The Best Halloween Ever (7 page)

Alice collected all her extra credit for the Halloween assignments and then announced that her oral report would be How It Feels to Be Almost Electrocuted.

At first Mrs. Hazelwood said no. “Our oral reports are intended to provide information,” she said, “that we can all use. I don’t think this is information we
want
to use. Choose another topic, Alice, of more general interest.”

Actually, near electrocution—Alice’s—was the most interesting topic anyone could think of, and maybe Mrs. Hazelwood realized that, so Alice got to give her report, which was very long and very boring. Who but Alice, you had to wonder, could make electrocution boring?

Then came the big surprise. Imogene Herdman began clapping even before Alice was through, and pounding and hammering on the kids sitting beside her to do the same.

“I couldn’t help it,” Louis Fraley said. “She had me by the ears, and she would have twisted them off. All she said was ‘You better clap or you’ll have two new holes in your head.’“

Naturally Louis clapped, along with Imogene’s other neighbors, and they kept on clapping until Mrs. Hazelwood finally came to and said, “Very well. That will be enough now.” I guess she couldn’t believe her own eyes and ears, so that took a while.

At recess I found Imogene and her sack of doughnuts. They had to be pretty stale by then, but “ … they’ll make good rocks,” she said.

“You must have really liked Alice’s report,” I said.

She shook her head. “Who cares if her ears sizzled and her toes turned blue?”

“That didn’t happen. She never said it did.”

“Would have made a better story.”

“Imogene,” I said, “you didn’t even listen to her report! So what was all the clapping about?”

“We owe her.” She aimed a doughnut at the back of the building and grinned, sly and sneaky. “She blew out the lights.”

I guess the Herdmans didn’t think of that, or if they did they couldn’t figure out how to do it... and then here came Alice, the Christmas tree, to do it for them, and it was the perfect thing. Mysterious candy, missing kids, secret slide, and then, just like that—blackout!

It was the last straw for Mr. Crabtree, according to my mother. “That poor man!” she said. “The whole point of this was to have a Herdman-free Halloween, and do you know what he said? He said, ‘I would rather have the Herdmans!’“

Well … he
did
have them. We all had them. The Herdmans were all over Woodrow Wilson School on Halloween night—in Boomer’s gorilla suit and my father’s pants. They were the Dracula-types in long black coats—
”ONGOING INVESTIGATION OF THEFTS AT MORGAN’S CLEANERS,”
the newspaper said that week.
“WINTER GARMENTS STOLEN, PERHAPS BY THE NEEDY.”
After all, who but the Herdmans had enough candy to fill up the boiler room, after years of taking everyone else’s candy? Who but the Herdmans could run around stealing coats from the cleaners and slides from the playground? Who but the Herdmans would spray-paint their cat black, and who else’s cat would survive that? Who but the Herdmans would think to
do
those things?

“But why?” Louella said, and there were several suggestions. “They did it for the doughnuts” was, of course, Alice’s idea.”They had to get the candy out of the house,” as if

Mrs. Herdman was a normal clean-up-that-mess mother. “They just wanted to ruin the PTA Halloween party… . “

“But wait a minute,” Boomer said. “It was a really great Halloween, and the greatest trick or treat ever … so was that why they did it?”

“We could ask them,” I said, but nobody jumped to do that, including me, because if the Herdmans wanted you to know what they had done they would tell you … and if they just wanted you to wonder about it you should just wonder about it and keep your mouth shut.

BARBARA ROBINSON
was born in Portsmouth, Ohio, and now makes her home in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. A graduate of Allegheny College, Ms. Robinson also received an honorary doctorate of letters from Allegheny.

Ms. Robinson has written several books for children, including
MY BROTHER LOUIS MEASURES WORMS, THE BEST SCHOOL YEAR EVER, and THE BEST HALLOWEEN EVER
.

THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER
is now a classic TV movie, and the play
THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER
is produced annually in theaters, schools, and churches all over the U.S.

Ms. Robinson has two daughters, Carolyn and Marjorie, and three grandchildren, Tomas, Marcos, and Lucas. You can visit her online at http://usawrites4kids.drury.edu/authors/robinson.

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T
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And Other Louis Stories