Chapter 1: Making an Impression

1 Making an Impression
Skeletons blanketed the school. They scaled the brick walls. Peeked into windows. Hung off the roof. One even stood on top of the building, its arms raised high as though declaring itself king of the mountain. But it wasn’t these ten-foot-tall monstrosities that set my heart racing. It was the swarming mass of ninjas and vampires and superheroes that carpeted the school’s front steps.

Perhaps Mom had been right. Maybe I should have worn a costume. My T-shirt and shorts were as out of place here as a fart in a perfume factory.

More than anything, I wanted to run. To hide. To sprout a pair of wings and fly away. Instead, I gave myself a quick pep talk as I weaved through the students, pushed open the heavy front door, and forced my feet to step inside.

Where everything—the walls, the lockers, even the floor—was a revolting shade of pumpkin orange. The only things that weren’t orange were the massive black bats dangling from the ceiling and the thick spiderwebs colonizing every corner.

The school office was right inside the door, exactly where Mom said it would be, and I gladly turned away from the nightmare of orange to peer inside the room. The Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz was there, standing behind a long counter. A long orange counter.

She smiled and motioned me inside with a bony green finger. “You must be Caleb Fisher, our newest sixth grader! Welcome to Samhain Intermediate School. I’m Ms. Heks, the school secretary.”

As I crossed the room, Ms. Heks’s forehead creased. And creased. And creased some more. Soon she was half witch, half Klingon.

“Is something wrong?” I asked. Had I spilled orange juice down my shirt? Left my fly open? Grown a third eye?

“Nothing is wrong, exactly, but didn’t your mom tell you to dress up?”

Duh. Of course that’s what was wrong. My outfit. The witch would undoubtedly have been happier if I had grown a third eye.

“She told me, but…” My voice trailed off. I probably shouldn’t admit I’d burst out laughing when Mom suggested the idea. “I didn’t listen. At my old school nobody past the fourth grade ever wore a costume to school.”

And even then it was only on Halloween. Not on September 8, the stinking first day of school.

“You’ll soon learn that things are a little different here in Samhain, Caleb.”

A little different? Talk about an understatement!

My old neighborhood in Los Angeles hadn’t looked as though a pumpkin-vomiting giant had spewed over every porch, step, and lawn in town.

The green space in front of the bank hadn’t been peppered with crumbling, moss-covered tombstones.

The dentist’s office didn’t have a flashy advertisement in the front window touting permanent vampire fangs and werewolf teeth.

And the office at my last school didn’t have a collection of animal skulls decorating the windowsill, a candy dish shaped like a cauldron, or a fiftyish-year-old woman dressed up as a witch serving as the school secretary.

“I wonder what we should do with you today, though,” Ms. Heks said, and my throat squeezed. What they should do with me? Were non-costume-wearers suspended from school? Assigned permanent hall monitor duty? Chained up in some cold, dank dungeon buried miles under the school?

“Too bad we cleared out the lost and found when school ended in the spring,” the witch grumbled as she rifled through drawers and shuffled around towering stacks of paper. Eventually she cheered. “I found something! Here you go.”

From her expression, you’d think she was offering me tickets to the World Series, not a dusty headband with two glittery pink cat ears on top.

“Thanks, but I’ll be okay without a costume today.”

“I don’t know.” Ms. Heks gnawed at her lower lip like it was a chunk of beef jerky. “Are you sure?”

I didn’t feel sure about anything, but I nodded anyway.

Ms. Heks reluctantly set the cat ears back down. “Okay, but I’ll leave these right here, in case you change your mind. Here’s your class schedule.”

She handed me a piece of paper covered in room numbers and teacher names. The thing might as well have been written in hieroglyphs for all the sense it made. I had no idea where to find room 20B. Or who Mr. Blaidd was.

I was starting to think that getting tossed into a dank dungeon might not be so bad after all when a girl skipped into the room. She wore tiny pink ballerina slippers and a dress covered in blue and purple sequins. Massive sparkly wings seemed to grow right out of her back. Her black hair was cut into what my mom would call a pixie cut. She was the World’s Most Perfect Fairy. Even her height fit the bill. I would have bet a hundred bucks—even though I didn’t have a hundred bucks—that she was barely over four feet tall.

“Are you Caleb?” the girl asked. She didn’t wait for me to answer before she was talking again. “I’m Tai. I volunteered to show you around this morning. It looks like you already have your schedule, so let’s go!”

She led me into the now-packed hallway.

“You’re super brave to show up without a costume, you know,” Tai said as she looked me over. “Some people will give you a hard time, but I find it refreshing. If I didn’t love dressing up so much, I’d no-costume it right along with you.”

Unfortunately, Ms. Heks and Tai weren’t the only ones to take note of my lack of costume. Everybody we passed stared my way. Hushed whispers and murmurs of “new kid” reverberated through the hallways. Before long my palms were sweating so much they could have passed as slug skating rinks.

We’d almost made it to Tai’s first objective, my locker, when THUMP. A hooded figure dressed all in black leapt directly into my path. My gut twisted painfully as I realized who it was: the grim reaper!

His skeletal face, half-hidden in shadow, let out a thunderous roar as he brandished his scythe. The vicious, curved blade had to be at least two feet long, and it was hoisted high in the air, poised to reap my soul.

My hands flew up to cover my face as I shrieked and stumbled backward. I had just enough time to register that the scythe was plastic before I was falling, falling, falling through the air.

Time slowed down as heads turned. Eyes widened. Mouths fell open.

Then I crashed to the ground with a loud, painful thud as the hallway exploded with laughter.

I couldn’t believe it. Had I really just screamed bloody murder and fallen over in the middle of the hallway? At my brand-new school? On the very first day of the school year?

Yes. Yes, I had.

I prayed for a humongous sinkhole to open up and swallow me whole.

But the hideous orange flooring didn’t so much as buckle.