The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford Page B

of Charlie Edison or Teddy Dunden.
    Halloween was close, our favorite holiday because it carriednone of the pain-in-the-ass holiness of Christmas and still there was free candy. The excitement of it crowded all problems to the side. The prowler, Charlie, schoolwork—everything was overwhelmed by hours of decision as to what we would be for that one night, something or someone who wasn’t us, but who we wished to be, which I supposed ended up being us in some way. I could already taste the candy corn and feel my teeth aching. My father had given me a dollar, and with it I’d bought a molded plastic skeleton mask that smelled like fresh BO and made my cheeks sweat.
    At the time the only thought I had about that leering bone face was that it was cool as hell, but maybe, in the back of my mind, I was thinking of all those eyes out there trying to look into me, and it was a good disguise because it let them think they were seeing deep under my skin even though it was only an illusion. I showed the mask to Jim, and he told me, “This is the last year you can wear a costume. You’re getting too old. Next year you’ll have to go as a bum.” All the older kids went around trick-or-treating as bums—a little charcoal on the face and some ripped-up old clothes.
    Mary decided she would be the jockey Willie Shoemaker. She modeled her outfit for Jim and me one night. It consisted of baggy pants tucked into a pair of white go-go boots, a baseball cap, a patchwork shirt, and a piece of thin curtain rod for a jockey’s whip. She walked past us once and then looked over her shoulder. In the high nasal voice of a TV horse-racing announcer, she said, “And they’re off….” We clapped for her, but the second she turned away again, Jim raised his eyebrows and whispered, “And it’s Cabbage by a head.”
    Only two days before the blessed event, Krapp threw a wet blanket on my daydreams of roaming the neighborhood by moonlight, gathering, door-to-door, a Santa sack of candy. He turned the joyous sparks of my imagination to smoke by assigning a major report that was to be handed in the day afterHalloween. Each of us in the class was given a different country, and we had to write a five-page report about it. Krapp presented me with Greece, as if he were dropping a steaming turd into my open Halloween sack.
    I should have gotten started that afternoon once school let out, but instead I just sat in my room staring out the window. When Jim got home from wrestling, he came into my room and found me still sitting there like a zombie. I told him about the report.
    â€œYou’re going to be doing it on Halloween if you don’t get started,” he said. “Here’s what you do: Tomorrow, right after school, ride down to the library. Get the G volume of the encyclopedia, open it to Greece, and just copy what they have there. Write big, but not too big or he’ll be onto you. If it doesn’t look like there’s enough to fill five pages, add words to the sentences. If the sentence says, ‘The population of Greece is one million,’ instead write something like, ‘There are approximately one million Greeks in Greece. As you can see, there are many, many Grecians.’ You get it? Use long words like ‘approximately’ and say stuff more than once in different ways.”
    â€œKrapp warned us about plagiarism, though,” I said.
    Jim made a face. “What’s he gonna do, go read the encyclopedia for every paper?”
    The next afternoon I was in the public library copying from the G volume. With the exception of the fact that I learned that Greeks ate goat cheese, none of the information in the book got into my head, as I had become merely a writing machine, scribbling down one word after the next. The further I got into the report, the harder it was to concentrate. My mind wandered for long stretches at a time, and I stared at the design of the