“Have you seen the gym yet?” Dexter asked. “It’s way too big for a school with just a few hundred kids. We can actually fit the entire population of Nowhere in there. That’s like a thousand people!”

“And we do fit them in,” Poe said. “All the time. Hope High is HQ for all festivals, carnivals, productions, and events.”

“The biggest of which is right around the corner,” Sophia chirped. “Only two months to the Halloween Hoopla!”

I was glad I had my coffee mug to my lips so they could not see my involuntary grimace. My eyes met Reg’s over the rim of my mug.

A hoopla?

Be nice.

As if sensing my judgment, the twins launched into a sales pitch.

“It’s a party.”

“It’s a parade.”

“It’s both.”

“It’s bigger than prom!”

I perked up at that. “So it’s like a dance?”

For all the events I’d attended in the last hundred years—from frat parties to formal galas—I had never once seen a school dance anywhere but on TV or in movies. I may not have a bucket list like Reg, but I had my own list of “never haves,” and high school dance was on that list. As long as I was stuck in this human skin, I was absolutely going to take it to a party.

“Kind of,” Sydney said. “It started out as a parade and exploded into a whole big thing.”

Sophia chimed in. “The Nowhere Halloween parade has been around forever—like fifty years. It’s so old.”

If fifty years was old, I was downright antique.

While fifty was young by vampire standards, I still had to wonder how a town that had been around long enough to have a fifty-year-old parade still barely had fifty buildings, other than houses. Why did some places on earth grow old yet never go away? It was as though towns themselves could be immortal.

Poe held his hands in front of him, palms a short distance apart, and spread them wider as he said, “Over the years, parade turned to costume party turned to festival turned to . . .” He spread his arms as wide as possible. “Hoopla. It’s ridiculous,” he concluded, with a shake of his head.

He dodged a swipe from Sydney.

“Keep talking like that, and we’ll kick you off the committee,” she said.

Poe dropped out of his chair to kneel on the floor before Sydney, hands folded as if in prayer. “Oh, please. Please release me from your wretched committee.”

“Committee?” Reg asked.

“Hope High Halloween Hoopla planning committee,” Sophia said.

“Say that three times fast,” Dexter joked.

Not that funny, but still cute. Still very, very cute.