Halloween

Halloween is a turning point in Willowdean Dickson’s developing relationship with Mitch Lewis: a holiday she expects to dislike becomes an evening of play, recognition, and an intimate moment that clarifies her uncertainty. Costumes offer Mitch a temporary escape from the failures and routines by which he thinks he is judged, but the kiss that follows exposes a divide between the excitement of the night and Willowdean’s actual feelings.

Background and Expectations

Halloween carries little uncomplicated pleasure for Willowdean. Outside school parties, her mother rarely took her trick-or-treating; the exception was church “harvest parties,” which she understands as Halloween parties under another name. Their costumes were restricted to biblical characters. For girls, the available roles seemed especially narrow: Eve, Esther, the Virgin Mary, or a prostitute. The memory makes dressing up less an open invitation to invent a self than another occasion shaped by limits on what a girl can be.

When Ron asks the staff to wear costumes for the elementary school PTA’s trunk-or-treat party in the parking lot, Willowdean is unenthusiastic. Her costume options are meager: she has only the Betty half of a Flintstones costume she and Ellen Dryver wore a few years earlier. Ron, already dressed as Zorro with a plastic sword, anticipates that the others may arrive without costumes and brings a cardboard box of borrowed hats from the church drama department. The improvised supplies establish the evening’s modest, communal scale: nobody needs a polished costume for the party to begin.

The Trunk-or-Treat Night

Mitch’s presence changes Willowdean’s response to the event. Her feelings swing between wanting him near and wanting him gone; at one point she registers both that he is crowding her and that he is not close enough. When Mitch’s costume is challenged by the suggestion that he looks like a fast-food employee or a candy striper, Willowdean accepts the invitation to let him prove otherwise. Her mixed reaction does not resolve into simple confidence, but it lets her participate in the evening rather than dismissing it in advance.

The trick-or-treating produces an encounter that turns the costume game into an act of generosity. At one house, a woman in a bathrobe answers the door with wet hair wrapped in a towel. Mitch holds out his pillowcase and asks for candy; after a moment of apparent disorientation, the woman returns with a bowl and pours half of it into his bag. Later, he and Willowdean sit on the curb with their candy at their feet. It is the first night that year when the breeze makes autumn seem close, and the contrast between the season’s cool air and Willowdean’s southern surroundings gives the pause a particular, physical immediacy.

Costumes and Recognition

Mitch explains why the night matters to him through the way a child sees him. The child saw Indiana Jones, not the person who had made mistakes in the previous night’s game or the guy who played video games all day. The costume has not changed those facts; it has changed which facts are visible to someone else. For a moment, Mitch can inhabit an identity defined by adventure rather than by a recent failure or an ordinary habit. Halloween’s disguise becomes less a concealment than a chance to be encountered differently.

That possibility sits in contrast with Willowdean’s earlier experience of costume as restriction. The church parties narrowed her choices to a small set of gendered biblical roles, while Mitch’s Indiana Jones costume gives a child a vivid, affirmative identity to recognize. The difference is not that one costume is elaborate and another improvised: Ron’s box of borrowed hats and the half-costume Willowdean has available make the night deliberately makeshift. What matters is the space the disguise opens between a person and other people’s assumptions.

The Kiss and Its Aftermath

The curbside exchange leads into a kiss. Mitch draws Willowdean’s hands away from her face, then brushes his lips against hers and curls an arm around her waist. The kiss is tentative rather than fully assured: their mouths are open, but they do not use their tongues, and his touch trembles. Willowdean experiences both terror and exhilaration in the moment, yet recognizes that she is not actually terrified. The expected feeling is missing. She concludes that the moment is a lie—not because the kiss did not happen, but because the emotion she believes she is supposed to feel does not match her own.

That distinction makes Halloween consequential beyond its initial fun. Costumes let Mitch step outside the identity attached to his mistakes; intimacy, by contrast, cannot be made truthful by playing a part. The night brings Willowdean physically close to Mitch while revealing an emotional distance she cannot dismiss. In the car afterward, she texts her mother to say she will be home late and finds a message from Bo Larson saying he is glad she is back. The two boys’ place in her life is not resolved by the Halloween kiss; the juxtaposition instead keeps her divided attention visible.

Later Echoes and Significance

Halloween returns later through objects Willowdean reuses. Preparing her talent costume for the pageant, she searches her room and finds the flapper headband she wore on Halloween. She pairs it with the black dress from Lucy’s funeral and borrows her mother’s black satin gloves, making the headband a small link between the holiday’s makeshift dressing-up and a later, public performance. The reuse does not erase the different circumstances: a night out with Mitch and a pageant talent costume serve different purposes, but the same accessory carries a trace of the earlier occasion into the new one.

When Willowdean later tells Ellen about the events that have unsettled her, Halloween is part of a wider account that includes Mitch, the dance, work at Harpy’s, and Bo. Recalling the kiss alongside those other experiences places it within an ongoing effort to understand her relationships rather than treating it as a self-contained romantic triumph. Halloween’s significance therefore rests on a double reversal: Willowdean finds the holiday more enjoyable than she expected, but its intimate climax does not confirm the feelings she thought a kiss should produce. The night makes room for a different identity for Mitch and a more honest recognition of Willowdean’s own uncertainty.