Then I realized what was wrong about the soccer goaclass="underline" the net was gone. End of the season? I thought. But no, if there was one week more of football, surely there was a week more of soccer, too. And I recalled in past years how the nets would stay on the goals until the first snow, as if it took the first storm to remind the maintenance crew what they had forgotten. The nets in the goals held the drifted snow—like spider webs so dense that they trap dust.
“The net’s gone—off the goal” I said to Franny.
“Big deal” she said, and we veered into the woods. Even in the dark, Franny and I could find the shortcut, the path the football players always used—and everyone else, because of them, stayed off it.
A Halloween prank? I thought. Stealing a net to a soccer goal... and then, of course, Franny and I ran right into it. Suddenly the net was over us, and under us, and there were two other people trapped like us: a Dairy School freshman, named Firestone, his face as round as a tyre and as soft as a kind of cheese, and a small trick-or-treater from town. The trick-or-treater was wearing a gorilla suit, though he was closer, in size, to a spider monkey. His gorilla mask was backwards on his head, so that when you saw the back of his head you saw a monkey, and when you saw his screaming face you saw him for the frightened little boy he was.
It was a jungle trap, and the monkey thrashed in it wildly. Firestone tried to He down, but the net kept jiggling him out of position—he collided with me and said, “Sorry”; then he collided with Franny and said, “God, awfully sorry.” Every time I tried to get back on my feet, the net would jerk my feet out from under me, or the net over my head would jerk my head back and I’d fall. Franny crouched on all fours, keeping her balance. Inside the net with us was a large brown paper bag, spewing forth the Halloween hoardings of the child in the gorilla suit—candy corn and sticky balls of coagulated popcorn, breaking apart under us, and lollipops with their crinkly cellophane wrappers. The child in the gorilla suit was screaming in that breathless, hysterical way, as if he were about to choke, and Franny got her arms around him and tried to calm him down. “It’s all right, it’s just a dirty trick,” she said to him. “They’ll let us go.”
“Giant spiders!” cried the child, slapping himself all over and twitching in Franny’s grasp.
“No, no,” Franny said. “No spiders. They’re just people.”
But I thought I knew what people they were; I would have preferred the spiders.
“Got four of them!” said someone—a voice with a locker-room familiarity to it. “Got fucking four of them at once!”
“Got a little one and three big ones,” said another familiar voice, a ballcarrier’s voice or a blocking back’s voice—it was hard to tell.
Flashlights, like the blinking eyes of rather mechanical spiders in the night, looked us over.
“Well, look who’s here,” said the voice in command, said the quarterback called Chipper Dove.
“Got pretty little feet,” said Harold Swallow.
“Got beautiful skin,” said Chester Pulasik.
“She has a nice smile, too,” said Lenny Metz.
“And the best ass in the whole school,” said Chipper Dove. Franny rested on her knees.
“Howard Tuck had a heart attack!” I told them all. “We’ve got to get an ambulance!”
“Let the fucking monkey go,” said Chip Dove. The net shifted. The thin black arm of Harold Swallow snatched the kid in the gorilla suit out of the spider’s web and released him into the night. “Trick or treat!” said Harold, and the little gorilla was gone.
“Is that you, Firestone?” Dove asked, and the flashlight shone on the bland boy named Firestone, who looked as if he were trying to fall asleep at the bottom of the net, his knees drawn fetus-tight up to his chest, his eyes closed, his hand over his mouth.
“You fag, Firestone,” said Lenny Metz. “What are you doing?”
“He’s suckin’ his thumb,” said Harold Swallow.
“Let him go,” the quarterback said, and Chester Pulaski’s painful complexion blossomed, momentarily, in the flashlight; he dragged the dormant Firestone from the net. After a slight pounding sound, of flesh on flesh, we heard the awakened Firestone trot away.
“Now look who’s left,” said Chipper Dove.
“A man had a heart attack,” Franny said. “We really are going to the infirmary for the ambulance.”
“You’re not going there now,” said Dove. “Hey, kid,” he said to me, holding a flashlight on my face. “You know what I want you to do, kid?”
“No,” I said. And someone kicked me through the net.
“What I want you to do, kid,” Chipper Dove said, “is stay right here, in our giant spider web, until one of the spiders tells you you can go. You understand?”
“No,” I said, and someone kicked me again, a little harder.
“Be smart,” Franny said to me.
“That’s right,” said Lenny Metz. “Be smart.”
“And you know what I want you to do, Franny?” said Chipper Dove, but Franny didn’t respond. “I want you to show me that place, again,” he said. “That place where we can be alone. Remember?”
I tried to crawl closer to Franny, but someone was tightening the net around me.
“She stays with me!” I yelled. “Franny stays with me.”
I was down on my hip, then, with the net growing tighter and someone was kneeling on my back.
“Leave him alone,” Franny said. “I’ll show you the place.”
“Just stay here and don’t move, Franny,” I said, but she let Lenny Metz pull her out from under the net. “Remember what you said, Franny!” I cried to her. “Remember—about the first time?”
“It probably isn’t true,” she said, dully. “It probably isn’t anything.”
Then she must have made a break for it, because I heard a scuffle in the dark, and Lenny Metz cried out, “Nuff! Son of a bitch, you bitch!” And there was that familiar sound of pounding—flesh on flesh again—and I heard Franny say, “All right! All right! You bastard.”
“Lenny and Chester are going to help you show me the place, Franny,” Chipper Dove said. “Okay?”
“You turd in a birdbath,” Franny said. “You rat’s asshole,” she said, but I heard flesh on flesh again, and Franny said, “Okay! Okay.”
It was Harold Swallow who was kneeling on my back. If the net hadn’t been all tangled around me, I might have been a match for him, but I couldn’t move.
“We’ll be back for you, Harold!” Chipper Dove called.
“Hang in there, Harold!” said Chester Pulaski.
“You’ll get your turn, Harold!” said Lenny Metz, and they all laughed.
“I don’t want no turn,” said Harold Swallow. “I don’t want no trouble,” he said. But they were gone, Franny occasionally cursing—but farther and farther away from me.
“You’re going to get in trouble, Harold,” I said. “You know what they’re going to do to her.”
“I don’t want to know,” he said. “I don’t get in no trouble. I come to this shit-ass school to get outa trouble.”
“Well, you’re in trouble now, Harold,” I said. “They’re going to rape her, Harold.”
“That happens,” said Harold Swallow. “But not to me.” I struggled briefly under the net, but it was easy for him to keep me pinned down. “I don’t like to fight, either,” he said.
“They think you’re a crazy nigger,” I told him. “That’s what they think you are. That’s why they’re with her and you’re here, Harold. But it’s the same trouble,” I told him. “You’re in the same trouble they’re in.”
“They never get in no trouble,” Harold said. “Nobody ever tells.”
“Franny will tell,” I said, but I felt the candy corn pressed against my face, and into the damp ground. It was another Halloween to remember, for sure, and I felt as weak and small as I’d ever felt—on every Dairy Halloween I could recall, scared to death by bigger, always bigger kids, stuffing my head in my trick-or-treat bag and rattling it until all I heard was cellophane, and then the bag bursting around my ears.