Wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt seemed to increase her level of laziness. She yawned, lifting her head from her arms. The silk shirt she had worn to the costume party on Saturday pressed against her hair-she had cast the shirt onto the desk that night and hadn’t moved it since. It was partly draped over the melted mass of candles that made up her shrine, hanging down and covering the wax lumps like a coroner’s shroud.

It had been a mediocre party at best. She and Tink were supposed to have spent Saturday piecing together their costumes with items that Natalie had been collecting all month from the store, but Tink couldn’t concentrate, and Natalie had ended up doing both of them. She should have traded costumes with Tink, but she hadn’t thought about it in time. Tink walked around the party all night with baggy patched pants, a tight striped shirt, and a painted clown face that was not masking the little frown that kept creeping into place. They had tried to use some spray-in hair coloring to turn her hair fluorescent red but it just ended up looking like somebody had tagged her head.

Rob had shown up with a huge translucent red garbage bag upside-down over top of him, with holes for his head and arms, and paper tassels glued up and down the seams. He had drawn some lines and circles on it with permanent marker, and it was only because she had seen the fake newspaper faceplate he had printed that she knew he was trying to be a blood fluke. Shawn, ever creative, was a spook, wearing the white sheet off his bed on top of himself, with two small holes cut out for his eyes, though he had gotten sick of it after a short time and draped it around himself, transforming it into a toga. Dara had painted her face and hands all white, with fake blood trickling from her mouth and darkened eye sockets-an undead corpse.

Nat had been a pirate, with a bright red silk shirt and black pants, and a homemade eyepatch that kept flipping up. She had spent an hour sewing the patches onto Tink’s pants before she had started to rush things. It wasn’t as fun when you were doing it all by yourself. She had pulled her hair back and tied it in a rough ponytail, and blacked out one of her teeth, but unfortunately it didn’t look real next to the genuine gap between her front teeth.

Dara pulled out a cake early on in the evening and they gave Natalie a few birthday cards and sang. Rob had included a little coupon in his, good for “one free hour of time,” which was kind of cute-daylight savings time ended that night. After the birthday portion was over, it almost seemed that nobody wanted to be too happy, for Tink’s sake, and so they all sat around and drank beer in the living room, subdued. At one point she almost laughed just looking at the couch full of characters: the depressed clown, the listless corpse, the Greek philosopher downing his fourth beer. It’s not that they were like that they whole night-they did laugh a fair amount-but there was an overall mood of sadness in the air and the laughs seemed disconnected from each other, separate. It was too bad. Dressing up was supposed to be fun.

As children, she and Scott had never been allowed to go out on Halloween night to collect candy. They heard the urban legends every year-the razor blades in the apples, the kidnappings and sacrifices. But most of her friends went every year and nothing happened to them. The church began to have a program one Halloween-Reformation Day-evening so that parents could offer an alternative to sitting at home with the lights out and trying to ignore the doorbells and knocks at the door.