She sighed. “How’re you holding up?” she said to the pumpkin.
I’m all right. This is interesting. There’s a lot to see…
“I can’t just keep calling you ‘hey you’,” Nita said. “What should I call you?”
I don’t know. I never gave it any thought before today…
“Well, you’re a Jack-O-Lantern now… how would Jackie be?”
Behind her, Dairine snickered. “Sooooo predictable…”
Nita rolled her eyes and ignored her. The pumpkin said, That’s a nice name. Jackie…
“Jackie it is,” Nita said.
Kit had been listening to this, and he was smiling a little behind the crooked mustache: but the smile had a slightly concerned quality to it. You know, he said privately to Nita, this could be a problem.
What?
You’ve given it a nickname, he said. Sometimes when we’ve done that in the past… it hasn’t worked out all that well for whatever wore the nickname. Fred… Ed…
Nita gave him a look, not entirely sure if he was teasing her. You’re having a sugar crash already, she said. Have one of those Three Musketeers we just got and see if your mood improves.
He started rooting around obligingly enough in his candy bag, and said nothing further. But there was something about the way Kit didn’t immediately come back with an argument or a smart remark that unsettled Nita slightly. Even if that’s true, she said after a moment, I’m betting we could change the odds a little if we worked at it.
“Here’s one,” Kit said, and came up with a Three Musketeers. “Want half?”
Nita accepted it happily enough, but she found herself wondering briefly about the nickname issue: it wasn’t something she’d ever considered before. I need to think about this a little and see if he’s got a point… And a few seconds later she found herself looking through her own bag for another of those candy bars. They were kind of habit-forming
They hit another fourteen or fifteen houses, and the bags began to fill, and the dusk settled over everything, the streetlights flickering on one by one. Jackie was taking it all in, though in most cases not having any real idea of what was going on. What do you do with all this stuff? he said.
“We eat it,” Nita said.
Nutrients?
“Well, sort of,” Nita said. She wasn’t sure she was equipped at the moment to explain the concept of junk food to a pumpkin.
That’s all right, then, Jackie said. That’s pretty much what we do, really. Acquire nutrients. He sounded as if the prospect, or the memory, brought him a lot of pleasure.
Nita caught a quick faint glimpse of his memory. “Sun and water,” she said. “You want all you can get of those…”
That’s right. Sun and water: you soak ‘em up, all you can. And nutrients: pull in everything you can. Time’s short. All you get is one season in the sun. We’re hungry all the time. So we soak it all up and get big. That makes the seeds inside happy. So when we finally fall off the vine and break down, there’s plenty for the birds and animals to eat. And the more of me there is, the more of the seeds get away to grow.
“So that’s it for you?” Nita said. “Sprout fast. Get as big as you can. Die fat and juicy.”
You got it. That’s what it’s all about.
The generally rounded and enclosing imagery Nita kept getting from the pumpkin in these exchanges was making her start to wonder if “Jackie” actually ought to be short for “Jacqueline.” But there was always a danger in trying to introduce human gender ideas to a plant, so Nita kept her surmises on this count to herself. What was also intriguing her, though, was a slight unaccountable tang of sadness in Jackie’s thought. “What’s the matter?” Nita said, pausing at the foot of one house’s front walk as the others went up to ring the doorbell.
Well, you know, I didn’t get… all that big.
Nita grunted as she shifted Jackie over to her other arm. “Sorry, but I have to disagree. Even without your insides, you weigh a ton.”
You’re just saying that to make me feel good.
She burst out laughing, both at herself and at the wistful tone. But Jackie took no notice. You get a little unhappy, it said, when almost everybody else gets picked and you don’t. If the sun hit one side of you more than the other while you were growing… if you came out lopsided, or squashed in… the people just walk past you and leave you there…
Nita sighed, having too many memories as it was of those humiliating lineups before gym-class softball games, where each side fights to keep from having to choose you. These days she’d pretty much stopped caring about it. She’d gradually realized that the other kids’ opinions of her weren’t going to change no matter how well or badly she played, and she had a lot of better things to use wizardry for than becoming a heavy hitter. But the embarrassment and pain had been real enough until she found her way through them. “Look,” she said, “it really doesn’t matter. It’s what’s inside that counts, even if it sounds like a cliché to say it. I mean, clichés usually have some truth attached: that’s how they get to be clichés to begin with.”
I suppose you’re right…
The others came down the walk, and Kit handed Nita a toffee apple. “It’s good and dark now,” he said. “You think we should head for Tom and Carl’s?”
“Sounds like a plan,” Nita said.
*
It was a four or five blocks’ walk from the point they’d reached near Nassau Road. Above the dryly rustling leaves on the trees, the stars were getting bright; Jupiter was well risen and showed coolly white in the northeastern sky. They turned the corner out of East Clinton onto Rose Avenue and headed down through the dark, seeing ahead of them the occasional glimmer of orange-shaded flashlights or glow-in-the-dark costumes or plastic-bladed lightsabers, the faint flicker of “ghosts” flapping by under the streetlights. “Remember,” Nita said, “the first time we looked Tom up in the manual? And we saw his address and said ‘Oh my god no, it’s that crazy guy, who knows what goes on in that place with the big hedge…’”
“We were so freaked,” Kit said, and laughed at the memory. But hard on the heels of the laughter came a long, high, spooky howl from down the road: a wolflike sound boosted by a very effective sound system.
“Imagine if we’d heard that…” Nita said, laughing too. “They’re rolling! Let’s see what kind of crowd they’ve got.”
They came to the yard with the tall hedges that had unnerved Nita so long ago. Now the hedge was festooned with fake cobwebs, and from inside it, little glinting eyes in batches of eight looked out creepily at passersby. A lot of costumed kids and escorting parents were heading in and out of the open gate that led through the single gap in the hedge. As the four wizards went through the gate and up the walk toward the front door of the house, Nita suddenly caught a glimpse of a couple of black cats off to one side, one a little slimmer and more angular than the other, their eyes glinting respectively golden and brassy in the dimness. “Guys, look—!”
“I see them,” Ronan said, and headed across the grass to where the cats were watching the proceedings from near the shrubbery closest to the house. “Hey, Rhiow! What’s shakin’?”
The little black cat put her whiskers forward at them all. “Things around here, I’d say! But you haven’t met my partner, have you, cousins? Hwaith, this is Hrronan— Khit and Hnita— Dhairine—”