At Least I Still Had My Candy

Free candy, costumes, friends, and a good time. See, back then you didn't need alcohol to have a fun time at a party. It was apple juice and fruit punch not mojitos or cosmos. My better Halloween memories are actually from a time when life was a tad simpler. When the only assignment you had due was an essay for your English teacher and where your pay for the week was based on whether you cleaned the dishes or not. Where no bills existed and headaches were evident. When life was a little easier.

I remember going out with friends all the time for Halloween. I don't want to lie and say we were saints roaming the streets at 1 am and I will admit we did have a few run ins or should I say run outs from the cops. The times were great and the friends even greater. At sixteen years of age we were still getting candy from out neighbors. It came down to the fact where it was a competition on who could get the most candy, similar to the kids who were practically one half our age.

One time, however, I will never forget it wasn't the same as the past years. Things were different and I could feel that things were going to change but at the moment I couldn't tell if it was for better or worst.

So the night started like every other October 31^st. I picked out a costume, which was merely whatever I could compile from my fathers closet, my closet and, dare I say it, my mother's closet. The costume was usually a sad excuse of anything yet to me I would be proud to say I made it. I then proceeded with meeting up with a few friends down the road. Right from there, as I said before, I could tell something was different, but it wasn't with my friends.

So we continue on our way with our plans, the candy competition, or whatever we called it at the time and things were going good. Today though unlike all the other Halloweens we decided to go in to the neighboring town, which at the time seemed like a fun plan. We could all honestly all say our town was getting boring and all the people practically knew us. The kids that never grew up.

So we stray across the road like a pack of lions looking for the nearest hunt, well not really. We just waited for the little green person-walking symbol to pop up and we proceeded to the next town. If I remember correctly that town practically did not have any lights what so ever. Say for a half-mile long road, the streetlight would be in the smack middle. And there would only be one.

Another thing that I didn't think about at the time was how different the two towns were. I'd like to say that my neighborhood was the better of the two. It just had a more comfortable feel to it and because of this difference the people from the two towns were opposed to each other. The high schools had a large influence on this. Considering football was a big part of peoples lives in the two towns if you went to one high school, you hated everyone at the other one.

This did not play in our favor because one of my friends was dressed as a football player with his football jersey from that season. Smart? No. Not at all.

So as we're walking down the street I see this black truck behind us. What scared me was that the truck was on, rolling towards us but it didn't have its headlights on. Maybe an electrical short? So we continue on our way and the truck starts to pick up speed and ironically so do we. We start practically sprinting with our candy; of course we can't leave our treasure! We round the corner and run for the main road. As we're sprinting I hear the faint sound of a hiss from behind us. Since we have a paint ball field by my house I've heard that sound plenty of times. I can actually hear these paint balls whizzing by us as well as crashing on the ground as we run. I suddenly hear my friend start screaming and I turn back and there's this bright green glow in the dark splat on his butt. I start laughing as I'm running cause all I see in front of me is this huge lime green radioactive looking splat on the back of his pants. After about ten minutes of running like lunatics we finally made it the main road. This time we didn't wait for the crossing light.

It was weird though because the chase vehicle stopped at the corner, flashed its headlights and turned around and kept driving. Kind of like a territorial thing. That I must say was the most interesting, scary and active Halloween I have ever had in my life. Was it fun? Yea of course. But the main thing was that I still had my butterfingers and that was all that mattered.