The Best Halloween Ever Read Online Free PDF

sweatshirt. Not too good.
    Of course he might be the
only
fake ape in a sweatshirt. So far I had heard about kids who were going to be rock stars, and kids who were going to be aliens, and some superheroes, and a human fly, but no apes.
    Joanne McCoy was going to be Imogene Herdman. “Why not?” Joanne said. “They aren’t going to be there.”
    Charlie said the same thing when I told him about Boomer’s offer to be half of the lion if Cecil changed his mind.
    “Why would Cecil change his mind?” Charlie asked.
    “You know what he said ...if the Herdmans come to school on Halloween he doesn’t want to be inside a slipcover.”
    “But they aren’t coming,” Charlie said. “They all said so. They won’t be there. Everybody knows that.”
    Mrs. Hazelwood wanted to make sure. “I certainly hope we’re going to see you in costume, Imogene,” she said on Halloween morning. This was a big lie—Mrs. Hazelwood didn’t want to see Imogene at all—so she probably had her fingers crossed behind her back.
    “We can’t come,” Imogene said. “Our mother won’t let us.”
    Imogene would have to cross her fingers and her feet and her toes and her tonsils to cover
that
lie. Her mother probably didn’t even know there
was
a Woodrow Wilson Halloween party.
    If Mrs. Herdman didn’t hang around the house much, she didn’t hang around the school at all … and she probably thought PTA stood for Put Trash Away, like the signs on the trash barrels all over town.
    Mrs. Hazelwood looked relieved anyway, and she didn’t even bother to say “Oh, that’s too bad,” which would have been the normal teacher thing to say if it was anybody but a Herdman.
    “Oh, honestly!” Alice muttered. “Their mother won’t let them! What place could be safer than Woodrow Wilson School tonight?”
    Imogene—nose-to-nose with Alice—gave her a long, steady, squinchy-eyed Herdman look. “Any place will be safer than Woodrow Wilson School tonight,” she said, and then, poking Alice in the stomach with each word, “any … other … place.”
    Alice gulped and turned pale—and crosseyed, from having Imogene right in her face—but she managed to squeak out that the PTA and Mr. Crabtree and her mother would all make sure that everything would be perfectly safe. “You’ll see!” she said.
    “No,” Imogene said … poke … poke …
“you’ll
see.”
    Well. News about this spread from class to class in the halls and the lunchroom, and by the end of the day it was all anybody could talk about.
    Did Imogene know something mysterious
    that no one else knew? Did all the Herdmans know it, and was that the real reason they were going to stay away? And what did they know?
    And, most of all, what was going to happen, tonight, at Woodrow Wilson School?

7
    W hen I got home Charlie was already there, which was surprising, and he was all upset, which wasn’t surprising.
    “Something’s going to happen tonight!” he said.
    “Well,” I said, “Halloween’s going to happen, just like it always does on October thirty-first.”
    “But the Herdmans—,” he began.
    “They aren’t even going to be there,” I reminded him, “so what could they do?”
    Actually they could do a lot. History was full of things that happened after they left—kids in the revolving door; their cat in a washing machine at the Laundromat; half-drowned turkeys at the turkey farm.
    I didn’t know what they could do at Woodrow Wilson School on Halloween night, but I did know that they were Herdmans, after all, and I had seen Imogene’s face outside the door and heard her saying, “Herdman-free?”
    Still, I knew Charlie really wanted to go to the Halloween party and be half of a lion in peace. Besides, how did I know what would happen … or might happen?
    So I said, “Don’t worry about it,” and he looked relieved.
    He was home early, he said, because “ … Miss Seaworthy let us out early, but we’re not supposed to tell anyone. She had us leave two or