Keeping Secrets (11 page)

“Magical?” suggested Ruby.

“I guess so. Wow.”

“That's because it's actually Halloween night, and people are out in their costumes,” said Ruby. “It's kind of like on Christmas Eve when everyone comes to town to see Santa arrive. Nothing has changed since the afternoon, but suddenly everything feels different.”

“See?” Lacey said to Hilary. “We told you it would be fun to go trick-or-treating on Main Street.”

“And I'm only a little sad that Flora and Olivia aren't here,” said Ruby.

Lacey and Hilary turned to glare at her.

“I said I'm only a
little
sad! Did you not hear me?”

Hilary took a good look down Main Street before she and Ruby and Lacey stepped inside Dutch Haus. The windows of the stores and businesses were outlined in orange and white lights. Carved pumpkins stood by doorways and everywhere, everywhere were people in costumes. Grown-ups and children and store owners and even dogs. (The dogs, Hilary guessed, were wearing the outfits they'd worn the previous afternoon in Nikki's parade.) During the moments that Hilary and her friends paused outside Dutch Haus, they saw two fairies, a giant parrot, George Washington, a milk shake, and a dog in a cow costume.

Ruby opened the door to Dutch Haus. A woman wearing a red dress, a curly red wig, and a pair of tap shoes appeared before her and held out a basket of candy bars.

“Hey!” exclaimed Ruby. “Little Orphan Annie. That's a good costume, Jeanne.” She turned to Lacey and Hilary and said, “We should have been characters from
Annie
. I could have been Annie and you guys could have been orphans.”

“
Or
,” said Lacey, “one of
us
could have been Annie and
you
could have been an orphan.”

“Why should
I
—” said Ruby.

“Girls,” interrupted Jeanne, “turn around. Let me see your costumes. Hey, those are great. Crayons! What an original idea.”

Ruby whipped out the sign.

“Oh,” said Jeanne. “Oh, dear. Well, you are very colorful fruit. Did you all get candy bars? Feel free to take more than one.”

Hilary's eyes widened. “Really? We can take two?”

“Yup,” said Ruby proudly. “That's another one of the great things about trick-or-treating around here.”

“Cool!” said Hilary. “Let's get going. Let's go to all the stores in order. We'll go as far as the square on this side of the street — do they even give out candy at the grocery store?”

“Yup,” replied Lacey.

“Excellent. And then we should cross and go down the other side of Main Street and then cross back and end up at the diner. You guys have to see my mom and dad. At first they didn't want to wear costumes, but then they got in the spirit, so now they're dressed as Frankenstein and the Bride of Frankenstein. And guess what,” Hilary chattered as the girls left Dutch Haus.

“What?” said Ruby.

“My mom is Frankenstein and my dad is the bride.”

Lacey and Ruby giggled.

The Still Life collected lollipops at Verbeyst's, Junior Mints at College Pizza, and handfuls of penny candy at the art supply store. Ruby was variously identified as a canary, a squash, and a pencil. No one had any idea what Hilary was.

“We have to hold the sign up at all times,” Ruby announced as the girls pushed open the door to Needle and Thread.

When they did so, it opened soundlessly into a darkened room.

“Min?” said Ruby in a small voice.

The lights flicked on and there were Min and Gigi, dressed as the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda — and Aunt Allie as Dorothy and Mary Woolsey as a Munchkin.

“Ooh, that was scary,” said Hilary, shivering.

“Too scary?” asked Gigi.

“Oh, no. Fun scary.”

“Mary!” exclaimed Ruby. “And Aunt Allie! This is a good surprise!”

Aunt Allie held out a bowl of Three Musketeers bars. “Here you go, girls. Your costumes are, um …”

Ruby pulled forth the sign.

“A still life. How inventive,” said Mary.

The girls continued on the route chosen by Hilary. They saw the Fongs at their studio (Grace was now wearing a ladybug costume) and Dr. Malone in his office. (“Huh,” said Hilary. “A dentist handing out candy.”) At Time and Again, Sonny Sutphin in a magnificent clown costume gave them licorice whips, and at the library they helped themselves to Mary Janes in a bowl that was sitting in the lap of Mother Goose.

At long last, the girls reached the diner. There were the Bride of Frankenstein and his wife. “Hello there!” said Hilary's father, patting his mountain of hair. “Well, look at the three of you. A rainbow. What a wonderful sur —”

“The sign! The
sign
!” hissed Ruby, and Lacey grabbed for it.

“Not a single person knew who we were unless they read the sign,” said Ruby a few minutes later as she and Lacey returned to Needle and Thread.

“I don't care,” said Lacey. “This was a great night. Wasn't it a great night? Hilary thought it was better than trick-or-treating in her old town.”

Ruby grinned. “Yeah. It really was great. Who cares if people didn't know what we were.” She crumpled up the sign. “But you know what? Maybe next year we should be the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, and the Leaning Tower of Pizza.”

Olivia sat miserably on her bed. Through her open window she could hear trick-or-treaters laughing and shouting as they made their way to Main Street, and she longed to be one of them. She let out a puff of breath and picked at her cuticles.

Olivia had decided that she didn't want to go to the dance at Central.

Why, oh, why had she said yes when Jacob had asked her? The invitation had been exciting, of course, but now that the big night had arrived, Olivia felt certain she had made a mistake. A very big mistake. And gazing at the open door of her wardrobe, inside of which she could see every outfit she had first decided upon and then rejected, she thought that perhaps wearing a costume to the dance wouldn't have been such a bad idea after all. A costume didn't need to be grown-up or cool or perfect. There was nothing right or wrong about a costume. And the idea of wearing a mask was very appealing just now.

“Olivia? Are you ready?” called her mother from the hallway.

Olivia tried to figure out how to tell her mother that she wasn't going to the dance. She hesitated for so long that Mrs. Walter knocked on the door and then opened it just wide enough to poke her head into the room. “Olivia?” she said again.

“No, I'm not ready,” Olivia mumbled.

“What's the matter?”

“I don't want to go!”

Mrs. Walter smiled. Then she sat down next to her daughter. “Opening night jitters?”

“What?”

“It's an expression. It means, ‘Are you nervous?'”

Olivia nodded. “I don't even know what to wear!”

“I thought you and Flora and Nikki chose something last night.”

“We did, but now it looks stupid. And babyish. Which is no surprise since we got it in the little kids' department.”

“What's Flora going to wear?” asked Mrs. Walter.

“Jeans and a sort of sweatery thing over a tank top.”

“Well, you have jeans and that striped shirt that buttons down the front and a tank top. Come on. You have to get dressed. I told Min we'd pick Flora up in ten minutes.”

“I'm not going.”

“You've decided to let Jacob and your friends down?”

Olivia sighed. “No.”

Her mother gave her a hug. “I'll meet you downstairs.”

Ten minutes later, Olivia, dressed in the outfit she and Flora and Nikki had chosen, was sitting in the backseat of the car beside Flora.

Nobody spoke.

Olivia looked out the window at the trick-or-treaters.

“Remember last year?” she said forlornly.

“Oh, for heaven's sake!” exclaimed her mother. “This is a
dance
. You girls are going to have
fun
. And if you get nervous, think of your father and me dressed as Sonny and Cher, handing out candy at the store.”

Olivia buried her head in her hands. “I hope nobody from school sees you.”

Mrs. Walter let out a sigh of her own. “Does everything we do embarrass you?”

“Life embarrasses me,” replied Olivia.

She brightened, though, when they pulled into the school parking lot and found Nikki waiting for them. Nikki was so excited that at the sight of the Walters' car she began to hop up and down.

“There's someone who looks happy about the dance,” commented Mrs. Walter. “Now, girls,
please
. Try to have fun.”

“You're not a size-two kid in a size-twelve school,” muttered Olivia as her mother drove away. But she could hear music drifting through the open door to the gym, and she admitted that she did in fact feel a teensy bit excited. She reminded herself that only seventh- and eighth-graders would be there. And, most important, Jacob had specifically invited her to the dance.

This was her first date.

“Olivia,” Flora whispered suddenly. “There he is.”

Waiting at the door to the gym was Jacob. He was standing by himself, his collar askew, his hair damp and slightly flattened, as if he had come straight from the shower.

“He's so cute!” exclaimed Nikki in a whisper.

Olivia found herself smiling. And when she approached Jacob, she found that he indeed smelled of soap — and also something sharp, which was not unlike her father's aftershave lotion.

“Hi, Olivia,” said Jacob. “Hi, Flora. Hi, Nikki. Olivia, you, um, you look really nice.”

“Thanks.” Olivia found herself incapable of uttering another word.

“Come on. Let's go inside!” said Nikki.

They entered the gym and Olivia sucked in her breath. “Ohh,” she said. “
Look
.”

Olivia had expected to find the room decorated with run-of-the-mill pumpkin cutouts, cobwebs, and orange and black crepe paper. What she found instead was a world of glitter and light. The walls had been hung with sparkly netting. The refreshment tables were strewn with silver sequins and confetti. The teachers were wearing blue-and-silver wizard's caps. And each student who entered the gym was handed a neon glow stick.

Olivia snapped hers smartly and watched it begin to shine a brilliant green. She was about to fasten it around her neck when Jacob said, “Here. Let me do that.”

“Thank you,” replied Olivia, blushing. Then she leaned over to Flora and whispered, “Hey, look. No one's dancing.”

Flora smiled. “I know. I guess we aren't the only shy ones.”

Olivia and Jacob, with Flora and Nikki in tow, walked across the gym to watch the band — three boys and two girls dressed entirely in black.

“Who are they?” asked Olivia after a few minutes. “They're good.” (She had no idea whether they were good or horrible.)

“They're called Snooze,” replied Jacob. “The band members are all in twelfth grade. My brother knows them.”

“Snooze,” repeated Flora. “You'd think a band would choose a perkier name.”

Jacob laughed. He turned to Olivia. “Want to dance?”

Olivia stepped back from Jacob. She looked across the dance floor. She looked at her feet. “Well …”

“You know what?” said Jacob. He leaned close to Olivia and whispered, “I don't want to dance, either.”

Olivia grinned. “Really?” She let out a rush of breath. “Oh, I'm so glad. I mean … well, you know.”

Jacob looked as relieved as Olivia felt. “I don't like to dance,” he admitted. “At least not when people are watching me. And then I go and invite you to a dance!”

“But it doesn't matter because
I
don't like to dance!”

“Hey!” exclaimed Flora, grabbing Olivia's elbow. “There's Willow. I feel terrible — we should have invited her to come with us. And we didn't even think of it. At least I didn't.”

“I didn't, either,” said Olivia. She saw Willow standing uncertainly by the refreshment table. “Let's go talk to her.”

Olivia, Jacob, Nikki, and Flora walked back across the gym, waving to Willow on the way.

“You came!” said Olivia, just as Flora was saying, “We should have asked you to ride over here with us. I'm sorry we didn't think about it. We're so used to —”

Willow interrupted with a wave of her hand. “Don't worry about it. I couldn't have come with you, anyway. I … I had to sneak out. Mom wouldn't give me permission to go to the dance, and I didn't want to miss it. So …”

“So you snuck out?” Nikki repeated. “How?”

“Believe me, I've had years of practice. The first thing I did when we moved into the Row Houses was check out escape routes. Well, not escape routes exactly, but you know what I mean.”

Olivia had no idea what she meant. She had never once had to escape from her own house.