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  “Then I’ll pay.” Cel held her hands out in front of her, palms up like she’d seen in movies, as though willing to be handcuffed.

  Jose’s eyes fell to her hands, moved back to her face. When he cackled, she lunged at him, reaching for his face, thrusting her thumbs into his eyes. He let go of Jeff and grabbed her hair as he lost his balance, and they all fell to the ground together like a mutated blob of flesh and bone.

  Jeff worked himself free of the pile, crawled a few feet away, and jumped up. Cel grunted and struggled with Jose, biting his wrist and scratching his cheek deep enough to draw blood, but at nearly twice her weight, he gained the upper hand in no time at all. After stunning her with a head-butt to the temple, he rolled her onto her back, pinned her arms down with his knees, and rested his backside on her sternum.

  “You always have been a scrappy little bitch,” Jose said, fingering the scrape on his cheek. He reached in his pocket, pulled out a pocket knife, and flipped out the blade.

  Cel tried to scream but Jose’s weight on her chest made it impossible to pull in a deep enough breath. She could barely breathe. She closed her eyes and was in the middle of mentally reciting a strengthening spell when Jeff howled and jumped onto Jose’s back. She opened her eyes as the jolt of both of their weight crushed down on her and watched Jose lift Jeff off and toss him aside like a sack of trash. Jeff landed flat on his back with a sickening thud and writhed and groaned from the pain.

  “He’s a feisty little shit, too, isn’t he?” Jose ran his hand over his shaved head and pointed the knife at Cel’s face. “Now, where were we?” He stroked his lucky stache. “What did you do with Frito?”

  Cel raised her eyebrows and shook her head as if she didn’t know what he meant.

  He inched the knife closer. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know,” she managed.

  “If you don’t tell me, I swear, my mom will do stuff—”

  He cut off when Parker slammed into him, driving his shoulder into Jose’s chest and knocking him off of Cel. The impact jarred the knife from Jose’s hand, and as he fumbled to pick it back up, Parker began punching him in the side of the head. After six or seven solid blows, Jose covered his face and head with his arms. As Parker jumped up and gave him a series of hard kicks to the stomach, Cel helped Jeff to his feet.

  “Parker,” Abby hollered. “Let’s go.” She was standing outside the perimeter rope, in between Natalie and Omar, who were holding up the rope for Cel and Jeff to duck under. Once Parker joined them, they fled the fairgrounds, zigzagging through the rows of cars back to the bike rack. Cel looked back over her shoulder only once, when Jose’s final threat caught up with them in the middle of the parking lot.

  “You will pay! You hear me? You! Will! Pay!”

  Chapter 18 - Cel

  At the bike rack, Parker removed Cel’s bike, and without asking her opinion, straddled the frame and placed a foot on the highest pedal. She hopped onto the pegs and held onto his shoulders as he aimed the bike away from the fairgrounds, homeward. They looked back over their shoulders and watched everyone else arrive, mount their bikes, and line up behind them. Everyone was breathing hard, faces slathered with sweat, eyes wild with adrenaline, but no one said a word. Natalie was the last to arrive and frantically struggled to remove her bike. When she finally jerked the front tire free, the handle bar jabbed her ribs, and she dropped her hat and yelled, “Damn it.”

  “You all right?” Cel asked.

  Abby shot daggers at Cel with her eyes. “Like you care.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s your fault if she’s hurt. That’s what it means.” Abby jabbed an accusatory finger at Cel. “All of this is your fault. It’s your fault Jeff’s hurt. It’s your fault Parker had to beat the crap out of Jose. It’s your fault they recognized me and ruined our night. It’s your fault they’re even after us to begin with.” She shrugged her shoulders. “And for what? Do you really think that stupid cat you stole was worth it? Your aunt isn’t getting any better.”

  If anyone else agreed or disagreed with Abby, they didn’t voice it. A silence as thick as a blanket, as cold as snow, shrouded the Cricket Hunters. Cel knew Abby was technically right, and part of her felt intense guilt for causing her friends pain and distress, putting them in harm’s way. But another part of her, the lifetime Cricket Hunter card holder, the one-for-all, all-for-one member, the one who knew she didn’t force anyone to do anything, felt needlessly attacked.

  Eventually, Cel gathered enough moisture in her mouth to speak. “I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt.” Her voice cracked with the last word. She cleared her throat, stepped off of the pegs, and faced Abby. “I had to try something to help my tia.” A deep, shaky breath. “And I told you two or three times that night you didn’t have to come with me, anyway.”

  Abby shook her head and continued spitting accusations as though she hadn’t heard a word Cel had said. “And it’s going to be your fault when they come after us again, too. Because now that they know who we are —”

  “Hey, hey,” Parker interjected. “Will you two knock it off? You can settle this after we’re a safe distance away from them? Get on, Cel. We need to get out of here.”

  “Yeah, come on,” Omar chimed in as he nervously glanced back toward the fair. “We should get a move on. Pronto.”

  “I don’t have anything else to say, anyway,” Abby said. And with that, she pedaled away, and the others followed suit.

  As they made their way back to the Gateway neighborhood, their bikes tearing holes in the still night air, Omar was the only one to speak, and he only said one sentence as everyone slowed when they reached his and Natalie’s turn off. “I think I’ll start the round robin in a little bit so we know everyone made it home okay.”

  Parker nodded in agreement, but no one else responded.

  Round robin was the circle of communication the hunters had started using in the first grade. Nobody could remember who’d had the initial idea, or why they’d first used it, but it was undoubtedly a spinoff of the whisper game they’d played on the magic carpet in kindergarten. It worked like this: if one person had an idea, or plan, or gossip, or whatever, rather than that person calling everyone, they called the next person in the circle, who called the next, and so on until the person who started the thread received a final call signifying that everyone had been contacted. The circle was alphabetical—Abby, Cel, Natalie, Omar, Parker—because, as first graders, that was the first idea that came to mind, and the calls weren’t to last longer than five minutes. As they’d aged, they’d used the method less and less, and when they did, it was usually for silly reasons, a form of nostalgia on whimsical nights mostly. This was the first time any one of them had suggested using it for safety.

  Parker, Cel, Abby, and Jeff continued on as Natalie and Omar cut down Garrett Street and rode out of sight. When they reached Abby’s driveway a few minutes later, Abby and Jeff rode up into the yard and hopped off their bikes. After retrieving the house key she’d hidden in the mailbox and unlocking the door, Abby briefly locked eyes with Parker before marching inside and flicking on the porch light. When Cel glanced back a few seconds later as Parker continued down the street, Jeff was standing in the doorway with his Bart Simpson doll under his arm, his face lit by the light’s warm glow. She threw her hand up in the air, and he did the same.

  Rather than standing and holding on to Parker’s shoulders like she did when the other hunters were around, Cel looped her arms around his chest, closed her eyes, and laid her head on his back. They rode in silence, inhaling and exhaling in unison. As Parker slowed to a stop behind his dad’s truck in the driveway, a sharp, urgent pain suddenly blared through Cel’s lower abdomen. Now that she’d calmed down and her adrenaline rush had subsided, her need to pee returned with a vengeance.

  She jumped off the bike, dashed over to the dark walkway between the garage and the Dodge Ram on the side of the house, pulled down her shorts, squatted, and relie
ved herself.

  Parker approached her as she pulled up her shorts and thumbed at the house. “You know we have toilets inside, right?”

  “Ha, ha,” she replied while buttoning her shorts.

  “They flush and everything.”

  “Smartass.” She stepped forward and tried to punch his shoulder, but he grabbed her wrist and pulled her to him. They studied each other’s eyes for a moment, lips inches apart, breaths colliding, then Parker wrapped his arms around her waist, forcing their hips together, and kissed her. She could feel how much he liked her, and, as one of his hands slid down her backside beneath her jeans and underwear, she reached down and rubbed his crotch. The kissing intensified, and he spun her around and backed her up against the house. He ran his other hand up her shirt, under the bra, and she moaned and forced her hand down his pants.

  They had gone this far before. She had even finished him off a couple of times, let him touch her down there with his hand, too, but she’d always been able to resist the urge, and his persistence, to go all the way. Tonight, though, the combination of the excitement of the fair, and the danger of the Jose chase, and the fact Parker had come back for her, rescued her, made the urge harder than ever to subdue. Tonight, her cautious inner voice, the voice that had always usually overridden her urges (No. Stop. You’re too young. You could get pregnant.), sounded farther away than ever before. Tonight, maybe—

  Cel’s eyes snapped opened, and she pulled away from Parker when the roar of an engine startled her. She reflexively crouched as headlight beams crept down the road and stopped at the foot of Parker’s driveway. Parker copied her and turned his head so his better cricket ear pointed toward the road. They watched the lit road for a moment, listening to the car idling just out of sight to their right. It had a monster engine, a muscle car engine. Like Jose’s Mustang. But it wasn’t loud enough to disguise the sound of a car door opening and closing. Cel grabbed Parker’s hand as images of Jose marching across the lawn with an anger-forged face and a baseball bat in his hand like he had outside his own house that night she’d stolen Frito flooded her mind. Parker looked at her, gave her hand a firm squeeze and nod of assurance, and then led her to the corner of the garage where they peeked at the street.

  A blue Firebird with the glass T-tops removed was parked in front of Parker’s neighbor’s house. Not a red Mustang. Not Jose’s car. Not Jose. Cel released a shaky sigh of relief. The white guy driving the car had a mullet, a wide grin on his face, and one hand cockily angled atop the wheel. Parker’s seventeen-year-old neighbor Cindy Lowden was skip-walking to her front porch with a stuffed animal in one hand and a balloon in the other. When she reached the front porch and glanced back at the car, the guy waved, then cranked up the radio and eased away from the curb.

  Once the car was out of sight, Cel faced Parker and let go of his hand. “That freaked me out. I was worried it was Jose.”

  Parker smiled a nonchalant smile, as if the notion of worrying were both foreign and absurd. “He’ll never come here.” He grabbed the front of her shorts and pulled her closer to him. “Now, where were we?”

  She turned her head down and sideways when he tried to kiss her. “He will find out where you live, you know? And he will try to get revenge.” She looked up. “He said so himself. Especially on you. Maybe even on your family.” She shook her head. “And what if he brings friends with him? And a bat? Or that knife? Or a gun? I know Maria has a couple.” Cel’s heart rate escalated with each spoken fear. Sweat began collecting on her palms. The possibilities kept coming. “And what is Maria going to do? Will she try something on us or my abuela? If she could do that to Tia Dillo then—”

  Parker put a finger on her lips as if she were a child. “Calm down.”

  Cel knocked his finger away. “Don’t tell me to calm down. This is not a joke. This is real. We need a plan.” She bit her lip and looked moonward. For the first time that evening, she noticed chirping crickets in the distance.

  Parker watched her until he found the right words. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s real.”

  A few seconds ticked by before she met eyes with him. “We need to call the cops and tell them that he attacked me with a knife at the fair.”

  “But then he’ll tell the cops about you breaking into his house and stealing Frito.”

  “I’ll deny it. It’ll be his word against mine. There’s no proof I was ever there.”

  “He’ll just do the same thing about the fair. There’s no proof of that, either. The charges won’t stick.”

  “So what? At least it’ll let him know other people are watching. I think if the cops question him, he’ll be way less likely to come after any of us. At least for a while. I guarantee you he doesn’t want to go to jail. When he was busted with pot last year, Tia Dillo said he bawled like a baby at the thought of spending any real time behind bars.”

  Parker glanced up and down the street, at the front door, and then his eyes landed on Cel’s. “What about Maria? You really think she’ll try cursing us or something?”

  Cel inhaled, held it, nodded, then exhaled. “I’ll have to talk to my abuela about it. Which means I’ll have to tell her about Frito, too.”

  “What do you think she’ll say?”

  “She’ll be mad.” Regret gushed over Cel as the realization of the coming dark stint settled in, causing her chest to tighten and her eyes to tear up. She shook her head in self-disappointment. “I’m so sorry, Parker. Abby was right. This is all my fault.” Tears streamed down her cheeks. “I shouldn’t have dragged you guys into this.”

  Parker pulled her in for a hug, and she rested her head on his chest. “You didn’t drag us into anything.”

  He sounded honest and sincere to Cel, and though she felt an inkling of an urge to look at his eyes to verify her belief, she held back.

  They stood there for a full minute before Parker’s porch light popped on. Cel snapped her head up and hurried to her bike at the end of the driveway, wiping her eyes with her flannel sleeve as she went. Parker called out her name twice, once when she hopped onto her bike, and again when she was rolling out of the driveway, but she didn’t look back. She stared straight ahead and pedaled as fast as she could.

  At home, she used the spare key hidden on the back porch to enter the empty house. Yesenia wasn’t home yet, and Cel guessed she’d probably fallen asleep at the hospital again. After walking through the house with a steak knife in her hand, whispering the protection spell over and over, turning on every light, checking every closet, under every bed, the small attic and single car garage filled with furniture and boxes, she took a quick, hot shower, crawled into bed, and pulled the covers all the way over her head.

  She was exhausted. She had just dozed off when the retro, clear phone on her bedside table rang, streaking fluorescent blue light across her room. She shot upright and stared at the phone for a moment before answering.

  It was Abby, playing her part in the round robin. When she greeted Cel, she didn’t sound angry, which surprised Cel almost as much as her willingness to even call, but she didn’t sound happy, either. She was floating somewhere in between, in the bored, obligatory zone. She probably wouldn’t have called if Parker hadn’t been her round robin caller. Cel figured he’d talked her into it somehow, maybe even asked her to “please do it, for [him],” knowing that would work. She didn’t say much, only a few arbitrary comments about the Singled Out rerun she was watching on MTV, Jeff’s obsession with his stupid Bart Simpson doll, and how tired she was. Anyone listening in on their two or three minute conversation would’ve never guessed at the magnitude of their night.

  Chapter 19 - Cel

  Two days after the fair, Cel, Natalie, and Omar stopped by Oak Mott Memorial Hospital after school for their daily visit and learned that Tia Dillo had suffered two massive strokes and had been moved to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). The doctors had used the defibrillator paddles on her heart three times after the second one in order to bring her back. Now she brea
thed via machine. Her prognosis was grim. Twenty-four hours to live. Maybe.

  After Natalie and Omar left, Cel was allowed to sit at Dillo’s bedside with Yesenia. She slid her hands inside her flannel shirt sleeves, pulled her legs up onto the chair underneath her, and placed her backpack on her lap to help combat her intermittent shivers. For the next two hours, she barely moved. She just sat there listening to Yesenia continuously whisper healing and strengthening spells as the heart monitor and breathing machine beeped and chugged in the background. Cel purposefully stared at the floor a majority of the time, only stealing brief glances at her abuela and tia when a young, lithe, blonde-haired nurse in pink scrubs came and went twice at the top of each hour to check the machines and IV bags. She knew that if she looked at Tia Dillo or Yesenia for too long or too hard, she’d burst into tears.

  Tia Dillo looked nothing like Tia Dillo. Her skin hung off her meatless skull like wet paper, and her chest twitched awkwardly when the breathing machine forced air into her lungs. That, along with the mainline jutting out of her chest, IVs in her hands, blood pressure cuff around her bicep, catheter tube trailing out from under the sheets, and the fat snake of a tube shoved down her throat, she appeared more like a cog in a machine than an organic human.

  And Yesenia looked nothing like Yesenia, either. Sure, she had her hair neatly braided down her back, her blue dress starched and pressed, and sat with perfect posture, hinting at her typical composure and strength, but when Cel looked into her eyes, she didn’t see the eyes of a strong, confident, vibrant, wise, woman. She saw the eyes of a scared little girl. She saw helplessness, desperation. A crushed soul hiding behind the veneer of a stable structure. And seeing her abuela in such a state made her bowels churn with guilt. What if Maria had performed a new curse, a new ritual, to finish off Tia Dillo, after hearing that Cel had been the one to break into her house? What if, by killing Frito, Cel had caused this escalation? Yesenia had been angry when Cel had told her about the cat and the following fair incident. She’d scolded Cel for a good hour, but she’d also forgiven her almost immediately afterward. The day after the fair, she’d even helped Cel create protective talismans for the hunters to hang above their beds, and she had gathered them in a circle in the backyard and performed a shielding ritual to help protect them from curses. But what if, Cel thought as she sat in the cold ICU room staring at the white tile floor, her abuela blamed her for Tia Dillo’s rapid downfall? What if that’s why she would barely look at Cel?