Fiction: October

If only I'd known. It was October. The air was thick with clichés as the cool night breeze nipped at our faces. Hormones pumped through our skinny pubescent veins as we filled the night with our footsteps. The click-click of sassy high heels—the sound of sophistication! Gleaming off-white teeth bounced light against the sky, our grins rivaling the moon. And the moon! I glanced upwards, nudged, gestured—it was full; staring down on us, reveling in our nostalgia as we broke into giggles at obscure inside jokes. The glowing yellowish orb above us was an old friend—the only one, it seemed, that would stay with us when we were thrust into adulthood in May and left only with our memories. As commencement drew nearer, we began to live for moments like this. It was October. Two days prior to Halloween, which had, as kismet would have it, fallen on a Monday. As seniors, weekdays were reserved for burying our noses in thick college-level textbooks or frantically filling out applications for our futures, so we, undeterred, moved our festivities to Saturday. We’d spent all evening getting ready, huddled in the hall bathroom, painting our faces in colors that did not appear in nature; and picking out garments that would dishearten our mothers, with a bit of lace here and a touch of skin there. And as we stepped precariously into shoes that pinched our painted toes, we knew no one but us could understand the glitz and glamour of that autumn evening. It was October. Young ladies our age from across the county were stumbling drunkenly out of family-owned sedans or hanging across boys they’d never care for in sobriety. We recognized a few of them, in face rather than form as their hips ground against the pelvises of faceless males. Requisite puffs of marijuana smoke floated in illicit clouds around the room. This, we thought, as we looked around, was the essence of high school. “A Costume Bash”, the invitation had read as it was shoved into our hands after school one day. The girls, it seemed, had come up with inventive costumes—supermodels, demons, fairies—while most of the boys sported ski masks and eye patches paired with clothes they’d be seen in on any given day. We had chosen a different approach. We’d found discount animal ear headbands and Velcro tails, and slunk into our revealing ensembles and heels. A kitty cat, a bunny, and a teddy bear. Ladies of the wild, we called ourselves. And for at least one night, we were free to be exactly that. It was October. We had linked arms and vowed to stay together all night, though this obligation crumbled with each interested young man. We forgot the rules our mothers taught us about parties, the rules we rolled our eyes at and blamed on overprotection. We forgot about leaving drinks unattended, or being alone with strangers, or losing the people you came with. We forgot that not every smile was to be trusted. We forgot to keep our cellular phones ready in event of an emergency. We forgot. And in this memory lapse, we became victims, two of ourselves, and one of depravity. We became tiny disasters. It was October, just like the one in picture books, with crisp air and bright orange leaves that danced to the ground. That night, we were leaves, dry and limp, falling down, down, down, as the moon embraced us with empathy. If only we'd known.