The stiff tube your father helped you make from yellow poster board doesn’t let you move normally. You have to take small steps down the sidewalk. The holes at the top cut into your armpits.

Just as the sun is setting, you wait for your friends at the edge of the woods, where you’ve all started the trick-or-treat route every year since you were five. This year, at thirteen, you’re finally allowed to go without parents.

A bark of laughter from the woods shatters the quiet, and then you hear the yells, curses, screams. It’s full dark in there already, like a black curtain hanging just off the sidewalk, where the cement turns to gravel trail, gravel to dirt and grass. You’ve been dared before, but you’ve never been brave enough to leave the sidewalk. Because of course you’ve heard the stories — the clown at the edge of the creek bank. Skin-peeled troll beneath the bridge. Green witches behind trees.

Your friends arrive in two separate cars. They step onto the street at the same time, all three in ragged jeans and black t-shirts. When she stops in front of you, Jessica slides her white hockey mask backward and looks you up and down.

“A crayon?” You catch the eye roll as she lowers the mask again. Lena wears rabbit ears, Brie cat ears, and that’s it for their costumes. Apparently, they planned this, some group chat you weren’t a part of.

You take off the yellow cone hat you spent a whole afternoon making, the one your mother fashioned with an elastic band to snap under your chin, and stuff it inside your treat bag. You see now that the canvas bag is wrong, too, with its orange jack-o’-lantern face on both sides. The girls all clutch wrinkled pillowcases in their fists.

Something erupts from the row of pines at the woods’ entrance, and all of you scream and run up the sidewalk, but only a few feet. You know you’re safe here, so you stop and watch the figure rocket into the purple sky, tatty black robe flapping around its outstretched, bony hands, which carry away a screeching, flailing boy.

Jessica spins away from you. “Let’s go,” she says, and starts up the sidewalk toward the first house on the left.

The owners are sitting behind a firepit in their driveway, and as you approach them, the woman leans forward to drop candy in your bags. She has short, red hair and crooked teeth. “Got another one,” she says. “You see?”

The man motions to the woods with his beer bottle. “Careful, girls. It’s wild out there.”

As you walk away, your friends examine their haul. “Damn miniature Snickers,” Brie says. “Is that all anyone gives out now?”

“I’ll take it,” Lena says.

“No trading.” You can tell Jessica just thought up this instruction, but she says it like it’s always been the rule.

Another scream cuts the air.

You gaze up at the sky, at the stars winking white, pure as snowflakes. “I thought they were going to do something about that.”

Jessica snorts out a laugh. “Like what? You think they can control the friggin monsters now?”

Brie stares into her candy bag. “I think that boy was Donna’s brother.”

“Oh.” Lena stops unwrapping her candy. “He was cute.”

Jessica is suddenly yards ahead and you all have to run to catch her at the next house. She rings the front bell and an old man in a flannel shirt opens the door. He grabs handfuls of candy from a green bowl and throws them into your bags. You’re last, and when he sees you, his mouth opens like a gash above his beard. “What the hell you supposed to be?” he says. He smells of onions.

“Crayon,” you say. And when he cups his ear with his hand, you say it again. Brie laughs from the driveway and you realize they’re going on without you.

The man laughs, his voice like a creaking door, and he gives you the candy. Then, he points a finger at you. He says quietly, “Run.”

You run. But it’s hard in the costume. As you move, you reach down and rip the posterboard so your legs are free and you can bolt across the pavement. By the time you catch up to your friends, your breath is coming in ragged gasps.

“Geez, chill out,” Jessica says. She slides her mask up. It holds her blonde curls back perfectly. She unwraps a piece of gum and pops it in her mouth as the four of you wind your way up the hill. The sounds from the woods grow quieter the farther away you get. This thought calms you. You all start giggling now, joking around, and it’s like it used to be those other years, when the woods seemed far away.

An hour later, your bag is satisfyingly heavy. But all around, there are signs something has changed. You can’t put your finger on it, some odd cast to the sky. It makes you want to go home and crawl beneath your covers. You’re grateful to follow the girls back to where you started, but then the woods are right there, and the closer you get, the louder the noise. Finally, it’s deafening.

Brie and Lena’s parents are parked already, and the girls wave goodbye as they pull away. But Jessica has to wait for her father to come. You tell her you’ll wait with her because your house is just across the street, and because you know she’ll be pissed if you don’t.

Jessica pops a bubble and licks it from her lips. “Think I’m scared?”

You both look toward the woods.

“I’d go in there,” she says. “Plenty of kids do. They come out with killer stories.”

You shake your head. “No one comes out.”

She snaps her gum. “Wanna go?” When you don’t respond, she says, “What’s the matter, crayon? Too yellow?”

She laughs, eyes squinted closed at her own lame joke, and just as she tips her head back, you see the shadow fall. She’s stepped onto the gravel, just inches off the sidewalk. When she feels herself being lifted, when her eyes fly open and cut from amusement to terror, she lunges for you.

You know you should reach out, but of course your legs don’t move right in your costume. It’s your first time after all, seeing this departure, this transformation. Anyway Jessica, you realize, has been leaving for a while now.

You do reach out, just before she’s gone, and pluck the pillowcase from her still warm fingers.

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