After the People Lights Have Gone Off Read Free Page B

enough.
    I fell through the trees, finally got to the little cliff we’d used to drop our action figures from to test our bandanna parachutes, and I splashed my dinner all down that scar of white rock.
    When my eyes could see again, what they saw was the east end of Saginaw Street, right before it hits St. Francis.
    Five years ago, this was the best candy street of all. It was all old people, who only got to see kids on Halloween, pretty much. Better, they’d forget you almost as soon as you left, so you could go back to that same well again and again. Sometimes we’d trade masks, mix and match costumes, but I don’t think they’d have busted us anyway. Or cared.
    Saginaw Street was still doing good business, too. Was still the place to be if you hated your teeth.
    I stood up to go back to the graveyard, and, if I’d just done that half a second sooner, I’d have never seen the shepherd’s crook cresting over the Frankensteins and ghost heads. It was navigating through them, moving down the sidewalk.
    Bo Peep.
    Grace.
    I smiled, nodded to myself, pinched the hateful menthol back up to my lips.
    There she was, all right. Her second-grade robot holding her hand. Cars moving slow and heavy alongside her—all the parents who were driving their kids instead of walking them. That’s cheating, though. If you want the candy, you’ve got to earn it.
    I waved my arms as big as I could then remembered one of them was glowing. I balanced my cigarette on a rock behind me then stood up again, waving bigger, and yelling.
    By now Grace’s second-grader was moving up a sidewalk, his silver tubed arms and legs making him look like he was going to topple over with every step.
    And she heard me, somehow.
    Because of love, I think.
    At first it was only her head angled over, like being sure, but then she turned around, her lungs filling with hope.
    I jumped, jumped, but what she fixed on instead of me was one of the parents creeping past.
    She leaned forward as if she hadn’t heard something all the way and the dad behind the wheel leaned out the open passenger window, holding out a white bow, the kind that goes on a good Bo Peep costume.
    Grace looked back to her second-grade robot, still cued up for some grandparent candy, and the way she looked I could tell she was timing it. That she felt she had to, because what was this dad going to do with a Bo Peep bow, right?
    Right.
    She lifted the front of her big skirt, kind of ran out to the car, and, because I was a good almost-boyfriend, I kept my eye on her second-grade robot for her, watched him stiff-arm his plastic pumpkin up to Miss Massey, who used to teach English, and always tied verses of poetry to her candy.
    Once upon a time the poem on my candy had told me the fields were white, the fields were long, the fields were waiting, and I’d always wanted to ask her for the rest of it, but never had the nerve.
    By the time I looked back to Grace, she was in the passenger seat of the car, and it was pulling away slowly, no rush at all. Just melting back into the parade.
    “No,” I said—what about the robot?—and started to step forward but my foot stabbed into open space and I had to balance back hard, my arms windmilling in space.
    I fell back, ran along the cliff for the next break in the trees, the last piece of road before the highway opened up, and I got there just in time for the driver to look right through the bushes at me, and nod.
    It was the dad from the movie, the one Grace had wished into our world.
    He smiled his winning smile, his trustworthy smile, his smile with the sharp, sharp corners, and that was the last time anybody ever saw Grace Lynn Andrews, except as a photo on the news for two states in every direction, and it was the last cigarette I ever smoked, too, and it was the last year Halloween was the same for any of us.
    It was also three months to the night before I crept out my window one Wednesday after lights out, and filled one of my mom’s good