‘I feel nauseous…’
‘True love,’ Geoff says cheerfully.
‘Come on, Skip, Carl’s not here.’
‘Juster, as your Acting Principal I order you to go over there and hit on that girl,’ Dennis commands. ‘That’s more – hey, where’s he going? Hey, she’s over that way!’
Ruprecht waddles after his friend. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Get them to leave me alone. I don’t want to talk to her now.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t feel well. I can’t breathe.’
‘Hmm…’ Ruprecht strokes his chin. He may never have been in love, but he knows all about not breathing. ‘Perhaps you might find this helpful.’ He presses something into his hand. Skippy looks down and just has time to recognize the blue tube of Ruprecht’s asthma inhaler, before Dennis sneaks up behind him and shoves him with both hands, sending him careering into Frisbee Girl.
‘Someone had to do something,’ Dennis says querulously, in response to the accusing looks the others are giving him. ‘He could have gone on mooning over this bimbo for ever.’
‘I wonder if he’s using my line,’ Mario cranes his neck.
‘I’m not sure he’s saying anything,’ Ruprecht bites his thumb pensively.
‘It doesn’t matter what he says to her,’ Dennis says. ‘Skippy and that girl are from two different worlds. It’s like a fish trying to hit on a supermodel. That fish could have the best lines in the world, it wouldn’t make any difference. It’s still a fish, with, you know, scales and stuff.’
‘So why did you push him into her?’ Geoff demands.
‘To bring him back to reality,’ Dennis says self-righteously. ‘The sooner he finds out the truth, the better. Hot girls like her don’t go out with weedy losers. They just don’t. That’s the way it works.’
There is a meditative silence, then Geoff says, ‘That’s how it usually works. But maybe tonight is different.’
‘Why the hell would tonight be any different, you anus?’
‘Because of Hallowe’en.’ Geoff turns his festering, Play-Doh visage to Dennis, and in his beyond-the-grave basso expands, ‘The ancient feast of Samhain, when the gates between our world and the Otherworld are opened, and unholy spirits march unchecked through the land. All laws are suspended, and nothing is as it seems…’
‘Sure,’ Dennis says, ‘except tonight’s not Hallowe’en, it’s Friday 26 October.’
With a gasp, Ruprecht checks his watch and then, without a word of explanation, sprints for the side-door out to the corridor. Dennis, Mario and Geoff look at each other incredulously. No one has ever seen Ruprecht sprint before.
‘Hmm,’ Dennis says thoughtfully, ‘I see what you mean,’ and they return to observing Skippy with renewed interest.
So far, things have gone predictably badly. He crashed right into her, spilling half her drink, and now she’s looking at him with a mixture of terror and contempt, the latter gaining the upper hand with every second he stands here twitching and blinking and not saying anything. But it’s impossible to think! Up close she’s even more beautiful, and every time she looks at him he feels like he’s been hit by lightning.
‘Uh, sorry,’ he manages to croak at last.
‘That’s okay,’ the girl says in a deeply ironic tone. She makes to move past him. Impulsively, he sidesteps into her path.
‘Daniel,’ he blurts. ‘Uh, that’s who I am.’
‘O-kay,’ the girl responds, and then when he doesn’t get out of the way, with obvious reluctance, she says, ‘Lori.’
‘Lori,’ he repeats, then falls back into the twitching, blinking silence. Behind the scenes, his brain, dashing around trying to put out the fires that have sprung up all over the place, shouts at him, Say something else! Say something else! But it does not tell him what, so he opens his mouth with no idea what’s going to come out until he hears himself speak the words, ‘Do you like…Yahtzee?’
‘What’s “Yahtzee”?’ pronounced in a tone of pre-emptive disgust that could burn through metal.
‘It’s a game of skill and chance,’ Skippy says miserably. ‘Played with dice.’
The girl looks like if she were any more bored she would actually be dead. ‘Do you have any drugs?’ she says.
‘I have an asthma inhaler,’ he replies eagerly.
The girl just looks at him. ‘Um,’ he says. Inside his whole body groans in agony. He couldn’t help it, it was right there in his hand! Now he stares at his shoes, from which one of the wings is coming off again, wishing the ground would swallow him up – when something else hits him. Scrambling off his quiver, he fishes down past the Arrows of Light – ‘I have these.’ He produces the tube breathlessly.
‘What are they,’ she says, without seeming too enthusiastic.
‘They’re, um, travel-sickness pills.’
‘Travel-sickness pills?’
Skippy’s head bobs mutely. She gazes at him as if urging him to complete the thought. ‘But you’re not going anywhere,’ she says finally.
‘No, but…’ He wants to explain about the pills and how they take you away from where you are even though you’re still there; but it sounds stupid even before he says it, and he tails off, sinking under the weight of his own foolishness. She is right, he isn’t going anywhere. He has ruined everything for ever, there is no way he’ll be able to wipe this from her memory. Now he just wants it to be over. ‘No,’ he says.
The girl is frowning, as though she’s doing maths in her head. Then she says, ‘What happens if you mix travel pills and asthma inhaler.’
‘I don’t know,’ Skippy says. Glancing over his shoulder, her eyes suddenly fix and widen. Skippy turns too, and sees that the main doors have been opened. He’s surprised, because when he checks his watch it’s still only 9.45.
‘This thing is totally lame,’ the girl decides. ‘I’m getting out of here.’ And before Skippy can say anything, she is walking away, every step she takes a sledgehammer whomping his heart into little tiny pieces. Then she pauses, and over her shoulder, in the careless way you might speak to a stray dog you’d met in the park, she says, ‘Coming?’
For some reason he starts babbling about how he thinks you have to ask permission before you can leave. But she’s already halfway across the hall.
‘Hey, wait up!’ He comes to and chases after her, catching up with her as she enters the cloakroom; and side by side they step out into the night.
‘Holy shit,’ Dennis says.
‘This Hallowe’en is powerful stuff,’ Mario says. He reflects a moment. ‘Perhaps these supernatural forces are also behind the mystery of my failure with the ladies tonight. If a born loser like Skippy can score a hottie-to-the-max like that, you know that some crazy shit is going down.’
Meanwhile, a long-limbed shadow is pushing through the crowd. Another reversal – this is a shadow for which people get out of the way. It rolls its eyes and gnashes its teeth, it seizes girls as it moves through the hall, pulling off masks and boring into their eyes before casting them aside – and now it catches sight of someone, blundering in tears in the opposite direction, her voluminous dress slipping down her arms so it looks like she’s escaping from an enormous pink-and-white jellyfish. It makes for her, grabs her wrist and pulls her into it. ‘Where’s your friend?’ it demands. ‘Lori, where is she?’
But the weeping girl just bursts out into fresh wailing. The shadow swears and goes back the way it came, shouldering people left and right in spite of the path that has opened up in front of it.
Howard and Miss McIntyre do not make it back to the Sports Hall by the end of the song. As soon as they pass through the door, they find themselves bewitched by the strangeness of the school at night. Its inky silence, its somnolence, make the familiar corridors feel like the underground chambers of a mausoleum, untrodden for centuries; Howard has to resist the temptation to yawp! hoot, jump around, shatter the echoey hush. Every step promises to take them deeper into uncharted terrain. Soon the music is only a distant murmur.