“How ’bout mummy toenail?” I shouted. “How ’bout black spiderweb?”
“For now, though,” Dad went on, not answering me, “I need to figure out how the shop is going to earn back the money we lost on twenty gallons of unsold candy corn flavor. So we’ll have this conversation later, little dude. Fourth-grade Halloween’s your time. Okay?”
I said okay.
Now, fourth-grade Halloween is a week away.
I’ve been writing down my ideas in a notebook since the start of school. I’ll be ready whenever Dad asks me. I have so many ideas, there’s no way he won’t love at least one of them. Here’s a page from the notebook:
The Sunday morning before Halloween, Inkling and I go with Mom to Big Round Pumpkin. The store’s not open yet, but Dad’s been at the ice-cream shop since dawn. When we arrive, the first thing I see is him making a signboard.
Sample our special Halloween flavor:
CANDY CRUNCH,
invented by Brooklyn’s own NADIA WOLOWITZ.
Made with all local, organic ingredients!
A Halloween flavor.
That Nadia thought of.
I can’t believe Dad made this flavor without even asking to look at my notebook. After he said we’d brainstorm together. After he said, “Promise, promise.”
Fine then. Fine.
If Dad’s not interested, then I’m not interested. I don’t need to be a flavor inventor. I’ll just clean the recycling area forever. I’ll clean it until my hands are raw and my clothing stinks and I’m ninety-five years old. People will feel sorry for that old guy who still cleans the recycling area and never got to do anything else with his life. That guy whose dad forgot to ask for his ideas.
Dad is all happy about the candy crunch and scoops me a cone to try. It’s vanilla with chocolate chips and chunks of peanut brittle.
I take two bites of it, but I’m too upset to eat. I give my serving to Inkling while my parents are back in the kitchen.
“Ugh, it’s cold!” Inkling says, sounding startled.
“Duh.”
“It’s freezing my tongue off!”
“Haven’t you had ice cream before?”
“First time.”
“No! Really?”
“Really. Never had it. And you know what? Once is enough,” says Inkling. “You mind if I dump it and just eat the waffle cone?”
“Go ahead.”
I tip Nadia’s stupid candy crunch off the cone into the garbage bin and let Inkling eat the cone out of my hand.
I pull my flavor notebook out of my back pocket and scribble hard across its pages. My pen digs holes in the paper. There are big black X marks all over my ideas.
Good. That’s how it should be.
No one’s ever going to see it anyway.
You Are Easy Prey
“I’ve decided I want a Halloween costume,” Inkling announces that afternoon.
“Good luck with that.” We are in my room, paging through my venomous reptiles pop-up book.
“I’m not too old, you know,” says Inkling. “I may be an adult in bandapat years, but I’m younger than you.”
“You are?”
“I’m not even nine.”
“You’re invisible,” I say. “The problem with your Halloween costume is not how old you are. It’s that no one can see you.” It’s true. Once Inkling puts something on, the thing goes invisible. I’ve done it with Band-Aids.
“I could see myself in the mirror,” says Inkling. He spends a lot of time sitting on the sink in the bathroom, admiring himself when I’m not around to get a look at him. He likes to get his fur as fluffy as possible.
“That’s not the point.”
“You’ll see.” Inkling shuts the pop-up book. “I’ll figure out a costume. You’ll be totally impressed.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“What are you dressing as?” he asks.
“Something mega-scary,” I say. “I have to be. Otherwise Nadia and her friends will get me again.”
“Get you again? What do you mean?”
So I explain. Even though I hate talking about it.
See, my parents always work on Halloween night. They dress in costumes and stand outside the shop, giving away samples.
That means Nadia brings me trick-or-treating.
Now, Nadia and I usually get along. She takes me out for pizza and sometimes loans me money. When my parents are working at the shop, she makes mac and cheese from a box and lets me watch science videos while I eat dinner.
But Halloween? It brings out the evil in her.
I was seven the first year. She was fourteen. This was long before Inkling came to live with me.
I was dressed as the Empire State Building.
Nadia was a vampire.
Vampires were very in that year. In fact, all Nadia’s friends were vampires, too. Dark wigs, pale skin, blood dripping out of their mouths.
I could barely keep up with them. It was hard to walk in my Empire State Building costume.
Suddenly, the street seemed empty.
Had Nadia turned a corner? Gone off with her friends?
A tall guy walked by in a skull mask, carrying what might have been a baby dressed as a lobster.
Or what might have been a lobster pretending to be a baby dressed as a lobster.
I wasn’t sure.
Did lobsters come that big?
What would a jumbo lobster do if it got loose on the streets of Brooklyn?
Would it try to climb an Empire State Building?
I have an overbusy imagination, it’s true. I was trying to calm it down by eating a Milky Way when—
“Boo!”
A vampire leaped at me from behind a mailbox.
“Boo!”
Another leaped out, baring bloody fangs.
“Boo!” Another.
“Stop!” I cried. “Leave me alone.”
“Vy should ve? You are easy prey.”
“Nadia!” I called out. “Your friends are booing me!”
“Boo!” Nadia herself jumped from behind a trash can.
I reeled, stumbled, and fell sprawling onto my back. Candy spilled everywhere.
Stupid costume. In case you are wondering, it is nearly impossible to stand up again in an Empire State Building suit, once you’ve fallen down.
I lay there, legs flailing. Trying not to cry.
Nadia stood over me, half laughing. “I got you good, didn’t I?”
The back of my costume was crushed. Five hours of work building and painting this thing, and now I looked like the Empire State Building after an earthquake.
“I can’t believe you booed me,” I told Nadia.
“Oh, come on. Don’t be a baby.”
I managed to stand up, and I followed the vampires for the rest of the night, but only ’cause I was too little, then, to find my way home alone.
After what happened, you’d think my parents wouldn’t send me out with Nadia again.
Wrong.
The next year, I was eight. Nadia was fifteen.
I was a hobbit. Nadia was a zombie.
Zombies were very in that year. In fact, all Nadia’s friends were going to be zombies, too. Bald patches; pale, rotting skin; blood dripping out of their mouths.
At least my best friend, Wainscotting, was going with us. With him there, you’d think, no zombies were going to boo me.
Wrong again.
This time, there were boys along. Boys Nadia thought were cute.
Turns out, Nadia will not defend her younger brother in front of cute boys. She will not explain that Wainscotting and I are hobbits, not twin Robin Hoods. She will not help when a cute boy says, “Let’s leave the twin Robin Hoods here. We’ll check out this party I heard about. Just for a minute.” Nadia will tell the hobbits to sit on a park bench. She’ll say they’re not to move one inch under penalty of having their eyeballs scooped out with a teaspoon.
She will make them swear never to tell their parents how she left them alone.