When I was a kid, Halloween was my favorite holiday. My best friend and next door neighbor Ricky would always get store bought costumes of superheroes and stuff. He was Batman three years in a row. My mom and I would hit the thrift store and put together the best costumes. I was a cowboy one year, and a robot, and a dragon.
But at some point, it stopped being fun and started being work. The thrift store used to be this giant box of possibilities, like the transmogrifier in Calvin and Hobbes. I could walk in an average kid, but when I left, I'd be a scarecrow or rat or doctor or president. Slowly, though, it turned into a haunted house, and not the fun kind. The clothes were all old and sticky, and the air was itchy. I didn't want to touch anything, and every time I did, it felt like grime and dust was working its way into the tiny lines in my skin. It was like I was getting slowly wrapped - mummified - in the cobwebby lives of all the clothes' previous owners. It was suffocating.
Ricky started to notice it, too. I'd have him over to play some video games, and we'd get in fights over who got to use the wireless controller. He thought I was just being selfish, but the wired controller was bad. I didn't know how to explain that holding it felt wrong, made me feel like I had to hold my breath to avoid breathing in its aura of badness. When we rode our bikes to the Walgreens for candy and cheap waterguns, sometimes I'd have to circle the parking lot a couple times before chaining up my bike at the rack because I needed to coast in at exactly the right angle. I knew he was frustrated and bored, but I couldn't stop myself.
Ricky and I stopped hanging out sometime in tenth grade. I think the last time was right after Ricky's dad got him an ancient rust bucket of a car for his sixteenth birthday. It was a piece of crap but Ricky was so proud of it. He picked me up just to cruise around town. I don't even remember what we talked about. I was just trying to keep it together and not think about the discolored stuffing that was coming out from rips in the seats, and the smell of old cigarettes, and all the fingers that must have touched the door handles. I think I was probably just sitting rigid in the passenger seat, because eventually Ricky dropped me off at home, said "You didn't have to come if you didn't want to, man," and sped off. We saw each other at school, or sometimes if we were both out mowing our yards, but he would carefully look in another direction.
My mom asked me a lot why I wasn't hanging out with Ricky, if something had happened, if anything was wrong. I wanted to tell her that the truth. That I loved and hated laundry day because the smell of the warm, clean clothes was safety but the hours it took to hang up my shirts (it's not sitting right on the hanger, the collar is crooked, the hanger is the wrong color) left me exhausted, defeated, and filled with shame. I wanted to tell her that sometimes I missed class because I couldn't get myself to step through the classroom doorway, or that I'd been plagued by insomnia for months because every time I drifted off, I would jerk awake, filled with panic because the moment of falling asleep felt like dying. That I missed my best friend. That I was starting to think there was something wrong with me.
I've been living in a holding pattern. Existing in a holding pattern. But I can't do it for much longer.
Yesterday, Ricky invited me to this Halloween party. It's the first time we've talked in over a year. I think maybe he's feeling nostalgic. We're seniors now, and pretty soon everyone we know is going to college, or moving to find work. I think maybe he's been thinking back to elementary school, when we'd compete with the other neighborhood kids to get the best candy.
It took me three hours to put together a costume from my closet. My mom tried to get me to go as a ninja, but the feel of her black polyester scarf over my face made me claustrophobic. Eventually I settled on being a Secret Serviceman. I just wore a suit and sunglasses and wore one earbud with the rest of the cord stuffed down the back of my jacket. Normally I don't like suits, because it feels like a restraint, but today it was armor.
I made it through the door on my fourth try. The party's in the basement of Ricky's girlfriend's house. It's kind of cheesy for a high school party. There's a playlist of bad Halloween music on, and bowls of candy corn and non-alcoholic lime punch with an ice cube in it that's shaped like a hand. I guess Ricky's girlfriend Alyssa is taking classes to be an EMT at the community college on Saturdays - she's pretty driven and healthy, so she doesn't drink much. But even so, people seem to be having fun. And, honestly, the school-party-style decorations make me feel almost normal, like when I was a kid.
I find Ricky - or Rick now, I guess - and he comes over. We talk a little, and it's both awkward and familiar. Things aren't the same, but maybe they're not as bad as I thought. We walk over to a table covered in shoeboxes that've been covered in black construction paper. There's a hole cut out of one side of each of them, with black fabric stretched across the top. It's one of those stick-your-hand-in-here-and-feel-something-gross things. One's labeled "Zombie Brains" and another "Ghost Eyeballs," which makes no sense but is just dumb enough to be funny. Rick dares me to reach in.
I look at him, wondering if he knows how hard this is for me. It's probably going to be damp, and other people have had their hands in it. I'll probably end up in the bathroom for the next twenty minutes, washing my hands with hotter and hotter water, worrying about using the towel on the rack because it might not be totally clean, waiting for my hands to air dry. I keep waiting to see signs of impatience or resentment or regret in Rick's face, like it was a mistake to invite me after all. But he's just looking between me and the shoebox, already amused at the impending joke. Alyssa joins us and says she knows the blind-touch boxes are silly but how it was always her favorite thing at Halloween parties when she was a kid.
What's the worst that could happen? It's something I've asked myself a billion times before about everything and it's never helped or worked before. But this is Ricky, and I'm here at a party, and life is going to be changing a lot soon no matter what I do, so I hold my breath and reach into the shoebox.
My fingers close on peeled grapes. I don't know what my face looks like, but Rick bursts out laughing. Not at me, but just happy at a good joke. And now my hand is occupying a huge amount of my brain, along with the internal neon sign that's flashing "WASH YOUR HANDS, WASH YOUR HANDS." The longer I don't, the more a sense of looming catastrophe builds. But Alyssa and Rick are smiling, and I realize that I'm smiling.
It's not like I'm suddenly okay. It still feels wrong to not immediately wash my hands. But I can handle it, at least for now.
And I'm staring into this metal tub, at the five apples left. All the apples with stems have already been fished out. These apples have no obvious handholds. Mouthholds. It's just going to be a matter of pinning one down at the bottom and sinking your teeth into it.
"BACTERIA. BACTERIA. BACTERIA." It's like a klaxon in my head. I don't want to get water up my nose, or have my head all wet, and I keep wondering if these apples were washed clean of pesticides before being dumped into the tub.
But I'm sick of the anxiety, the hesitation, the fear. The klaxon is still wailing and I still want to wash the sticky grape juice remnants off my skin, so I focus on one apple, one apple, one apple, the only thing in the world, and take a deep breath, and plunge.
