Page 8 of The Boo Next Door

Which is how I end up in my own side yard at two in the morning, in a bathrobe, running my heavy-duty cord — quietly, respectfully, like a raccoon with a plan — across the property line and into the exterior outlet on Grady Ellis's garage.

Look. I know. But hear me out: his garage has its own subpanel — it's visible right through the window, the man has enough amperage over there to run a small regional airport — and this is a victimless crime. I'll unplug before dawn. He tests his fog at six. I know his schedule the way you know the schedule of an enemy submarine.

"This never happened," I tell Beetlejuice, who has followed me out in violation of every household policy, and is sitting on the fence post watching me commit utility theft in a bathrobe.

He blinks, slow, which in cat means either I love you or I've seen worse. With him it's genuinely both.

The fog machines run all night. It's beautiful.

Saturday morning, my lawn has been rearranged.

I notice it from the kitchen window, mid-coffee, the way you notice a spelling error in a tattoo. Overnight, someone has taken the twelve plastic skeletons I'd staged as fleeing séance guests and re-posed them on my front lawn in a neat choreography, and it takes me a second to see it, and then I see it and I cannot unsee it.

They're arranged into letters. The skeletons spell GIVE UP.

The G is two skeletons doing something that would get them ejected from a family attraction. The exclamation point at the end is a single skeleton, face-down, defeated, with my own orange extension cord coiled beside it like a signature on a crime.

He found the cord. He unplugged it, coiled it — coiled it nicely, which is somehow the most insulting part, the man could not stop himself from cable management even mid-taunt — and then he used my own dead army to send me a message.

I stand at the window for a long moment, coffee cooling in my hand.

"Beetlejuice," I say. "We're going to Frankie's. Mommy needs war counsel."

Frankie Nguyen makes coffee the way I build monsters — with contempt for moderation. Her shop lives where the video store used to be, and she's kept the MEMBERS ONLY sign as decor, and when I walk in she looks up from the steam wand, tracks my expression, and says, "Whoever it is, we hate them."

We were nine together in this town. Some friendships you just re-enter, like a house.

"Grady Ellis," I say.

The shop goes quiet. Not silent — quiet, the way a room gets when everyone in it wants to hear better while pretending to read.

"You can't hate Grady Ellis," Frankie says, but she's already making my drink, which means she's negotiable. "He's on the water tower calendar. He's Mr. July."

"He posed my skeletons into the words give up."

Frankie sets the milk down. "Okay, that rules. What did you do to him first?"

"Why would you assume⁠—"

"Lila."

"I ran one extension cord into one outlet on his garage. Barely a cord. A courtesy cord."

"You stole power from the fire marshal's favorite son to run your ghost porch." She hands me something with maple foam on it, and Marge was right, I would fight my family for this. "God, it's like Bee never left. Do you know he closes his whole street with the fire truck on Halloween? Do you know what you're up against?"

"A winch," I say. "I've been told about the winch."

"You're up against a man this town would elect mayor by acclamation, and you're going to be the crazy lady stealing his electricity in a bathrobe."

"How do you know about the bathrobe."

"Denise runs at five. She has a group chat." Frankie leans on the counter, and her voice drops out of comedy for exactly one sentence, which is her way. "You okay? House and everything?"

"Roof's eighteen. Estate's got two."

"So you need the Gourd money."

"I need the Gourd money."