Cali,” I whisper.
Suddenly, I feel a tug on my sleeve, and Teague’s looking up at me with huge, glossy eyes, his lower lip trembling like a leaf in the wind. “Gage, I’m scared,” he says quietly, to the point where I nearly don’t hear him over the background chatter.
His gaze cuts briefly to the ominous-sounding garage, and I follow his line of sight to find that only a few people stand between us and the haunted house. The exaggerated, eardrum-blasting noise of evil scientist laughter can be heard from our spot, and there’s a pre-recorded mess of clanking machinery that acts as white noise beneath well-rehearsed dialogue.
And all my worries disappear to make room for his. I hunker down to a squat so I’m level with him, and I give his shoulder a comforting rub. “Hey, Little Man. It’s alright. We can turn around right now.”
Teague shakes his mop of ginger hair, mouth set in a thin, hard line. “I don’t want to turn around. I want to go in. But I’m…scared.”
“You know, I’m kind of scared too. Maybe if we hold hands, it’ll be less scary, yeah?”
I can tell he’s skeptical as he glances between me and the foreboding garage, but he eventually nods his head in agreement, clinging to my hand so tightly that he cracks my knuckles. Am I scared? Hell yes, I am. I don’t know what the fuck lies behind those sketchy-ass tarps. Will I punch one of the scare actors if they jump out at me? I’ll try not to.
Teague hands his bucket off to Cali to hold through the haunted house, since she’s the least likely out of all of us to feel any terror walking through it. She’s a horror junkie—which makes sense as to why she’s so scary sometimes.
The tour starts relatively calmly, with our guide dressed in a blood-splattered lab coat and his hair an electrified mess of spikes on top of his head. He leads us through the first room, which consists of a man being bound to an operating table by leather restraints, squirming and thrashing while he screams bloody murder. Another scientist hovers over him with a drill to his head, complete with fake blood squirting from the realistic-looking wound on the man’s temple. If that wasn’t gross enough, there are tons of glass vials and bottles filled with unidentifiable body parts and murky liquids. Blinding lights flare in my eyes, and a particularly gruesome jump scare thieves my breath and makes Teague grip my clammy hand harder.
I keep him hugged to my leg as we creep through a pitch-black corridor, only illuminated in spurts, timed with the screams from both actors and traumatized kids. I have no idea where I’m going, and I can hear Cali squealing and falling into easy laughter behind me. The fear in my body is palpable now, my heart juddering at an alarming rate, and my stomach relocating to my goddamn esophagus. When we round the corner, a new, disturbing scene is laid out before us: a woman strapped down on a table, but this time, her body has been severed in half, and the scientist is digging through a gory spillover of entrails with his bare hands.
Dear God, this is terrifying. This is definitely not suited for children. Teague has his face buried against my hip, and I feel for the little guy. Cali’s having a blast behind us, totally unfazed, and I’m beginning to question how unmanly it would be if I grab onto her arm for support. The last room is a sensory nightmare, with the prominent stench of rotten, spoiled food perfuming the musty air. It takes everything in me not to gag. I don’t even want to know how these people replicated that smell.
The final victim is a man who’s getting all these dismembered body parts sewn onto his new body like some twisted Frankenstein retelling—the brain from the first man and the lower body from the second woman. In the background, discarded limbs pile high and soak in a mess of bodily juices and syrup-thick ichor. We get ushered out quickly to accommodate for the conveyer belt of incoming bodies, and I’m thankful, because the stench was overbearing.
When we stumble back into the real world, my chest swells with a much-needed breath of fresh air, and the horrified shrieks of other children detonate like a nuclear blast in that surprisingly large garage.
“Wow, that was incredible!” Cali gushes, already rummaging around for another piece of candy like she didn’t just witness someone’s intestines slopping onto the floor.
“Uh-huh” is all I have the energy to say, trying to shake those creatively morbid images from my brain—which will probably come back to haunt me when I’m sleeping tonight.
Poor Teague is quivering against me, and I don’t think he’s opened his eyes yet to notice that we’re safely outside. I rub mollifying circles on his back, trying to coax him to look up at me. “Hey, T. We’re outside. You can look now.”
He hesitates for a moment, as if he’s trying to decide whether or not the coast is clear, and then he glances around, all while keeping his unrelenting grasp on me. “That was scary,” he mumbles under his breath.
“I know. I was terrified,” I agree.
His mouth forms an O shape. “You were?”
“Oh, yeah. But you were being so brave in there that I knew I had to be brave too. I don’t think I would’ve made it without you by my side, Little Man.”
Tears dollop on Teague’s lashes, and I’m not trained enough in kid etiquette to know if they’re good or bad tears. So, I’m about to console him when he charges into me with a lineman-tackle hug, squeezing my legs with his arms. I can hear Cali awwing in the background, and love nestles deep in my heart at how close I’ve grown to Teague in the past month. All the pessimistic thoughts working a full-time shift in my brain—the ones claiming that I’m not good enough to be a role model for him, that he shouldn’t look up at me with hero worship—they’re instantly silenced by the way he smushes his cheek into my thigh.
I was scared of Teague putting me on a pedestal, but seeing him lean on me for support through such a scary event…it feels like maybe I was put on this earth for that exact reason. Put on earth to be someone’s hero. Put on earth to hold shaky hands and calm the tremors.
I want to be in his and Cali’s lives. I want to be a role model who he can look up to. I want to be a father figure to him, especially because he doesn’t have one—and neither did I.
I just…I want to do right by him. By my brother. By Cali.
Careful not to startle him, I scoop him up under his armpits and haul him onto my shoulders, keeping a secure hold on his legs. It hurts my hip a little, but the look on his face is worth every twinge of pain. He’s giggling uncontrollably, and the three of us start walking back to the Reapers’ mansion to turn in for the night.
“Can we have a sleepover at Gage’s house?” Teague asks Cali from above me.
Cali chews off the end of a Twizzler, humming thoughtfully. “That’s up to Gage, kiddo.”
Teague thumps his little legs against my chest. “Pleeeaaaseee, Gage. Please can we sleep over at your house?” he whines, inspiring laughter to ripple up from my belly and fill the slowly growing silence as we distance ourselves from the main road.
“As long as it’s okay with your sister.”
“Cali, can—”
“Yes, Teague. It’s okay with me,” she chuckles.
“Yay!” Teague squeals with enthusiasm, and I keep his shins clamped in a stranglehold before racing down the street as fast as my hip will allow, leaving behind the encroaching fear and misguided self-blame from my past.
