Midnight Masquerade - Various Authors!

The Way Home - @GregCarrico

Joey

"Well," Joey said, hefting his sack of Halloween candy like a prize fish, "looks like I have enough candy. I better get this loot home and hide the good stuff before Ryan gets there," he added with forced casualness.

His four companions stopped and turned to face him. They stood in the orange glow of a Jack-o'-lantern-topped streetlight at the wooded edge of the neighborhood. Fewer trick-or-treaters were out in the gloaming, and the skeletal trees seemed to shiver as their thinning foliage left them bare to the chill of night.

Branches creaking in the wind drew Joey's gaze from Nikki, as if to let him know he was staring at her again. She had been one of his best friends for ages. Why was he suddenly being weird about her? He tried to stop, but he just couldn't keep his eyes off her. That costume... Stop staring, creep!

Nikki's pale pink, almost skimpy Barbie costume reminded Joey that she really was a girl. She wore it ironically, of course, with intentionally smeared makeup, and plastic, spider-shaped rings tangled in her dirty-blond hair. She might be a girl, but she had never been girly. Still, she looked and acted differently while wearing it. She was different. Feminine. Beautiful?

Those words had never occurred to him looking at Nikki. Taller than some of their teachers and nearly blind without her bold, large-framed glasses, she wasn't what Joey would have called pretty. In fact, he seldom even thought of her as a girl.

From the day she had strolled into the elementary school library and sat down, uninvited, at the table where Joey, Clive, and Tyrel played Dungeons and Dragons, she had always just been part of the group. One of the guys. But now...?

Joey had barely noticed what the rest of his friends were wearing, even Clive. Made up as Jason from Friday the Thirteenth, Clive could have just walked off a Hollywood film set. Tyrel loomed convincingly as a Grim Reaper, but Robert's plastic Ninja outfit bore a strong resemblance to a garbage bag with armholes. And Robert's was way better than his.

Joey had decided to go Trick-or-Treating at the last minute, and it showed. A few hours ago, his candy bag had been a humble pillowcase, and his wind-whipped ghost costume, a bedsheet. The pillowcase would resume its previous role, but the eyeholes he had cut into the bed sheet destined it for the trashcan.

The wind paused for a moment, like the space between inhaling and exhaling, and the leaves halted their skittering trek across the sidewalk. Punctuated by the brief silence, a loud crack and strange chittering noise made them jump as one. They peered into the darkening spaces between the trees to discover its source, but saw nothing.

The leaves resumed their crunchy dance across the pavement in the renewed breeze, and Nikki broke their reverie with a half-hearted laugh.

"Must be those high-school jerks in the woods, trying to scare the younger kids," she said. Then she looked at Joey apologetically.

"You can't go home yet," Clive said. "Come on, Joey. We are at almost at the end of the neighborhood."

"You can go three more streets," Robert added. "What difference will it make?"

"Look," Joey said, "I shouldn't have come out tonight. I thought I wanted to, but it was a mistake. I...". I just want to go home.

He had missed out on trick-or-treating the previous year, and maybe only one more left before he would be too old to want to go. His mother hadn't forbidden him from going, but it was understood that they would no longer be celebrating Halloween.

"But you did come out," Robert said. "If you stop creeping on Nikki, maybe you'd be able to walk a little faster, and we'd be done. Let's go!"

"Wha... I'm not..." Joey stammered. He shrugged at Nikki as if he didn't know what Clive meant.