Yip, yip, yip! I look up to see audience participation, lumbering shapes aping around the others, sounding like a zoo after hours—Ahhh-ah-ah-ah! Mwaaa-hoohoo!

“Next time anybody saw Ricky, he was red guacamole.” Kincaid pauses, smiling faintly, but he’s not really seeing me now. “Ever since, Mumbler’s been around. Takes a bad kid every few years, always in October. Grown-ups have some bullshit excuse for what happened to them, but we know.”

Nods pass around the circle. I watch for inside looks—they’ll drop the act when they see I’m not taken in—but the quiet drags on. “What’s the Mumbler look like?” I hold Kincaid’s gaze, willing him to let me in on this, let me prove I don’t scare easy. “So I’ll know him if I see him.”

Kincaid looks to Trace, again with the smile that creases his eyes into merry slits, a kid showing his little sister where Mom hides the Christmas presents. “We can take you to him.”

Four

DAYLIGHT’S ALMOST GONE, stranding us in murky charcoal twilight that blurs perception in the woods. Pines press close, their smell sharp and cloying, and it’s too dark for this, but we’re going anyway, a small band of us, because the boys made the dare, and how could we respect ourselves in the morning without putting our heads in the same lion’s mouth?

Kincaid’s down the trail somewhere, wearing his question-mark smile, sheer magnetism pulling me through the dark after him, my feet catching on unseen roots, risking a branch snapping back in my face. My hands imagine finding his shoulder blades, my fingertips exploring the rough wool of his coat, discovering what he smells like. Bree is here beside me, silent, and I wonder if she’s feeling half of what I’m feeling, even a quarter.

A yell, and someone grabs us both. I’m so amped up that I scream, a real girly scream I didn’t know I had inside me. Humiliating. Bass laughter and a gust of Trace—draft horse sweat, shock of peppermint—as he shoulders between.

“Asshole, how’d you get behind us?” Bree turns on her phone flashlight, shining it in his face.

He winces. “Jesus. That’s not fair.” He grabs the phone, holding it easily out of her reach. “I don’t have a light.”

“Give me my phone.”

Giggle. “You get so mad.” He tosses; she fumbles; it lands on the ground. Not that Trace is there to see—he’s already barreling off, trying a leapfrog boost on the shoulders of a boy with hair spiking out from under a knit cap and drumsticks in his back pocket, who laughs, nearly falling.

Bree wipes her phone on her fleece, swearing. “I am so buying a tranq gun and putting him down.”