The eight-year-old version of
myself stared dubiously out her bedroom window.
The ten feet between ledge and ground were much scarier at night than
they were in the daytime, and it was such sights that made me long for the real-life
existence of transporter beams. Normally
after a fun-filled Halloween evening of candy gathering, hoarding, and devouring
I was ready for sleep, but not this Halloween evening. Tonight my friends and I were going to find
ghosts. What we were going to do with
them once we found them, we didn’t know.
We just liked the glamorous idea of looking for them because, odds were,
we’d run screaming into the opposite direction should one actually appear.
Having changed out
of my Lt. Commander Deanna Troi costume and into something more clandestine yet
teeny-bopperishly stylish, I clutched my Hello Kitty bag crammed full of
trick-or-treat chocolate bounty while intently watching the driveway leading up
to our house. He was late.
“Katie!”
I
jumped at the sound of Mick’s nine-year-old voice unexpectedly coming from the
side of the house instead of the back.
“Up here! Did you bring the
ladder?”
Mick
clunked his way to my window, dragging the modified ladder he’d just “invented”
along behind him. “Yeah, I just finished
it today. Do you have any extra
chocolate? I didn’t have time to go out
and get any myself.”
That
was his code for “I was too busy combining uncombinable chemicals and blowing
up stuff to remember today was Halloween and we were supposed to go candy-gathering
and ghost-hunting tonight.” Even at age
eight, I had accepted this about Mick’s personality. “Plenty.
I got extra just in case. Where’s
everybody else?”
Mick
quietly and carefully leaned the ladder against my outside wall as I
tentatively made my way onto the ledge. It
had a bizarre configuration, but even as I stepped onto the top step, I knew it
would be the sturdiest ladder ever. Mick
was a brilliant and nice kid like that, always making sure he didn’t
inadvertently murder me. As I slowly descended,
Mick replied to my previously asked question.
“They’re not coming.”
I
stopped mid-ladder. “What? The big sissies, are they really that
scared?”
Mick
stood at the base of the ladder helping to hold it steady. “No, they got caught toilet- papering
Principal Dooley’s house. They barely
got away before he smacked ‘em all with that paddle of his. Anyway, now they’re hiding out.”
I
couldn’t help but laugh at the thought of my friends being chased down Rosewood
Avenue by an irate Principal Dooley armed with his monogrammed paddle. “Then I guess we’ll just have to do this
ourselves and make fun of them later,” I said as I hopped off the final
step. Together he and I dragged the
ladder behind the house until it was sort of hidden in some tree shadows. “You ready?” I asked him.
Mick
dug around in his pockets for several seconds then pulled out a compass, map,
notebook, and a pencil whose use I could only assume was for taking notes. He spent several more seconds aligning his
compass with magnetic north as I rolled my eyes. “We’re only going a few blocks away. I don’t think magnetic poles are going to flip
in that length of time.”
He
looked at me, surprised. “How do you
know about magnetic poles flipping?”
“I
decided to read my science assignment this month. Now let’s go.”
“Candy,
please?”
I
handed him my Hello Kitty bag. He was
less than pleased. “Really? You want me to carry this thing?”
“Did
you want the chocolate or not?”
He
finally took the girly accessory from me, his lust for candy overcoming his manly
sense of shame and embarrassment. A walk
that should’ve taken fifteen minutes wound up taking half an hour due to the
“unusually bright and defined appearance” of Mick’s favorite constellation at
which he decided to stare for the additional fifteen minutes. And he took notes. Copious
notes. They even had equations in
them. Never trust someone—especially a
nine-year-old—who uses words and equations on the same sheet of paper.
“Stop
it with the math already! We have a
mission, and it has nothing to do with the dimensions of the Snickers Galaxy.”
“Milky
Way.”
“Whatever! Don’t talk about it, just eat it!”
We
spent the rest of our walk in relative silence, relative because anytime Mick
ate caramel, he smacked it like a gum-chewing cow with TMJ. As we reached the front gate of our destination,
Mick was excited in a scientifically intrigued sort of way. I was bloody freaking terrified.
Mick
yanked out his pencil and notepad again then grabbed my hand. He was in “unparalleled discovery” mode. “C’mon, Katie! Let’s see what we find!”
He
may as well have been attempting to coerce an antelope to play in the lion’s
lair. “I can’t. I, umm…I have to pee.”
“No
you don’t, you’re just scared.”
“Scared
people have to pee all the time!”
“You can hold my
hand, and I promise I won’t let go.” He
meant it. It was sweet.
Still,
I continued to resist his insistent tugging at my hand. Suddenly an old white, lacy curtain wafted
from one of the supposedly haunted house’s front room windows and into my line
of vision. The ghosts wanted my soul! “No, I really do need to pee now!
I think I’ll run over to Rosewood Avenue for some toilet paper.”
And
with those words, I ran fearfully in the direction of my house leaving a poor,
bewildered Mick standing on that forlorn sidewalk all by himself.
--COPYRIGHT 2013--
