Free The Best Halloween Ever by Barbara Robinson Page A

revolving door.”
    Nobody got hurt and everybody got out all right, but they had to call the fire department to take the door apart, and they had to close the bank till they got the door back up.
    The fire chief said he never saw anything like it. “Two kids,” he said, “maybe even three kids might go in that door at the same time to see what would happen, but this was eight kids! What you had was one section of a revolving door full of kids. Couldn’t move the door forward, couldn’t move it back, had to take it down . . . unless, well, you couldn’t just leave them in there.”
    This was supposed to be a joke, but most people thought it would have been a great opportunity to shut the Herdmans up somewhere , even in a revolving door.
    It would have been a great opportunity, except that by then it wasn’t Herdmans in the door. It was eight different kids, including Charlie.
    “Why?” my father asked him. “Why would you follow the Herdmans anywhere, let alone into a revolving door?”
    Charlie shrugged and looked up at the ceiling and down at the floor and finally said he didn’t know. “It was just that they were all around,” he went on. “There were Herdmans in front of us and Herdmans in back of us, and then Ralph said, ‘Let’s see how many kids will fit in the door,’ and so . . . ” He shrugged again.
    The bank manager was mad because of his door, and the bank guard was mad because he picked the wrong thing to guard, but nobody blamed him. How could he know what the Herdmans were going to do? Most of the time, I don’t think even the Herdmans knew what they were going to do.
    I don’t think they planned to mix up the mice and the guinea pigs until they happened to see some guinea pigs, and I don’t think
    they decided to find some kids and shove them into a revolving door until they happened to see the door and a bunch of kids all at the same place at the same time.
    There probably wouldn’t have been any trouble at the pizza parlor either if Mr. Santoro hadn’t introduced a new variety— sardine pizza—and that wouldn’t have caused any trouble if Boomer Malone didn’t have to get rid of his guppies.
    Boomer started out with two guppies in a fishbowl, and by the next week he had about a hundred guppies in jars and bottles and bowls. Mrs. Malone told my mother that she even found guppies in ice cube trays.
    Boomer’s original idea had been to sell the guppies, but he finally had to pay Leroy Herdman fifty cents to take them away. According to Gladys, they were going to dump all the guppies into their bathtub and then charge kids a quarter to come and see
    the guppies go down the drain, all at once.
    “It won’t hurt them,” Gladys said. “They’ll just go wherever the water goes and swim around. They’ll like it.”
    Maybe so, but it never happened. Before they got the guppies home to the bathtub, Leroy and Claude and Gladys stopped in the pizza parlor, saw six sardine pizzas on the counter, and immediately swapped guppies for the sardines.
    Nobody ever did think that sardine pizza would be a success but, as Mr. Santoro said, “After that , sardine pizza didn’t have a chance.”
    The customers agreed. One man said he didn’t think he’d ever eat any kind of pizza again. “Wasn’t looking,” he said, “ . . . took a bite, and the next thing I knew there was half a guppie in my mustache.”
    So there really wasn’t any last straw, but by the time school finally started, so many
    people were so mad at the Herdmans for so many reasons that you knew something was going to happen.
    “It’s got to stop!” the mayor said . . . but nobody knew that “it” was going to be Halloween.

2
    I t
was
only natural for people to blame our principal, because Mr. Crabtree didn’t like Halloween in the first place. He didn’t want anyone to wear costumes to school or put up Halloween decorations or have homeroom parties, and every year he sent home a note that said Halloween would not be