The Sweetest Thing

by J. Minter

  I gave myself one last look-over in the mirror. Maybe I hadn’t put on a sexy pirate dress or a lady-bug leotard like my friends, but I thought I looked really nice. I felt sad that Bennett wouldn’t get to see my costume, and then felt guilty because I hoped Adam would think I looked pretty.

  “What’s wrong?” Meredith asked, tilting her head at my reflection in the mirror.

  I shook my head quickly. “Nothing. Come on, let’s go.” I put on my clear Lucite shoes and grabbed my purse, and the three of us hurried out to watch the parade. It didn’t start for another hour, but we wanted to get a good spot, and some people camped out there hours ahead of time.

  The Halloween parade is just about the wildest thing I’ve ever seen in Manhattan. It turns my neighborhood into a complete zoo every year—literally about two million people show up for it—but I don’t mind, because it’s like Mardi Gras, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, and an avant-garde performance-art piece all rolled into one. Every year it starts out with the puppets, these enormous living sculptures that go flailing down the street, in front of all the floats and stuff. Skeleton-shaped puppets usually go first, and I’ve also seen puppets of the Statue of Liberty, robots, monkeys, and Godzilla. They used to give me nightmares when I was a kid—some of them move so realistically they almost look like they’re alive—or dead—but now I’m so used to seeing them that it wouldn’t feel like Halloween without them.

  It’s also worth going to the parade just to see everybody’s costumes. Anyone is allowed to join the Halloween parade, and a lot of people from my neighborhood get really into dressing up for it. I’ve never done it, but plenty of times I’ve seen Patch and his buddies go marching by dressed as gladiators or ninjas or whatever else they think is cool that year. Other people dress up in way weirder costumes, though. A lot of people go in pairs—ketchup and mustard, a policeman and a doughnut; once I even saw three people dressed up as rock, paper, and scissors, which I thought was pretty cute. And I’ll never forget the year I saw a big burly guy dressed as Cruella de Vil chasing about twenty people in Dalmatian suits around the corner onto Perry Street.

  Anyway, the parade is usually a blast, and this year was no exception. Meredith and Judith and I stood there on the sidewalk for about an hour, laughing and clapping and cheering at all the wild stuff going by, and I never got tired of it, not even when some kid dropped his ice cream right next to my shoes and started screaming at the top of his lungs and his mother (who was dressed as a pumpkin) had to elbow past us to get him out of the crowd. Nor did I mind the guy who stood two feet away playing a tuneless song on the accordion, because his tinfoil trench coat was actually kind of cool.

  After a while, though, we decided it was time to go to the party—my Lucite shoes were cute but not that comfortable to stand in, and Meredith and Judith seemed awfully anxious to get over to Sara-Beth’s before a certain somebody arrived. We tried to push back through the crunch toward Perry Street, but it was practically impossible with all of the fake Siamese twins and Medusas pressing in on all sides. Judith and I lost Meredith for a second, and we almost panicked, but then we caught a glimpse of her four feet away, hanging on to a lamppost as the Seven Dwarves and a flock of evil stepmothers swarmed around her. After what seemed like forever, the three of us finally broke free from the crowd and, brushing off the fairy dust an overeager Tinkerbell had just sprinkled on us, we walked back through my neighborhood toward the party.

  “That was a really beautiful parade,” I said. “It was so great how they got those cannons on the Captain Hook ship to fire candy out into the crowd.”

  “I loved that float with all the people dressed as body parts.” Meredith laughed. “I’ve never seen a gallbladder before, but I bet that’s exactly what they look like.”

  “Ugh—that float was so gross. And I’m quite sure it was inaccurate.” Judith shot Meredith a smug, sidelong glance, like she really wanted to say, But that’s okay, because a weirdo like you could never steal my future boyfriend. Then she said sweetly, “Meredith, I think your makeup’s getting a little smudged. You’re looking less ‘ladybug’ and more ‘drippy insect bug.’ You should probably get some fresh eyeliner.’”

  “Omigod!” Meredith’s hands flew to her face, and she raced to the pharmacy at the next corner. Judith and I waited outside for her, watching as a witch and a fluffy red bird walked past.

  “I thought her makeup looked okay,” I said to Judith, trying to keep the conversation neutral. I was worried she would try to bring up Adam, and I just couldn’t stand to hear about him right then. I felt so nervous about the evening: one part of me was feeling sick to my stomach at the thought of seeing him again; another part of me was worried about my friends seeing him; and the last part of me—the worst part of me—was already practically bursting with excitement.

  “Whatever. I just wanted a chance to talk to you alone.” Judith glanced back and forth surreptitiously, then whispered, “I’m sure I’m going to kiss Adam tonight. My parents always tell me you can get anything you set your mind to, and it’s true. I’ve thought everything about this all the way through and I’m not taking no for an answer.”

  “Oh, Judith, just … don’t do something you’ll regret.” My heart twisted in my chest; why did this have to be happening?

  She laughed and flipped her hair. “Believe me, I won’t.”

  “All done,” Meredith sang as she skipped toward us with a little plastic bag. “One of my glitter eyelashes was drooping a little. And I found this amazing red glitter lipstick—isn’t it perfect?” She stuck the lipstick in her purse and we walked on toward Perry Street.

  Judith strode ahead of us like she wanted to be first in the room to pick her seat for the PSAT, while Meredith and I lagged behind. Meredith was busy delighting in every new sight and sound, and I was having trouble keeping up, because my Lucite heels were absolutely killing my feet. Even though I was wearing my Cinderella dress, I felt suspiciously like one of her ugly stepsisters—apparently I’d gone up a shoe size since I’d bought these two years earlier.

  “Isn’t Halloween great?” asked Meredith, admiring some pumpkins wearing sunglasses in the window of an eyeglass shop. “I think it’s my favorite holiday.”

  “Yeah, it’s cool I guess,” I said warily, aware of where this conversation could go.

  “And it’s such a beautiful night!” Meredith sniffed the air. “I just feel, like … currents of energy—really good energy.” She smiled contentedly and lowered her voice. “It’s going to happen with Adam tonight, I just know it. I feel like it’s meant to be.”

  I looked down at my feet, which were starting to blister. “Well, I’m glad you’re so happy. But are you sure this is what you really want? There’ll be some major consequences—best friend consequences—if something does happen.”

  Meredith took a deep breath. “I just hope he shows up. Then everything will be perfect. It might take her a little while, but Judith will understand. Besides, I know you’ll be my friend no matter what happens.”

  I bit my lip and said nothing. If Adam did come to the party, it didn’t seem like things could turn out perfectly for any of us. Even though that terrible part of me wanted to see Adam tonight, for the first time I really truly hoped he wouldn’t show up. Because as we went up the steps to Sara-Beth’s town house, I had a feeling—as strong as Meredith and Judith’s feeling that tonight was their night to win Adam—that tonight would be the night when something terrible, maybe even irreversible, would happen to our friendship.

  CHAPTER 25

  IT’S NOT A PARTY UNTIL THE WHOLE SCHOOL CRASHES

  When we stepped inside Sara-Beth Benny’s newly haunted house, the party had most definitely begun. It was like the entire Halloween parade had migrated into her living room. Jack Sparrow and the Zodiac were arguing with each other across a cauldron filled with punch; the Bride from Kill Bill was hitting on Frankenstein; Spider-Man was eating a cookie shaped like a broomstick. “Thriller” blasted at top volum
e from speakers camouflaged as furry black bats up in the corners of the room, and in the spaces where there wasn’t a crush of bodies, I could see that SBB’s new furniture had arrived: strewn around the room were a dingy, molding Victorian-era sofa, an electric chair (unplugged, I hoped), and a bench made out of what looked like a coffin on stilts.

  I couldn’t believe how many people had shown up. I had thought Sara-Beth was inviting twenty or so at most. But now her town house was stuffed so full of monsters and superheroes I could barely make my way across the room. Most of the people looked like they were from Stuyvesant—how many people had Judith and Meredith invited?—but with all the elaborate costumes I couldn’t be sure. One thing I did notice, though, was the unusual number of Kermit-the-frogs wandering around. They all had on these terrycloth suits that looked like little kids’ footie pajamas, and big plastic masks like mascot heads that covered their entire faces. They were cute, sure, but there were an awful lot of them.

  “I’m going to look for Sara-Beth,” I yelled to Meredith and Judith over the blasting music, then pushed on through the crowd. The fact was, I needed to get away from the two of them for a while. Watching them scan the room for Adam made me feel guilty and nervous—and a little bit giddy too.

  Almost as soon as I got away from Judith and Meredith, I spotted Liesel—the Ice Queen herself. Seriously. She was dressed in a powder blue Carolina Herrera gown, with white glitter accents around her eyes, and an icicle-like clear plastic chopstick speared through her done-up hair.

  “Darling, you look adorable!” She flung her arms around me and we air-kissed. “How long have you been here?”

  “I just got here. But I thought you were going to be at the Museum of Modern Art tonight. Don’t you have a benefit gala or something?”

  Liesel waved away the question. “They’ll get along all right without me. When I found out about this, I knew I couldn’t miss it. The last time Sara-Beth threw a party, I woke up the next morning with a new PR project and Ashton Kutcher’s number in my phone!” She looked over my shoulder. “Although the crowd here does seem a little younger this time …”

  “Well, I better find Sara-Beth. Have you seen her?”

  “She’s upstairs. Bye-bye, snookums! Kisses!”

  Waving to Liesel, I pushed past two Kermits, a Batman, a Hermione, and some girl in a bubble-wrap dress as I went up the stairs. Considering how crazy the place was, Sara-Beth Benny was surprisingly easy to find. She was in her upstairs den, working the room with a bowl of cold pasta.

  “Feel these brains!” she was shouting to a confused-looking Oompa-Loompa. “Aren’t they disgusting? But it’s really cold spaghetti! Touch it anyway! Cold spaghetti!” Then she spotted me and gasped with delight, almost dropping the spaghetti brains on the blood-splattered floor. “Flan, you look adorable!”

  “Thanks. You do too.” I wasn’t really sure who Sara-Beth was supposed to be; she had on the tight, lacy black dress and dark red tulle train that she’d bought with me earlier that week, but she hadn’t done anything to make her costume more specific. She could have been dressed as a vampire, an undead prom queen, or as herself at an awards ceremony. It wasn’t until she shoved the bowl of pasta at me and grabbed her pointy black hat off a chair that I figured out she was supposed to be a witch. “This place is packed,” I added, glancing around. “I had no idea you invited so many people.”

  “Oh, I didn’t. But news about these things spreads like some kind of disease!” Sara-Beth shook her head. “Not that I blame anyone. If I got invited to a party like this, I’d tell everyone too.”

  “So the invite got out?” I looked around, shaking my head. No wonder all of Stuyvesant seemed to be here. “That’s terrible!”

  “My only concern is the paparazzi, of course, but they’ll never recognize me like this!” She stuck her hand into the bowl spaghetti she’d made me hold and wiggled it around with horrified delight. “Eww! It feels so weird. You can carry it around for a while. People love it! Cold spaghetti!”

  “I think you’re actually supposed to pass it around in a dark room,” I explained. “When people can’t see what it is, they think that it’s brains.”

  Sara-Beth ignored me.

  “Now,” she said, linking her arm through mine, “you’re going to have to point out this Adam character to me. I need to see the boy who’s causing my sweet Flan so much trouble!”

  “I don’t think he’s here yet,” I said, setting the pasta bowl down on top of a large steel cage we passed. Inside, a large black cobra stared up at me, motionless. I decided to believe it was stuffed.

  On the way down the stairs, we passed a guy whom I vaguely recognized from my algebra class. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt.

  “Oh, no, you don’t!” Sara-Beth stopped on the stairs and wagged a finger at him. “No costume, no party.”

  The guy glanced sheepishly from her to me to her again, to see if she was joking. She wasn’t.

  “I really was going to get one,” he explained, “but I didn’t get a chance this afternoon.”

  “No excuses! Go straight down to the basement. Thorn will take care of you there.” Then she pulled out a little cell phone, punched a number, and said, “Thorn? One medium size guy, on his way down.”

  “Thorn?” The guy gulped. Sara-Beth stared at him mercilessly, her bony arms crossed, and he backed down the stairs.

  “He better actually go to the basement,” she said. “If I see him in here again like that, I’m sending Thorn up here to get him.”

  “You’re really serious about this costume rule,” I observed. “What’s in the basement?”

  “All kinds of medieval torture thingies. But most of those are just for show. I sent that boy there to get his costume. A friend of Lenore’s at Halloween Adventure sold us a surplus of Kermit-the-frog suits—I love that Kermit and don’t know why more kids don’t want to dress up like him—so I decided, if you come here in regular clothes, then poof, you turn into a frog! I only thought they were sending a dozen or so, but we’ve got at least fifty. And it’s a good thing we’ve got them, too!” SpongeBob SquarePants and Frodo Baggins cleared out of the way as SBB continued down the stairs. “I don’t see what the big deal is—people told me what to wear for the first twelve years of my life and I turned out just fine!”

  I decided to sidestep that one. “So, who’s needed them so far?”

  “Mostly freshmen boys, it seems. Mmm, lot of mediums.” Sara-Beth spotted a girl dressed as a skeleton. She tapped her on the shoulder angrily. “Do you have a problem with me?” she demanded. “Are you trying to say something about my weight?”

  Everyone standing on the staircase stopped their conversations to look at the girl. The girl, totally confused, scratched the bone appliqué on her elbow.

  “No?” she offered hopefully. “I think you’re cool.”

  “Okay, just checking,” Sara-Beth said, cheerful again. She took my arm and we walked into the living room. “So, Flan, when you see this Adam, I want you to tell me right away, all right?”

  “Sure. But don’t talk about him anymore right now.”

  “Why n—oh, I see.”

  Meredith and Judith stood not too far away, over by the punch bowl. From the way they were scanning the crowd, I could tell neither of them had bumped into Adam yet. They looked kind of happy when they saw Sara-Beth Benny, though.

  “Sara-Beth!” Judith ran up to her and they air-kissed. Meredith hung back, sipping her punch.

  “Is he here yet?” she asked me in an undertone. But Sara-Beth has ears like a hawk, and apparently she heard, because she whirled around, all dramatic.

  “Do you mean the mysterious quarterback I keep hearing rumors about?” she exclaimed. “Because I just realized, nobody’s even told me what he looks like yet!”

  “His face is so sensitive,” Meredith cooed. “His eyes shine like starlight!”

  “He’s tall and handsome. Like a movie star,” said Judith, frowning at her friend.

 
“He cuts a dashing figure,” Meredith retorted. “In earlier times, he would’ve ridden horses across the moor.”

  “You don’t even know what a moor is,” Judith snapped. “Listen, he’s hot. Really hot.”

  “Lots of guys are hot. Adam has a piercing gaze and the grace of an immortal.”

  Sara-Beth Benny looked utterly confused. So I put in, “He’s got a bandage on his elbow. From where he scraped it in the football game.”

  “Oh!” she cried. “I remember him. He didn’t have a costume either—so lame! And he’s not an immortal or a movie star—he’s just a frog.”

  Meredith and Judith looked at each other.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” said Judith.

  “I’ve got to check out your amazing new house,” said Meredith.

  And they took off in opposite directions, combing the room for frogs. Sara-Beth raised an eyebrow.

  “I warned you,” I said. “They’re totally insane.”

  She shook her head, and I noticed for the first time the earrings she was wearing. They were little gold teeth.

  “I do have to say, Flan,” she said, snaking her birdlike arm around my waist, “you hang out with some of the strangest people.”

  CHAPTER 26

  YOU’VE GOT TO KISS A LOT OF FROGS TO FIND YOUR PRINCE

  Sara-Beth declared that she had to go mingle with her other guests. I felt badly pointing out that she didn’t really know most of them, so I let her go alone, and a couple of minutes later I was all by myself, standing awkwardly in the middle of the living room, trying to avoid making eye contact with any of the Kermits. It was really disappointing that the party wasn’t the small, intimate affair SBB and I had planned. It had seemed like such a great plan at the time. And I wished Bennett had been able to come. It seemed so much harder to remember that I didn’t want to see Adam when Bennett wasn’t by my side, reminding me what an amazing guy he was. Even though it was difficult to be around them with all the secrets I was keeping, I felt a little lonely since Meredith and Judith had ditched me, and I couldn’t really go talk to anyone else, because I couldn’t recognize my classmates in their costumes.