The Best Halloween Ever (3 page)

“Meet the Monsters might be okay,” I said.

“Not really,” Stewart Walker said.

“It’s better than drawing faces on cookies,” I said.

“Not really. They aren’t real monsters.”

I stared at him. “Come on, Stewart! I know that.”

He shook his head. “No, I mean they aren’t normal monsters. These monsters are going to be parents. Yours … mine … “ He pointed around the room. “His … hers … “

Parents? “Mine?” I asked.

“Well … mine. My father’s going to be

Dracula. He’s got these fake teeth, like Boomer’s braces.” He sighed.

“I’m sorry, Stewart,” I said.

I didn’t think my father would agree to be a monster, but Charlie wasn’t so sure.

“Maybe not a monster,” he said, “but there’s other things people have to be—ghosts and ghouls and living dead and all.”

“Ghouls?” my father said. “Living dead? I don’t think so.”

“Stewart Walker’s father gets to be Dracula,” Charlie said, “and Gloria Coburn’s mother is a witch, and Margaret—”

“Well, good for them!” Mother said. “I told Hazel Wilson I wouldn’t be anything like that, so they put me on the pumpkin committee. I really want to do my share because I want this to succeed. Just think … peaceful Halloweens, year after year! I guess I could be a witch if that’s what they need … not one of the main ones, though.”

“You’d be good on the pumpkin committee,” I said. I didn’t know what the pumpkin committee was, but it had to be better than your mother running around in witch clothes where everybody could see her.

I didn’t know who the main witches were, but Alice did.

“There are three main witches,” she told me. As usual, Mrs. Wendleken was in charge of everything so, as usual, Alice knew everything there was to know.

“There’s the witch in charge of the boiling cauldron, and the witch in charge of the Mystery Swamp … “

“What’s the Mystery Swamp?” I asked.

“I think it’s going to be the fourth-grade room.” Alice was so full of privileged information that all you had to do was ask What? or Why? or Who? and you would get the whole story.

“It was supposed to be the teachers’ room,

but there’s a big hole in the floor of the teachers’ room. They keep a bookcase over it, but, naturally, there wouldn’t be a bookcase in a swamp so they’d have to move it, and then somebody might fall down the hole. So it will probably be the fourth-grade room unless they use that for the monsters… . “

There was only one way to shut Alice up, or at least to get her to change the subject. “What are you going to be for Halloween?” I asked.

She looked around, very cautious. “If I say, will you not tell anybody? Swear?”

“Sure,” I said. “Spit and swear.”

“O-o-oh.” Alice made a face. “Just swear,” she said. “Spitting is dirty.”

I guess it is, but if I want someone to keep an absolute secret, we’ll spit and swear. In this case, though, it didn’t matter because nobody was all that crazy to hear about Alice’s Halloween costume.

“I’m going to be a Christmas tree,” she said. “I’m going to be a lighted Christmas tree … and if anyone else is a lighted Christmas tree, I’ll know you told!”

I didn’t expect to hear about any Christmas tree costumes, lighted or not, but I didn’t hear that much about any costumes. Usually that’s
all
you hear about for the whole month of October—”What are you going to be for Halloween?”—and, except for Alice, people tell you.

They’re going to buy their costume and be Superman or Batman or Wonder Woman … or they’re going to make their costume and be an accident victim or a deck of cards or a two-hundred-year-old man or woman.

But this year—none of these.

“What are you going to be for Halloween?” I asked Boomer Malone. One year Boomer built himself a dinosaur costume out of sandpaper, so he had a lot to live up to.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I was going to wear my grandmother’s old fur coat and be King Kong, but I don’t want to do that after all.” He shrugged. “I mean, with Halloween here at school … Maybe I’ll just be a Happy Hobo.”

The Happy Hobo was on a sign at the hardware store—”Happy Hobo Uses McAllister’s Machine Oil” the sign says, and there’s a picture of a smiling man in droopy jeans. Usually one or two people will be a Happy Hobo for Halloween, but I never expected Boomer to be one of them.

Charlie, too. “Maybe I’ll be a Happy Hobo this year,” he said.

“Well, that’s not very interesting,” Mother said. “Let’s see if we can’t think of something more exciting for you to be.”

Normally my mother would be crazy about a Happy Hobo costume because it was so easy. “Oh, be a hobo,” she would say. “All you need are your father’s wash-the-car pants and a lot of dirt.”

Now she was saying, “What about those old slipcovers in the attic … could you be something in slipcovers?”

“What did she mean?” Charlie asked me later. “Does she want me to be, like, a sofa or something?”

Mostly, I think, Mother just wanted us to be more excited about the Woodrow Wilson Halloween, because nobody was.

I knew, so far, of eleven Happy Hobos, not counting Boomer and Charlie, so that tells you something. This Halloween was going to be exactly what my mother said it would be—safe and controlled (by Mr. Crabtree and Mrs. Wendleken and the PTA) and peaceful and boring.

The only scary thing was going to be Mr. Walker’s Dracula teeth.

T
he Herdmans must have figured that out because, according to Charlie, “They aren’t going to come!”

“We’re not going to waste our time on some dumb Woodrow Wilson PTA Halloween party with schoolteacher ghosts and no trick or treat” was what Ralph said.

“You have to go to it,” Charlie told him. “I have to go. Everybody has to go. It’s like a big school event.”

As usual, there was more than one

Herdman on hand to comment about this. “A big school event would be that the school burned down,” Claude said.

“Yeh!” Ollie grinned—the Herdman grin, sly and sneaky. “Or blew up.”

You had to think twice about that because the Herdmans were famous for starting fires and blowing up garbage cans. Still, all they had to work with was a Junior Science kit that they stole from the hardware store, so the school was probably safe.

Of course anything the Herdmans stayed away from was sure to be popular with everybody else, so right away kids quit complaining about Mr. Crabtree and the homework and the family monsters. Nobody said they were glad about no trick-or-treating because nobody
was
glad about that.

“It’s like we made a trade,” Boomer Malone said. “We get rid of the Herdmans but we give up trick-or-treating.”

It would be great if we could get rid of the Herdmans forever but that wasn’t going to happen, so this was better than nothing.

“This is a
lot
better than nothing,” my mother said. “Do you realize that this will be the first time in history that a Woodrow Wilson School event will go the way it’s supposed to? Nothing will be stolen or blown up or burned down … or buried or dug up or”—she looked at Charlie—”wallpapered.”

When Charlie was in the second grade, his teacher, Miss Evans, gave them some rolls of wallpaper to decorate their room for Parents’ Night, and while the rest of the kids wallpapered their books and their lunchboxes and the blackboard, Leroy Herdman wallpapered Charlie to the coatroom door.

Miss Evans told my mother that she walked past him twice before it occurred to her that the door looked very strange.

“It was all … bumpy,” she said. “But, my

goodness, I didn’t think … well, you don’t expect to find a child underneath the wallpaper. What alerted me the third time I went past that door was that the whole thing was moving. It looked like two or three puppies under a blanket, you know?”

Charlie had wallpaper paste all over himself—his clothes, his hair and eyebrows, in his ears and up his nose.

“Leroy’s idea?” my mother said.

Charlie nodded. “I was supposed to jump out during Parents’ Night and go ‘Ta-da!’ Leroy said it would be a big hit.”

“Then why didn’t Leroy do it?” Mother asked, scrubbing away at the wallpaper paste.

“He couldn’t. He’s allergic to wallpaper.”

Mother never forgot this episode, and she never let Charlie forget it either, up to and including now. “Allergic to wallpaper!” she said.

“I was in the second grade!” Charlie protested. “I didn’t know any better then!”

I wasn’t sure he knew any better now, so it was good that the Herdmans almost never did the same thing twice. Once they had wallpapered you, you could be pretty sure they wouldn’t wallpaper you again. You could relax.

And if Charlie was right, and the Herdmans stayed away on Halloween,
everyone
could relax.

“I just wish I could be sure,” Louella McCluskey said. “If I bring my little brother, Howard, to school that night and take him around to some of the things that aren’t very scary, my mother will pay me eight dollars. But that’s only if the Herdmans don’t come. If they come my mother won’t let me bring Howard.
I
still have to come.” She sighed. “But I can’t bring Howard.”

“Why don’t you ask Imogene?” I said. But we both knew that wouldn’t help because she might say yes and it would be a lie, or she might say no and
that
would be a lie.

“I could ask her what she’s going to be for Halloween,” Louella said. “That might give me a clue.”

It did.

“What am I going to be for Halloween?” Imogene said. “Well, I’m not going to be hanging around here in some secondhand bathrobe with a lot of fake witches and spooky music on the PA and little kid games like that … “ She pointed to the second-grade room, where two PTA mothers were deciding where to hang up a sign that said “Pin the Tail on the Black Cat.”

That satisfied Louella. “I know exactly what I’m going to do with my eight dollars,” she said. “After Halloween they’ll mark down the price on all the leftover Halloween costumes, and I’ll buy one. I don’t even care what it is, just so it’s not a Pilgrim.”

Louella was lucky, I thought, because this year the stores were full of Halloween costumes instead of Halloween candy.

“What did you expect?” Mother said, when Charlie came home moaning and groaning about the empty shelves at the supermarket. Charlie spends most of October checking out all the different candy, deciding what he wants most and what he doesn’t want, and what he wants my mother to buy in case there’s some left over. You’d think he never
saw
candy except at Halloween.

That’s what Mother said. “You’d think you never
saw
candy except at Halloween, but you have candy all the time. I buy candy bars for the high school band trip every year. Your father buys me candy on my birthday. Aunt Elizabeth makes that wonderful fudge at Christmas.”

“But that’s not like Halloween candy,”

Charlie said. “Halloween candy is like … it’s like … “

I helped him out. “It’s like you get to have all the candy there is, all at once. You get to look at it, and count it, and separate it into little piles … “

“And trade it,” Charlie said, “and eat it...

“And hand it all over to the Herdmans,” Mother said. “Don’t forget that part.”

But what Charlie couldn’t forget was the empty shelves at the supermarket. “There isn’t
anything
there,” he kept saying. “No candy at all, not even healthy candy like PowerBars.”

Mother said there was no such thing as healthy candy, and I guess she was getting tired of this subject, because she changed it. “Just wait till you get to school on Halloween night,” she said, “ … lots of surprises!”

What surprises? I wondered. We already knew about the Mystery Swamp and the boiling cauldron and the monsters, and anything we didn’t know about Alice would be glad to tell us—unless my mother had some private surprise. Did they talk her into being a witch? Or some other gross thing?

As far as I knew she was still on the pumpkin committee, and there were notes about it on the refrigerator:
pumpkin committee meeting, Wednesday, 10:30
and
call Mr. Brown about pumpkins.
Still, I wanted to make sure. “How’s the pumpkin committee going?” I asked Mother. “Is it a lot of work?”

“Well, it’s a lot of time asking people to donate pumpkins and a lot of time lugging pumpkins around,” she said, “but I don’t mind.”

“Because you’d rather collect pumpkins,” I said, “instead of being, oh, some witch or Mrs. Ghost or something?”

“No,” she said, “because I just want this to be the best Halloween ever!”

My mother was going to be very disappointed, I thought. Now that the Herdmans weren’t coming for sure, the Woodrow Wilson Halloween looked a
little
better, but not much, and not to everybody.

Charlie wasn’t the only one who checked out the supermarket and the empty shelves—there were kids there every afternoon, remembering where their favorite candy always used to be.

“ … M&M’s on the top shelf at the end” … “Reese’s Pieces right in the middle, between two kinds of Hershey’s Kisses” … “Milk Duds on the bottom, beside Jujubes … “

Boomer remembered the year there weren’t any raisin-and-nut Chunkies. “They were my favorite,” he said, “and I had to collect something else.”

Louella missed Peanut Butter Cups and I missed Starbursts, but what we all really missed was just Halloween candy on Halloween.

The only good thing about it was that it would be Herdman-free, which, according to Alice, was the whole idea in the first place.

“We were wrong about the homework,” she reported. “That wasn’t why Mr. Crabtree decided to have Halloween at school. The mayor made him have Halloween at school so they could keep track of the Herdmans, my mother said.”

“But they aren’t coming,” I said.

“Well, the mayor didn’t know that would happen, and Mr. Crabtree didn’t know that would happen, but at least
we
get to have a Herdman-free Halloween!”

Alice was so pleased with herself and her inside information that she didn’t even notice who was standing around to
hear
the inside information, but I did.

Besides me and Louella, there was Boomer Malone and Gloria Coburn and Junior Jacobs. And, right outside the door, taking in every word and repeating “Herdman-free?” to herself … was Imogene.