A Funny Costume
A Halloween Story
Mr. George was wearing a sling on his left arm when Charlotte walked into the classroom on October 31st. In honor of the holiday, he had hung a purple and orange string of lights along the top of his whiteboard.
“That’s a funny Halloween costume,” she told him.
“That’s because it isn’t a Halloween costume,” he replied.
“Oh,” she said.
“I’m not really a Halloween kind of guy,” said Mr. George.
Charlotte thought about this. “Can you guess what my costume is?” she asked. Charlotte was always the first student to school, which she imagined said something about her work-ethic, even though she knew it was because her mother needed to be at work by seven-thirty.
“I can’t,” said Mr. George. “What is it?”
“Oh, come on. Just make one guess. Please.”
“A dinosaur,” said Mr. George, even though Charlotte’s costume was clearly not a dinosaur.
“No, that’s wrong. It’s a minion.”
“A minion?” asked Mr. George.
“From Despicable Me. Haven’t you seen Despicable Me?” asked Charlotte. “Minions are small and yellow and they like to jump up and down.” She jumped up and down to demonstrate.
“I haven’t,” replied Mr. George.
“Oh.”
By now, other students were trickling in. Most of them wore costumes, although one or two of the boys didn’t, because Trent said nine was too old for Halloween costumes. And also, Abigail didn’t wear a costume because she thought she was too cool for costumes. Charlotte sat next to Abigail at lunch, but Abigail always told her that peanut butter and jelly was for little girls and she should start eating grown-up food for lunch like Abigail. Abigail ate cold chicken and green beans.
The rest of the students were dressed as ghosts and cartoon characters. Lee was, in fact, dressed as a dinosaur, but Charlotte noticed that Mr. George didn’t ask him about it.
“Aren’t you going to ask Lee about his dinosaur costume?” she prompted him.
“Charlotte, would you please sit down? The bell’s about to ring.”
“Lee,” Charlotte said as she passed Lee. “Are you a brontosaurus or a brachiosaurus?”
“I don’t know,” said Lee. “My mom got it at the store.”
“I think you’re a brontosaurus,” said Charlotte.
“Charlotte, would you please sit down?” asked Mr. George. “I don’t want to have to ask you again. Every day, the rule is that you must be in your desk when the bell rings.”
The bell rang. Mr. George got up from his swivel chair and limped over to the podium at the center of the room, where he perched on his stool and called roll. Even though he knew that if all the desks were full it meant all of the students were present, Mr. George called role every day because he felt it was important to keep this ritual going, that it set a tone for the day, and that it was the best use of the three minutes between the bell and the intercom.
The intercom came on and the students were told to rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. They dutifully stood and placed their hands over their hearts and stared solemnly at the flag hanging in the corner. Then they sat and bowed their heads for the moment of silence. Finally, the principal read the announcements.
“Happy Halloween,” he began. “I hope you all wore your costumes. I’ll bet you can’t guess what my costume is. I’ll be going around to each of your classrooms today to see everyone’s costume and wish you a happy Halloween.”
“He’s Smokey the bear,” muttered Charlotte, who had stopped by the office to say hi to Principal Stevens that morning.
“Charlotte,” said Mr. George, whose hearing had not diminished in his forty years of teaching, “please don’t talk during the announcements.”
When the announcements were over, Mr. George began passing back last week’s test on long division. He placed each test face down on each desk, but Charlotte made sure to turn hers right-side-up so that everyone around her could see the red one hundred with a circle around it. The students talked among themselves while he passed the tests back.
“Charlotte, what candy is your mom handing out?” asked Greta, who lived in Charlotte’s neighborhood. She and her father and sister would come over to meet Charlotte and her father and brothers before they walked the neighborhood.
“I don’t know,” said Charlotte. “I think it’s a variety pack.”
“That’s no fair,” said Greta. “She only lets us take one piece.”
“She only lets me eat one piece every day,” said Charlotte.
“Your mom only lets you eat one piece of candy a day? Even on Halloween?”
Charlotte nodded.
“My parents let me eat as much as I want,” said Greta.
“That’s why you’re fat,” said Charlotte.
“Charlotte, will you please come up here for a moment?” asked Mr. George, who had returned to his desk at the front of the room.
Charlotte got to visit Principal Stevens again that morning.
Charlotte arrived home before her mother and father. She poured some cereal into a big yellow bowl and went to start on her homework before it was time to go trick or treating. The phone on the wall rang, and Charlotte went to answer. She pulled it off its hook, slid down against the wall, and held the receiver up to her ear. She listened.
Eventually, a voice said, “Hello? Hello? Is someone there?”
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello, yes, who is this?”
“Charlotte,” said Charlotte.
There was a pause. “Is Mrs. Brook there? May I speak to her?”
“No,” said Charlotte.
There was another pause. “Is Mrs. Brook your mother?”
“Yes.”
“Will you take a message for her?”
Charlotte considered this.
“Maybe,” she said.
“Maybe?”
“It depends.”
“It depends on what? Do you charge for taking a message?”
“No,” replied Charlotte, “but that is a very good idea. I could charge a nickel for every message I write down. My mother will give me a whole pack of bubblegum for five nickels.”
“Would you please just tell your mother that Mr. Russell called from the pharmacy and that her prescription is ready?”
Charlotte pondered this. “I suppose,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Happy Halloween,” said Charlotte.
“Yes, Happy Halloween to you, too.”
“Trick or treat.”
“Trick or treat what?”
“I don’t know,” said Charlotte. “That’s what you say on Halloween. How should I know what it means? I didn’t come up with it. Everyone just told me to say it. Maybe it means you have to give me candy.”
There was a laugh on the other end of the phone. “Happy Halloween,” the voice said again. Then there was a click, which Charlotte knew meant the person on the other end didn’t want to talk anymore. She returned to her cereal and her homework.
At five-thirty her mother came home and at six her father came home with her older brothers. While they showered and changed out of their uniforms and shoulder pads, she helped her mother cook dinner. Charlotte’s mother gave her all of the important tasks, including taking the vegetables out of the fridge, removing the cutting board from the cabinet, and starting the water. Charlotte wasn’t allowed to chop the vegetables until she turned ten, which wouldn’t be for another whole month. She thought this wasn’t fair, because she was taller than most of the boys in her class and that had to count for something.
She was allowed to pour the pasta into the boiling water and empty the jar of tomato sauce into a pot. When the jar was almost empty, she tried to lick the last of the sauce out from under the rim of the jar, and her mother took the jar from her and thanked her for her help and told her she could go back to her homework.
“I’ve already finished,” said Charlotte.
“Well, you can go and tell your father that he ought to get in here and help me if he wants to have anything to eat tonight.”
Charlotte found her father reading the newspaper, and told him what her mother had said. When he went into the kitchen, she took his place and picked up the newspaper. It was from Tuesday. Her father had a habit of reading newspapers long after their contents had grown stale, and Charlotte wanted to see what the fuss was about. There was a story about the Pentagon running low on missiles, a story about the slide in oil prices, and a story about the World Series. She read for a while, but couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. She turned to the cartoons, but these were in black and white and none of them made any sense, so she went to go and find her book. Charlotte was reading Jane Eyre, because she thought this was the sort of novel a literate young woman ought to read, and because she was hoping it might explain to her what the word “precocious” meant, which adults were constantly telling her she was. She noticed they never said that about her brothers, who mostly played Call of Duty instead of reading books.
Eventually, it was time for dinner.
Halloween was anticlimactic. Her brothers said that fourteen was too old for trick-or-treating and stayed home to play Fortnite. Greta came over in a different costume. Now she wore a sparkly dress and a necklace of dental floss. She said she was the tooth fairy.
When their parents weren’t looking, Greta punched Charlotte for calling her fat, and Charlotte concluded that this made them even, so she ignored it.
Greta’s sister was dressed as a Snicker’s Bar, but she was only six. Greta’s father wore a Farve jersey and Charlotte’s father didn’t wear a costume, because he never wore costumes. The two men walked behind the three girls, presumably arguing about the election, which they liked to do whenever their wives weren’t around. One house was decorated as a haunted house, but most of them had more campaign signs than Halloween decorations. Charlotte asked her father why that was, and he told her that the election was Halloween for adults.
“Do you dress up in costume?” asked Charlotte, who couldn’t remember the last election, except for some vague memories of everyone having to stay home from school for a year.
“Some people wear stickers that say they voted,” said Greta’s father.
“Do they say who you voted for?” asked Charlotte.
“No, but a lot of people can guess,” said Greta’s father.
“Who do you think will win?” asked Charlotte, but Greta elbowed her and told her nobody wanted to talk about the election, because it was boring.
“Are your parents voting for the same person?” asked Charlotte.
“No,” whispered Greta.
“Oh,” said Charlotte. “I wish kids could vote.”
“Why?” asked Greta, wrinkling her nose.
“It’s not fair,” said Charlotte.
“You aren’t allowed to drive, either,” said Charlotte’s father.
“That’s not fair either,” said Charlotte. “I would be a good driver. I would practice every day and I wouldn’t drive too close to the car in front like mom.”
“She probably would practice every day,” said Greta’s father.
“That’s why she isn’t allowed to drive yet,” said Charlotte’s father. “Girls, why don’t you hurry up and go to the next house so we can be home before your bedtimes.”
“My dad isn’t voting,” said Charlotte. “He said he doesn’t like anyone running.”
“Do they actually run?” asked Greta’s sister. “Is there a race to see who is the fastest?”
“No,” said Charlotte. “Don’t be silly. Of course they don’t run.”
“Then why did you say your dad doesn’t like anyone running?”
They continued in this manner back to Charlotte’s house, where Charlotte’s mother still had a sizable bucket filled with candy. After Greta went home, Charlotte’s mother put her to bed and told her she couldn’t have any candy, so Charlotte stayed awake until after she was sure her parents had gone to bed. She snuck out and went downstairs, retrieved a stool as quietly as she could, and stood on it to open the cabinet with the candy jar.
There was a note reading, “Go to back to bed, Charlotte,” on the candy jar. For a second, Charlotte was so frightened she almost fell off the stool, but she worked up the nerve to unseal the jar and remove two packets of Skittles. Then she closed the cabinet, put the stool away, and hurried upstairs to her bedroom.
“How many pieces of candy did you have last night?” asked Charlotte’s mother the next morning.
Charlotte’s eyes grew very wide. “How did you know?” she asked.
“Because I know everything that goes on in this house,” said Charlotte’s mother.
Charlotte pondered this the rest of the day and decided maybe her mother had a camera. But when she came home, she couldn’t find it. After she finally sat down to do her homework, she found herself standing up three times to go and sneak a piece of candy, but when she went over to the cabinet, there was another note which read, “Charlotte, do your homework.”
She went back to her homework, but couldn’t concentrate. Finally, her mother came home and put her to work cleaning the kitchen. Then it was time for dinner and after dinner she could have one piece of candy.
That night, she tried one last time. This time, the note read, “Charlotte, go to sleep.” Charlotte closed the cabinet without taking any candy and went back to bed, but she had trouble sleeping that night. That was the last time she tried to take a piece of candy.
It was worth it, though, because the next week Greta complained that she hadn’t grabbed enough Halloween candy and was already out. Charlotte stuck her tongue out at Greta because she still had a whole jar, and Charlotte was sent to the principal’s office again. Which ended up working out well, because Secretary Evans had a jar of chocolates and told Charlotte she could take as many as she wanted.