Mismatched

He leaned against a crooked, knobby tree, skin so pale that it evoked a modeled sheet. His hair fell over his forehead in dark waves, and from the fork of a particularly stubborn lock peered light brown eyes, veined with black like the rings of an ancient tree.

His name was Beckett, and he was twenty-two years old.

Her name was Regan Marie, and she had known him since they were five.

“Eight years and you’re still late,” Beckett said, lips twisted into a wicked little smirk. “Every Halloween we’re here, every Halloween you show up in a less than timely manner. Doesn’t it get tiring?”

“No, and Halloween’s not for another two days,” Regan answered, shrugging her backpack from her shoulder. She set it on the flat top of a particularly mossy gravestone, strap-side down.

When she was five, she had not given a damn. It was so easy to toss her backpack on the kitchen floor to gather dust and dog hair in favor of an evening spent outside with her new neighbor, a child of endless grins and silly aspirations. I’m going to be an astronaut, he had told her the first time they met, what about you?

I’m just going to be an adult.

He had laughed.

“What did you bring to eat?” Beckett asked, moving away from the tree with a low hum. He stood at her side, a cool breeze winding between the two of them like a flexible brick wall, blocking their contact without rigid denial. Regan did not lean away to dig into her backpack.

“Halloween candy I bought at Walmart today,” she said, pulling a fat, colorful bag of fun-size chocolates from the larger pocket. “A PB&J, and a bag of Cheetos in case all that sweet gets to me.”

She set the second objects on the stone next to her backpack, the plastic-wrapped sandwich a buffer between her open bag of Cheetos and dirt-stained moss.

“Mm,” Beckett said. “And none for me, I imagine?”

“Never,” she said, sitting down heavily in the yellow grass. It crunched beneath her thighs like a thousand tiny, tiny bones, and the wind shrieked through the trees arched over the edge of the graveyard. 

This place should have been quiet, but it never managed it for more than a few minutes at a time. She and Beckett had come here that first night to find some peace from the cacophony of family, she from the angry collision of her father and brother, he from the ever-present oppression of his uncle.

He hummed in thought, the sound reverberating in the cold; the iron scent of oncoming snow weighted the air, hardened the flesh of her lungs. At her rear, Beckett seemed unbothered, wearing little more than a long sleeve t-shirt and a pair of jeans. He looked like a model for some teenage magazine, half frat boy and half goth, carefully tousled hair and a single earring shaped like a falchion.

Two years ago she had hated him for it. Not just the earring or the hair, not just his crooked grin or his snide sense of humor; all of it. Everything. She had looked at him and wondered whether she had changed or if he was just that obnoxious.

They had met on the road outside the graveyard, him bearing the usual messenger bag full of college homework, a camera, and a box of Cosmic brownies that he joked about eating all on his own. Regan had laughed it off. It was so small, it shouldn’t have bothered her, but she wanted to take his stupid camera and bash him over the head with it.

She tore open the bag of Halloween candy, a mini Snickers falling onto the side of her shoe. Beckett buzzed beside her, likely tempted to claim it for himself. Regan snatched it up and dropped it back into the bag, plucking a Butterfinger from the depths instead. The buzzing ended, and when she looked over she saw that he had silently sat himself next to her.

“Is your brother coming this time?” Beckett asked, voice laced with a certain venom. He had always clashed with her elder brother, had not even taken pity on him after he’d been punched so hard in the eye that one of his pupils had permanently blown, and Regan hated him for that. Her brother was erratic, often explosive, but he loved her more than their father ever had.

“No,” she said through a mouthful of chocolate. “He has an appointment elsewhere.”

“And his friends?” Beckett asked.

“Likewise.”

“Mm.”

She watched him stick an elegant finger into the dirt, pull it up with a tuft of crunchy grass and throw it to the wind. It landed flatly back on the ground, a small root poking through a little cluster of earth. 

The first night they had spent here had been lovely. They were teenagers younger than they thought they were, and they pretended to be kids for a night. It had drizzled early that day, leaving the ground soaked in wide patches, wetter even where the graveyard met the woods. Regan had been the first to pull a millipede from the dirt and throw its coiled form like a miniature discus. 

Beckett had howled and screeched, swiping at his clothes long after the insect had returned to its nest. They’d had a mud-fight. He’d gotten a worm knotted in his curls, and she had had to yank it out while he whined for it to be over. 

The next year had been much the same. He’d found a lizard and held it while it twisted and thrashed, setting it down only when it failed to bite him. He’d offered it a potato chip as a consolation prize, not that the poor creature paid it any mind before bolting into the tangled roots of a cracked tree.

“You’re thinking about the first time, aren’t you?” Beckett asked, and Regan’s silence answered for her. “What happened to us?”

“I guess we changed,” Regan said, stuffing the empty Butterfinger wrapper into the pocket of her backpack. “That’s what kids do. They change. And we aren’t kids anymore.”

“But I’m not much of a man, either,” said Beckett.

“No. You aren’t.”

The shift had come about two years ago. Regan’s brother had become the town loon, and Beckett in all his agnosticism and science-adherence had laughed, how can he believe in all that stuff? what for? 

Shut up, she’d snapped at him, and he had. 

They had not spoken at all in the weeks leading up to their annual meeting, taking shelter instead where the ground was even. Regan spoke to her brother, and Beckett spoke to god-only-knows; his uncle would have hit him for expressing an emotion, and his pack of “friends” cared about him as much as they did the latest fad. 

The day came, and she had not known whether or not she would go. Her sleeping bag had remained stuffed under her bed; it used to sit out for the entirety of the week before their graveyard visit, excitedly awaiting its purpose above the dirt. 

Her brother had noticed, had asked about it, had encouraged her to go. He would have a talk with Beckett sometime, he said. Beckett would know better.

“How are your classes?” Beckett asked now. “Are you still going to try for a law degree?”

“Yes,” Regan answered. They spoke once a year. She did not feel the need to elaborate, and Beckett did not prod. He shifted silently in the grass, his movement dragging a chill down her spine.

It had been a warm night for October, about fifty degrees and clear. Beckett wore a too-tight long sleeve t-shirt and jeans. She had just switched her degree, and he was on the verge of graduating with his. 

“Late,” he had said, mouth tilted into a crooked grin. She hated him. They had always been opposites - his brunette to her blond, his outgoing nature to her isolation, his loneliness to her contentment - and standing across from him two years ago she felt it more intensely than she ever had.

His name was Beckett, and he was twenty-two years old. He held a cheap disposable camera in one hand, a safer, journeyman’s replacement for his usual pricey Nikon, and with the other he waved a corny three-fingered wave.

“Yeah, yeah,” she’d replied, dropping her sleeping bag on the ground and laying on it. Beckett lowered himself next to her, frowning. They sat in silence for almost a half hour before he spoke.

“I’m sorry about what I said about your brother,” he’d said softly. “It was rude. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

“Yeah,” Regan told him. “You should have.”

And it was strange. His face had lit up in terror, and he’d risen to his feet, stumbling over a headstone as he stepped backward. His heel caught on a plant. He had yelped, and said, “Reg, we need to leave, like, now.”

She sat up, irritation burning through her and followed the line of his gaze. From the edge of the graveyard a small cluster of men marched steadily toward them, hoods woven of twigs and grass concealing all but their eyes and their mouths. Regan felt a jolt, but not fear.

“Wait,” she had said, grabbing the end of Beckett’s sleeve. “Wait. I think…”

He thrashed, whined and whimpered like a kicked dog, said something about a cult, something else about the police, and to his credit he pulled out his phone. Regan stood then, so rapidly that he lost his grip on his phone. It landed with a muted thump. The men were upon them now.

“Go home,” one had said to her, his voice artificially lowered but intensely familiar. She met a pair of mismatched eyes, one pupil blown wider than the other. “We need to borrow your friend.”

“Regan, no! No, please, you can’t! You can’t!”

She had looked into those eyes, her blood cold, and she had bolted, Beckett screaming at her back.

He was in the news for months, quotes and anecdotes and pictures of him alive and mangled decorating the front page for weeks upon weeks. She thought that he would have liked that.

“I forgive you,” Beckett said, his form flickering in the tail of a particularly angry wind, and Regan did not believe him.

“I didn’t mean to leave you to die,” she said, and she knew that he did not believe her, either.