All Hallows' Eve by Vivian Vande Velde Page B

wet pavement made Marissa glad she wasn't driving.
    But JoLyn was confident and was doing a fine job. She had gotten them singing Christmas carols—since they couldn't find any decent radio stations, being still too far from Rochester, and since they didn't know any Halloween songs.

    Rodney had started, "Up on the Housetop," but he didn't really know the lyrics beyond that, and he was floundering. After checking that the road ahead of them was clear, JoLyn, still gripping the steering wheel, glanced over her shoulder into the backseat as she energetically sang the refrain, "Ho! Ho! Ho! Who wouldn't go?"
    In the front seat, Marissa saw the eighteen-wheeler ahead of them lose control on the slick road and begin to veer, then twist till it was sliding forward sideways, with their car aimed right at it.
    There seemed to be all the time in the world for her to tell JoLyn to look out, to step on the brake—but carefully so that they wouldn't skid, too. There seemed all the time in the world to slow down safely. But it must have been only a moment, for JoLyn, all unaware, was still preoccupied with Rodney, was still belting out the second, "Ho! Ho! Ho!"
    And then they hit the truck.

    Just over fifty-six years later, four months short of Marissa's seventy-fourth birthday, the staff at Hillcrest Home were discussing what to do with the old woman who had been in a coma ever since the car accident that had scrambled her brain and killed her four friends.

    As far as they could tell, she had no family, or at least no one had come to visit in the two decades the most senior of them had been working there. For some reason, Hillcrest in Rochester was overcrowded, while their sister facility had several empty beds.
    Since no one ever came to look in on her, and since she didn't know where she was, everyone agreed there could be no harm in sending her by air ambulance to Buffalo. A nice, short, safe trip.

When My Parents Come to Visit
    "When your parents get here, Matt," Nona tells me, "try to relax. Try not to let them get to you."

    "You, too," I say by way of encouragement.
    Yeah, right. Easier said than done. We both know that each of us will be ready to run from the room, screaming, before the night is done.
    Not that running from the room, screaming, will help.
    Which each of us knows so well that we both jump when the doorbell rings. Even though my parents never ring the bell. They just walk into my grandmother's house and start to spread cheer—spread it like an oil spill or a fungal infection.
    I glance at the wall clock on my way to the door. Eight fifty-five. This is early for my parents—my father, VP of Marketing for a big insurance firm, and my mother, the attorney, who announced when she was still in high school that she was going to become the youngest female judge in the city. But it's kind of late for trick-or-treaters—especially since I turned off the light by the front door about half an hour earlier.

    My parents always arrive promptly at nine o'clock. My father likes to say they're punctual. I like to say they're anal-retentive.
    I open the door and find a group of four kids: two guys and two girls. They look about my age, which is fifteen, which is way too old to be going door to door, extorting goodies from the neighbors, even if you like Halloween.
    I, personally, hate Halloween.
    Although they are dressed in just regular clothes—jeans and sweatshirts—one of the girls wears a set of wings, which I guess she figures qualifies as an angel, butterfly, or bumblebee costume, and the other girl has a witch hat with a sparse fringe of fluorescent green hair overlaying her own blond hair. One of the guys wears a football jersey, which may or may not be a costume, and the other has a T-shirt with I BELIEVE MICHAEL JACKSON IS INNOCENT on it, which
has
to be a costume, because nobody really believes Michael Jackson is innocent.
    They may well be classmates of mine, but my grandmother and I have just moved into this