The Impossible Knife of Memory(49)

“Not for me,” I said on my way out the door. “But thanks.”

After school on Thursday, we parked in a secluded place and made out until the alarm on his phone went off. We adjusted our clothes and buckled up.

“Do you know what you’re going to wear tomorrow?”

he asked as he started the car.

A simple question, right? Maybe it should have raised a flag or something, but I was still swooning, because daaaang that boy could kiss. He could have asked me anything, like what’s the specific gravity of honey or what kind of bra did Marie Antoinette wear, and I would not have found it odd.

“Hayley?” He waved his hand in front of my eyes. “I said, do you know what you’re wearing tomorrow?”

I blinked, still not getting it. “No, not yet.”

“I know, right?” he replied.

Had I been less swoony it might have struck me as weird that he was asking about my wardrobe, but a block from my house we parked again and got tangled up in a good-bye kiss and I forgot all about it.

My Chinese homework, that was partly to blame, too.

I’d started it, but then I had to go online to look something up and one thing led to another and suddenly I found myself gaming with Finn in a distant galaxy. Totally pwnd him. His manly pride took offense at that and so we had to play again. And again. We would have played until dawn— me winning, him losing—except that I got a text from Sasha, who had become my drill partner in Chinese, asking me if the test was just going to cover chapter four or everything since the beginning of the year.

I don’t know what came over me. You could blame the kissing, I guess. His saliva had infected me with a strain of Finnegan Ramos Conventional Success Syndrome. I stopped gaming and stayed up past three trying to memorize eight weeks’ worth of Chinese characters.

I woke up with my face on the keyboard, my phone screaming inches away from my nose.

“I’ve been waiting out here for ten minutes,” Finn’s voice said. “Are you okay?”

I hadn’t changed into pj’s the night before, so I didn’t have to waste any time getting dressed. I grabbed my stuff, staggered out the front door, down the street and into the Acclaim, which smelled more like burning oil than ever.

My first glance at Finn made me wonder if I were still asleep.

“Like it?” he asked, pulling away from the curb.

I was speechless.

He pointed to the cardboard cutout of an old-fashioned pipe sitting on the dashboard. “Can’t you guess who I am?”

“What’s on your head?”

“A deerstalker,” he said. “It’s a detective hat. This,” he plucked at the ugly gray thing he was wearing over his shoulders, “is a cape. I should have on fancier shoes but they don’t fit anymore. Looks good, huh?”

“I just woke up, Finn. You’re confusing me. What’s going on?”

“Elementary, my dear Kincain,” he said in a lousy British accent. “It’s Halloween!”

*

He filled me in on the details as we drove (almost reaching the speed limit for several thrill-filled moments), but I didn’t believe him. My mistake.

Our principal was dressed as a spider. The secretaries were all convicts. The janitors had transformed themselves into Luigi clones. All of the teachers were in costumes. The cafeteria ladies, too: beehive hairdos and poodle skirts from the 1950s.

Gracie was wearing a T-shirt that said disfun on the front. Topher’s T-shirt said ctional. They were as keyed up as six-year-old kids at a birthday party with unlimited candy and cupcakes.

“I don’t understand,” I said again. “Why is the staff more dressed up than the kids?”

“Because they get to make the rules,” Gracie said.

“Because the students all wanted to be inappropriate,” Topher said.

“It’s a game,” explained Sherlock Finn Holmes. “A game afoot! The challenge: to walk the thin line of costuming that separates what the administration has labeled—”

All three of them made bunny-ear quotation marks with their fingers: “Distractions!”

“And those that are merely, ahem . . .” Sherlock stared at me.

“Lame,” finished Gracie. “Your ignorance is mind-boggling. What time should we pick you up?”

“Who is ‘we’ and why are ‘we’ picking me up?” I asked.

“Trick or treating, duh!”

The entire day was surreal. Ms. Rogak taught English dressed as the Bride of Frankenstein. My Chinese teacher was a ham-and-cheese sandwich. She canceled the test and let us watch a movie. My forensic science teacher was dressed as a crime scene, dusted with fingerprint powder, sprayed with Luminol, and wrapped in yellow police tape. As the day wore on, I found myself liking it, actually loving it. Halloween—the day when we could pretend to be whatever we wanted—seemed to be letting everyone be who they really were. Wearing face paint and masks gave everyone in school permission to drop the zombie act. Even the kids who were hinting at actual zombification by the way they walked and moaned seemed more human to me than ever before.

When I was called down to the guidance office at the end of last period, I took my sweet time getting there so I could admire the decorations that made the music hall look like the palace of Versailles. (The chorus teacher and band instructor had dressed as Mozart and Scarlatti.) If every day could be like this, I bet test scores would go through the roof.