“Let’s check out the haunted house,” Brady said abruptly as the boys finished the fifth house on Oleander Place.
It was just past sunset, with enough light to see the grey-white gleam of sidewalks sandwiched between swathes of green-black lawn and the darker asphalt.
“There isn’t one.”
“Sure there is.” He pointed up the road at the new houses. “We can Trick-or-Treat until we get to the top.” He lowered his voice to what he hoped was a menacing tone. “To the haunted house.”
“It’s not haunted, just empty,” Kyle said, knowing as he did so that the truth wouldn’t faze Brady’s imagination.
Brady shot Kyle a withering glance and Kyle felt his head nodding, distantly, as if it were someone else’s head nodding yes to someone else’s best friend’s question.
“Okay,” the fearless cowboy sighed. “Let’s go.”
That was it. The decision was final.
For a couple more houses, Brady went through the motions of little-kid Trick-or-Treating. He even grinned outrageously when one old guy pretended to be horrified by Brady’s mummy costume and acted like he was going to barf in Brady’s candy bag, hunching his shoulders over the opened bag and whoop- ing like he was about to spew his guts up. But Kyle could tell that Brady’s heart was somewhere else, and he waited apprehensively for the moment when Brady would look at him and say, “Come on, let’s ditch this stuff.”
And all too soon, Brady did.
So, without really knowing why, certainly without wanting to, a lone black-and-silver suited cowboy trudged up the hill behind a tattered, shambling mummy. His head bowed, his feet dragging, Kyle was the only kid on the street no longer excited by Halloween.