Halloween

Halloween Tess Lennon­Dorn

Halloween is a short story about reluctantly going to a haunted house, despite hating to be scared, in an effort to fit in with new friends from college.

I don’t like being scared. So the times in my life that I’ve agreed to do something scary, it was because I was trying to fit in or impress someone. It’s never been worth it. Once was at U of I, when I agreed to go to a haunted house with my new friends who I knew would judge me if I declined, and another time was when I agree to watch “Quarantined” with this bipolar buddhist that I had the hots for.

The haunted house was in an old church. You walk into this church, and it’s completely silent. It’s empty and dark. You walk up the stairs into the main room where there’s pews and the altar. You walk down the altar, taking light and nervous steps forward on the dirty red carpet and suddenly these figures jump out at you from the pews. Then you walk into this side room that leads to the basement. You walk down the rickety winding staircase of church basement. It’s dark and there’s loose light bulbs on the floor so you can barely see anything. It’s crammed in with bookshelves full of papers going all the way up to the low ceiling.

Suddenly, as you’re quivering through the path in the basement, this guy jumps out with a chainsaw. I scream, and start running as fast as I can. He chases after me. And as I run, scared out of my mind, my heart pounding against my chest, I think, ‘Why am I trying so hard? Why do I have to let a stranger chase me around with a chainsaw just to feel like I’m socially acceptable? To prove to myself and my Big Ten friends that I’m not a total hippy homeschool pussy? Why can’t I just become friends with people who don’t like haunted houses? I mean, honestly at the end of the day I am kind of a hippy homeschool pussy. And they’re going to find that out eventually anyway.”

And then again, as I laid on my bed next to the bipolar buddhist, both of us nineteen, not in school, I thought, “He totally doesn’t want to fuck me. And no movie I watch with him is going to change that. And yet, here we are. Watching people give each other rabies in an isolated mansion, until the last of the survivors is on the floor, slowly crawling toward the exit, when they are swiftly grabbed by the ankle and yanked into the abyss by this gnarling slimy rabid monster.”

I think sometimes grown women do the same thing as me. Them dressing in slutty costumes is their version of watching Quarantined or going into that haunted house. Like they just do it because they think they’re supposed to want to, and they want people to think that they want to. But really, what they probably want on Halloween, what we all really want on Halloween, is to be curled up in bed with a glass of wine watching “Gilmore Girls”.