The Best Halloween Ever Read online

  “ … have never encouraged these activities in the past,” Mr. Crabtree was saying. “However, this year … “ The PA system crackled and hummed and quit and came back on, which is normal for it to do. “ … going to have Halloween right here at Woodrow Wilson School on October twenty-ninth, and … “ There were more crackles, as if somebody turned the microphone upside down, and you could hear voices all over the school … “got it wrong … date … wrong? … that’s the wrong date!”

  This was the first clue to what was going to happen to us. Mr. Crabtree didn’t even know when Halloween was.It was hard to believe. “How could he not know?” Stewart Walker said. “Unless he’s so old that they didn’t even have Halloween when he was a kid.”

  “I don’t think he ever was a kid,” Louella McCluskey said, and you could almost believe this. Of course Mr. Crabtree had to start out like everybody else, as a baby, but after that, once he got up on his feet, he was probably just like a small principal right from the beginning.

  Nobody could figure out why Mr. Crabtree, of all people, would suddenly think Halloween was great and we should celebrate it.

  “Why don’t you just ask him?” Mrs. Hazelwood said, and then, “I’ll make that an assignment—interview Mr. Crabtree for extra credit.”

  This is how teachers’ minds work. They see extra credit in everything. Danny Filus once had to eat frogs legs in a restaurant, and Mrs. Hazelwood made him describe that for extra credit. Danny did a good job—only two kids got sick to their stomachs, but they were kids with pet frogs, so you could understand that.

  “Volunteers, please, to interview Mr. Crabtree?”

  No volunteers … except, of course, Alice Wendleken, who must have “I volunteer” tattooed on her chest.

  “Thank you, Alice,” Mrs. Hazelwood said, moving right along, “but I think … Stewart Walker might like the chance to earn some extra credit.”

  That was the last thing Stewart wanted to do, so he was practically under his desk, pretending to hunt for something on the floor, but it didn’t do him any good. Mrs. Hazelwood can see around corners and through walls when she’s on the trail of an extra credit.

  I guess Stewart tried to interview Mr. Crabtree, but he probably didn’t try very hard, and after a couple of days it didn’t matter. After a couple of days everybody knew what Mr. Crabtree suddenly saw in Halloween.

  Homework!

  In every class, on every blackboard, there were special assignments and papers to write and things to look up: Discuss Halloween costumes—at least three paragraphs; Owls, bats,toads—choose one and discuss importance to Halloween in three paragraphs; Witch and broomstick. Why?—at least three paragraphs.“I have to read all about pumpkins,” Charlie grumbled, “and then tell what all we do with them, and why.”

  “Pumpkin pie,” I said. “You could write out the recipe for pumpkin pie.” I thought that could be part of Charlie’s paper, but he thought it could be the whole thing, so he was excited.

  “You buy a can of pumpkin,” Mother told him, “and you buy a pie shell. Put the pumpkin into the pie shell, put it into the oven, and bake it for forty-five minutes.”

  Charlie frowned. “Is that a recipe?”

  “It’s my recipe,” Mother said.

  Charlie’s teacher said it was her recipe, too, but it better not be Charlie’s paper or he would have to do it over. Kindergarten kids were lucky because they could just draw black cats and spooky houses the way they always did, and everyone in my class was lucky because Mrs. Hazelwood made all the assignments extra credit so you didn’t have to do them.

  “But of course,” she said, “I hope all of you will take this opportunity to learn a little more about Halloween customs and traditions.”

  Right away Alice sharpened up her pencil and copied everything off the board, so you knew where all the extra credit was going to go.

  “I don’t care if she has all the extra credit in the world,” Louella McCluskey said, “and I don’t care about all the homework either, if it means we get to have Halloween after all. What are you going to be?” She sighed. “I guess I’ll have to be a Pilgrim again.”

  Mrs. McCluskey had won a Pilgrim costume in a Chamber of Commerce Turkey Raffle and she didn’t know what else to do with it, so Louella had already been a Pilgrim twice.

  “Unless you want to trade,” she said, “and be the Pilgrim this year. My mother won’t let the costume go to waste.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m going to be a belly dancer. I’ve got all the stuff for it—part of a sparkly bathing suit and some curtains and some long beads.”

  “Your mother won’t let you be a belly dancer,” Louella said, “with your whole middle showing and a jewel in your belly button!”

  She was partly right. Mother said I absolutely could not have any jewel in my belly button. “ … or anything else. And you can’t go barefoot. You’ll have to wear some kind of shoes.”

  “And if it’s cold,” I said, “I’ll take that big lacy tablecloth for a shawl.”

  She looked surprised. “Well, it won’t be cold in the school.”

  “But before that,” I said, “when we go trick-or-treating.”

  “Beth, nobody is going to go trick-or-treating. You know that. It’s the whole point of having Halloween at school.”

  Charlie yelped. “The whole point of Halloween is trick-or-treating for candy!”

  “No, around here the whole point of Halloween is to beware of the Herdmans. Think about it—the dogs and cats and the Rotary Club cake … and you, Charlie, spray-painted green from head to foot!”

  Of course Charlie wasn’t the only spray-painted kid that year, and green wasn’t the only color. There were red kids and blue kids and some gold kids, including Alice. Mrs. Wendleken said it was a miracle that Alice didn’t die of clogged-up skin pores, but you could tell that Alice didn’t really mind because she was still a little sparkly, here and there, two weeks after Halloween.

  By now Mother was all warmed up to the subject. “ … and the turkey farm,” she went on, “when they turned on the sprinklers and nearly drowned all the turkeys. Yes, and the candy. Every year we buy all this candy and hand it out, and the Herdmans end up with all of it. I don’t know what they do with all that candy, year after year. They couldn’t possibly eat it.”

  I knew Charlie didn’t want to talk about that, because one year Leroy Herdman made a bunch of kids, including Charlie, buy back their own candy.

  “So,” Mother said, “this year will be different. This year Halloween will be entirely in Woodrow Wilson School, controlled and safe. Don’t forget—there almost wasn’t any Halloween at all, because of the Herdmans. The mayor wasn’t kidding when he called it off.”

  Charlie was still in shock about no trick or treat when Mother answered my main question. “I guess the Herdmans will be there,” she said. “Can’t very well keep them out, but nobody has to worry about them. After all, how much trouble can they cause right there in school, with teachers and parents everywhere? What can they do?” Mother smiled at us, as if that was that. It wasn’t.

  4

  Normally none of the Herdmans ever looked at the blackboard, or knew what was on it—especially if it was homework, which they never did anyway. So it was possible (this was Charlie’s idea) that they wouldn’t know about Halloween being at school and nowhere else.

  “They’ll go out,” he said, “just the way they always do, looking for kids they can shove around and candy they can steal, and there won’t be any! No kids, no candy! They won’t know what happened. They’ll go crazy!”

  This made a great picture—all the Herdmans running up and down the empty streets, getting more and more frustrated, bumping into each other, maybe even running into trees or parked cars—but you knew it would never happen.

  Besides, the Herdmans didn’t have to read the blackboard to know all about the Woodrow Wilson Halloween. There were signs about it everywhere; all the first-graders had take-home notes pinned to them that
said, There will be no community Halloween. Come with your family to Woodrow Wilson School, 7 o’clock, Halloween night; and almost every day Alice showed up with a new extra credit report about owls or bats or bonfires till Mrs. Hazelwood took pity on us (“Took pity on herself!” my mother said) and shut Alice down. “New school policy,” Mrs. Hazelwood said. “No more extra credit.”

  Somebody had straightened Mr. Crabtree out about when Halloween really was, and every morning he got on the PA system to tell us what we had to look forward to on October 31—costume parade and prizes, cookie-decorating contest and prizes, Meet the Monsters …

  “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.

  5

  The 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.