by Joseph Fink
“Think she’s going to try to sneak out and go anyway?” her dad said.
“Ha! Yeah. Yes. Definitely.”
In her room, Esther pulled up her most recent text chat. She and Agustín had been best friends for years.
“Hey, we need to talk,” she typed. “You around?”
“Sure. Cool. Want me to head over?”
“No, I’ll come to you. See you in five.”
She stood to leave, already planning the act of contrition she would put on for her parents. As she stood, movement caught her eye outside her window. There was a group of trick-or-treaters walking down the street. It was the day before Halloween. What were they doing out there? And why were a bunch of little kids like that walking around without an adult?
One was dressed as a ghost, white sheet and eye holes and all. One was dressed as a pirate. One was dressed as a witch. Their costumes were filthy and torn. Who had let them outside in old costumes that were in such bad condition? The pirate turned to look at her, as if they knew she was watching. She couldn’t see the child’s face. They were standing in bright afternoon sunlight, and there should have been no shadows from that angle. But she couldn’t see their face. The pirate looked away, and the small, ragged group of trick-or-treaters continued around the corner and out of sight. Esther Gold felt a cold fear run through her body, and she didn’t know why.
“HEY,” AGUSTÍN SAID, from among the gravestones. The gravestones did not mark any graves. His mother carved them for a living in a workshop out back of the house, and she put them on the front lawn as an advertisement for her business. The climbing vines on the side of the house grew out through the gravestones, giving the whole yard a wild air. As a result, their yard got a lot of interest during Halloween. No one in Agustín’s family liked Halloween.
Agustín lounged on a beach chair set up between an old-school raised gravestone and a more earthquake-safe, flat-to-the-ground slab. Both of the gravestones were marked with the word “Sample,” which made the whole yard look like the last resting place for a family named Sample. The beach chair was always out between the graves in the front yard. When Agustín’s grandfather had first immigrated to the United States, he had ended up in Michigan, which is where Agustín’s mom grew up. When she had moved her family to Southern California, the winter warmth had been not merely a novelty but a true miracle to her. She reveled in short sleeves in December and liked to sit out in a beach chair and chat with the neighbors in the afternoons as people returned from school and work.
“Listen, Gus,” Esther said. “I need a favor.”
“What kind of favor?”
She and Agustín had been friends since second grade, when random seat assignments had put them at the same desk. After a couple days of playful bickering, they had become inseparable and remained that way. They played video games and wandered around in the canyon, exploring and developing the challenges that would become The Feats of Strength.
“I need you to go trick-or-treating with me,” she said.
He shook his head. He had his eyes closed, because he was reclined on the beach chair with his face directly in the sun. She found herself staring at his face in the dappled light coming through the tree. Fortunately, he couldn’t see her staring with his eyes closed.
“I can’t, Est. You know my mom and I have our tradition. It’s the only time all week I’m going to get to see her for longer than five minutes.”
Esther plopped down on the grass next to his chair, her back on a Sample gravestone. “She’s been really busy, huh.”
“Yeah. I get it. She wasn’t raised with much money, and this business is doing really well. It’s our family’s way to a better future. For me, especially. But still, it sucks not seeing her.”
Esther felt terrible asking, but without Agustín, there would be no real Halloween for her this year. “There’s another part to the favor.”
He turned his head and opened his eyes to a suspicious narrow. She quickly looked away from his face and pretended to study the gravestones.
“What?” he said.
Agustín and his mother had a tradition. She hated the kids that liked to hang out in her front yard on Halloween and saw the whole holiday as disrespectful to the calling she took very seriously, so a few years before she had offered Agustín a deal. They would skip trick-or-treating. Skip Halloween altogether. In exchange, she would take him to a movie on Halloween night, and then the next day she would take him to the store and buy him some of the bags of heavily discounted candy. That way, he got to have fun and also have candy, and she didn’t have to worry about being home on a holiday she hated. He had eagerly taken her up on that. He didn’t care about Halloween either way, and as long as he also got candy, seeing a movie was as good as trick-or-treating.
Esther was baffled by that idea. She genuinely couldn’t understand why anyone would agree to that. But now the arrangement could be her lifeline.
“I need to tell my parents that I’m going with you and your mom to the movies.”
“But instead, you’ll be trick-or-treating.”
“No. Instead we’ll both be trick-or-treating.” She said this with the conviction she felt deep inside. She wanted to trick-or-treat, so she would, which meant Agustín would say yes because he just had to.
“Sorry, Est. I like the movies. And I hate Halloween. Trick-or-treating is your thing. It’s not mine.”
“Please.”
He laughed.
“Man, it must be serious if it has you acting so polite. But no.”
She put her hand on his arm. It was only supposed to be a way of getting his attention, but they both froze for a moment when she did it. Things had been different between them in the last year or so, although neither of them could quite say how. Where once there had been the open borders of friendship, now there seemed to be walls and pitfalls they never saw coming until they ran into them. And here was one now, the reaction they both had when she touched his arm. She took her hand back and turned away, looking at a gravestone that had a meticulously carved angel posed upon it.
“Please, Agustín. Just this year. For me.”
He squinted at her as if she were a stranger he was trying to get to know, and then relaxed and closed his eyes against the late-afternoon warmth.
“Ah, my mom kept complaining about having to take time off to go out tomorrow anyway. She has a deadline soon. Kept saying it was going to put her behind. She’ll probably be happy.” He sighed. “She always has a deadline soon.”
“Well.” Esther didn’t know what to say to that. “Thank you” is all she had to offer.
“What am I supposed to wear? I don’t do costumes.”
“My brother has some old ones. You can wear one of those.”
He let out another long sigh, but he didn’t seem that annoyed. It was more that he felt like he should be annoyed, and so was putting on a performance of irritation.
“You owe me, Esther Gold.”
“I owe you,” she agreed.
“Hey, did you see the news about that guy who got arrested near here?” he said.
They moved easily back into conversation, the negotiation done with, promises made.
“No? Why? Where?”
“Up in the hills. You know, where the big houses are. Some guy had all this stolen art and artifacts. Millions of dollars’ worth of stuff taken from museums. Like, art that has been listed as missing for hundreds of years.”
“Wow. How did he get caught?”
“That’s what’s weird. Someone robbed him, and right before they did, they called the cops. Told the cops they were going to rob him.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I guess they only took one thing. By the standards of this guy’s collection it was barely valuable, some exhibit stolen from a science museum’s van a few years back. Cops think that maybe the robbers weren’t in it to get a big haul, but only wanted to call attention to the guy. He’s going to jail for a long time.”
“Wow,” she said.
“Right? Think about what might be going on in all these houses around us. What other secrets are there?”
He got out of the beach chair, using the gravestone next to him to haul himself up. The vines growing between the gravestones crunched under his feet.
“Better go break the news to Mom. See you tomorrow.”
“Thank you, Agustín.”
“Pick me out a cool costume, okay?”
She giggled, and then was embarrassed that she had done that. She walked back home, blushing about having giggled, and that made her giggle again. Knock it off, she told herself. But that only made her blush harder.
ESTHER LIKED TO WATCH scary movies while she prepared her costumes. It put her in the right mood for the occasion.
Halloween was a day in which you could pretend you were inside a horror story. Now, maybe most people wouldn’t want to be inside a horror story. But as far as Esther could see it, the real world was pretty scary itself. And the real world was scary in a way that was simultaneously boring and difficult. Whereas horror stories were scary in a way that was exciting and simple and, most important, not real. They were a way to think about very scary stuff in a very safe way.
Right now she was watching a movie about a teenage girl being followed by a monster that no one understood. The movie didn’t understand it. There was nothing to understand. All that anyone needed to know was that this monster would follow the girl until it caught her, and she must never let it catch her. It was one of Esther’s favorite movies.
All of this was happening in her bedroom, because she couldn’t let her parents know she was preparing costumes. Still, they knew. They understood what a closed bedroom door and the sound of a horror movie meant. They pretended they didn’t so there didn’t need to be a big confrontation about it.
She had edited her three costumes down to two. The one she had originally planned for trick-or-treating was too obvious—a reference to a viral video that, in retrospect, was likely to inspire half the costumes on the block—and so it had to be abandoned. She had moved to her backup costume, a horror movie villain of her own invention, that, fortunately for her plan to deceive her parents, looked a lot like a person wearing normal clothes until the makeup and fake wound patches she had ordered online made it all horrifying.
The costume for school was the same as it had been from the start. The idea of it was so clever that she couldn’t have abandoned it, and anyway her parents didn’t care about her wearing a costume to school. One part of the costume unexpectedly popped and fizzed, and she prodded it to try to understand what was going wrong with the mechanism. It was all pretty complicated, but she had built it herself, so it didn’t take her long to find the tube that had a loose seal and fix it with some duct tape. She put the entire mechanism on and pressed the button in her palm. There was the satisfying hiss of it all working perfectly.
A couple perfunctory knocks and then her dad opened her bedroom door.
“Whoa. Cool.” He frowned. “That’s for school, right?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Thank you, honey. I know. You hate us. But it’s just . . . it’s time. This is the year.”
“It’s fine, Dad. I’m going with Agustín to see a movie.”
“Oh wow. Okay. Perfect. Hey, do you want to see something a little funny?”
He indicated toward the front window, and she followed him out. Parked down the block was another ice cream truck, playing a discordant, mournful waltz.
“Heard that song and couldn’t stand it,” her dad said. He was very sensitive to pitch. “But funny, right? Who sells fruit from an ice cream truck?”
This truck had a picture of a big rosy apple, like the kind that would be poisoned in a fairy tale. Every part of the truck, from the tires to the warbling speakers up top, was pristine. “Queen of Halloween Apples. They Have a Bite!” said the text under the picture of the apple.
“Should we?” her dad asked.
Esther remembered the other truck, the much dirtier one, and the sullen man driving it.
“I don’t think so. It seems weird.”
“Ah, it’s worth a shot,” her dad said. He went outside and, after a moment of hesitating, she went after.
“Hi there,” her dad called as they approached the truck. “Selling apples?”
Esther couldn’t see through the truck’s window as they approached, and all at once she didn’t want to see inside of it. She was sure there was a ghoulish creature waiting there. The moment that they came close enough, a horrifying face would appear and she would drop dead merely from the sight of it. She was as certain of this as of her own name.
But her dad was walking on, and she couldn’t let him confront alone whatever waited inside the truck. She held her breath and stepped a little closer, and then the window popped open. A man stuck his head out. He was a pleasant-looking man in his twenties wearing a neat white uniform with a white paper hat. His hair was combed back under the hat. Every detail about him was exactly in the right place.
“Good evening, sir,” the young man said. “I’m afraid not just yet. Tomorrow is when business starts.”
“Scouting out the area?” her dad said.
The man smiled. It was wide and friendly, but also practiced. Esther felt that if the man smiled a thousand times, each one would land in exactly the same way. It had the forced, repetitive execution of a teacher trying to make “good morning” sound cheery on the third month of the school year.
“Something like that,” the man said. He held out his hand. “Dan Apel.”
“Dan Apple?” her dad asked, shaking the hand.
The man looked furious for a moment, a violent and animal rage, but then his placid smile was back, broad and warm, exactly where it had been. The shift was so quick that Esther wasn’t sure she had seen it.
“Apel,” he said. “Similar, I know. But at least I’m not my brother.”
“Is he the one with the pumpkin truck?” Esther asked.
The man shifted his smile to her, like a spotlight seeking out an escaped prisoner.
“Why yes, you must have seen him driving around. I apologize for the state of his truck, he doesn’t have the same enthusiasm for customer service that I do. But yes, he sells pumpkins.”
“Why did you say at least you’re not your brother?” she asked.
“His name is Ed Pumken. You can imagine the confusion.”
“Why do you have different last names?”
He leaned down toward her. His smile was like a paper-thin mask, and she felt there was a face so terrible it hardly was human waiting right behind it.
“You ask a lot of questions,” he said. Then he laughed, and he was genuine and happy again. “Well, thanks for stopping by. Hope to see you both tomorrow.”
“Sure,” her dad said. “This is a real interesting business idea. I’ll have to keep my eye on that. I’m always interested in how people run small businesses. I run a wedding band, you see.”
“I see,” the man said. “Thanks for saying so.” He looked down at Esther. “I’ll have my eye out for you tomorrow. See you then.”
There was ice in his voice. Her dad didn’t seem to hear it. He walked back toward the house, chuckling, and Esther hurried ahead of him, wanting to get as far from the truck as possible.
“What an interesting young man,” her dad said.
She looked back. Dan Apel was watching them, no sign of a smile on his face.
THAT NIGHT, Esther had trouble falling asleep. She always did, the night before Halloween.
She thought through her costumes, and how amazed everyone would be by them, and she started bopping her head on her pillow. Then she thought about how she had made Agustín break his tradition with his mother and how she would be tricking her parents, and she bopped her head a little less.
Was she in the wrong here? Probably. But she was human. Didn’t she deserve to be in the wrong sometimes?
Next year she wou
ld be open with them about trick-or-treating. Or she wouldn’t. She’d figure it out when she got there.
But enough guilt. Her bedside clock ticked over, silently, digitally, to midnight. It was officially Halloween. She forgave her own imperfections, and allowed herself to feel only excitement. Her favorite day of the year had come.
There was a hacking cough from outside her window. Then noises of an engine barely holding it together. She sat up in bed and looked out. The ice cream truck that sold pumpkins was limping its way down the street, black smoke pouring from its hood. Ed Pumken was in the driver’s seat, one arm out the window. As he drove under a streetlight, she saw a glimpse of his face, as grumpy as before, and his crooked hat and uncombed hair. What was he doing driving around this late? She didn’t trust him or his brother.
There was movement behind the truck. A small group of children in Halloween costumes, running in formation. Their costumes were ragged and torn. One child was dressed as an astronaut. Another as a dinosaur. A third as a wizard. But it looked like their costumes had been buried for years and then dug up. Even as they passed in and out of the streetlights, she still couldn’t quite see their faces.
What she was seeing scared her. Not like how going to high school next year scared her, or not like how it scared her that Grandma Debbie went out of her house less and less and seemed to remember Esther less and less every time she saw her, and Grandma Debbie might die soon, which Esther knew was just a natural part of life but still refused to accept, unwilling to let the version of her grandmother she remembered as a child disappear into whatever was going to happen to Grandma Debbie next. Nothing as complicated as that. What she was seeing now scared her like a scary movie. It scared directly and simply. She didn’t quite believe what she was seeing, even as she had no choice but to admit that she was seeing it.
A long shadow unwound itself, covering the whole of the street. The source of the shadow was out of view of her window. Ed slowed his truck to a groaning halt. He got out of the truck, wiping at his grease-stained uniform. His paper hat had fallen crumpled on the floor by the driver’s seat, and his hair hung over his face. He walked slowly toward the source of the shadow, and the children in costumes followed him. Then he stopped and got down on his knees, right in the middle of the street. The children did the same.