Free The Best Halloween Ever by Barbara Robinson Page B

an acceptable excuse for tardiness or late homework or headaches or stomachaches or failure to stay awake in class or anything else.
    One year Eugene Preston went trick-or-treating without a flashlight, fell over the Johannesons’ birdbath, and broke his ankle, and Eugene was scared to come to school.
    He even had a dream about it. “Mr. Crabtree took away my crutch,” he said, “and he made me hop everywhere—up and down the stairs and outdoors for recess—and he made me play basketball. In my dream I kept telling him that I had a broken ankle, and he just kept hollering, ‘No excuse! No excuse!’“
    “Well, that’s just silly,” my mother said when Charlie told her about Eugene’s dream. “Mr. Crabtree didn’t say anything about broken bones. He was just saying don’t stay up past your bedtime and don’t forget your schoolwork and don’t eat a lot of candy and get sick. What’s wrong with that?”
    Nothing, if you were a mother … but these were the exact things that Charlie and I expected to do on Halloween. Actually, these were the exact things we
did
do on
    Halloween, except for eating too much candy. We never ended up with too much candy and neither did anyone else, thanks to the Herdmans.
    They were around every corner and behind every tree on Halloween. They didn’t dress up—they didn’t have to, because they looked like Halloween all the time. Sometimes kids even dressed up like them. They didn’t go trick-or-treating—but they didn’t have to do that either as long as everyone else did, collecting candy and gum and money for the Herdmans to take away from them.
    Of course this meant that they had more time than the rest of us. They didn’t have to pick out or invent costumes, try them on, and cut holes to see out of. They didn’t have to be polite to the neighbors and say thank you and only take one trick-or-treat candy. They didn’t have to stay on their own block and come in at 8:30 … so they were free to run all over town, starting fires and breaking windows and moving street signs and stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down.
    Although they had done all these things at one time or another, they had never done all of them at once, which was about the only good thing you could say for them.
    “Well, at least they didn’t set fire to the hospital,” people would say if they set fire to something else, and when they ran off with the Rotary Club cake (it had “Rotary Club—Happy Halloween!” spelled out in M&M’s, and it was supposed to serve eighty-five people so I don’t know what they ate instead), everybody said “Well, at least it was a cake they stole. It wasn’t somebody’s life savings.”
    Last year they jimmied open the cages at the Animal Rescue and let all the dogs and cats out. The dogs and cats didn’t know it was Halloween, or why everybody had on sheets and rubber noses and aluminum foil underwear … and kids didn’t know where all the dogs and cats came from, so there was a lot of barking and yelling and crying.
    Naturally there were parents trying to find their kids and police trying to get things under control, and the dog officer trying to collect whatever animals he could get hold of, along with the Fire Rescue truck and paramedics with dog-bite medicine.
    There wasn’t anything for the paramedics to do because nobody got bitten and nobody got scratched, but they did have to rescue Alice Wendleken.
    Like everything else in Alice’s life, her Halloween costume always had to be better than everyone else’s—more original and unusual, or more beautiful and sparkly. When Alice said “Trick or treat!” she wanted people to gasp at the wonder of her, and maybe applaud.
    That year she was a hot dog, with the bun and the mustard and all. At the last minute she thought it would be more realistic if she smelled like a hot dog, so she cut one up into little pieces and glued them inside the bun part of her costume.
    It was realistic all right. Once the