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“Mikey, can you help me carve the jack-o’-lanterns?” Laurie called out to her older brother from where she was in the kitchen with the pumpkins placed on the kitchen table.
For a few moments, all Laurie heard was the sounds of the movie they had been watching playing. She could hear the growls of the werewolf as she listened for her brother. After a few seconds, Laurie heard the sound of the sofa creaking and then the sounds of footsteps heading towards her.
Within seconds a brown-haired young-man in his twenties appeared in the doorway looking at Laurie with a slightly bored expression across his face.
“Oh, don’t be like that you love carving pumpkins with me and you know it,” Laurie teased as she stuck her tongue out at her older brother before letting out a laugh and turning back to the drawer she had been going through.
As Laurie pulled out two knives she heard Michael heading towards the dining room table where she had set everything up for them. The sound of a chair scraping against the floor filled her ears as she turned towards the table to see Michael sitting in front of one of the pumpkins.
“See, I knew you wanted to,” Laurie giggled as she watched her big brother pick up one of the markers that were on the table to start sketching a face on his pumpkin. Laurie couldn’t help but laugh a little harder as Michael gave her another look, both of them knowing that her statement wasn’t completely true.
It wasn’t the fact that Michael didn’t want to carve a pumpkin it was more the fact that the reason he had come in here is that Laurie had asked him to. Michael would do anything for Laurie and that was well known among everyone, not just their family. Now Laurie knew the reason, Michael, behind this it was because he wanted her to know that he would never hurt her, not in a million years.
It wasn’t a secret why Michael wanted to prove this to her, in fact, everyone in town knew why but no one really brought it up anymore, well no one except a few bullies that liked to mess with Michael and Dr. Loomis who had once been her brother’s psychiatrist but that hadn’t gone well.
“Come on, Mikey, you know it’s fun,” Laurie teased as she walked over to her brother with both of the knives in her hand. “Plus, it’s Halloween,” She said as she looked into his dark eyes a smile on her face. “You can’t have Halloween without jack-o’-lanterns,” She explained as stopped in front of him to hand him one of the knives.
She quickly handed him a knife of his own before walking to the other side of the table with her own knife and sitting down. She placed her knife down on the table before picking up a marker of her own so she could start carving her own pumpkin.
As Laurie began to draw she stole a glance at Michael who had started cutting into the top of his pumpkin to remove the pulp from the inside. Laurie watched him for a moment as she let her marker hover near the front of her pumpkin.
She watched him carefully cut into the pumpkin with ease, and she watched as the light glinted off the knife from the kitchen lights above them.
Laurie knew what he had done when he was six-years-old, she knew about their sister Judith and why she wasn’t around anymore. Laurie also knew that Michael had gotten help though, she and their family knew that Michael was better now and that the doctors of Smith's Grove had helped him. Michael had gotten better, he took the proper medication that kept his mind clear, and he had been out of Smith's Grove for a few years now.
Even through that entire time that all of that had been going on Laurie had never once been scared of Michael. Not even when their parents took her to see him in Smith's Grove when they were young, not when she learned what he had done, and not when she had heard the doctor called Loomis yell about her brother being evil. Laurie wasn’t scared of Michael and to be honest, not a lot of people were anymore.
Michael had completely changed over the years, he had finished school during his time at Smith's Grove, and when he left he had moved in with Laurie and her adoptive parents The Strode’s who had later become Michael’s adoptive parents as well. Michael had even gotten a job at the local grocery store and despite a few bullies that tried to rial him up, which Laurie would put a stop to every time most of them with threats and other times with her fist.
Laurie looked at Michael with a smile when he pulled his eyes away from his pumpkin to look at her with a questioning look. Michael hadn’t said a thing since that night fifteen years ago, but he used sign language to communicate with them all.
“Don’t mind me just trying to figure out what to make,” Laurie said with a smile as she looked at her brother, who rolled his eyes and went back to the pumpkin in front of him.
Laurie’s smile remained as she looked down at her own pumpkin and began to sketch heart-shaped eyes on to the front of it without another thought.
As the brother and sister sat there listening to the horror movie in the other room, both seem happy and relaxed in one another’s company as they continued to work on their pumpkins so they could light them and put them outside.