“Going door to door collecting candy from neighbors. It’s a whole thing. Going house to house, collecting as much as you can.” I start carving out the second eye.
Khatak’s brow furrows. “You demanded food from strangers?”
“Sort of? It’s tradition. You knock on doors and say ‘trick or treat,’ and people give you candy.”
“And if they refuse?”
I pause mid-carve, grinning at the memory. “Well, that’s where the ‘trick’ part comes in.”
He’s stopped scooping entirely now, watching me with rapt attention.
“So there was this one house—Mr. Peterson’s place. Every year, he’d turn off all his lights and pretend he wasn’t home, even though everyone knew he was just being cheap.” I carve out the mouth, making it a wide, crooked smile. “Anyway, Mara and I had this route planned out—all the houses that gave the good candy. Full-size chocolate bars, the fancy stuff. And then we came upon Mr. Peterson’s place… By this point, we’d filled our pillowcases with candy and our heads with… ideas.”
“What kind of ideas?”
“Harmless ones! Mostly. We started with Mr. Peterson’s house—we filled his fountain with bubble bath. You should have seen the foam. It was like a soap mountain.”
I cackle at the memory. It served him right; he never cleaned the fountain, and it smelled terrible even from the street.
“Then we hit Mrs. Chen’s place with fake spiders in her mailbox because she’d given us raisins. Raisins! On Halloween! That’s like sacrilege.”
Khatak’s eyes widen slightly, but he doesn’t interrupt.
“Though I’ll admit, we might have gotten a little carried away. We TP’d at least five houses that night.”
I’m smiling fully now, remembering the thrill of it.
“You…” Khatak leans closer, his voice dropping low. His breath is warm against my ear, sending an unexpected shiver down my spine.
“You urinated on their homes?”
I freeze. Blink once. Twice.
Then I burst out laughing so hard I nearly drop my carving knife. Pumpkin guts slide off my hands as I double over, gasping for breath.
“What? No! Oh my god, no!” I manage between giggles. “Not pee. TP! It stands for toilet paper! You throw rolls of toilet paper into trees. It unravels and hangs there like streamers! Annoying when it rains and makes a mess, but not any real property damage.”
Khatak pulls back, his skin darkening to that deep burgundy flush that I’m starting to recognize. “Oh. I thought… my translator suggested…”
“That we went around peeing on people’s houses?” I’m still laughing, wiping tears from my eyes with the back of my wrist. “What kind of vandalism would that even be? ‘Sorry about your lawn, Mr. Peterson!’”
He covers his face with one hand, but I can see his shoulders shaking. He’s laughing too, even through his embarrassment.
“In my defense,” he says, his voice muffled behind his palm, “human customs are very confusing.”
“Okay, that’s fair.” I grin at him. “But no. No peeing. Just toilet paper. Much less… biological.”
Khatak looks at me sidelong, curiosity making his eyes bright. “And your parents permitted this… tricking?”
“Oh, they didn’t know. That was the beauty of it.” I grin at him. “We thought we’d gotten away with it too until Mrs.Peterson caught us putting fake tombstones in her yard. She just stood there on her porch, arms crossed, watching us. We thought she was a statue, so she damn near scared us to death when she started cackling like a mad woman and chasing us.”
“You were punished?”
“That’s the best part. She started laughing. Turns out, she’d been wanting to teach her husband a lesson about Halloween spirit for years. She told us we did a good job, gave us each a king-size candy bar, and sent us home.”
I look up from my pumpkin to find Khatak staring at me with this expression I can’t quite read. Not shock anymore. Something else.
“So, come on.” I lean forward, resting my chin on my hand, getting pumpkin guts on my face and not caring. “Surely you’ve got some interesting stories from your childhood. Haven’t you ever been a bit wicked?”
