“You’re supposed to say ‘trick or treat,’” I said primly, then immediately wanted to kick myself. Two cute boys come to my door and the first thing out of my mouth is, “You’re supposed to say ‘trick or treat’”? How uncool was I?
“It must be like a costume, Lal.” Neel winked while licking syrup off his fingers. “No one wears boring clothes like that for real.”
An uncomfortable heat rushed over my face. “What are you, the fashion police?”
Even though I amazed myself by coming up with a smart answer in time, the tall boy’s statement stung. Here was another rich kid with fancy clothes, I thought, making me feel bad about what I could afford to wear. And what about them—Lal and Neel? Weren’t those the Bengali words for red and blue? And they were dressed according to their names? How fashion forward was that?
When Neel reached out to pick up more sweets, I slapped his hand away. Hard.
“Yo, easy, Princess!” The way he said it, all sarcastic and dragged out, made me think he was making fun of me. Obviously, I was the furthest thing from a princess in his mind.
I felt a pricking behind my eyes and I blinked the moisture away like crazy. Then, as if the atmosphere was reflecting my mood, the air became filled with a putrid, garbage-y smell. What was that?
I turned my back on Neel and his mocking eyes, and appealed to the handsome Lal. “Am I ready? Am I ready for what?” I put my hand on the door.
But the boy in red didn’t answer. Instead, he took out his sword—which suddenly didn’t look like a costume sword at all. It looked shiny. And sharp. Before I could react, he grabbed my wrist and tried to yank me out of the house toward him.
Now, if I wasn’t as streetwise as I am (I’ve been to Manhattan five times and ridden the subway twice), I might have made the mistake of thinking this was some kind of dream come true. But I’m a Jersey girl, and Jersey girls are no dummies. I knew perfectly well that no matter how handsome someone is, you can’t let them start grabbing at you. Seriously, I’ve seen a lot of made-for-TV movies in my time, and those serial killers are always super good-looking.
“Get off me!” I said in my loudest anti-attacker voice. Every muscle and nerve in my body felt taut—ready to fight. I shook him off, and pulled myself back into the house. I weighed the serving tray in my hand, ready to clobber him in his gorgeous head if I needed to.
“That, my dear lady,” Lal finally said. “Are you ready for that?” He pointed at something behind me.
It was then that I realized that Lal wasn’t the one I had to worry about.
Someone in a snarling monster costume had slammed through the half-open kitchen door. The creature was at least ten feet tall, with warty green-black skin, enormous horns and fangs, and beady eyes that squinted as if it couldn’t see very well in the light. It drooled a stream of thick saliva on Ma’s clean floor. The costume was freakishly good. Too good. My hand went loose and a bunch of sweets slid to the floor. Neel grabbed the falling tray before it crashed down.
My heart hammered so loudly in my ears, Lal’s next words came from miles away.
“It’s a rakkhosh, my lady! Come for tricks, I fear, not treats!”
A rakkhosh. A rakkhosh? Not somebody in a costume, but a real demon—straight out of one of Baba’s folktales? Right here, in my kitchen, in Parsippany, New Jersey?
I tried to scream, but the room had gone all wickety-wockety, like one of those paintings of melting clocks. My bones were molasses.
The monster crashed blindly around the kitchen, ripping off the refrigerator door with its razor-sharp nails, crushing the cabinets with its huge feet. It was kind of hunched over, but its horns gouged long holes in the ceiling, and plaster flaked down on its already beady eyes.
“My parents told me not to let a rakkhosh in the house,” I heard myself squeak.
The demon was tossing back dinner plates like they were pieces of popcorn. It then started chomping on the still-plugged-in toaster, making sparks fly everywhere.
“Hate to break it to you, but it’s too late now!” Neel took out his sword too, but he looked less worried than his brother. He filled his pockets with the sweets that I’d dropped on the floor.
I barely had time to grab my birthday card, with the money and map, before the brothers shoved me out of the house. The last thing I saw before they slammed the front door behind them was the demon emptying my fruit-flavored gummy vitamins into its ginormous mouth.
Finally, I shrieked.
“Oh, man, my mom is going to kill me!”
Things got seriously weirder after that. I ran out of the house, my feet barely shoved into my untied boots. The first thing I saw were two winged horses standing in a corner of the front lawn, snuffling at the few lone strands of grass Baba hadn’t killed. There was a medium-sized white one with snow-colored wings and a larger, dangerous-looking black one with feathers the color of a raven. Their wings were muscular and wide, sprouting right out where you’d imagine their shoulders would be. Both horses pawed the ground near Baba’s snake ditch. They whinnied nervously. Apparently, they didn’t like snakes either.
Some little trick-or-treaters on the sidewalk gaped at the winged horses, giggling and pointing, but their parents ignored the animals—as if the horses had some kind of grown-ups-can’t-see-me spell on them. Even as the adults sauntered by with their little ghosties, firefighters, and goblins in hand, a group of high schoolers dressed as punk-zombie-rockers stopped in front of the house to squint at the winged horses, blinking as if they weren’t really sure what they were looking at.
“Wicked horse costume, man!” a boy with mascara and a nose ring shouted as we came rushing out of the house. “Hey, who’s in there?” he yelled into the white horse’s nose.
“Unhand our horses, sir!” Lal yelled as Nose Ring tried to pull one of the midnight feathers off the stallion’s wings.
The pack of costumed boys broke out laughing. “Check out the loser! Look at that getup! Fresh off the boat!”
Lal stopped in front of the boys, growing as red as his turban. “You uncouth hyenas!”
“Enough already with the posh accent!” I thought I heard Neel mutter. In a louder voice, he called, “Let it go, Lal!” Neel and I hadn’t stopped running, and now he shoved me onto the back of the black horse, which snorted and shifted under me. “We’ve got more important things to worry about right now!”
The crashing sounds coming from the house were getting louder. For a second, I thought about how upset Ma would be at the mess when she came home. But then I remembered I had no idea where she and Baba were. Had the rakkhosh taken them before I got there? What was it that Ma wrote? Something about a protective spell being broken on my birthday? Was all this really happening? My stomach clenched, and I felt my tear ducts doing something suspicious, until I reminded myself: Blubbering is for babies.