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Name: Jay Taylor Nicknames: N/A Age: 27 Height: 6′1” Sexuality: Bisexual Occupation: Teacher
• Jay hasn’t always had a cushy—or morally upstanding—life. His parents’ sole source of income was a gig running the grounds-keeping service for the historical lighthouse on Winter Island on the eastern shore of Echo Isle. It could be tough to make ends meet, but Jay had a way of filling the gaps for himself (petty theft.)
• It’s hard to say exactly when or even whether he fell into the “bad crowd” friend-wise, or if his kindergarten buddies all naturally developed into teenage delinquents with him, but by high school they were notorious trouble-makers, engaging in vandalism, theft and bullying as their favorite pastimes.
• Jay had secretly always felt a little like he was putting on an exaggerated performance trying to impress his friends, especially Ernie, but he didn’t actually feel all that bad about the crimes (besides the stealing from small business owners) until something majorly changed his perspective.
• While he used to spend Halloween with his friends smashing pumpkins, toilet-papering houses and literally stealing candy from babies, that routine was disrupted one fateful year—the Halloween night that changed the course of his life. It was the year Max Dennison moved to town.
• After school that day, Jay and Ernie had run into Max in the cemetery and tried to shake him down for smokes or cash, but getting none of those from him they settled on his brand new Nikes. Later, they stopped him and his little sister for the candy toll while he was taking her trick-or-treating. Typical so far. Until about 3A.M. when a witch followed the scent of Dennison’s sneakers straight to Ernie’s feet.
• The boys had no way of knowing at the time that those witches weren’t just women in Sanderson costumes, but the three sisters themselves returned from the grave thanks to a virgin lighting the black flame candle. If they had known what would come of it, there’s no way Jay would have antagonized them, but he opened his big mouth and landed himself and his best friend in cages dangling from the witches’ cabin ceiling.
• They were tormented for hours by the promise of being cooked into a stew or chopped up for potion ingredients as the witches brewed something in a massive cauldron. At some point the witches left and came back with Dennison’s little sister, who they planned to suck the life force out of after feeding her their evil potion; Max came through to rescue her, but left Jay and Ernie hanging. Left them for dead, after he’d been the one to bring those witches back to life in the first place.
• That much would actually almost be forgivable in retrospect—he needed to make a quick getaway, seeing as Winnie seemed to have a personal vendetta against the little girl for calling her ugly. The witches soon took off in pursuit of the Dennisons rather than feasting on any of the other children they had within grasp, including Jay and Ernie in their cages.
• Except that Max had never come back after apparently dealing with the three witches, nor bothered to tell anybody that they were locked up there. It was only because they took turns screaming for help for hours, and by the grace of God that the Sanderson cabin wasn’t too far from town, that they were rescued the next day.
• Jay and Ernie changed their act right up after all of that. If almost being eaten by three evil witches on Halloween night wasn’t a “come to Jesus” moment, then nothing else would have scared them straight. It was impossible not to acknowledge and reflect on their own actions that had led to them being endangered that night, even if Jay privately still holds a grudge against Max Dennison for leaving them to rot. If they hadn’t been such jerks in the first place, they probably could have avoided that.
• He had vowed to himself that he’d be a better person if he managed to make it out of that cage alive, and he followed through. Jay stopped stealing, stopped breaking things that didn’t belong to him, and started paying attention in class.
• Most of his old friends didn’t understand why, because nobody believed his and Ernie’s tale of the Sanderson sisters coming back to life—everyone just assumed the boys were embarrassed to admit that they had locked themselves in those cages thinking it would be funny and lost the key, or else that they’d been tripping (even though the hardest drug they’d done was weed.) Jay quickly learned to keep that truth to himself.
• Ernie was the only person in the world he could talk to who knew and understood what they’d been through that night, sharing the trauma, but he moved away at some point to pursue a park ranger job all the way across the continent in Oregon. He didn’t want anyone to be lost and scared the way they were that night…Jay understood the motivation, but it hurt like hell all the same. He figured there were similar job openings closer to home, but Ernie wanted to get as far away from this place as possible, even if it meant leaving Jay behind.
• Jay was probably more than halfway in love with his best friend in the way all latent bisexuals experience during their coming of age, but in retrospect it seemed so obvious and natural as to not even need unpacking. Crazier things have happened, carry on.
• He became the first in his family to attend college, pursuing a degree in education as he wanted to make a difference in other kids’ lives, setting a good example as a reformed teen delinquent himself. He currently teaches civics and U.S. government classes in high school, but has higher aspirations of going into administration and even working up to becoming a principal.
• One of his first years teaching, Dani Dennison was actually in one of his classes. She had of course forgiven him for the candy-stealing incident in years past (he never made up with Max, however) and he found her acidic wit to be one of the most entertaining parts of that class period.
• When he was twenty-five his daughter Katie was born and she instantly became the light of his life. She’s only two now, but treated like a little princess, getting anything she wants from her dad even though being a single parent means his time is split between childcare and earning a living. He also took over care of the lighthouse from his own aging parents, taking Katie up to Winter Island on weekends for swimming, fishing and boating.
• The only thing he doesn’t indulge in is celebrating Halloween, but she’s still too young to know what that is or question why daddy locks all the doors and draws all the blinds one day a year. She’ll notice his paranoia eventually, but Jay doesn’t plan on telling Katie exactly where it comes from.
