“Maze of the Damned!” Anna and Layla both yelled in their spookiest voices.
“So, what, like a haunted house?” I said, as I typed out a response to Grant: Don’t apologize! I’m glad we talked. I miss you.
“No,” Anna said, “a haunted corn maze just south of Knoxville. So it’s a maze but it’s also ‘maize,’ get it?”
I rolled my eyes but I was smiling.
“You’ll really like it,” Layla said, flourishing her free hand dramatically like a claw and deepening her voice. “It’s a macabre feast for every sense!”
“Also,” Anna said, bouncing, “there’s funnel cake!”
Anna and Layla spent the hour-long trip giggling with each other over snippets of gossip, bickering over something sacrilegious Layla said, and singing along loudly to Taylor Swift. I didn’t know the words so I made up my own, which sent the girls into hysterics—except Chloe, whose silence was as loud as an air horn. It took Grant most of the ride to respond, but eventually I got another text: I miss you too.
* * *
We headed to the Maze of the Damned just as the sun finished creeping out of sight. We walked past a looming grain silo, a red-roofed barn with SEE ROCK CITY painted on it in white text just visible in the light from a nearby bonfire, and a dark-windowed farmhouse that looked at least a hundred years old. On the other side lay rolling fields dotted with patches of orange firelight, and in the center, rising like the walls of a fortress, was the corn maze itself.
Nothing happened for a few hundred feet once we were inside, but then the cackling began. Anna screamed and pointed above our heads, where figures in cloaks leaped across the walls, looking down at us with glowing eyes before disappearing again. We turned into a shrouded clearing, where pale figures dressed like Civil War doctors loomed over a soldier who screamed over the imminent loss of his limbs. Layla and Anna screamed and ran ahead. I grabbed Chloe’s hand and pulled her through a break in the cornstalks running wildly through a network of side paths left over from the farm’s normal comings and goings.
“Uh-oh,” I said. “We’re lost.”
“On purpose,” Chloe said, picking a long blade of grass and chewing on it.
“What?” I said, tilting my voice up and stretching the word out for way too long. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Right,” Chloe said, looking at me stonily.
“Really though,” I said after a moment of silence. “I actually have no idea where we are. Can you get us back to the path?”
“Just ’cause my parents own a farm,” she said, crossing her arms, “you think I have, what, magic corn-vision?”
“Um … yes?” I said, biting my lip and shrugging. She laughed once, softly, which made me feel a small sense of accomplishment.
She let out a long breath and looked up at the stars as we came to a branch in the path. “Just ask what you wanna ask.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, picking up a thin, bendy stick and swishing it hard across the leaves on the path. Chloe gave me a curious look. “In case we have to come back this way, we’ll know where we’ve been before.”
“Clever,” Chloe said, nodding slowly.
“Thanks,” I said, swishing the stick absentmindedly. “So what’s new in your world, Chloe?”
“Gotta turn around,” she said, brushing past me as she doubled back. “Track curves away from where we need to be.” We walked a few more yards before she stopped and sighed, her shoulders slumping. “You really aren’t gonna ask?” I shrugged and tried to appear as innocent as possible. “She dumped me.”
“Oh,” I said, long and soft. I took a few steps forward and wrapped her in a hug. “That sucks.”
“I guess?” Chloe said, kneeling and ripping up a long, bendy stick of her own. We continued walking, me watching her as she swiped and slashed at the corn stalks. We only needed a few marks to find our way, but, I knew, sometimes people just needed to break things. “Yeah. It sucks.”
“What happened?” We reached a fork that neither of us had an immediate hunch about, so I flipped a coin and we went right. “You don’t have to answer.”
“No,” Chloe said. “It’s fine. Guess I’m not used to talking about it.” She kicked a clump of dirt ahead of us and stared up at the stars. She was using more than five words at a time, which usually meant she was about to say something important. “You’re only the second person who knows … about me.”
“Bee was the first?” I said. She nodded. “That must have been lonely.”
“Yeah,” Chloe said. “We didn’t have Internet or anything on the farm when I was little. It was just me, my parents, my brothers, the animals, and the farmhands. There was no place I could’ve learned about people like me. I thought I was the only one in the whole world when I was little.”
“Jesus,” I said, touching her shoulder.
“It was almost better,” she said. “Before I knew how I was different it was just a vague notion. So much easier to ignore.”
“But then Bee showed up?”
“Yep,” Chloe said, sniffing sharply and tossing her stick aside. “Come on.” She took my hand and pulled me through one of the corn walls. It was slow-going off the path, but I assumed she knew what she was doing.