Cyanide and Razor Blades

A short story

This is a big one so you’d maybe better brace yourself. Today we present the debut contribution from

Kamela Hutzley

and like so many former debutantes she has stepped up big time.

I’m pleased to see piece continuing the trend of our writers being bold and taking risks and offering up works that are clearly exactly what they want them to be. I have said before and I will say again that I don’t care about the length or topic or genre or form of the work in question, or any other commercially minded considerations- I just want the work to be good and to be real and to be something the author clearly believes in. Well Kamela, as with so many others, is holding me to my word. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Enjoy.

TJB.

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Kimberly had just turned nine, and Halloween was coming. October, her favorite, the air chill and the leaves crispy and orange and Halloween coming, always so slowly, then suddenly, inexorably here. Everyone called her Kimmy then, and that was okay; it was years before she’d feel the dragging, adult pull of her full first name. For now she was just Kimmy, Kimmy at nine years old, Kimmy getting ready for Halloween and it was impossible that she could be more excited.

No other grown-up ambition possessed her mind but this: for the first time, she would be allowed to go trick-or treating after dark. Plus, her older cousin Matt told her, their parents were going to let them go out alone. Without adults.

Her family had always been overprotective, though it was hard for her to really know that. She had trouble making friends, so she didn’t know much about what other kids did. It was hard to compare when you never, ever talked to strangers. It was 1985, and she knew from the news and from her mother’s whispering that bad people were putting razor blades in apples, that some maniac had put poison in Tylenol, that the outside world was a very scary place and that bad people were everywhere. She had learned the word “cyanide.” She had night terrors, in which she bit into an apple and her shredded lips and gums bled and bled.

But Halloween was special. Scary holiday that it was, it somehow pushed aside the fear. You got to be someone else, to dress up and play, to have the adults pay attention to you. What you were for Halloween was dreadfully important. Words Kimmy was years from knowing swam, tadpole concepts in the muddy pool of her young mind: words like subversive, like aspirational, like Carnivale. The world turned upside down, a children’s crusade, a time when kids were kings and queens of the night and could be anything they wanted.

This year. This year she would be anything she wanted.

Last year, she’d known what she wanted to be: she could taste it by the end of summer, as soon as the leaves started to change. She wanted to be something scary. Her father, a very tall man, had dressed up in a Frankenstein mask the year before and had scared even her. The little kids in the neighborhood tore screaming from their door before they could even get a handful of candy. She wanted to scare other kids like that. Make them run screaming.

So she decided she’d be a vampire. A lady vampire, like she’d seen from behind the couch on a movie her mom had been watching late one night, when she was supposed to be in bed. Sharp teeth and a pale face and a bloody mouth and long, long black hair. She drew pictures of what it would look like in her notebook.

But then her mother went shopping with her aunt, and they went to some kind of fancy store and bought her a costume. It wasn’t a vampire costume at all.

“Look at how beautiful this is, Kimmy,” her mother said as she laid out each of the pieces. “You told me you wanted to be an artist when you grew up. So I thought you could be a French artiste for Halloween. See, it has a palette and everything!”

A French artiste. Kimmy stared at the costume pieces. A blue smock and pants, a red beret. A blank wooden palette with no paints.

“I don’t want to be a French artiste,” she said to the floor. “I want to be a vampire.”

She could actually hear her mother smile, that awful smile that meant no. “Kimmy, you can’t be a vampire, you’re a girl, plus you know you can’t wear makeup.”

Something prickled up the back of her neck. “Why not?” she said a little louder, but with her eyes still glued to the bumpy beige carpet of her bedroom.

“Because it’s trashy and it’s bad for you.” Her mother’s voice was still a singsong but the key changed. “Look, I got this beautiful costume for you. Aunt Paula loved it, thought it looked very ritzy.”

“I don’t care about ritzy, I want to be scary!” Kimmy looked up, finally. Her face was burning and her stomach was filling with little shaky things. Her whole body felt like a shaky thing. She knew she would cry soon and she hated it.

“Kimberly. Come on now.” The full first name meant her mother’s patience was nearly out, and no argument would be broached. Kimmy’s mother wasn’t mean like some mothers. She didn’t slap Kimmy’s leg in the car the way Aunt Paula did when she was upset. But when her mother and Aunt Paula teamed up on an idea, there was no getting out of it.

She was eight years old, too old to scream and throw herself on the ground and cry until she got her way, but that was what her body did anyway. The shaky things, the heat that prickled in her face and neck and stomach and then all over until she tingled and was sweating, the way her throat started to close up and the tears rushed into her eyes and nose in a way she couldn’t control, and she hated, hated it, hated all of it, hated her aunt and her mother and the stupid French artiste costume from the fancy stupid costume shop and she hated it, and she wasn’t going to be an artist for Halloween she wasn’t, and all of those things threw themselves on the floor in a heap, kicked their helpless feet, flailed their thin arms, pounded their fists and sobbed inarticulately until her mother left her there on the floor to cry and think about how ungrateful she was being.

O Halloween, Eve of All Souls, the yearly ritual spilling of the dead into the night, the children’s hour, holy. Kimmy-at-eight-years-old poured every ungodly howl, every operatic Lacrimosa, into her lament for the vampire costume. The injustice was intolerable. At Halloween, the rules were supposed to be suspended. She knew this, not because anyone had told her but because it was True: the kids were supposed to get what they wanted for once. The adults, massive and immoveable, were meant to stand aside, just for one night.

But her experience had not yet borne this idea out. Horrendously arbitrary Halloween rules had included, but were not limited to: No makeup or face paint. No wigs. No going out trick-or-treating without an adult. No trick-or-treating after dark. No eating candy while still out trick-or-treating. All candy was to be dumped out onto the table when they got home and most of it would be thrown away because it probably had cyanide or razor blades. Later, she and her brother and cousins would play with lightsticks inside the house. That was fun, she guessed.

This year would be different. Now that she was nine, and a big kid. She thought about being a clown. Clowns could be scary. but you really needed makeup for that. And what kind of clown didn’t wear any facepaint?

Her kind of clown, it turned out. Her mother loved the idea when Kimmy told her, and as had happened the previous year, her mother went about preparing everything in advance. She got a big shiny shirt and a giant polka-dot bowtie. A red foam nose that fit onto her regular nose. A pointy yellow hat with two big dots on it. The store had clown shoes but her mother was too afraid that she’d fall trying to walk in them.

Kimmy was far too old to throw herself on the ground screaming now. And anyway, it hadn’t even worked.

And so it was that Kimmy stood with her brother (an eleven-year-old dog that evening, ludicrous in furry pajamas with an eared hat and pinned-on tail), each of them holding a decorated plastic candy bag, waiting to be released into the wild with their cousins, Matt and Jerry. Kimmy thought she looked like an idiot, but smiled for her aunt’s camera anyway, tilting her head to one side with a winsome expression she thought a clown might give. At least she could have had a rainbow-colored wig or something. She looked in the mirror once more before they left. Confirmed: she looked like a reject in a clown outfit. Instead of floppy red clown shoes she was wearing her stupid sneakers.

Matt was ten this year, close in age to Riley, and was dressed as a ninja, which was a super-cool costume given the rules they had. The hood with the face mask showed nothing but his eyes; the black soft pants and wrap-around shirt was like the gi he wore for karate. Even his shoes were cool, split-toed slippers meant for putting throwing stars in. Matt had gotten a ninja-to sword for his birthday in June, but he wasn’t allowed to carry it with him. Still, he looked awesome, and he carried a pair of fake rubber nunchucks as a prop. Probably Aunt Paula had gotten his outfit from that fancy costume store, or maybe it was even a real ninja uniform. Matt and Jerry always got all the awesomest things that they wanted.

Jerry was dressed as a vampire.

He was a little younger than Kim, still eight, and she tried not to scowl at him when he came out of his room in his black cape with red lining, white tuxedo shirt and black pants, shiny shoes and slicked hair. He didn’t have any makeup — that was an unbreakable rule, apparently — but he was wearing big silly plastic teeth, which he chomped loudly at her when he got close. She stuck her tongue out at him in response. He pressed her red foam nose and made a honking sound.

Riley in his dog outfit looked bored and vaguely shamed, as dogs themselves often look. He pal’ed around with Matt when he could, but Kim could tell Matt didn’t think Riley was so great. Riley kept his distance from Kim whenever Matt was around; he was a lot nicer to her at home. But now he was in the stairway, wandering back and forth on the landing, pushing himself against one wall when he reached it and bouncing in the other direction, making pinball sound effects. Kim just stood quietly and waited, leaning against the wall next to the bathroom just inside the door of her aunt’s house.

They lived in what her parents called a “development,” a bunch of condos all stuck together in courtyards, the groups of houses different colors. Her cousins’ house was in a blue courtyard. When they walked around, they went to yellow ones and olive green ones and pale beige-like ones, all the same, with vinyl siding and shutters on the windows and little bushes and air conditioners out in front of the doors. There were other places, in the older part of the development, that looked like fake Tudor houses, but they never went that far.

She didn’t know what they were waiting for now. It always seemed like she was waiting for something, for somebody else to be ready or tell her where to go. She sat down on the stairs, feeling the thump-thump-thump of Riley’s pinballing back and forth on the landing a few steps above her. She took her nose off; it was making her sweaty and itchy. She squeezed it, rhythmically, in her right hand.

Finally Matt was ready, Jerry came out of the bathroom, and Aunt Paula came and handed them each a lightstick. “Break them now so they’re already on when it gets dark,” she said. “I want to make sure the cars can see you.”

The condo complex, where speed limits were 20 miles an hour, was called Manor on the Green because it was built around a bunch of small golf courses. At this age, Kimmy was naturally uncritical about such things, but in ten years she would hold these two beliefs: that a gated community based around golf was super fascist, and that her aunt, who didn’t care about golf at all, had chosen the community because it sounded like “Tavern on the Green.”

At the moment, though, her sole criticism of the whole thing was that it seemed impossible for anything bad to happen to them there, and so having to go out only when it was light and only with adults when she had friends at school who were allowed to stay up until ten watching TV shows, and who were going out trick-or-treating in groups of kids only in real neighborhoods with houses while wearing awesome rubber masks and face makeup and really cool costumes, and they got to eat their candy...well it just wasn’t fair.

The four of them took their lightsticks from Aunt Paula, who had already unwrapped them from their cardboard and plastic and the little foil sleeves which, Kimmy imagined, kept the lightsticks safe. The boys all broke theirs right away and started shaking them hard, calling out “I got a red one!” and “Yours is brighter” and “switch with you!” Kimmy held onto hers, vowing to break it only once it started to get dark. She held it in her hand, down by her side. With all the hubbub of the others, nobody noticed she didn’t break hers right away.

Aunt Paula took Matt by the shoulders. “Matthew, remember, you’re in charge, okay? Make sure the little ones are safe. You have your watch?”

“Yeah, mom,” said Matt, trying to keep the eyeroll out of his voice.

“Let me see it.”

Matt held up his left wrist, on which, between his shirt sleeve and his awesome ninja gloves, he was wearing a black digital watch that lit up when you pressed a button on the side.

“Okay,” said Aunt Paula. “Remember to look at it, and to use the light if it gets too dark to read it. Be back here by 8:00, okay?

“Okay, okay, Mom. I’m not a baby, God.”

“Matthew Parsons Stein.” Aunt Paula, like so many parents through the ages, had instilled in her children an understanding of the inverse relationship between the number of names that she used and her willingness to bend in the face of smart-mouthery. “You will watch over these kids and get them back here by 8:00. No crossing the big road. No eating candy while you’re out. No going inside people’s houses—”

“—No petting people’s dogs, no going outside the development — I know, Mom, okay?”

Aunt Paula looked like she might yell; her body stiffened, she gave Matt a sidelong glare and breathed in hard. But then Matt smiled, and Aunt Paula paused, the breathed out again and smiled back. “Just be careful, all right?” She looked at the rest of them, all shifting from foot to foot and stealing alternating glances at the door and the clock in the hall.

“I will, Mom, I always am. We’ll be okay.”

“Okay then. See you all soon.” With that, she stood all the way up and, taking this as their cue, the kids tumbled toward the door, chattering and giggling and straightening their hats and ties and teeth. Aunt Paula pulled Matt briefly to her once more, to plant a kiss on top of his head.

“Moooom,” he moaned, but Kimmy could tell he sort of liked it.

“Right, go, go!” said Aunt Paula, and the little band spilled out into the night.

Or rather, the evening. It was 5:30, and it was still very light out. Their own courtyard was empty at the moment; the houses around theirs all had older people living in them who didn’t go in much for putting out decorations or having children near them. They left the U-shaped ring of slate-blue condos and walked toward the olive-green ones just across the way. Kimmy saw a bunch of little kids being brought around by their parents or older brothers or sisters: a probably three-year-old dressed as a ladybug and wearing a puffy pink coat over her costume because it was cold; a family with a baby in a stroller wearing a tiger-striped onesie.

They went to the houses that had pumpkins out front or lights on the doors, tissue-paper ghosts in the windows or – the best, as far as she was concerned – creepy music with thunder sound effects and evil laughter. One of the places in the olive green courtyard had gravestones on its lawn, fake spiderwebs across the porch, a blacklight that made Jerry’s white plastic teeth glow bright. He actually put them in his mouth for that door; the rest of the time, he carried them in his hand, tired of the constant drooling and slurred speech. He took every opportunity to snap them at Kimmy when she wasn’t paying attention.

After an hour or so of walking, deciding which doors to knock on, getting crappy apples and Mary Janes and rolls and rolls of Smarties, Matt led them into one of the older Tudor-looking places. It was the farthest they’d ever been from their house. “There’s a good house over here, I’ve seen it before,” he said, sharing trade secrets. “Look, see all those kids?”

It was getting darker, although the lightsticks were still useless. Kimmy held hers tight at her side, and Matt hadn’t made her crack it yet. They could see a group of older kids, maybe Riley’s age, going up into the courtyard; on closer inspection, it was a line up to the door. There were little kids, five and six maybe, finishing up their evenings with their parents holding their hands. And bigger kids, twelve and thirteen year olds who apparently didn’t think trick-or-treating was uncool. (What could be uncool about it, Kim always wondered. You get to dress up in a costume and go around to people’s houses and get free candy.) One of the big kids was dressed as Jason, with a hockey mask and a big machete, and another as Freddy, complete with horrible burn makeup and a glove with blades spidering out of it. Kimmy wished, for a moment, that she could hold someone’s hand. Instead she hung back, hoping her dumb costume made her uninteresting.

The house didn’t look as awesome as the one they’d visited earlier, with its creepy lighting and monster music and fake spiderwebs. it looked more fancy in the way Aunt Paula liked: pumpkins all around the stoop that looked professionally painted, not carved; cornstalks with glittery orange and black ribbons around them; a cute scarecrow standing in the bush outside their front window. It all looked, as her mother would say, “very ritzy.”

It turned out that the woman who lived there was giving out full-sized candy bars: Butterfingers, Baby Ruths, 100 Grand, which was Kimmy’s favorite. No wonder the place was a mob scene. Kimmy stared, the prospect of such sugary riches beyond her understanding. She could imagine the candy bar, its shape and heft, the satisfying crinkle-crisp sound it made when you bit into it, then the slow sink through the caramel. But she knew the reality: they’d wait in line, get the big candy bars, then have to throw them away when they got home.

Matt seemed to get the same idea. “Hey, let’s go, guys,” he said to them all from behind his ninja face mask.

“Whaf? Whyyy?” said Jerry, whose teeth were back in his mouth in preparation for presentation at the door. “Vey have Bubbafingah.”

“Yeah, I know, Jerry, but we can’t eat it anyway. Let’s go hit some more places. This place is all full of weirdos.”

The Freddy and Jason had just made it to the door, where they struck a theatrical pose and made loud growling noises at the woman. Kimmy was close enough now that she could hear the woman give a mock scream and start laughing. The woman had a big feathered witch hat. She seemed nice.

Riley was quiet, shuffling along in his dog outfit, his orange lightstick hanging from his collar like a luminescent license. Once they were out of the circle of light of the popular house, Kim looked around and realized it was actually getting dark. She cracked her lightstick, first trying to do it with one hand but finally resorting to two. She watched the chemicals mix and slowly start to glow.

“You have to shake it,” said Matt, grabbing it from her hand.

“I know — I wanted to…”

But he’d already taken it and shaken it up for her. It was acid green, the color of the glowing slime they sold inside little plastic eggs in supermarket toy machines. They called it The Blob. She was never allowed to get it. She stared at the lightstick, sighing.

Kim liked to experience things slowly, to savor them. Her cousins would hunt around the house for their hidden Christmas presents, thrilled to find already-wrapped goodies nestled in the unused corners of their parents’ closets, not daring to peel back the wrapping (ritzy, the wrapping was) and see what the present might be. Kimmy dreaded finding her presents, wanting everything to be a surprise. Matt and Jerry would tear into their gifts, shining shreds of red and green flying in all directions, while Kim sat, painstakingly unsticking the Scotch tape so as not to rip Santa’s face. Part of her wanted to see if she could keep the paper intact enough to be used again on another present. But mostly she wanted the slow pleasure of unveiling the gift, making the suspense last. She ate the same way: starting with the things she liked least, saving the things she liked best for last. It drove her cousins and brother crazy; they just wanted to finish eating stupid dinner so they could go back to playing, not try and see if they could get a single pea to stick on each tine of their forks.

So Kim knew that Matt didn’t understand what it meant when he cracked her lightstick for her, shaking it up and making it glow as fast as possible. He just wanted her to have her light so she would be safe and he would be doing his job. She wanted to watch the chemicals swirl inside the translucent tube, like oil and vinegar in a salad dressing bottle, the whorls and fingers of the thicker liquid dancing in suspension, the magic prolonged.

When she looked up from the lightstick, the boys had already gone ahead; she was standing at the edge of the courtyard with the popular house, and they hadn’t noticed yet that she wasn’t with them. She glanced around, back at the house. The kids had cleared from it; the scary Freddy and Jason had wandered off. Now the doorway was empty, and Kim, rather than catching up with the boys, decided to take her chance.

She took one look over her shoulder to see that the boys were a ways down the street, Jerry’s cape flying in the breeze, Riley still shuffling absently, Matt in the lead, creeping along in an ironically ostentatious attempt to seem silent and invisible.

She went to the door, uncertainty haunting her steps. The nice woman in the witch hat had gone in, and for a moment she was unsure. Maybe the lady was tired from all of the kids, and she should just leave her alone. But then she heard the lady’s laugh, and it made her bold: she reached out to the doorbell, glowing pale orange next to the closed screen door, and pressed it. She could faintly hear the ding-dong it made inside the house.

Footsteps followed. It sounded like a kid running to the door. The door opened and Kim saw the face of the lady at last. She was younger than Kim had imagined, though of course still very old, as all grown-ups were. She still wore her black witch hat, and her face was painted all green, with a big wart on her nose. Her eyes sparkled under heavily painted black eyebrows. She gave a big wicked laugh, just like a real witch. She looked down with an expression Kim was sure was supposed to be evil, but she couldn’t help but laugh.

“Think that’s funny, do you, my pretty?” the lady said, sounding just like the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, which Kimmy watched every year when they played it on TV. This made her laugh even more, which made the lady smile.

“And what makes you think,” the wicked witch said, “that I don’t eat little clowns like you?”

Kimmy gasped, putting her hand over her mouth, then lowered her eyebrows at the lady, pressed her lips together, gave an awful scowl, then honked her red foam nose. The lady laughed, a real laugh this time, not a fake wicked one, and reached for the bowl of candy next to the door. “Go on, take one,” she said.

Kim looked at the bowl and could hardly believe it. It was true: whole, full-size candy bars of all the best kinds. She began to reach, slowly, indecisive, and cast a look toward where her brother and cousins had gone. Then she remembered she had to hurry.

“Where are your friends?” asked the lady suddenly. “Are you out all by yourself?” It was strange to hear this grown-up start to sound worried, from inside her perfect wicked witch costume. Kim almost expected her to invite her inside with the promise of gingerbread, then stuff her in an oven for dinner. But she wasn’t scared of her. She knew she wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, but she liked this lady. She seemed like she would make a really nice mom.

“My brother and cousins are that way,” she said, tipping her head in their direction, feeling her hat tip too and thinking that might look funny. She reached up and straightened it, making the lady smile again. She was really pretty, actually.

“Go on then,” she said. “You’d better hurry and catch up. Take a candy, and happy Halloween, little clown!”

Kimmy looked at her, then at the candy, and saw the red and white wrapper of a 100 Grand bar peeping out from among Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and the ever-hated 3 Musketeers. She grabbed it, almost dizzy with the reality, and instead of sticking it into her plastic bag with the Halloweeny pictures all down the side, she slipped it into the pocket of the pants she wore under the clown pants. She smiled at the lady, suddenly shy, and the lady smiled back, then scowled and waggled her fingers at her menacingly. She had long fingernails stuck on, Kim noticed, all curled and black. Anything you want to be. Kimmy turned and moved toward the edge of the courtyard again, holding her lightstick in front of her. She could hear that the lady hadn’t closed her door; maybe she was stepping out to see that she was okay and not really by herself.

Because Kimmy was by herself, now, and all at once it occurred to her to be scared. Where had her brother and cousins gone? Which direction? How far away were they, and how could she find them? Did she know where she was? Was she lost? And if she was, she was going to be ashamed of herself. She was nine years old, after all, and she read books all the time about intrepid children her own age who were brave, and knew where they were going, and had adventures out in the world by themselves when their parents died or were kidnapped or whatever. But she knew she wasn’t brave, or intrepid. She daydreamed, and she kept her head in those books, so she didn’t know where real things were, or how to read a map, or how not to get lost because you got distracted by something interesting or beautiful on your path, or because you were looking at your feet while you walked instead of the landmarks, or because you were thinking, as Kimmy always seemed to be, about something else.

When she was three years old she’d gotten lost in a mall. She didn’t even remember how, though the memory was vivid from the moment she realized she was lost until the moment she realized she was found. Maybe her mother had gone inside a store or the bathroom for a moment and told her to stay put and not go anywhere? Maybe it was her grandmother, who was known for sometimes parking the kids somewhere and going shopping alone? She remembered that she had wandered off toward a fountain, wondering if she had a penny to throw in it. The next thing she remembered was knowing that she was lost, and that some adult had told her not to move if she got separated, but to stay still and wait for the adult to find her. But she couldn’t seem to do it, even though that’s what they’d said. She had to keep moving, because otherwise, how would she find her mother again?

She walked along in the mall, her feet matching the brick-like tiles in the floor, dark brown and vertical to her steps. Her feet fit into them almost exactly. She walked quickly, watching her feet, chanting, “I’m lost, I’m lost, I’m really really lost,” over and over again, a three-year-old’s desperate marching cadence. When she thought about it now, she couldn’t figure out why she had been so stubborn, so stupid, as to go marching around a mall like that when an adult had told her to stay still and wait only a few minutes before. And here she was now, so much bigger and she thought so much smarter, doing the same thing. She walked on, looking at her big stupid sneakers swinging and striking beneath her, her wide green clown-pants wafting around her legs.

She had no idea how long she had been at the door, talking to the nice witch-lady, feeling good and warm in her presence, getting a good candy bar. Maybe they’d gotten miles ahead of her, and she was alone and wouldn’t ever be able to find them. Maybe they’d gone out onto the golf courses for some reason. Maybe she’d have to be found by one of those golf cart security guard people who drove around sometimes. She could only imagine what Matt would say if a golf cart security guard brought her home after she’d gotten lost. Just like she was some dumb three-year-old.

Then she looked up. Ahead of her, she could see three boys, outlined faintly in fluorescent light. They all had their lightsticks in front of them, or held at their sides, and the orange and blue and red glowed around them, a kind of magic. They were at the edge of another courtyard, one of the fake Tudor ones, and they were looking around, as if they’d just realized she wasn’t with them anymore.

That was when she felt the tears coming, and she looked up and blinked, furiously. How long had she been separated from them? How long had she stayed behind, talking to the witch lady and getting her candy bar? Why hadn’t they noticed? Looking at the glow around them, brighter now since they had turned in her direction, she almost wanted to go back to the witch-lady, stay and talk to her, go inside her house the way they were never, never ever supposed to do.

Instead she stopped walking, looked straight ahead of her at them. She knew they could see her lightstick. She thought of the full-size 100 Grand. It was a special candy bar, one she’d gotten all on her own, on her little adventure, talking to a stranger and not listening to all the weird rules her aunt had. She’d savor it later, alone.

She had proven it tonight: not all strangers are bad. Not all strangers want to molest you or kidnap you for ransom or lock you up in their basements for years so that your parents never saw you again and the police decided you must be dead. When she thought about it, it made perfect sense: of course all strangers couldn’t be that way. Most strangers were probably people’s moms and dads, or their friends or uncles, or their teachers or neighbors or store owners or whatever. Only a few strangers were really bad, and her mother and aunt were so scared about them running into those strangers that they just put all strangers in the same bucket.

But if she never talked to strangers, how could she ever meet anybody?

Just then, she felt someone grab her hand and start walking forward, fast. She yelled out, not knowing what was happening: could it really be a bad stranger, arriving at just that moment to teach her a lesson? Little girl, don’t ever think that bad strangers aren’t EVERYWHERE.

But after a moment in which she was dragged forward by the angry steps of a grownup, she realized: it was her grandfather.

Her mother’s daddy was a big man, like her father: tall and bald and gentle, even more gentle than her dad. He never got angry, that she could see, and was never mean, which was why it was so surprising for him to come out of nowhere and grab her by the hand like that.

But he marched her up to the boys, who were still standing there, frozen. Matt’s ninja hood was off, the blue light stick making his face glow with concern and fear. Jerry had his plastic teeth in his hand and a slow, satisfied smile on his face; Jerry could always see trouble coming for other people and enjoyed it while he could. Riley was looking down, his floppy dog ears tilted forward and hiding his face, like he wished he were somewhere, anywhere, else.

Pop-pop, as they called their grandfather, stopped in front of the boys, towering over all of them, still holding onto Kimmy’s arm.

“I think you lost something,” Pop-Pop said to the older boys, not raising his voice.

After a pause in which they all looked at each other, as if deciding their strategy and whom to betray, everyone started talking at once. “Kimmy where were you—” “How did you get separated—” “Mom’s gonna kill us—” “I have to pee—”

“Quiet,” said Pop-Pop, and even though he hadn’t gotten louder than any of them, they all shut up and started looking at their shoes. Except Jerry, who was still looking at Kim with a smug smile on his face, such a small smile that only Kim could tell. She stuck her tongue out at him.

“Kids, you had one job – you were supposed to stay together. Matt, you were made the leader. Was that a mistake?”

Kimmy loved her grandfather, but as with most adults, he kind of terrified her. She hadn’t said anything since he had grabbed her and marched her back to the boys. But then Riley said what she was thinking. “Pop-Pop, how did you get here?”

Matt sighed, the kind of world-weary sigh only a ten-year-old who knows everything can muster. “He’s been following us the whole time, duh. Did you really think we’d be allowed out on our own? They just wanted us to feel like were were alone.”

Next to her, Kim could feel her grandfather suppressing a smile. He squeezed her hand, gently, where he was still holding it. “Is that why you let Kim get separated from the rest of you, Matthew, because you knew that I was watching all along?”

Even Matt, the greatest liar in the universe, couldn’t look Pop-Pop in the eye. “Yeah. I guess so. I just...she was being so slow, you know how she is, and we wanted to keep moving. I knew she could catch up with us, and I knew you were behind us so she wouldn’t really get lost, and…” He trailed off, unable to come up with much more justification.

“Riley?” said Pop-Pop. Riley had turned away from the rest of the group, head down, arms folded, hoping, perhaps, that he could bury himself like a dog buries a bone.

“Yeah?” he said, barely audible.

“Look at me,” Pop-Pop said, gently but in a way that brooked no argument. Riley looked up, his dog ears flopping hopelessly.

“Why did you let your sister go off on her own?” he asked.

“I didn’t know! We were just walking, I thought we were all together!”

“For ten minutes?” Pop-Pop said, one eyebrow raised.

Riley looked down again, his face going red. “I don’t know…” he mumbled.

“Don’t leave your sister behind, do you understand?”

“I guess.”

“Don’t guess, know.”

“Okay,” he said. God, Kim hated her brother.

“Kimmy,” Pop-Pop said, and Kim went cold. She had thought she was safe and that the older boys would get all the flack, but no.

“Why did you stay behind?”

She looked up at him, then looked down again, because his eyes said that she was in trouble and she didn’t want to cry in front of her cousins and brother. “I just…” she started, but couldn’t say anything without feeling the front of her face getting hot, the tears wanting to come, her throat closing up. “I...I wanted to see what was in the house.” She was looking down now, watching a couple of tears fall and plop onto her big polka-dot bow tie.

“You can’t do that, do you understand? It’s not safe.”

Kim thought of the woman, her witch hat, her smile, her loving laugh. How could somebody like that be unsafe? Right now she felt more unsafe than that, which didn’t make any sense. It was Pop-Pop, and Matt, and everyone. But she felt it, felt like she wanted to run.

“I know,” she said, instead of saying all those things. “I’m sorry.” Then she was crying and couldn’t stop herself, and then she was ashamed of crying, could almost hear Jerry laughing at her and everyone else wondering why she was such a baby.

“Hey,” Pop-Pop said, and turned her face up to his, gently. “It’s okay, just don’t do it again. Listen to your aunt and your cousins, okay? We just want you to be safe.”

“Can we go home now?” she said, as softly as she could. This wasn’t fun anymore. She’d go back, rinse her face, dump out her candy on the kitchen table with everyone else’s and watch Aunt Paula pretend to inspect them before pitching them in the trash. She’d take out her special candy bar, later, and eat it in her bed, as slowly as she could.

“It’s dark now, yeah. Let’s go, kids.”

“Aw, man!” said Jerry, who, as the youngest, hadn’t gotten a talking-to.

“Shut it and let’s get moving, my friend,” Pop-Pop said, not unkindly.

Matt just fell in line, looking less like a ten-year-old who’s had privileges revoked and more like a vanquished general marching home with his head held high in spite of grim defeat. Riley shuffled a little behind them all, uninvolved as always.

Kim kept hold of Pop-Pop’s hand as they walked, and Pop-Pop let her.

She would never stop wishing, years later, that her grandfather could have met that woman in the witch outfit. She’d wish her whole family could have seen, could have known. She’d wish she could have stayed lost just a little longer, scared but alight, in the winding streets of the Manor on the Green, the darkness a cloak, her lightstick a blazon, her hidden candy a talisman, a ward against the falling night.

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