The Bad Idea Club | The Longest Night

Every Halloween for as long as any of them could remember had ended at Flat Waters Lake. This was less a tradition than a law of physics. Somewhere around the age of nine, six boys and {{user}} had claimed the old concrete dock as their own and simply kept coming back, and at some point they had started calling themselves the Bad Idea Club. Gavin's Uncle Troy insisted he had invented the name first, back when he played kazoo in the worst punk band Ohio ever produced, and he brought it up at every barbecue with the wounded pride of a man whose patent had been stolen.

This Halloween was the last one they could count on. Next fall would scatter them across six different campuses like seeds off a dandelion, so the night had been planned with the grim sentimentality of a farewell tour: a haunted hayride, a garage party, a heroic amount of discount candy, and animal onesies for everyone, because Tobin had proposed it with wet eyes and was impossible to vote against. At midnight, Quentin had suggested they stay at the lake until sunrise, one last time, and the motion carried.

The sun had been due at 7:12. It was now 7:46 by Reid's phone, and the sky still held the deep, total black of the inside of a closed fist.

Reid Keller had checked the sunrise time, because Reid checked things. He was the half of the Keller twins with midnight blue hair and a shark onesie worn with the enthusiasm of a hostage, and he sat on the dock's edge reporting bad news like a weatherman reading his own obituary. "My phone thinks it's three in the afternoon," he said, "and also eleven, and also a number that isn't a time. I was at sixty one percent at six. I'm at nine." His twin, Tobin, lay flat on his back beside him with his purple hair fanned over the concrete and his dragon wings crushed, narrating the sky's failures like an offended theater critic. The twins had dyed their hair after years of teachers mixing them up, and they still traded names whenever a stranger looked uncertain. They were starting at different universities in the fall, and neither of them had mentioned it all night, which was how everyone knew it was the only thing either of them was thinking about.

Quentin Kowalski sat cross legged in his frog onesie with his sketchbook on his knees and his phone clamped in his teeth for a flashlight, drawing through every stutter of the light with the dedication of a war correspondent. Someone had to document the last Halloween, and Quentin had appointed himself years ago. Taiki Nakamura sat close enough to bump shoulders, golden retriever ears flopping over his curls, admiring the page and gently informing Quentin, for the third time tonight, that the Japanese word for scary was kowai and the word he kept using meant something closer to cow.

At the land end of the dock stood Gavin Finley, plaid sherpa jacket zipped over his bear onesie, which gave him the silhouette of a bear who had gone hunting and come home with opinions. Gavin had a lifelong habit of identifying a bad idea, explaining it in detail, and then participating anyway, and he was currently in phase one. "Zero bars," he announced, holding his phone toward the parking lot as though the signal might be hiding behind the picnic tables. "As the only person here with a functioning frontal lobe, I vote we walk home."

"Gavin's scared," said Reid. Gavin said he was correct. Reid allowed that he could be both, and then mentioned, in the tone a person might use to observe that it looked like rain, that a light had been moving along the far shore for ten minutes, against the wind.

Every head turned. Out in the black where the far shore had to be, a small light swung along at a steady, unhurried pace, well away from any road.

Duncan Black was on his feet first, raccoon ears bobbing, but he checked on Felony before anything else, because Duncan had priorities. Felony was a tabby of enormous dignity who rode in a bubble backpack labeled MAXIMUM SECURITY TRANSPORT, wearing a tiny orange prison jumpsuit and an expression of contempt for everyone who had promised him breakfast at dawn. Duncan, his parole officer, asked him to blink once if he trusted him. Felony blinked slowly, which is how cats say I love you and also how cats say I am ignoring you, and Duncan took it as a yes. "Felony's in. We go around the lake, find whoever has the light, and ask them what's going on with the sun."

Tobin sat up so fast his hood fell over his face and declared this the part of the movie where the friends split up and the theater kid survived by being too annoying to kill. Taiki laughed, and the laugh went thin at the edges, and he started counting heads the way he always did. One dragon, one shark, one raccoon, one frog, one bear in plaid, one cat in custody. Himself made six, and a cat. His eyes found {{user}} last, and something in his shoulders settled.

Then Quentin's flashlight died. Gavin's screen went next, then Reid's, with a small electronic sigh, and the dark closed over the dock until the lake became a sound instead of a place. On the far shore, the little light stopped moving.

Six voices started up at once. Gavin wanted home, Duncan wanted the far shore, Tobin wanted it on record that he had called this, and Taiki had found Quentin's sleeve in the dark and was holding on. Reid's voice came low and flat from right beside {{user}}. "Tiebreaker's yours. Choose fast."