The café owner finishes ringing up two older ladies that the girls were puzzled to see had been there long enough to finish a whole meal and a pot of tea while they hadn’t noticed at all. Next up at the counter is the couple that had been their first surprise, making a bit of small talk with him while paying their bill. While the girls wait their turn for his attention, Eleanor gently pets the glossy green leaf of a philodendron with a finger. Michelle could swear it was leaning into her touch.

She wants to ask her about it. She’s wanted to since the previous year’s science lesson on ecosystems, where her terrarium’s seedlings sprouted the first night and didn’t stop growing. And then all the surrounding terrariums began to thrive as she spent more time working on hers to replant parts of the ever-tangling mat of growth that overtook the larger and larger containers she found to separate it all. She’d chalked it up to her overactive imagination, blaming it on her strange recurring dreams about an amorphous child surrounded by a jungle of greenery. I mean, just moments ago, I thought I saw a toad seated at a perfectly proportionate table.

“Earth to Michelle?” Eleanor has reached across the table to give a light tug to the thick blonde tassel at the end of her fishtail braid.

 The two girls both let out small gasps. Eleanor, shocked that she’d actually touched her hair, apologizes. “I’m sorry for startling you—you were zoning out? He’s asking if we’d like anything else?”

“Oh. Oh! No, I think I’m good,” she answers, sitting up to pull her wallet out of her back pocket, surprised she’d been so lost in thought. Ridiculous thoughts. She’d been trying to figure her classmate out for months and was squandering this opportunity.

René grins, his dark brown eyes turning to crescents by his raised cheeks. “No need for that,” he gestures with his upturned palm to the little suede wallet she’d saddle-stitched herself. “The lady says it’s on her,” he nods back toward the bookcase, or rather, the small table where the toad was seated.

 Michelle’s chin drops as she opens her mouth before quickly closing it, unsure what she even wants to say. Eleanor leans to look behind him and then looks back at them in confusion. “You mean the lady who just left? We didn’t get to say thank you,” she frowns, turning to the window to see if she was still in sight.

“I’m positive your gratitude is felt, my dear,” he says to her and then to Michelle, “No?”

She’s looking at the toad, who blinks each eye separately before bowing her head. “I, um, need to… can you show me where the restroom is?” she asks him.

“Of course, right this way,” he steps back from the table so she can slide out of the booth.

She points to her bags, “Ellie, do you mind watching my stuff?”

“Yeah, no problem,” she answers as Michelle hops down from their booth’s raised platform. Michelle follows behind the café owner and tilts her face toward the marble top bookcase as she walks by. Softly, she whispers, “Thank you, ma’am,” not entirely convinced she’s offering her thanks to anyone, but just in case. He turns down a small hallway and smoothly directs her to a door at the end with a practiced fluid motion. “Mogieannah said you’re welcome.”

She stops and turns to him, jaw slack and eyes the size of his chocolate orange chip ginger cookies. “You—I—I mean, I didn’t imagine,” she hesitated, then in an even lower whisper, “a toad? At a little table?”

 “May I?” he asks, holding out his hand to her as he had across the counter. She places hers on top with a nod. Let’s see what our little diviner wants. He closes his eyes and tastes a charcuterie board of smoked confusion and pungent need for answers paired with a vinegared slaw of desperation for certainty, a souring pickled self-doubt ready to ferment some stronger anxiety. But the flavor of curiosity drizzled across the platter before him was clear: this young lady would attract some unwanted attention if she worried much longer.

He opened his eyes, now the pale amber of his ancestry. She inhaled deeply but didn’t retract her hand resting on his. Perfectly still save for her racing heart, she looks into his true eyes as the curiosity in her, thick and crystallized in some places, warms and bubbles up to the surface. Michelle Marin desires answers.

In the main dining room, Eleanor watches a large crow take off in the direction of All Faith’s Cemetery. I’ve got so much to tell Gramma Jane tomorrow!

In the brick apartment building on Orchard St, Eleanor wakes from a night of strange dreams she can’t really remember. It’s Halloween and she’s got plans. School, where her new friend may or may not remember her. Try not to get your hopes up. Then she’s got to see Gramma Jane and the crow with some news. Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s the same as always. Then, she’s got to figure out where Badger’s Combe is. Should we bring some costumes to quick change in and out of and snag some candy along the way? Michelle might need to bring some home. Alibi treats. She digs through her closet for a pair of black jeans. They have tears in the knees and a few more in other places, so she puts on a pair of gray and black striped leggings first. Satisfied with her lower half, she buckles her belt and thinks about colors. Despite the teachers’ warnings about making sure cars can see you during trick-or-treat, she scrapes several hangers across the closet rod, skipping over the mostly too-small pink and purple shirts and flipping through her darkest options. Yes, of course. A worn-to-perfect-softness, once-black, now charcoal-colored tee for the Ottarstedt Community College Underground Literature Trust. She loves the Art Nouveau revival swoosh and ligatures of its 1960s psychedelic poster lettering in age-creased white ink, and couldn’t believe her luck finding it at the Melitown Flea the previous summer.  Perfect. With her boots on and her hair down and parted in the middle, she felt good about the day. If she doesn’t remember me, I will just strike up a conversation and try to be more memorable this time.

Across town, Michelle Marin sat at the breakfast table, staring at the little blue sharks floating around her unfinished cereal bowl, half listening to the conversation around her while replaying her conversation with the café owner, Mr. Akereggi.

“…This is probably the last year Neely won’t have better things to do on Halloween night than walk about with the terror squad, so I’m taking them up on the offer to send your brother with them. I know you don’t want to join them with the triplets again after what happened last time, so since you’re off the hook, what are your plans?”

“Me?” Michelle asks, glancing around the table, and seeing her mother’s nod, continues, “Well, there’s the haunted hayride over at Hilde’s farm? I was going to ask my friend if she wants to go—if it’s alright with you if I go?”

“Oh Hilde’s does such a good job with that. That sounds like fun! Who is this friend?”

“A girl from my class? Ellie Kistler. She gets super good grades.”

“Well good on her! Maybe she can share her studying methods and you can get some super good grades too.”

“My grades are good.”

“Mmm, yeah.  Could probably be better if you did more reading than drawing, butterbean.”

“Mom,” she says flatly, scrunching up her face and jabbing at a shark with her spoon while her little brother snickers.

“What are you laughing at, prickly pear?” their mother asks, making him scowl. “Now you go finish getting ready for school. And you… there is nothing sadder than a soggy sharkberry. Either add some more and finish up, or clean up and get on with the gettin’ on.”

Groundwork laid. I can work with this.

At the start of homeroom, Eleanor is once again a surprise to the teacher, but she is relieved to catch Michelle’s eye across the room and have her smile returned. This experiment successfully repeats from first through fourth period, and she looks forward to lunch for once.

“You look cool today,” Michelle says, plopping onto the bench in front of her with a tray of limp pizza and an orange and black cupcake. “I mean, not that you don’t look cool normally. Just… I like,” she motions up and down, “your whole deal here especially, with your hair down and the shirt’s neat.”

“Thanks! It’s my favorite. I like your bracelets and stuff.”

“Thanks! So, I think I will need to make a stop after school. I need a few bits of hay to really sell my story. We’re going to the farm with the haunted hayride, by the way, if anyone ever asks. It was super fun.”

Eleanor grins, “Alibi hay, not alibi treats. Got it. I was thinking we should get some candy along the way like we’d been trick-or-treating.”

“Ooh, that’s good too. Cuz why wouldn’t we get what we could?”

“I’ve got a question,” they say in unison and follow up with “Jinx!”

“You first,” Eleanor laughs.

“How’d you sleep last night?”

Eleanor thinks back to the morning and the fuzzy haze of what lingered from her sleep before she started her day. “Ok, I guess. I think I had some strange dreams, though. I remember thinking, ‘That was weird’ as I woke up, but then it was gone as soon as I started thinking about today. Well, tonight.” With her canines growing in, her grin looks like a jack o’ lantern. “Why do you ask? Too hopped up on sugar to get any? Those cookies!”

“Right? They were huge.”

“Yeah, yeah, the biggest cookie I’ve ever seen. We gotta go back.”

“We really should,” she agrees, thinking about Mr Akereggi, but shaking herself from that train of thoughts, she quickly asks, “What was your question?”

“Do you know where Badger’s Combe even is?”

“Ah! I do… Sort of.”

Eleanor nods, “Go on?”

Michelle has finished her pizza and split the cupcake in two, offering half to Eleanor. “It’ll be easier to show you in the library later.” How am I going to explain this? ‘Oh, you know, I dreamed it, no big deal.’

By 2 p.m., they’re huddled over a hand-drawn map Michelle had pulled from her sketchbook and an open book of Melitown history. “Right, so I think it’s in the woods beyond the Ramble Ave side of town.”

“In the woods?” Eleanor asks. “I’d thought it was like a bar, or maybe some college kids named their house and had shows there.”

 “Combe is an old-timey word for valley,” she says, pointing to the topographic map of the surrounding area the book is opened to. “This is the lowest part of the county, and look!” She tapped the words BADGER’S COMBE” overlaying the v-shaped contours on the map.

“Wow! How did you even know to look here?”

“I just heard it somewhere before. Maybe someone was camping out that way or something?” she shrugged.

They make plans to meet back up at the Square near the start of Ramble Ave after taking care of their separate “real quick” stops. At the ringing of the dismissal bell, they part.

“So the café is really cool inside. I wonder if you ever went there? You’d have liked the desserts—so many different kinds of pastries and cakes. Little individual pies, too. I don’t know anything about coffee, but it smelled really good,” Eleanor, seated on the top of Jane Kistler’s grave, says in the direction of the marble peacock.  A rustling of black oil-slick shimmering feathers as the crow lands on the headstone stops her soliloquy. “There you are!” Digging into her backpack, she pulls out a bag of crackers and tosses one up to him. After catching it, he flaps his wings and shakes his head.

“Yeah, yeah, ok,” she says, taking a handful out and spreading them on the ground cover before her. “No tricks, only treats! I’ve got more stuff, too.” She adds a few carrot sticks and half a ham sandwich to the feast. “The rest of this is mine, though. I need my energy to go into the woods tonight. Ever been to Badger’s Combe, buddy?”

As if he was listening, he looked up from his pile of pretzels. Tilted his head, looking sharply at her, he opened his wings and beat the air, letting out a loud series of caws.

“WHY WOULD YOU GO THERE?” Fable was shouting. 

“Yeesh, fine, I’ll make another sandwich when I get home, I guess,” she sets the second half on top of the first and gets up to leave. The Japanese maple standing sentry over the Kistler family plots shivers and creaks as if leaning toward her. She is zipping up her bag and doesn’t notice its reach or the angry strutting and hops of the crow.