Quad Squad

by R. Barri Flowers

Halloween

  Rachel’s dad was saying, “... when the U.S. ranks, what is it---?”

  And her mom said, “37th?”

  “That’s by the World Health Organization,” her dad pointed out.

  “Okay, fair enough,” her uncle Louis said, “But that does not mean that an individual mandate which tromps on the individual rights --”

  “Oh, come on now!” Rachel’s dad nearly shouted, although he also shook his head with a half smile, half smirk. He slammed his fork down on the tablecloth and reaching for his red wine. Bits of lasagna that her mom had made carefully with kale because it was healthy and with extra ricotta, because her dad loved it, went flying in a little splatter pattern from the fork, which Rachel had to look away from to ignore.

  Rachel was thinking one very specific thing in particular as her parents and her uncle fought about health care in the United States: I gotta get the fuck out of here.

  Uncle Louis was okay, in fact she had really liked him when she had been little, but as she had gotten older she had gotten kind of sick of the fights between him and her dad, always intellectual, no heavy emotions allowed in the Cohn household. The fork slammed on the table was about as street as things got. More than that, it was -- well, it wasn’t exactly one specific thing that drove her crazy, it was just … them. Them being them. It was not possible for her to stand it one more night, but here she was.

  The thing was, you had to stick around for about ten to twelve minutes at dinner or you’d get questions and nagging. More than that wasn’t necessary, but less would be noticed. If she just tried to skip it or said she wasn’t hungry, that would lead to a half hour discussion with her mom about why not, and Rachel did not need that. She went with her past research, which had taught her that sitting through dinner took way less effort than trying to avoid it.

  Dinner started at 6:00 and it had for as long as Rachel could remember, with the occasional exception when somebody worked late. Those nights were usually a lot easier for Rachel, nights when she and dad or she and mom would just microwave something and Rachel would do some homework or if she didn’t have any, which was pretty rare, maybe they’d watch something or play a board game.

  But she was desperately trying to avoid a family night tonight. They’d tried to hint at it, suggesting that she’d like to give out candy or “go trick-or-treating with a friend.”

  Even the idea of this nearly made Rachel a) gag physically and b) apologize to whichever friend they had in mind. But they didn’t actually mean a friend, they meant Holly. Rachel was fifteen years old, and she damn well wasn’t about to go door to door in a princess dress with Holly from the temple.

  Not gonna happen, she thought.

  “You not hungry, Rach?” her mother asked.

  Shit, she’d forgotten to push stuff around on the plate.

  “It’s delicious,” she said, which wasn’t an answer technically but was the right answer actually. She had gotten a burrito and a slushie from the 7-11 after Academy, but it was wiser not to mention this.

  Uncle Louis said, “I mean, you’re on my side, right, Rach?”

  Rachel glanced at the phone in her lap and without looking texted maybe not to Sarah, who had just sent her a shot of herself in a Halloween costume she was calling a “business bitch,” which seemed to just mean cleavage and booty shorts and a man’s jacket over it. Rachel couldn’t see the shoes, probably high heels. The makeup was red lipstick and pink-looking smoked eyeliner. It was gross. Sarah was okay and kind of worshipped Rachel for some reason but had zero taste. Not the brightest bulb in the package, but Rachel felt like Sarah was nice, and that counted for a lot for Rachel. There was a no-phones-at-the-table rule but Rachel was pretty good at hiding a phone under a tablecloth, in her own humble opinion, texting Sarah but u do u while saying to her parents, “Personal responsibility is an important value, I guess.”

  “See, exactly!” Uncle Louis said, clapping once, but too loudly.

  Her dad leaned in toward her uncle to demand, “Since when is an intellectual position validated just because you have agreement from a 15-year-old kid?”

  “A very smart 15-year-old kid,” her mother corrected with a smile.

  “A very smart 15-year-old kid,” her dad conceded with a smile.

  Even Uncle Louis smiled at Rachel and said, “That she is.”

  Sometimes, Rachel thought, smiling back at her family, I wish they’d all crawl in a hole and die.

  After dinner she went to her room, followed pretty quickly by her mom, who said, “I’ve got Warren’s stuff right here.”

  “Thanks,” Rachel said, not sure how she felt about this whole decision. She took the old duffel bag of Warren’s football gear. Warren was just starting med school and probably wouldn’t be needing any of his old football stuff any time soon. Her mom left and Rachel sat down at her vanity, feeling herself moving in slow motion, but not very worried, since no one was going to give her a ride for half an hour at the earliest. She tried to decide if she should put on the black stuff that football players put high on the cheekbones, what kind of makeup she would use if she did do that, and what the point of that ridiculous look was, anyway.

  She had no answers. The only definitive decision she could make in that moment was to use a cleansing pad on her cheeks.

  Halloween was always such a minefield, trying to figure out what to wear that would look at least a little original or creative but not too crazy, and look like you were having fun but not trying too hard, plus the difficulty of trying to figure out what to do when you were too old to trick or treat and too young to go to clubs and places like that, and worst of all, the question who to go with. For years she and Holly Sanderson had been pretty much forced to trick or treat together because Holly’s parents and Rachel’s parents were temple friends and they lived nearby, but neither of the girls actually liked each other.

  Last year Rachel, who obviously, obviously, -- why could her mom not figure this out? -- just wanted to hang out with Maya and Andrea and Sabrina and all of those guys, not with Holly, had gotten stuck with her anyway, because her mom had made a huge deal about it. So Rachel had had her mom drop her and Holly off at Andrea’s, but that was even worse, because her friends walked with each other in a tight, hilarious group. They so obviously ignored Holly and put Rachel in such a terribly awkward in-between position, that Rachel was moved to grimace with horror at the memory at her own reflection in the vanity mirror at that moment. For weeks after that she had been pissed at her mom and finally they had had it out and apparently, as Rachel now thought about it, she was going to be able to live her own damn life.

  There was a text from Philip. He had started up an Academy precalc group text that Rachel was in, and now he said to it, “There has to be a limit to the number of primes if n is less than infinity.”

  She pulled open her precalc spiral to the spot where she’d glued in the problem sheet and, as she’d thought, there was nothing specifically saying that n was or wasn’t infinite. She thought for a moment about texting “n is undefined, just nonzero” then looked unhappily at herself in the mirror and instead started texting, “It’s Halloween, people, get a life,” then deleted that and put the phone down.

  She sighed. This was the price of being her.

  Tim said, “I’m not going as a pig.”

  Jerry said, “Well, you have to go as something.”

  “Just because you have a pig nose doesn’t mean I’m going as a pig. Halloween is fucked up.”

  Jerry killed two zombies but Tim was caught outside the diner by a whole onslaught of them. His fingers on the controller were pounding away but they kept coming.

  “Help a brother out,” he said calmly.

  “Trying,” Jerry said.

  “Fuck,” Tim said.

  “Use your --” Jerry started to say, but then they both cursed and relaxed their grips for a moment.

  “What else do you have?” Tim asked.

  “I don’t kn
ow, look in there,” Jerry said, gesturing to a pile of clothing he had turned onto his bed, next to a large cardboard box that said “Halloween Stuff.”

  “What’s Cole and those guys doing?” Tim asked, walking over to pile. He picked at it, throwing aside a fireman’s hat, a Superman cape, and some vampire teeth, rejecting them all as little kid stuff. He found a black cape and put it around his shoulders.

  “This I could do, I guess.”

  “What are you?”

  Tim paused, “Black cape man?”

  “You mean, like, Dracula?”

  “No, just, Black Cape Man.”

  “That’s not a thing.”

  “I know, but I’m not wearing those cheap-ass plastic teeth.”

  “You have no Halloween spirit.”

  “Fuckin’ A,” Tim said. Jerry couldn’t tell if this was agreement or disagreement. Jerry’s dad was a lab technician and had donated one of his old white lab coats a few years back to the collection. Jerry put it on now and added a rainbow afro wig.

  “Mad scientist,” he said, studying his reflection in the closet mirror.

  “It’s cool,” Tim said, secretly thinking that there was no way on Earth you could get him to wear something so dorky as a rainbow wig. But he was also envious, because there was something about Jerry, a kind of who-cares attitude, that let him do stuff like that and get away with it.

  “Dementor,” Tim decided, pulling the robe a bit tighter around himself. “From Harry Potter, you feel?”

  “Sick!” Jerry said. “Do it. You don’t even need a mask --”

  “With this face,” Tim finished for him. “Yeah, yeah, saw it coming.”

  Jerry picked up his phone and grimaced. “Vinh is coming too, I guess.”

  “Oh, shit,” Tim said.

  “Not my idea,” Jerry said. “Him and Cole and that Mike guy.”

  “Fucking Vinh,” Tim said.

  “Well, yeah, but its Halloween,” Jerry said. “Let’s have a little fun. Smash a few pumpkins?”

  “No, for sure,” Tim said, “It’s just that Vinh guy. A few pumpkins, whatever, but that guy...”

  “I know, right?” Jerry said, growing a bit worried. “He’s coming over here with Cole.”

  “Let’s meet somewhere else,” Tim said, trying to take care of Jerry.

  Jerry nodded. “Yeah, good idea.”

  “If he tries to, I don’t know --”

  “Yeah, then we’re out,” Jerry said.

  “That guy’s bad news,” Tim said, sounding gloomier to himself than he usually did.

  Rachel was still studying her reflection and grading the results poorly, ignoring the Academy precalc texts, and trying to figure out when everything had all gotten so complicated.

  Memories came, unbidden.

  Until second grade she had just been a kid, as far as she had known. Then one day she had been pulled away unexpectedly from Rachel’s Rug. Rachel’s Rug was had a barnyard print and a bean bag chair next to a bookshelf in the corner of Room 8, Mrs. Dahlgen’s room. This was where Rachel was usually to be found after having finished her classwork early. In theory every kid was allowed to use Rachel’s Rug, but almost inevitably Rachel would finish her assignments both completely and correctly well before the other kids did, and would plop down on the blue bean bag to reread one of the four last and thickest Harry Potter books.

  It was only years later that she realized that this behavior had no doubt made her insufferable in the eyes of the other students in Room 8.

  Awareness of such resentments filtered in gradually. One day in third grade a girl on the playground called Rachel a “brainiac.” Rachel had not previously thought of having brains as a bad thing, but the tone of insult is far more damaging than the content. For a while she was upset that she was apparently too smart, but soon came to realize that being smart wasn’t really the hazard, it was being different that really hurt.

  This despite, or perhaps especially since her mother and father made a habit of telling her that she was special, clearly implying that this was a good thing. Rachel had a strong feeling some days that her mom and dad were created in a laboratory, maybe the same place where greeting cards are made; and a certainty that they had never attended anything like Mason Middle School or Kennedy High, because being different sucked ass, in Rachel’s humble opinion.

  But that day in second grade she’d been more innocent, unaware of the social guillotine about to drop.

  A woman calling herself Tina had taken her to a room she hadn’t known existed at the school, and asked a number of questions. Rachel knew it was a test, but didn’t know what it was for. In her limited second grade understanding of the world, adults were beings who took a person places and asked questions and used up their time as they choose, and kids didn’t protest or ask questions of your own. If somebody tried that now, at Kennedy, she realized, they’d get so much attitude that -- well, they’d get a lot of attitude.

  “The fck r u?” Maya texted.

  “Omw,” Rachel texted back, which wasn’t technically true, but she wasn’t ready to nag her mother for that ride yet. Her mom needed the dishes at least soaking before heading out or Armageddon would strike. Rachel thought for a moment that she could help her mom clean up and this would make things move quicker, but the thought died away quickly. She was far more interested in feeling bad about memories of being an outcast.

  She remembered that Tina had tested her in an unknown room at the school. There had been a poster on the wall of a cat clawing at a wall tapestry with big splashy words advising “Hang in There!” in yellow. It was only in fifth grade that she learned that this was the staff room. There had been a microwave and couches. Teachers living it up in style.

  “Fine,” Tina said when she had quickly graded Rachel’s first efforts. Second grade Rachel was a bit excited that an adult was permitting Rachel to address her by first name. Tina was glamorous to Rachel, a dark brunette with a chignon and a prim little outfit featuring a little black dress and tights. This last was a major draw, as seven-year-old Rachel adored tights. Tina also wore a white cardigan with white pearls close to her neck. Rachel instantly had a little girl crush on her, the kind that has nothing to do with sexuality nor romance and everything to do with envy.

  Rachel remembered that her mother had told her that one can distinguish real pearls from fake by rubbing them against one’s teeth to assess for grit, and imagining this sensation greatly distracted her in her doings with Tina.

  “Do you see this piece of paper?” Tina asked. Even at seven years old Rachel knew a rhetorical question when she heard one, and stayed quiet. Tina nodded and continued, “If I fold it like this,” performing what is called in schools the “hamburger fold”, lengthwise down an 8.5 x 11 sheet, “there will be two sections, right?” She showed Rachel the two sections. Rachel blinked, waiting for her point. She was something of a blinker, she now remembered with great embarrassment. She realized now that before she had gotten contact lenses, all that blinking must have had a rather grotesquely magnified effect in tortoiseshell glasses, with glass as thick as Coke bottles, and now she worried that she had possibly alarmed Tina, but she somehow maintained calm. Rachel considered that this all had probably occurred before the Keep Calm meme, and decided that Tina was way ahead of her time.

  Rachel remembered Tina nodding again in her Glamorous Tina way and folding the paper again. “How many sections are there now?” she asked, without unfolding the paper.

  This seemed so elementary that Rachel waited for some trick. When none was forthcoming she asked, “Four?” and Tina nodded. She folded the entirety again and, eager to please her, Rachel said that there were eight sections, and then they moved on to sixteen.

  Then Tina said, “Well, I can’t seem to quite fold it again, but if I could, how many would there be?”

  This fascinated Rachel, not the math, but the idea that there was something -- a rather simple something -- that Glamorous Tina couldn’t do.
She now thought: it’s called folding paper. Not that hard, Tina.

  Second-grade Rachel was much more eager to please. She said then what she now remembered with embarrassment as something like, “Well, the pattern is powers of two. We started with two to the zero, which is one section, one piece of paper. Then you folded it and we had two to the first power, which is two. Then to the second, third, fourth, which was sixteen. You’re just asking me what two to the fifth is, which is 32, and since I think it’s only going to get harder to fold, the rest of the pattern that I remember is 64, 128, 256, 512, and, let me see, 1024?”

  “Get yr skinny ass ovr here,” Maya texted.

  “I’m not taking a bag,” Tim said.

  “Come on, man, you want candy or what?” Jerry asked.

  “Take a bag, dude,” Cole said. Cole was some kind of accident victim or some gory thing, fake blood all over his face and his clothing, although he didn’t have any other costume so it was kind of weak. Mostly he looked like what he was, which was a guy who liked fake blood. After threatening to bring Vinh he had showed up without him, and without New Mike, who wasn’t answering texts, and neither Tim nor Jerry had said anything about it.

  But he was out there, Vinh, Tim could feel it. It was like swimming in clear blue water in one of the Sharknado movies. Any second now -- bam!

  “I’m not fucking trick or treating,” Tim said. “How old are you?”

  “There’s this one block,” Jerry said. “We hit that, it’s fucking sick, and then we see what’s up. Need me some Reese’s.”

  “Fuck Reese’s,” Cole said. “Kit Kat, Hershey, Twix, in that order.”

  “Dafuck?” Tim said. “Milky Way, Starbust, Tootsie Rolls. Then Reese’s.”

  “What?!” Jerry demanded. “Did you just -- you did not just put Starburst on the same list as fucking Reese’s!”

  “Starburst are --”

  “You’re sick,” Cole jumped in. “There’s something seriously wrong with this guy, Jerry. You need fucking mental help, Tim. How the fuck are you putting a Tootsie pop in with a fucking Hershey bar? This is like some twisted fucking joke.”

  “Fuck you,” Tim said, aware it wasn’t the cleverest thing he had ever said, but also aware he was losing this fight. Then again, he felt indignation hitting him hard now. “I said Tootsie Rolls, not Tootsie Pops, dumbshit.”

  “You said--”

  But Tim was on a roll. “And fucking Starburst is sick candy, motherfuckers. Starburst you get a million different flavors. Hershey you’re just sitting there chewing on chocolate --”

  “This is unbelievable,” Jerry said. “You’re fucking with us, right?”

  “I’ll trade you,” Tim said. “You’ll see, after, I’ll trade every --‘’

  Cole suddenly said, “Wait, look at this,” and showed them a picture of Sarah. They crowded around his phone and started at it for a long moment. The candy conversation was officially dead.

  “Damn,” Cole said appreciatively. “What the hell is a ‘business bitch?’”

  “I don’t know, but it’s kind of hot, I guess?” Jerry said.

  “I guess,” Tim said, to deflect attention away from the fact that his body was overreacting again. It was good to have a cape, sometimes.

  Unable to think of anything else to do this early, they headed out into the night. The strategy was, follow little kids. The three guys found a group of about six little kids who were knocking on every door and calling out Trick or Treat and handling all the stupid questions about “what are you supposed to be?” and then, right at the end when the little kids were done, the three teenagers would show up and grab as much as they could from parents who were just about to head back inside and didn’t feel like starting over with all the questions. It was, as the three of them kept telling each other, a sick strat.

  They each had a massive bag going when Vinh, Carlos and McMillan dropped out of a tree right in front of them, scaring the shit out of them.

  Vinh immediately cracked up, pointing with the side of his hand, something like a karate chop, aimed at Tim and saying, “You cried out like a little bitch,” and Tim could feel it: something shady was going to go down tonight.

  “You little pussies trick-or-treating?” Carlos asked, although that was completely obvious. He and Vinh and McMillan a bra on over their shirts, and Carlos had a wig, which apparently meant that they were going as girls, but other than that they weren’t making much of an effort, just wearing pants and T-shirts and jackets and looking to Tim like pretty much just guys with bras.

  McMillan, who never went by his first name, said, “Got any Milky Way?” and this set off a debate about the best kind of candy, and the six of them walked for a while arguing the point while Tim kept looking at Jerry, who was also trying to figure out how to ditch these guys without looking like a pussy.

  Vinh ran onto the steps of a house with all its lights on, grabbed two pumpkins, and tossed one after the other them toward traffic, in high, arcing throws that missed the cars but made one of them honk and then suddenly stop. That sent the guys running. Vinh and Carlos were laughing like crazy, but Cole and Tim and Jerry were just running, capes flying, wigs falling off, candy bouncing out of bags.

  When they finally turned onto a quiet corner and caught up with each other, Cole said an obligatory “That was sick,” to Vinh, but Tim a little bit hated him for being a suck-up. That didn’t last, though, because McMillan said, “Let’s go find some girls,” and the conversation pivoted very quickly in that direction.

  Rachel put the weird football shoulder pads on over her tank. This reminded her of her brother, Warren, who was always the jock, Rachel the brain. Throughout elementary school she had been on a faster track in some way or another, in after-school classes or the undefined “gifted,” program, while Warren was busy setting some school record in hurdles or something else she didn’t care about.

  She wasn’t profoundly resentful of having learned some things she might not have otherwise, and she had met some kids she thought of as tolerable geeks, but living in two worlds was unsettling. Now in ninth she attended the specialized Academy three days a week after the start of lunch, eating on the bus, and lived in the world of so-called normal kids the rest of the time, mornings and evenings.

  “What a time,” she said to her mirror, “to be alive.”

  She added the football shirt over the pads. More than that she wasn’t sure she could stand to do. No helmet, that was for sure, and not the stupid football stretch pants, either, she was just going to wear jeans. What to do with her hair was a matter of great internal debate.

  “Knock knock,” her mother said, not knocking.

  “Mom,” Rachel said, but decided not to push this old fight again, since she needed a ride and she was about to deceive her mother, so this was probably not a good time to go on the offensive.

  “Sorry,” her mother said, not sounding sorry, and stood behind her. She gathered up Rachel’s hair as if to put it in a ponytail, but just kept playing with it. Rachel’s skin was crawling just a bit.

  “It looks great. You look so lovely,” her mother said, which didn’t really make sense for a girl in a football uniform, Rachel thought. Then, trying to sound as though she had just thought of it, her mom added, “Hey, you know, Natasha says they’re still available.”

  “Mom,” Rachel said with sudden wild irritation. Natasha was Holly’s mother.

  “I know, I know,” her mother said. “It’s just --”

  “You want me to speak up for myself, and then when I --”

  “No, of course, no, this is your decision!” her mom said.

  “Okay, then,” Rachel said.

  “Fine,” her mom said.

  Rachel tried not to glare, and for the sake of the ride and easing of possible later repercussions, asked, “What do you think I should do with my hair?”

  She asked the exact same question fifteen minutes later, this time in front of the mirror in Maya’s room. Kar
en and Naeli were already there, laughing too much. Rachel was pretty sure they were high, mostly because they always were, but that would be a little bit weird, because they were in a group costume with Maya, which was weird itself, because Rachel hadn’t realized that Maya, who hated drugs, was so down with Karen and Naeli, who, to put it mildly, didn’t hate drugs. Rachel was horrified to learn so late that she had missed the earlier part, probably days or weeks ago, when the three of them had agreed to go together as the girls from Clueless. She felt a nearly all-consuming envy of them, because they completely had it down, and got to wear cute tartan skirts that in Rachel’s opinion were a little too high, but not that bad, and they just looked awesome together, which she said to them in a voice that was possibly too enthusiastic.

  She’d missed out, again. This was one of those things that had probably happened in school when Rachel was at Academy. Of course she couldn’t criticize Karen and Naeli for being in on a team thing because the two of them were always like that, but they obviously needed a third and since Naeli was the black one they needed a white girl, which could have been Rachel but had ended up being Maya. That made sense, but Rachel would have died just to be asked.

  “Just let it flow,” Maya said. “Like, just natural, down.”

  “Really?” Rachel asked, pulling it up in the back and frowning. “I was thinking maybe put it up, because it’s supposed to be a helmet? Or this?” She showed Maya a terry cloth sweatband, but Maya had run off to the front door and came back followed by Sabrina.

  Sabrina smiled shyly at the girls. She was Iggy Azalea, or more exactly Jenna Marbles being Iggy Azalea, with a huge stuffed butt and a tied-off top and that twist in her blonde hair.

  “Oh, my God!” Rachel, Karen and Naeli called out, “Sabrina! You look awesome!” Rachel couldn’t tell if this was true or if she was just shouting what she had to shout.

  “I look so stupid,” Sabrina said. “Oh, my God, you guys look just like the movie!”

  Naeli said, “I’m Dionne, because I’m the black chick,” and everyone laughed, with a slight nervous edge. This was clearly racist, but it was probably okay because she herself had said it. Rachel wasn’t quite sure.

  The political situation only became more complex when Maya ran off to the door again to let in Andrea, the last arrival. She had on a short red skirt outfit with a red dragon print and a sort of red matching cape. She modeled it for them with dramatic flair, gesturing with her hands up and down her skimpy outfit as they cheered.

  “Geisha, bitches!” she shouted.

  Racist? Rachel asked herself. Yes, the answer came back. But: what to do about it? Also: degrading to women. But, if she was being honest with herself, half of the costumes in the room and most of the ones she expected to see that evening, were going to be that.

  “Oh, my God, Rachel,” Andrea started to say, with half a laugh, but then stopped herself.

  “What?” Rachel asked, looking at Andrea, then at her brother’s 34 in gold on a red background, extra large and suddenly so, so stupid.

  “Nothing,” Andrea said, trying to walk it back.

  Rachel immediately and unexpectedly burst into tears. God, she hated this.

  Everyone immediately crowded around her, asking “What’s wrong?” in the most sympathetic voices ever.

  “Nothing,” Rachel said quickly. The sooner she started talking, the briefer the amount of time that they would all gather around her and make her feel even more pathetic than she already felt. It was horrifying to her: everyone looked so good and so, like, flattering, and she looked like her brother’s middle school football photo. She said, “Obviously this looks so stupid. I had to wear it for my mom, she wanted me to wear it.”

  This went over reasonably well, since they all knew Rachel’s mom.

  She pulled out her duffel bag. “I was thinking this instead,” absolutely and completely grateful to herself for thinking of bringing a backup just in case. The weird thing was, that was really her mom’s training, bringing a backup costume just in case. She could just hear her mom’s voice: just in case!

  Maya was thinking: if you weren’t going to wear the football thing why did you ask me about your hair? But she kept it to herself because it was Rachel.

  “What is it?” Naeli asked.

  “It’s a slip,” Rachel said, holding it up against her jeans. It was pink, silky and way too skimpy. “And then this,” she pulled a cigar out of the bag and pretended to smoke it.

  There was a long silence.

  “Freudian slip?” There was a silence. Before she could stop herself, Rachel added, “Do you get it?” and there was silence, just a gaping nothing, in that terrible, endless moment she knew that she was still that little girl in second grade, trying to impress Tina, and strongly and dearly wished that the Earth would open up and swallow her right there and then.

  McMillan had most of a fifth of Jack Daniels and passed that around. Jerry took a swig and passed it to Tim, pretending that this was the kind of thing he did every day, but privately thinking: that shit is nasty.

  “Where’s the party at?” Vinh asked, not for the first time.

  Carlos said, “Fucking boring,” to nobody in particular.

  Jerry said, “Malik and those guys are going downtown?”

  “Fuck that,” Vinh said.

  Tim thought, fuck him, who said he gets to decide what happens? But he had no better ideas.

  Not too surprisingly, they kept wandering the streets, eating candy, inflicting minor mayhem on mailboxes. Carlos kept scaring or trying to scare little kids, which was in Tim’s opinion stupid as fuck, but no one tried to stop him. Vinh checked car doors to see if they were unlocked. They weren’t.

  Then Cole looked up from his phone and said, “Maya and those guys, Andrea, are on Washington. I guess they were walking around?”

  “Hold up, yeah,” McMillan said.

  “Yeah, let’s check that out,” Vinh said. Everyone else had their phones out, but Vinh didn’t. Jerry noticed and tried for a minute to figure out why, then realized that either none of those girls would ever in a million years text Vinh, so why bother, or that it had been taken away by his parents, which duh, Vinh was exactly the kind of guy who would lose phone privileges. Now that Jerry thought about it, he was surprised the guy was allowed out at night on Halloween by his parents. Then Jerry realized: he probably isn’t. Or: they don’t care.

  They found the girls on Sycamore near Washington, where the streetlight was yellow and hazy. It was a bit weird for Tim, suddenly these two groups meeting up, but Karen ran over to Cole and hugged him, kind of fake but laughing, so that made it cool for everyone.

  Tim was trying very hard not to stare at Andrea. She was wearing this extremely sexy thing, he didn’t know what it was called, like a silk red thing with a dragon and you could see way up her legs and everything, and he didn’t want to seem like he was staring so he said to Maya and Naeli, “Clueless, cool.”

  “Thanks,” Maya said. McMillan pulled out the Jack and offered it around and a few of the girls looked guiltily at Maya but took a swig.

  “That’ll be gone way too soon,” Carlos said.

  “Right?” Karen said. “You have some bud?”

  “Seriously,” Vinh said.

  Sabrina looked like she felt, out of place. She hated having chosen her Jenna Marbles/Iggy Azalea look because nobody knew what it was, it just looked ridiculous with a pillow in her butt. She stood as near to Rachel as she could, without thinking about why.

  Rachel was glad Sabrina was hovering next to her all night because she felt horribly exposed. What the hell had she been thinking, wearing nothing but a slip and a tweed jacket out into the night? Nobody got it, she had long ago thrown the cigar away anyway, and now she just felt stupid and weird. But the guys in bras? What the hell weird kind of sexist bullshit was that supposed to be? She considered asking, but she had never liked McMillan. Carlos was alright if you just talked to him one on one, and she had
no idea why anyone tolerated Vinh. He was cute, but he was obviously bad news.

  Andrea said, “Hey, Vinh, nice bra.”

  This got a pretty big laugh from everyone.

  “Got it from his mom,” Carlos said.

  Vinh took a sharp, threatening step toward Carlos, who backed away too quickly, making everyone laugh again.

  “Got it from your mom,” Vinh said.

  “Oooh,” Naeli said.

  Andrea scowled in her direction, but Naeli didn’t notice because she was swigging the last of McMillan’s Jack.

  Jerry said to Sabrina, “First things first, you’re the realest,” in a terrible Iggy Azalea impression voice, which also got a big laugh and a sort of minor gasp of appreciation from the girls, because he had figured out what she was supposed to be, and a minor inhalation of appreciation from Tim and Cole, who had been trying to figure out how to talk to her or to Andrea but hadn’t been able to think of anything.

  Rachel said to Tim, “Hey, Tim,” which was as good an offer as he was going to get that evening, and he knew it. He said, “Hey, Rachel,” and then ran out of things to say.

  She said, “Count Dracula?”

  He looked confused for a moment, then grabbed at his cape and said, “Oh, no, this? Just a dementor. From --”

  “Harry Potter,” Rachel said. “Totally.”

  “They suck your soul out,” Sabrina said in a quiet voice, and although both Tim and Rachel nodded, they weren’t quite sure what to say to that.

  Andrea thought Vinh was cute but she knew her friends pretty much hated him. This made her both want to not talk to him and extra talk to him, because she hated the feeling of having to not talk to someone or like him because her friends didn’t.

  Maya was thinking that Vinh was gross and a little bit scary, so obviously Andrea was going to try to impress everyone by hanging out with him, but the cute one was maybe Carlos?

  Vinh said, “I think my bro can hook us up.”

  “Cool,” Andrea said quickly, avoiding eye contact with Maya.

  Maya was getting really sick of being everyone’s drug czar and was trying to figure out a way to say that but couldn’t, so she just went on her phone as they stood there.

  “Where at?” Karen asked, with a voice of experience. “What’s he got?”

  “Weed, mostly,” I think, Vinh said. “Maybe some molly.”

  “Cool,” Karen said.

  Rachel quickly tried to remember what precisely molly was. She had been absent in 8th grade science when this was covered, and there was a little gap right in the middle of her meticulous notes taken from student presentations regarding pot, LSD, cocaine, mushrooms, and alcohol. Sabrina moved a little bit closer to her. Tim picked at something on his cape that wasn’t there.

  Jerry said to the group, “Does anyone -- I was thinking -- I was just kind of getting tired, kind of and I was thinking of getting a frappucino? There’s a Starbucks? We don’t have to stay there.”

  “Definitely!” Rachel said, with surprising volume.

  “I need coffee,” Maya said, although she rarely drank coffee.

  “I need something to eat,” Tim said, mostly in order to have something to say.

  “Let’s all go, like, freak the normal people out,” Jerry said, although he knew that in a rainbow wig he wasn’t likely to freak anyone out.

  Sabrina started to say “Definitely,” but trailed it off into a question when she saw that Andrea didn’t seem as enthusiastic.

  There was a clear sense that the group was now about to split. Jerry started walking, with Tim, Rachel, Maya, Sabrina in his wake, but then he noticed that Vinh, Carlos, McMillan, Andrea, Karen and Naeli were still circled around Carlos’s phone.

  “Guys?” he said.