II

I was never so scared in my life.

Halloween’s supposed to be scary, but I was monster-roller-coaster terrified. I felt like I was going to pee myself, and all I was doing was walking down the street. Little kids in costumes passed me going the other way, with their parents behind them. Everybody stared at me. At least that’s how it felt. The dads looked extra close. One of them whistled when he saw me, and as he went by he said something to Uncle Teddy, who was walking a few steps behind me.

“What did he say?”

“He said I’m lucky to have such a pretty niece.”

“Really?”

“More or less. Look, if this bothers you, we can go back.”

“No way,” I said.

“Sweetie, you’re shivering.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s fantastic.”

I was the world’s sluttiest vampire. That was the bright idea Uncle Teddy got after we fooled around. I had on a black cape, with a purple satin lining, over what Uncle Teddy called a Victorian bustier with black and purple stripes and matching panties that left a gap across my navel. It would have been a lot more eye-catching on a girl with actual tits, but Uncle Teddy said it was perfect for me. I was also wearing black boots he found for me somewhere that came up to my thighs, which were bare. At least nobody would recognize my face. I had on white pancake, with dark circles under my eyes and purple lipstick. I’d painted my fingernails purple, too — everything matched the bustier. I had plastic fangs and fake blood dribbling from the corners of my mouth. My hair is long and blond, and instead of dyeing it or covering it with a wig, we teased it and made it scraggly and put some mascara in it to make it look dirty. Uncle Teddy said it made me look more ghoulish. He was right. I was a total ghoul.

I was also totally exposed. All I really had on was the boots and cape. The bustier and the panties were even more daring than they looked, because they were made out of paint.

My uncle is a freaking genius, and I swear, inside that repressed Catholic mama’s boy there’s a horny twelve-year-old just like me. Before we went out trick-or-treating, he took me down to his basement — “Step into my la-BOR-a-tory,” he said in a strange voice, flicking his tongue at me — and told me to take off all my clothes. I happily obliged, since he’d already seen me like that, while he switched on the air compressor he paints his model planes with. It’s got a thin blue hose with a nozzle at the end where he can screw in bottles of paint. He says it’s better than buying spray-paint in cans. Anyway, he sprayed me black and purple from my neck to my pussy. The rest — like the lace around the bra cups, a purple bow between my titties, and the panty straps over my hips — he did with brushes. It took like two hours. It would have taken less, except we got distracted when he had me sit on some newspapers on the floor and spread my legs so he could spray in there. It felt a little too good, and I told him so, so he unscrewed the paint bottle and shot a jet of air into my pearl for a while.

“Give my creation life!” he said, watching my pussy.

Like I said, he’s weird.

The first test was getting past Grandma, who was sitting in the living room, watching “Jeopardy!” I tried to cover up till we got outside, but the cape wasn’t big enough to hide my body completely, and of course, she wanted me to see the whole costume before we went out.

Uncle Teddy, who was behind me, reached around and pulled the cape open like a curtain.

“Ecce vampira,” he said.

My knees almost gave out. I mean, I like showing off, but this was my grandmother, for heaven’s sake.

But all she said was, “Oh, Ted, she looks like she’s wearing underwear.”

“That’s what she wanted,” he said.

“Well, she looks like a little ... I don’t know what.”

She knew what, all right. The phrase was “little whore.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s dark out.”

“How did you find something like that to fit her?” she asked.

“I made it myself,” Uncle Teddy said, not quite lying. “We saw something like it online, but they only had adult sizes.”

“Well, go then,” she said, putting us out of her mind and looking back at the TV. “Just be careful.”

I was still shaking when we got outside.

“I can’t believe you let her look!” I said.

“That shows it works,” he said. “Everybody’s so shocked at how skimpy it is, nobody notices what it’s made of.”

We walked around the block while I worked up my courage. It was a damp, windy night, perfect for Halloween. The rush of the wind in the treetops was thrilling, and I loved the way it filled the cape and went up my legs and around my bare ass. But inside, I was all knotted up.

We passed some more of the little trick-or-treaters, and finally Uncle Teddy stopped in front of a house on a corner.

“Here’s your big chance, Kid,” he said.

“Can’t we wait for some more kids to show up?”

“Nope. You go alone. I’ll wait here.”

He lifted the cape off my shoulders, so it hung down my back. My titties pointed into the wind like a pair of sniffing dogs.

“Okay, here I go,” I said.

I patted his crotch for luck — yeah, he was big and stiff in there — and started up the walk. The house was all done up for Halloween. There were styrofoam tombstones in the yard, and a dummy hanging from a gallows by the neck, with a green spotlight on him. The front door was open, but it was dark inside, except for a jack-o’-lantern that seemed to be floating inside the storm door. There was fog on the ground, too, spraying out of an oversized version of Uncle Teddy’s compressor, and sounds — organ music and screams and witches laughing — from speakers hidden somewhere.

Uncle Teddy says the wonderful thing about Halloween is there’s no way to do it wrong. You can be as over the top as you want, and nobody thinks it’s too much, the way they do at Christmas. He says nobody ever says, “Let’s put the Hallow back in Halloween.” That’s what I was thinking as I went up the front steps of the house. I was so nervous, and it was getting so hard to breathe, that I had to pull myself up by the railing, and before I could knock on the storm-door, a voice that seemed to come from everywhere boomed out, “STATE YOUR BUSINESS!”

“Trick or treat?” I squeaked out.

“WHAT!?”

“Trick or treat!”

“ENTER!”

I looked back for Uncle Teddy, but the green spotlight was in my eyes.