Maybe it was Halloween the first time I saw him. I remember being, like, seven, dressed up like a clown in some goofy shoes and my face was all sticky with white paint and black diamond tears. My dad was barking ”Harlequin!” at me and I had no idea what it meant: I just enjoyed leaping around the furniture. It was one of the last big parties my parents threw before my mom died. I was (and will be forever) nuts about undead goosebumpy stuff, but they always brought over loads of weird adults, so I used to hide in my room.

Anyway, I was about to sneak away and devour my secret candy stash when I saw this figure on our fire escape through the window wreathed with fake spiderwebs. He was real skinny and blonde and the same age as me. How did he find my house? Boys were alien in my world. I shuddered. It was like he was staring through my body, Doctor, all the gore and dreams and big dark woods inside me—you know all about them, huh? He was as still as a mannequin until I came close enough to mist up the window with my panicky breaths, and then—bang!—he started rapping on the glass like he was desperate to come in, mad frenzied thrashing that made the windows shake. I wanted to scream but my screams died in my mouth: he was gone, all at once, like, as fast as he appeared, and nothing but breeze was left.

My dad is zonked out on the couch right now from, um, ”Yuletide excess,” with shards of ice in his beard: he looks like a frostbitten werewolf. He’s totally afraid of ghosts since he’s a Hungarian ex-gravedigger. He used to see evil vampires hanging out in Reverend Runt’s cemetery—they had their own language, like the screeches of bats. I love my daddy. I never told him what happened and once my mom died a few months later of an out-of-nowhere aneurysm, there wasn’t much point anyway: he was getting ripped apart by grief.

’Twas the week before Xmas and I was at the ice rink when the boy came back. It was insane with revellers, duh: kids fat as snowmen, cadaverous romantics, wicked private school girls with exquisite cheekbones who swooped around me like wrathful swans. BFD: I was twirling alone like normal giving off my trusty forcefield of weirdness. But then there was something wrong, an infection in the air. The world spun around me, real slow and odd, the faces of all the other skaters reduced to a sinister ooze, and ‘Jingle Bells’ on the fairground organ was all spiky and nauseating, stabbing pieces of smashed kaleidoscope in my brain. There he was! Surrounded by those faceless ghouls, eyes rolling back in his head, black, like, filth drooling from his mouth. His delicate little body was convulsing, a scarecrow in a big storm, his arm outstretched and offering a beautiful rose, which, since nobody else could see him, I knew was meant for me. The veins were etched into his face like bloody trees.