You walk with friends on Halloween night; the costume that you’re wearing looks like a cheap rip-off of Scooby-Doo and your friends all match with you. Shaggy on your left and Velma on your right. You feel like this year will be more fun than usual. It always is with friends, right?
Trick or treating is still fun, and you all are walking down neighborhood streets, hoping that you don’t all look like you’ve been to a sweat-fest when it’s time to go home. Passing kids dressed like fairies, Spiderman, and animals and adults dressed as clowns, and dozens of Spidermen.
The first house that you stop at is decently decorated. A little too many motion-activated witches which, let’s be honest, are funny the first two times and annoying otherwise. But the house seems like a good candy spot since kids are walking away from the house after spending some time at the door. Fred knocks on the door and when it’s opened, he’s greeted by an older woman wearing cat ears and a cat in her arms. She says nothing to you and your friends other than “Only take ONE” and offers a bowl full of those orange, marshmallow peanut treats. Since food is food and you’re not telling her “No Thanks”, you each grab one and walk off.
After a weird start to the night, you and the rest of The Mystery Gang hit a couple more houses and got some good stuff. Sour Patch Kids, Skittles, Halloween themed Reece’s. You hope this stash will last you until New Years.
But then, as soon as the wish came, it left when you tripped over the tail that was poorly sewn into the back of your costume, it rips off under your foot, and you fall on the ground. Your entire bag spills into the rain gutter in front of you.
Upset, you get up, and brush your sweaty hands on your pants and keep on walking. Since your friends have their own stash to worry about, they don’t offer you a lot. Since they’re your friends you get a couple mini-Hershey bars and a pack of jellybeans that you suspect have been in the original owner’s kitchen drawer since Easter.
The joy of candy has left you and you decide that it’s time to leave the sugar part of the night and get to the part where random people scream at you in their sheet covered yards. Home-made haunted houses are both cringy and sometimes horrifying.
You leave this street and walk to the one next to it, hoping to find something better than the last. Your friend dressed as Shaggy points out a big house that is open for trick or treaters to come in and to quote the sign “be scared out of their skins”. Your group walks around a dad trying to get his kid dressed like a dinosaur to get up off the floor and stop crying, but the power of a cranky six-year-old is too much for him. He eventually grabs him and carries him off, but the kid still isn’t too happy about that. You wonder if he met the marshmallow peanut lady yet.
The haunted house was a joke. Literally, it was just people making fun of Florida. Someone dressed as the sun and jump-scared your group yelling “SUNBURN!!”. There were at least three kids dressed as mosquitos who buzzed and followed you the entire time. And the rest of the “terror” was to poke fun on how alligator and bug infested Florida was.
After the night was over, the thought that you wouldn’t look too bad that you had at the beginning of the night perishes. You get home to see how wrecked your costume is (more than it already was), the handful of candy that you acquired is melting, and as expected, you’re dripping with sweat. Well, you think, Better than last year at least.
Cody Castro//Staff Writer
