Scary! by Dawn McIntyre

Kids love to be scared. I remember gravitating toward ghost stories or tales about awful monsters, even if they gave me nightmares for a week. Halloween checked all the boxes for me. Spooky stuff, dressing up in costumes, a bunch of candy—ours was a household in which sweets were scarce.

As a small child, I was dolled up in elaborate costumes my mother made for me—an angel, a devil, a witch, a flapper (she and I had matching costumes that year.) She’d drive me to my cousin’s house and she and my aunt would escort us up and down their local main street, where the shopkeepers had even better treats than the ones handed out by the homeowners.

As I outgrew that phase, I began putting together my own costumes: a sailor, a queen, a sort of fairy thing—anyway, lots of tulle and sequins were involved. The year that I was thirteen, I planned on being a hobo. I was asked if maybe I wasn’t getting too old for Halloween dress-up. I was discouraged but stubbornly decided to go ahead with my plans. At that point in my life, I wasn’t eager to give up childhood and the freedom to run around like a fool, climb trees and at least dream about jobs a girl couldn’t have anyway. I dreaded slipping into the narrow slot of secretarial work, then marriage and babies that threatened to be the only future available to me.

In my father’s discarded clothing, my uncle’s crushed fedora and black smears on my face, I made a pretty convincing vagrant. My friend Allie was decked out as a bridesmaid and Cindy was dressed as a demon, complete with pointed tail that the three of us kept tripping on as we cruised the streets with our quickly-filling bags of treats.

Since we were older, we were allowed out later than the throngs of younger children. We ventured out of the regular territory of our neighborhood and headed for the larger, fancier homes around the park, which proved to be a good choice. The ones on the hill required trudging up long flights of concrete or stone steps to reach the front doors, but the results were worth it. Someone even gave out full-size candy bars, the holy grail of trick-or-treating.

On the way home we watched porch lights switching off, first floor windows going dark. We knew that, just like our parents, the townsfolk enjoyed the adorable, stumbling toddlers and the cleverly concocted get-ups of us bigger kids but had no interest in facing down a group of older teen boys who needed a shave, dressed in their regular street clothes, who shoved dirty pillowcases at them and growled “trick or treat” in a menacingly low octave. “They’re grown men,” my father would grumble, slamming the front door and slapping the light switch. “Let them get jobs and buy candy.”

High on sugar, we decided to cut through the park. As we passed by the concrete wall of the handball court, we picked up a tail of three such characters. At first, they followed at some distance but kept up a steady chatter that was alarming, then verged on threatening. In the dark, it might have been possible to mistake me for a boy but that was not the case for Allie in her chiffon skirts or Cindy in her shiny red she-devil dress. Under the feeble glow of the street lamp, the three of us exchanged glances, nodded, and hit the gas.

We had a two-block head start, but young men are faster than thirteen-year-old girls in clumsy costumes. I was too frightened to wonder why they weren’t catching up with us. Looking back much later, I realized that they hadn’t meant to do more than terrify us—especially obvious because, when we ditched our candy bags, they fell upon them like vultures. We didn’t hear any more running steps after that but I was so scared, that fact didn’t even register with me. The three of us split up and snaked through neighboring yards to reach the safety of our homes.

Curled up in bed, clutching a stuffed animal I hadn’t played with in years, I knew that this would be my last Halloween outing. Kids love to be scared, but only by things that they know can’t really hurt them. Childhood was over and the perils and limitations of womanhood loomed large. Which, as I thought about it, was even more scary.