#157. Trick-or-Treat (Friday, October 30, 1998)

What was your best day…of sharing a best day with someone else?

There’s only so much you can infer about someone from an eighteen-month friendship in third and fourth grade—especially when you haven’t even seen that former best friend since. But there was one subtle thing about Harry Liu (#113, #92) that, even then, seemed almost perfectly aligned with me.

We both seemed to just “know” the obvious and subtle things that made a day good or bad, and naturally built a little shared taxonomy around them.

No, there was no 1998 precursor of 100 Best Days from either of us.¹ But when a day went particularly well—or just stood out in one of a thousand possible ways—it earned a semi-permanent place in our shared vocabulary. We could refer to “that day,” and its nuances, emotional swings, and little details would be instantly understood by both of us.

Just like that night at McDonald’s (#113) or with The Incredible Machine (#99) or with the Pokémon Fossil Set (#92), this Friday had a regular place in the roster. So, even if most of the striking details have since disappeared, I owe it to him to reconstruct it as best I can—even the pointless parts.

In the days leading up, we were hard at work completing our “Halloween activity books”—basically a series of coloring pages and basic mazes and (even more basic) crosswords—to hand in to Ms. Watson on Friday. A boy and a girl would each be crowned the winner. The strange part was that there was no fixed set of pages: Ms. Watson had a lot of printouts, so we had to be selective on which ones to do, and then curate them in what we believed was a logical and aesthetically pleasing order. This third-grade project apparently had such exacting artistic standards that I got into a massive argument with my mom Thursday night over how disorganized mine was. Eventually we settled down, and she helped me assemble something respectable, with the witch-at-the-cauldron page as the obvious title page.

Before finding out the winners on Friday, though, we have a full-day Halloween party. The only costume I remember is Harry wearing a Slappy mask from Goosebumps. I don’t even think I wore a costume myself—or at least I can’t remember one—which would have made me extremely out of place in a late-’90s grade school.² In French class, we play Bingo using Halloween vocabulary. I miss the big prize because I try to be fancy and put “réglisse” (licorice) in a key square instead of “monstre.”

After lunch, we go to a legit haunted house that some older kids have put on. The thing has impressively high production value, at least from my third-grade vantage point, with eerie lighting, ghoulish sound effects, and scary creatures in every kind of costume—with the loudest (and therefore scariest) being a girl claiming she was Geri, who had left the Spice Girls five months earlier and had now “returned.” Later, amid a blur of Halloween partying I can no longer recall, I get called down to the office to give my side of a conflict between David and Tom, where one had apparently tried to poke the other’s eye out—even though I hadn’t seen it happen.³

Finally, the day draws to a close, and the time has come for Ms. Watson to announce the winners. And…

I win. Somehow, my Halloween curation is judged the best among the boys. For my victory, I get a ghost banner, some miscellaneous Halloween door prizes, and four coupons for McDonald’s. I give two to Harry, and we promise to go to McDonald’s together later in the year (leading to #113).

The full Halloween experience wraps up with the traditional trick-or-treating experience the next night—on actual Halloween—with Harry and a girl I never saw before or since. It’s my first time trick-or-treating with a friend, and this just elevates the day a few more levels higher in our shared memory. We pound the pavement hard, and by the end of it I have enough chocolate and candy to slowly eat away in my room for the next two full months.

I recall my parents did not ration the candy at all and let me just eat freely, which still makes me wonder what level of self-control let it last that long. Maybe the sheer variety helped. That Halloween was when I first encountered singles or pairs of most of the famous candy brands⁴: Starburst (my favorite, #69), Coffee Crisp, Crispy Crunch, Crunch, Crunchie (real creative naming), Mars, Reese’s, Hershey’s, Caramilk, Snickers, Aero, Whoppers, Chiclets, Nerds, Fruit Roll-Up, Fruit to Go. I’m definitely missing some.

A day Harry and I agreed was one of the best of our lives. Preserved through the rest of 1998, and far beyond.

If you’d forced us to make a list back then—maybe a less ambitious Top 25—I’m sure we could have produced some even stranger stories that have since been lost.
For the record, the few grade-school costumes I remember were basically just masks—Darth Maul from fourth grade onward, maybe with a generic black sheet once or twice.
Apparently I was treated as some kind of neutral arbiter in that class. I remember being called down for similar reasons one or two other times—and being equally unhelpful.
I’ll exclude Oh Henry!, Smarties, and Kit Kat because I’d already eaten plenty of all three. Harry was especially addicted to Kit Kat.