She will let the big boys take the hobbits’ trick-or-treat bags, too.
Then she will leave the hobbits alone in the park, without candy, and she will go “check out” the party.
For more than an hour.
The hobbits will be far enough from home that they’re not sure of the way back.
They’ll be on a park bench.
In the dark. On Halloween.
Wainscotting and I ran out of things to talk about.
Then we held hands.
People walked by in scary rubber masks.
A cat meowed.
A twig snapped.
“Boo!” Zombie Nadia leaped from behind our bench.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” Wainscotting and I ran screaming across the park.
The stupid boys came out. Nadia’s friends Jacquie and Mara did, too. They were laughing and pointing, their zombie teeth gleaming in the dark.
“Don’t boo me!” I yelled at Nadia. “I can’t believe you’d boo me after what happened last year.”
“Oh, come on, Hank.” Nadia put on lip gloss. “I brought you each a pack of gummi spiders.” She walked toward me and Wainscotting, holding out two packages.
“I don’t want your stupid spiders,” I shouted. “Where’s all the rest of our candy?”
“I think we left it at the party,” Nadia said. “But we can get more. It’s Halloween.”
“You left it at the party? I had Toblerones in there.”
“Wolowitz, take the spiders,” whispered Wainscotting. “Those are hard to get.”
“Take us home!” I barked, snatching the spiders out of Nadia’s hand. “And don’t ever, ever boo me again!”
“If you tell Mom and Dad I left you in the park,” Nadia whispered in my ear, “I’ll do a lot more than boo you. You can be sure of that.”
I Can’t Take All the Tutus
This year, I am nine and Nadia is sixteen. I’m not sure what I’m going to be yet, but Nadia is going to be a unicorn. Unicorns are very in this year. Not pretty unicorns with pink ribbons in their manes. Devil unicorns with red eyes and sharp teeth and blood dripping out of their mouths.
Nadia’s unicorn head has been hanging off her bedpost for a couple weeks now.
“It’s not safe out there with Nadia,” I tell Inkling. “She’s booed me two years in a row. She left me alone in the dark and took my candy.”
Right now it’s the Monday before Halloween. Inkling’s eating leftover Thai food and sitting on our kitchen counter. I can see the bits of carrot disappear as they slide down his gullet. “Can’t you trick-or-treat by yourself?” he asks.
I shake my head. “Only inside our building. My parents say if I go out, I have to be with a friend and his parents or they’re going to make Nadia stick with me the whole time. They say Brooklyn can be dangerous at night.”
Inkling and I are alone in the apartment after school. Well, not really alone. Mom is in her bedroom paying bills. I’m not allowed to disturb her.
“Go with Chin from downstairs,” Inkling says. “She seems nice. I bet her mom would take you.”
Chin is nice. But I know for a fact she’s going trick-or-treating with Locke, Linderman, and Daley, her three best friends. All girls.
Chin and I are building a Taj Mahal out of matchsticks together after school some days, and she’s a really good drummer and excellent at playing alien schoolchildren, too—but there’s a whole ballerina side to Chin that I don’t really get.
“No Chin on Halloween,” I tell Inkling. “I can’t take all the tutus.”
“How do you know she’ll wear a tutu?”
“Oh, she’ll wear a tutu, all right,” I say. “She’ll wear a tutu, and Locke will wear a tutu, and Daley. Linderman, I don’t know about for sure. But I wouldn’t put it past her.”
Inkling waves a piece of broccoli at me. “Trick-or-treating with tutus is definitely better than trick-or-treating with Nadia. That unicorn head she’s got in her bedroom is terrifying.”
“You went in Nadia’s room?”
“She bought new hair spray yesterday.”
Lately, Nadia is always yelling at me for going in her room. She says if I do it again, she’s going to snap my fingertips off like asparagus spears. Only, I never go in there.
Until now, I haven’t had any idea what she was talking about.
It’s Inkling. Looking for products to fluff up his fur. “Don’t go in her room,” I tell him. “It makes trouble.”
He ignores me. “Is she wearing only the head or does she have a whole unicorn suit?” he asks.
“A suit. Why?”
“Could be even scarier than zombies if she and her friends are making a whole herd,” Inkling answers. “I saw unicorns in Cameroon all the time. Those things are no joke.”
“Unicorns don’t exist.”
“What do you know? You didn’t know bandapats existed until I showed up.”
He has a point.
Inkling must be standing on his hind feet on the kitchen counter, because he puts his padded paw on my shoulder. “Unicorns are descended from the kangaroos of the redwood forests,” he says. “There was this famous bandapat, Lichtenbickle. He had a tame unicorn. But most of them are extremely bloodthirsty. It’s a little-known fact.”
“Hello? There are no kangaroos in the Cameroon redwoods.”
“Are too.”
“There are no Cameroon redwoods at all!”
“Oh please,” says Inkling. “There are whole parts of Cameroon that aren’t on North American maps. You think North American mapmakers care about getting details right in Cameroon? There are a million things left off maps all the time. Things left out of encyclopedias! Things not in books, or on the internet, or in papers of any kind!”
“But—”
“Think about it,” says Inkling. “Bandapats. And glacier pumpkins, right? So maybe unicorns. Maybe even ghosts!” He grips my shoulder dramatically.
“Maybe ghosts?”
“Yes. Maybe.”
A chill goes down my spine. I change the subject.
Do You Have to Be Such a Little Brother All the Time?
“Do you know what a dangerous pumpkin is?” Nadia asks as she walks me to school Tuesday morning. She’s drinking a large takeout coffee from the diner. I’m eating a corn muffin from a paper bag.
I give her a blank look.
She explains. “It’s a pumpkin carved beyond the usual basic pumpkin carving. Way, way beyond. My school is having a contest, on the day before Halloween. I think I have a chance to win.”
“Cool.”
“So, listen up.”
“What?”
Maybe she’s going to ask for my ideas, I think. I have a lot of ideas for stuff like dangerous pumpkins.
“Leave my pumpkins alone when I carve them,” says Nadia.
“What?”
“Don’t even touch them. Not even with one pinkie finger.”
Oh. She doesn’t want my help. At all.
“I don’t want to touch your stupid pumpkins,” I say. “Why do you think I even care?”
“Dad told me about your top secret squash project. I don’t want you getting ideas.”
Ugh.
That top secret squash project that doesn’t really exist.
I wish I’d never invented it.
“You’ll regret it if you mess with them,” Nadia adds.
“Now you’re making me want to mess with them,” I say, cranky. “Now you’re tempting me.”
She stamps her foot in her big boots. “Do you have to be such a little brother all the time?”
“I am your little brother.”
“I am really not in the mood for you right now.” Nadia takes an angry sip of coffee.
“I’m not in the mood for you, either.” I take an angry bite of corn muffin.
We walk the rest of the way to school in silence.
That afternoon when Dad and I get home, Nadia has four jumbo pumpkins on the dining table, carving them for the contest Friday night. They have their tops cut off and their insides scraped out. She is bent over one of them with a vegetable peeler.