Trick-or-Treat Cute - Chapter 2
Jack sighed and pushed one of the beers across to Drew. “Okay, here’s the thing. I thought I’d gotten over Chloe, but being back here—even with so many changes—I still miss her like crazy.” That first part wasn’t entirely true. He’d thrown himself so deeply into work in his five years in Chicago, he barely had a social life outside of business functions. It was less that he thought he’d gotten over her and more that he drowned the memory of her in his career.
Drew grunted and took a swallow of beer. “Saw her at the library last month,” he commented with what seemed like careful neutrality.
How did she look? Was she wearing a wedding ring? Did she ask after me? He took a sip to keep the questions bottled inside him.
“Guess she still loves Halloween, because she was putting up some sort of kids’ book display for it. Really going all out with the realistic spiderwebs and shit.” Drew shuddered and Jack smiled in spite of himself. Spiders were still his old friend’s kryptonite, then.
“I’m sure no real spiders were employed in the creation of a library display,” he said, moving over to the L-shaped sofa on the living room side of the space and dropping down into it. Drew followed, sighing heavily.
“Yeah, I’ll stick with physical therapy. No spiders and no little kids.” Drew’s specialty was rehabbing elite athletes and he was, apparently, really good at it. Jack wasn’t surprised. It ticked all his old friend’s boxes: athletic, empathetic, challenging, encouraging.
He leaned forward and clinked his bottle against Drew’s. “Well, here’s to sticking to your strengths.” He peered around the room, depressed again by the sheer volume of cardboard he’d have to empty, flatten, then drag outside on trash day. When was trash day? So much to learn when you moved to a new place. He’d never really experienced a full move before he went to Chicago. College dorm living didn’t really count, after all.
“You still crazy for Halloween?” Drew asked.
He nodded, swallowing beer and his feelings. It had been their holiday—his and Chloe’s. They’d always gone all out, putting together the most epic costumes and then committing to those characters completely. Chloe was goofy and intense in equal measure and he’d never known anyone who lit him up inside the way she did. Once, he was sure they were each other’s perfect match. “I haven’t gotten any candy yet, but I don’t think it’ll be a good year for trick or treat here, since half the development is still under construction,” he said, hating how mopey his own voice sounded. He really liked trick or treat in his condo building in Chicago. The kids were so damn cute, and a lot of their costumes were really creative.
“That thing you used to go to. The Pirate Lounge party? That’s still going on.”
Jack paused, the bottle partway to his lips. “It is?”
“Yeah. I mean, it paused for a couple of years when everything was closed during lockdown, but it’s definitely back. I saw an ad on a bus just the other day.”
Jack lifted his hips and dug his phone out of his back pocket, typing with one thumb. “Shit, yeah. It is still going on. And they still have tickets available. Want to go with me?”
His friend shook his big head. “I love you, man, but I’m not going to be your date for a Halloween dance.”
Jack rolled his eyes. “You know I don’t mean it like that. Come on. If you’re there, I won’t be thinking about Chloe every five minutes. Or maybe I will. I don’t know. But if I’m back, I’ve got to start doing some of the stuff I enjoyed with her back in the day. Because I can’t just not do a bunch of stuff I loved, you know?”
His friend studied his beer bottle. “I don’t have a costume,” he said. At that moment, Jack knew he won.
“Just wear your scrubs. Maybe cut them short and go as a sexy physical therapist.” Then he ducked, laughing, as Drew lobbed a pillow at his head.
***
When Chloe got home from work, she pulled out her makeup kit and the wig she thrifted that looked like Sally’s trademark curtain of red hair. She pulled back her own dark hair and cleaned her face, then started in with the pale blue foundation with a hint of green she purchased from a theatrical supplier. She blended some pale highlighter into strategic places on her brow and cheekbones, did some contouring, then contemplated her eyes. The last time she did a test run on this, she hadn’t gone big enough, so this time she went for large white circles with some shading to create depth.
She grinned. It was utterly unfinished, but she already looked like she had Sally’s huge, saucerlike eyes.
A crosshatch of stitches from the corners of her mouth and across her brow and neck, ruby red lipstick creating a Cupid’s-bow mouth, and false eyelashes and…wow. This was really going to work. She smoothed on the wig, not yet bothering with trying to contain her own hair, and regarded her face in the mirror.
And squealed.
She was Sally.
Her phone rang and she grabbed it from the vanity. “Stephen!” she said when the video connected. There was a beat when her brother just looked at her from the little screen, then he cracked up.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“My Sally Halloween makeup.”
“Oh, that’s right. You have that couples costume with your boyfriend tonight.”
A sour feeling at the back of Chloe’s throat ruined the moment. “No. No boyfriend, no couple’s costume. Just me.”She hadn’t realized when they’d been together quite how perfect Jack was for her. Nobody felt about Halloween the way she did. The few men she’d dated since him had thought her wanting to take Halloween seriously was a little cringey and weird. But Jack never had. He’d loved everything about it as much as she had.
Stephen’s brows drew together, his expression anguished. “Dude. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because he dumped me today over the phone while I was at work?” Chloe rolled her eyes. The false eyelashes felt weird now.
Her brother made a disgusted sound in his throat. “Fuck. I’m sorry. Want me to kick his ass?”
She snorted. “What, all the way from LA? I don’t think so. Anyway, he’s not worth it. We hadn’t even been dating for two months. Did I tell you his name is really Ralph?”
Her brother snorted. “Did he think he was too cool for his own name?”
“Who knows? Good riddance. I’m putting on my glad rags—literally, in the case of Sally—and going to the dance and I’ll have fun without him.”
“You sure you don’t want to come home? That place hasn’t been so good to you all the time.”
“Like Los Angeles was so wonderful? Nah. For the most part, I like what I’ve got going on here.” The D.C. suburbs suited her fine. She wasn’t made for big city living. Jack leaving her behind was proof of that.
“That’s the spirit. Want some pointers on improving that look?”
“Shit yeah.” She wouldn’t ask, but if her Hollywood makeup artist brother was going to offer to help her kick this costume’s ass, she was not going to say no. She ejected her toothbrush from the holder that was a permanent ledge in the ceramic tile of her bathroom and balanced the phone on it so he could see her and she could see him.
“Okay, let me pull up some reference photos…” Her brother’s brow furrowed in concentration for a few moments as he searched, then he apparently switched back to the video call app and he studied her face. “First of all, you can go deeper with the shading around the eye socket. Darker color on the interior, blend it out.”
“That won’t look too Elvira?” she asked, thinking of the Funkos scattered like bowling pins on her desk this afternoon.
“No. If you’re nervous, test it out in light layers on one side, but trust me. It’ll just make your eyes look bigger. Next, Sally doesn’t have eyebrows, but I can still see yours, so here’s what you do…”
***
“What are you even doing?” Drew asked as Jack ripped open the tape on yet another box in the guest bedroom.
It had to be here. He’d left his friend downstairs to finish his beer, saying he’d be right back and—oops, he’d been ransacking cardboard boxes for over half an hour. “Halloween costume,” he grunted.
“You’re going to go as…what? Sexy Cardboard Chaos?” Drew quipped, and sipped from what looked like a fresh beer. Jack was about to cry foul when Drew extended a full bottle to him with his other hand.
Jack sat back on his haunches and wiped his sweaty brow. “No. Though I’d love to see what that looked like. I have a costume I put together a few years ago and never had the stones to actually wear. Stuff I went to in Chicago always had a kind of corporate angle, you know? I never wanted to go all out.”
“You mean you didn’t want to out yourself as the king of the dorks,” Drew mumbled into his beer. But it was an affectionate kind of mumble. “What did you go as instead?”
“Cereal killer.”
Drew blinked. “Like John Wayne Gacy or Jeffrey Dahmer?”
Jack shook his head, laughing. “No, it was a pun costume. I just wore a T-shirt with colorful cereal pieces stuck to it and carried two plastic knives. Cereal killer, get it?”
Drew looked at him blankly. “And that was better than whatever you’re tearing open half your belongings to find?”
Jack rubbed his chin, looking over the unsexy cardboard chaos he’d created. “No. It was just more acceptable in terms of being a consultant. Conservative.” Chloe would have hated it. Low-effort, done to death, not even spooky. Total costume fail.
“You sure you want to stay in this job?” his friend asked.
Jack shot him a toothy grin. “Yeah. Because now that I’ve proven myself, I have a reputation and more authority and I can have a little more latitude.” He snapped his fingers, rising to his feet. “I think I know where it is.” He strode out, heading for his own room. It was hanging in the second bedroom closet in a garment bag in Chicago, so maybe the movers thought it went with his clothes.
“Do you need an audience for this, or can I go home?” Drew complained as he entered the master bedroom. “Hey, whoa. This is really nice,” he said, pausing in the doorway and taking a swig of his beer.
“Thanks,” Jack said, still distracted. He tore off a couple of more strips of tape and did a cursory inspection of those boxes. No garment bag. But in the third box…
“What’s this?” he crowed, drawing it out and holding it high.
***
Half an hour later, Chloe was looking at the most perfect Sally makeup job she’d ever seen, even on YouTube. “That’s it, girl,” her brother said from his perch on the toothbrush holder. “You do have a wig cap, though, right?”
“What do you think I am, an amateur?” she asked. “Stay right there.” She dashed out to her bedroom while her brother groused that yes, she was the definition of amateur and then she dashed back with the mesh cap and showed it to him.
“Don’t show. Do.”
“Fine,” she said, carefully removing the wig and laying it down on the vanity. Brushing out her dark hair, she braided it while her brother made sarcastic comments. Then she pinned it up and smoothed the cap over the whole thing. Finally, she carefully pulled the wig on, tugging it down in the front.
“How secure is it?” Stephen asked.
She swished her head from side to side, then nodded and wiggled. “Pretty good. I don’t think it needs any pins.”
“Okay. You need to take it off before you put on the rest of your costume, but for the most part, that looks solid to me.”
“Really?” Nerves began to twang as she contemplated going to the party by herself.
“For sure. You got this, kiddo.”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t call me kiddo.”
“Just making sure you were paying attention. Okay, I gotta jet. I have an A-list actress going to a party tonight who doesn’t have half the skills you just exhibited, and is going to need me to make her look extra spooky-beautiful.”
“Hope she’s paying you the big bucks,” Chloe said.
“All of them. Love ya.”
“Love you too. Thanks for your help.”
“Yeah—and take that wig off before you put on the rest of your costume!” he managed to wedge in before she cut the call off.
“As if I wouldn’t,” she muttered, lifting it carefully off while she walked out of her bathroom and laying it down on the bed. She opened her closet, revealing the rest of the Sally costume. A patchwork dress, a sheer, long-sleeve leotard in pale blue-green that she’d decorated with yet more faux-stitching on the sleeves and chest. Tights that had the same treatment. Gloves that matched. Black-and-white-striped socks and black ankle boots.
“I am going to be Sally,” she said, smoothing on the tights. “I am going to have a good time.” On went the leotard. “I am going to dance and laugh.” Carefully, so as not to disturb her makeup, she dropped the loose dress over her head. She pulled on the socks and shoes, carefully redonned her wig, and smoothed on the gloves before turning to the full-length mirror in the corner of her room.
A fizzy thrill went up her spine at what she saw. She blinked slowly, her eyelashes fanning coquettishly. She smiled, her red Cupid’s bow made spooky by the stitching stretching from the corners of her mouth.
“I am Sally and tonight is going to be magical,” she informed her reflection.