by Octavia Zane
Riley inspected him curiously. Regular shoes, regular chinos, and a white T-shirt with a strange symbol on it were all the vet had on. “I don’t get it.”
Theo pointed to the symbol. “That’s the astrological sign for Sagittarius.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“I’m a Scorpio.”
Riley’s grin grew wider. He passed Theo a package of gummy candy from the bowl and stepped aside to let him in. “That’s good. Can I ask why you just happened to have a T-shirt lying around with the wrong astrological sign on it?”
“I ordered four plain white T-shirts online a few months back. This came in the box with them for no reason. I hadn’t ordered it, I wasn’t charged for it, it was just there. So I threw it in my drawer at work just to have a spare T-shirt around.” Theo slipped the candy into his pocket. “Nice hat, your highness.”
“Thanks.”
“That’s Doctor Theo’s voice!” The kids and the dog ran for the entryway. Sherlock and Gigi made it first since Jesse’s marshmallow hat fell off. The strings were made of some kind of slippery fabric that kept untying themselves under his chin.
Theo patted the dog and admired Gigi’s costume. “Are you going trick-or-treating with us?” Gigi asked. “We’re going to get so much candy! Chocolate and gum and lollipops and the house on the corner gives out tissue paper ghosts with pennies inside and-”
“But not the apple house! I don’t want to go to the apple house,” Jesse put in while fixing his hat. “They always give out apples. Not even caramel apples!”
Gigi agreed as she picked up her empty plastic pumpkin. “Not the apple house!”
“And we have to go to the haunted house!”
Rivers came into the entryway and offered her hand to Theo. “Hi, I’m Rivers Carder. We haven’t had a chance to meet yet.”
“Hi, I’m Theo.” Theo shook her hand.
She narrowed her eyes at his shirt. Then she laughed. “I get it. Great costume.”
“I told you she was the brains of this operation,” Riley said. “I’m just the pretty face.”
“But you two have the same face,” Jesse said in bafflement. “Mom just has the girl version and Uncle Riley has the boy version.”
“I ate my stupid dinner and I took those stupid pictures and now it’s time to go trick-or-treating!” Gigi said, swinging from Riley’s arm. “Please, please, please . . .”
“God, get them out of here before they explode,” Rivers said. Riley clipped on Sherlock’s leash, and they were off.
Halloween was magic to him as a child. Carving pumpkins and picking out his costume, running around the neighborhood with his sister to collect candy, gaping at spooky displays at people’s homes . . . And then staying up late to watch scary cartoon specials, freaking out over every bump and scratch and squeak out in the darkness, candy wrappers spilling onto the floor until the thought of eating another piece made him sick . . . His boyhood self thought Halloween was the greatest holiday ever invented.
He couldn’t love Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Easter as much, since those holidays inevitably brought out the worst behavior in his parents. But Halloween mattered little to either of them, so his memories of those days were flawless jewels. Why they tangled over their grandkids’ Halloween now was beyond him.
It was still magic today, getting to experience it all over again through Jesse and Gigi. The two kids skipping joyously out to the sidewalk, their flashlights bobbling, Riley strolled along behind them with Theo and Sherlock. Jack-o’-lanterns glowed at almost every house along the road. Skeletons leaned menacingly over fences to leer at the small, costumed passerby; shot from hidden projectors, ghosts swirled along walls as scary music played from within homes.
They waited at the gate of the neighbors’ house as Jesse and Gigi went up to the door to knock. “Trick or treat!” Dogs barked from out of sight.
“I wasn’t really expecting you to come along,” Riley said, though he was thrilled that Theo had.
“I liked Halloween as a kid,” Theo said. “Usually I just slung a sheet over my head and traveled along from house to house as a ghost. I got in a lot of trouble one year when the sheet I cut eye-holes into was my mother’s favorite flannel bedsheet.”
“Say thank you!” Riley called to the kids, who had gotten their candy.
“Thank you!” they chorused.
“We always had store costumes,” Riley said as the children hurried through the yard and pivoted at the sidewalk to go to the next house. “Our best was the year that I was a shark, and Rivers was a school of fish. We took first place at the school’s costume parade in fifth grade, me chasing her all around the field.” Theo chuckled as they tagged along.
The second house was lavishly decorated with every piece of Halloween paraphernalia that it was possible to buy. A coffin creaked upon the lawn, a bone-white hand sliding out as the kids triggered a hidden motion sensor. Gigi shrieked in fear and doubled back at top speed for Riley. “It’s a vampire!”
Jesse retreated from the coffin nervously. “It’s not real, is it?”
“It’s not real,” Theo said as another clutch of kids went up the pathway to the house. The littlest child shook her head hard and the mom brought her back to the sidewalk while the dad went on with the older girls.
A curtain twitched in an upstairs window and a ghostly face looked down to the yard. Jesse looked wistfully to the woman handing out candy on the porch, but he had lost his nerve. “Never mind. Too scary.”
“We could all go,” Theo suggested.
His offer met with the kids’ approval. They braved the coffin as a group and then moved on down the block, where the haunted garage became another group activity, Gigi welded to Riley’s side and Jesse stuck to Theo like glue. At the end, the kids got tissue paper ghosts with coins inside.
They crossed the street to start down another block, which had two lines of dark homes but a sea of orange lights in the distance. Jesse swung Theo’s hand as the four of them walked along. “Are you married?” Jesse asked. “You don’t wear a ring.”
“I’m not married,” Theo said.
“Are you gay?”
“Jesse!” Riley exclaimed. “That’s a very personal question!”
In the dim glow of the flashlights, Theo looked very surprised. “Uhh . . .”
“Because Uncle Riley is gay, and he’s not married,” Jesse said. “It’s not a bad question, Uncle Riley! It’s just a question.”
“But it’s still a personal question, and he doesn’t have to answer it,” Riley said.
“Yes,” Theo said to Jesse. “Yes, I’m gay.”
“Come on, Jesse, we need to get to that house all the way down there!” Gigi cried urgently.
The kids sped up.
“Wow,” Theo said.
“The filter takes a while to install,” Riley said apologetically.
“I’ve just never had a kid ask me that question outright before. I didn’t even understand what that was at his age,” Theo said. “I’d heard the word, but it didn’t have any meaning to me other than it meant something bad.”
“I’m sorry that he put you on the spot like that.”
Theo shrugged, and then smiled a little. “It’s not a bad thing, is it? Having it out in the open instead of a secret. That was why it was a bad word to me back then, because I didn’t know anybody who identified that way and had to fill in the blanks with what I heard in the schoolyard. With what my father said when he didn’t know I was listening. But it’s not a bad word to Jesse, or a bad thing to be.”
“No, he thinks I’m extremely normal and boring. Gay doesn’t have much more . . .” Riley fought for the word he wanted. “Resonance? It has no more resonance than brown hair or blue eyes, or being born in March.”
“Significance,” Theo said.
“Yes, that’s a better word for it. It’s not a significant thing to him; it’s just another descriptor. I like that. He can’t fill in the blanks, like you said, with whate
ver trash he hears around his school or from TV. He hears gay and just thinks about his boring old uncle who makes him do his homework and take out the trash.”
“What was the significance to you at his age?”
Things had changed in such a short period of time. “It was bad. Funny, too, but mostly bad. A gay guy squealed over flower arrangements and danced to show tunes. Gay guys were ridiculous: the comic relief with lisps and flapping hands.” Riley had laughed at that comic relief, unable to apply it to himself. “My parents never talked about gay people, so mostly it was stuff I picked up from movies and TV shows. There were rumors that a science teacher in my junior high was gay, but I didn’t believe them. He was just so regular, so he had to be straight. Not that I wanted to be thinking about any of my teachers’ sexuality in the first place.”
“Mmm.” Theo looked pensive under the glow of a streetlight.
“You’re thinking something interesting.”
“Debatable.”
“Out with it.”
Theo took the candy out of his pocket. The crackling of the plastic made Sherlock look back, tongue hanging from his mouth and his tail wagging, pleased as punch to be having a nighttime adventure. Popping a gummy into his mouth, Theo said, “I was just wondering what you made of yourself then, once you realized you were gay.”
“Don’t trip,” Riley called ahead. Tree roots butted up the sidewalk along this stretch of the road. Hustling along in the lead, the kids shined their lights down. “First I rejected it, just like I rejected the idea of that science teacher being gay. I didn’t want to be the comic relief, you know? I didn’t lisp or flap my hands; I didn’t know any show tunes and I wasn’t all that tidy. God knows I didn’t give a shit about fashion. I was into sports. I wanted to be taken seriously.”
No, that wasn’t quite right; Riley hadn’t ever been a serious person. He tried again to explain. “I wanted them to laugh because I was telling a joke, not because I was the joke. Honestly, I was offended at the thought that I had to transform myself into the stereotype. It took a while before I understood I could just be me, the same me as I’d always been.”
Theo nodded.
“Were you afraid of being the comic relief, too?”
“No. I was afraid of the oversexed ape waiting to burst out of my skin.”
“What do you mean?”
With regret, Theo said, “That was my understanding of gay men when I was a boy: they were interested in bedding every single man to come along. They had no control over themselves. I was so terrified that having sex would trigger that crazed ape in me that I didn’t go on a single date until I was nineteen years old. Looking back, it sounds so dumb-”
Theo tripped on the broken sidewalk. Riley’s hand snapped out to catch him before he fell. “We should be walking in the street. All four of us have tripped here at one point or another.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem.” Riley let go of Theo’s arm, although he didn’t want to.
“Look at that!” “Look!” the kids shouted back.
They were pointing to a gigantic tarantula, which was squatting on the roof of the house done up in orange lights. The yard was literally crawling in fake spiders. They hunkered atop pumpkins and lurked behind hay bales, rested beside tombstones and dropped from the windows. Cobwebs covered everything and trailed off the trellis over the walkway, flapping softly in the breeze.
A huge line of kids waited their turn along the walkway, Jesse and Gigi joining it. Hanging back, Riley flicked his cell phone flashlight to the lamppost. Good. The FOUND poster for Sherlock was still hanging there. They hadn’t gotten a single call about him, and that was good, too.
“They’re not real, right?” Jesse called, giving a wary glance to the spiders closest to him.
“Not real,” Theo and Riley said together.
A sleek red coupe slowed as it went down the street, the driver lowering the passenger side window to stare at the spider house. “Amazing car,” Riley commented. It was completely out of place in this modest neighborhood.
Theo glanced at it. “2017 Ocoro coupe, leather seats with diamond design upholstery, V8 biturbo engine.”
As the car accelerated with a purr to the corner, Riley said in surprise, “You’re into cars.”
“I’m not,” Theo said bashfully. “My ex drove one of those, except his car was silver. The price tag made me choke.”
“Fifty thousand?” Riley guessed.
“Higher.”
“Seventy thousand?”
“Higher.”
Riley snapped a quick picture of the spider house to send to Rivers, saying, “One hundred thousand? Are you kidding me? Who spends that on a car except for celebrities?”
He was shocked into momentary speechlessness when Theo said, “Higher.”
That was insane! “Uhh . . . one hundred ten?”
“One twenty-five,” Theo said, still looking over to the car. It was idling at the corner so the driver could peer at another house done up in style for Halloween. “I should say that’s what he used to drive. He could be driving something else by now.”
Riley had choked paying fifteen grand for a used hybrid. “What in the hell did your ex do for a living? How did he afford a car like that?”
“Vaughn is an intellectual property lawyer.”
“A what? What is that?”
As the car sped away, Theo looked back to Riley. “Think copyrights, patents, trademarks, that kind of thing. His focus was patent law and that’s about as intense as you can get. He had an undergraduate degree in biology, then went to law school and sat for the bar exam as well as the Patent Bar. The pass rate is low, but he did it on the first try.”
“He must be incredibly smart.”
“He’s a brilliant man. Absolutely brilliant. But it wasn’t just the money he made as an attorney; his family is extremely wealthy from generations in law and real estate. He came into a trust fund in his mid-twenties that was generous indeed. Money was nothing he ever had to be concerned about, and he spent it accordingly.”
“Did you grow up rich, too?”
Theo cracked up. “No. God, no! You’ve obviously never been to the city of Poke.”
“No. Never even heard of it until you.”
“Nobody’s heard of it. Nobody rich lives in Poke. There was always food on the table and clothes in my closet, but not a lot left over for extras. We camped on my summer vacations and our car was old as the hills. I thought going to Bucko’s for a pepperoni pizza was a fine dining experience.” Theo chuckled at himself. “Then I met Vaughn and stepped into a different world of resorts and Michelin-star restaurants, and all the trappings that come with wealth at his level.”
Riley suddenly felt very out-of-step with Theo, and painfully aware of how scruffy and silly he looked in his ripped-up jeans and princess hat. “Do you miss it?”
“The money?”
“Yeah.”
“Sometimes. It was nice to not have to worry about money when I came from a household full of those worries. With Vaughn, there was always more. I grew up on a tight budget and Vaughn had no concept of what a budget was. If he wanted something, he bought it. But it doesn’t always work to your benefit, having endless money like that.”
“How wouldn’t it?”
Theo ate the rest of his gummy candy and pocketed the trash. “In some ways . . . it makes you impatient. You’re accustomed to being commander of the universe. Vaughn was used to throwing money at his problems to make those problems go away. His whole family did that. You just keep hurling money until you get the results you want. But some problems can’t be fixed with money and that flummoxed them. I grew up with little, yet I had more reserves to fall back on when something didn’t swing my way. Things came easily to Vaughn with his money and his looks and his intelligence. When they didn’t come so easily, he was left not knowing how to cope.”
That made sense, though Riley had trouble picturing what it would be like to have that level of
wealth at his fingertips. Growing up, his family was financially comfortable, though far from rich. None of his boyfriends had had much. Dreyer was a step above penniless; Jeremy was stable in his IT job, but certainly couldn’t splash his money out on whatever took his fancy.
He checked on the kids, who were nearing the front of the line. Already there was a bittersweet tinge to this night. They didn’t need him quite as much as before. Last year they wouldn’t have been brave enough to venture past the spiders without him. While it was amazing to see them stretching their wings, he missed those trusting little hands in his.
That out-of-step feeling had faded. Riley was no genius, but the family bakery did quite well for itself. He was proud of it. Besides, the vet chose to be here tonight with him, not this Vaughn fellow and his lap of luxury.
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask what broke Theo and Vaughn up when Gigi ran back with her pumpkin and immediately dashed away to the next house. Jesse came back sourly, his marshmallow hat crushed in his fist. “It won’t stay on!” He thrust it out to Theo.
“I’ll try.” Theo crouched down to put it on Jesse’s head. “Too bad I don’t have any tape. That would make this stay put.”
“The strings are the wrong kind and they’re too short,” Jesse complained. “I’m going to throw this stupid hat in the garbage!”
“Well, we could knot it to Sherlock’s collar instead. A marshmallow man should have a marshmallow dog.”
The furrows in Jesse’s forehead evened. Calming down, he said, “A marshmallow dog. Sherlock, do you want to be my marshmallow dog?”
Sherlock had no problems with this proposal, and they went after Gigi with the hat knotted tightly to the dog’s collar.
Happy again, Jesse said, “Do you want to come to my class, Doctor Theo?”
“Why would I come to your class?” Theo asked.
“’Cause we’re supposed to invite a grown-up to talk to everyone about their job. Mandy’s dad is a firefighter, so he came in to talk to us about what he does, and Raymond’s aunt came in with a cool costume on ‘cause she’s an actress. We did a play together. And Vince had his neighbor come in. His neighbor designs video games and he showed us glitches. That was funny.”