“For a moment, I thought you were barefoot, Grace,” I told my sister and pointed to her flesh-colored flats. Grace was sitting on a boulder, eating as she usually did. For some reason, it was the first time I’d noticed how squirrelly she was. I was almost surprised that a bushy tail wasn’t attached to her purple jeans. 

“Inside my shoes, I’m barefoot,” she said and nibbled on her butter biscuit and shrugged her shoulders. “I always am.”

“But you’re wearing socks.”

“Yeah, and underneath of those, I’m barefoot.”

“That’s like saying you’re all bones!”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, ‘cause under your clothes, there’s skin. And under your skin, there’s fat. And under your fat, there’s muscle. Then under that there are your bones. So, underneath it all, you’re bony.”

“Yeah,” Grace muttered, as she plucked crumbs out of the wrinkles in her jeans, “Now you’ve got it.” She stood up and shook herself around, then wandered to the nearest trashcan to throw away her biscuit wrapper.

It was Halloween morning, just two days before Grace’s eighteenth birthday. But at an age when most people celebrated their transition from childhood to adulthood, Grace was still skipping from tree to tree, stashing her acorns away in the soil and not remembering where she buried them. Except that she buried sweets, not acorns.

Nosy neighbors said she was still a little girl but Grace was more like a small, disoriented animal that never imagined a world greater than her burrow. In fact, days like Halloween baffled her; the thought of knocking door-to-door across the city made her realize just how big Richmond was compared to her own backyard, a place she rarely left since she dropped out of high school at sixteen. That thought scared her.

“So what are we doing tonight, Cat?” she asked me when she retreated to her mossy boulder.

“Tonight’s Halloween, Grace.”

She cocked her head the way a squirrel does before accepting food from your generous fingertips. “Um…oh.”

“We’re taking Jason and Mary trick-or-treating,” I explained, referring to our cousins who lived a few blocks away from us, and careful not to mention the word ‘candy.’ Still Grace appeared confused. Her eyes flittered. “We’ve been doing it the past couple of years, remember?”

Her head moved but whatever she did, it wasn’t quite a nod.

“You’re going to dress up as a fairy,” I continued, “and I’m going as a supermodel zombie, remember?”

“Oh, yeah,” Grace said, “A fairy. Mom bought my wings yesterday.”

“That’s right.”

“Hmm, Halloween. That’s the day where we get lots of can—“

I sternly cut her off. “Grace.”

“What?”

“There’s no more room in the yard.”

“Of course there’s more room! I made a map, Cat,” she said and jumped up to fish the piece of paper out of her pocket, “I can show you where every piece of candy in the yard is.” Grace shoved a sheet of notebook paper before me, one I never knew existed. I was shocked that she was that organized. Like everything about Grace, the map smelled sweet and looked syrupy. She had probably drenched it in one of her cotton candy scented perfumes. 

“Please, Grace, I don’t want to see it.”

Grace drooped a little upon hearing this. “It’s a very nice map. I color-coded it and everything. I can show you where all the chocolates are and all the fruit candies and all the bubble gums and everything.”

I didn’t respond to Grace for a moment. An ambulance blared in the distance, screaming, screaming, screaming until its wails disappeared completely. Sometimes I wondered when someone would truck Grace away and finally treat her for a nervous breakdown caused by her mental disorder.

“Grace,” I started once the silence between us had grown long enough, “Let’s try to make this a fun night for Jason and Mary, okay? Let them take home all the candy. We’ll come home afterwards and watch ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ or something.”

Now Grace was quiet. She hopped off of her boulder and bent down, turning her back to me. I stopped and watched, even though I knew what she was going to do. The sight was hardly new. Grace kneeled and pulled up a clump of grass so she could sniff the roots. I don’t know why she always sniffed the roots but she had ever since she was a kid, since the first day of preschool to be exact. Then she plucked a piece of silver foil from her newly created hole. She tore the foil open to expose a pocket of something sand-like.

Even from the five or so feet away that I stood, I could taste the old chocolate in my mouth. “Don’t eat that, Grace! That stuff’s ancient. It probably has worms and weird germs in it.”

She shot me sort of a haughty glance. “I buried it only a month ago, if what I wrote down on the map is right.”

“Yeah, but that’s…unsanitary. I mean…” I wanted to say more but when she dumped the grainy chocolate into her mouth, I was speechless. I pictured a shower of bacteria pouring down her throat and into her stomach. In the next instance, I snatched the map out of her hand, almost involuntarily.

“Hey!” she shouted, “Give that back!”

But I was already at the other end of the yard, making my way onto the deck and into the house. I slid shut the deck door behind me with a loud phewbuck. By the time I got to the living room, Grace was pounding on the glass door and yelling, probably insulting me.

I had to get rid of the map. If I had known she had it, I would’ve destroyed it much sooner. I scanned the room and in a second my eyes landed on the fireplace. Of course. 

Mom had set up an old-fashioned witch’s cauldron and was heating up pumpkin bisque in celebration of Halloween. I had to be careful not to disturb the bisque or else I’d have a lot of explaining to do. Instead of haphazardly throwing the map into the fire, I carefully fed it into the flames licking the bottom of the caldron. The fire ate it up so quickly that I almost wondered if I’d dreamt it.

Once the fire had totally consumed the map, almost on cue a furious knocking came from the front door. It had to be Grace. I pushed the front picture window’s curtain aside a hair and, surely, my sister stood on the doorstep, rabid. I had to let her in. It was her own house after all and she didn’t have any other place to go. Besides, I reasoned, if I left her outside too long, she would only creep to the backyard and begin digging up rotten candies. 

“Hi, Grace,” I chirped when I opened the door.

“Where’s the map?”

“Why don’t you come in?” I asked, obviously ignoring her question.

But she stayed put. “I want my map.”

“Grace, come inside.”

“Where’s my map?”

“We need to get dressed now, okay?”

“I don’t care about that!” she cried and stomped her feet. “I WANT MY MAP!”

“Well, that doesn’t matter. We need to get dressed and pick up Jason and Mary so we can drive them to Willow Lawn shopping center.”

“They can wait.”

“No, they can’t. They’re little kids and it’s Halloween. Aunt June and Uncle Ken are both at work and then they’re going to a grown-up party so we have to---”

Grace wouldn’t listen. She pushed past me, into the living room, and starting tossing things aside. She turned over pillows and crawled to peek beneath the chairs and sofas and tables. She even examined the table lamps and opened up books on the shelves near the kitchen. In the meantime, I remained in the doorway. 

Right after Grace grabbed a French dictionary and shook it, she froze. Her gaze locked on the fireplace.

“Cat,” she whispered and stepped toward the cauldron. She was breathing hard, almost panting. 

“Grace, get into your costume.”

“Your burnt it, didn’t you? You burnt the map!”

“We need to pick up Mary and Jason in an hour.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Would you put your costume on now, please?”

“Now how am I supposed to know where all my candy is?”

Instead of replying, I headed upstairs to get dressed. Grace didn’t follow. I could hear her mousy sobs from my mother’s bathroom, where I seized a tube of lipstick. I puckered up my lips and painted them bright red. Then I dusted my eyelids with purple powder and applied fake eyelashes. Before long, Brooke Shields was staring back at me from the mirror. But I had to communicate ‘zombie model’ somehow so I drew on some fake scars and spread a greenish foundation over my face.

By the time I began teasing my hair, Grace’s sobs had ended or at least the loud ones had. She may have still been crying softly. I slipped into a scratchy sequined dress, squeezed into violet pumps, and scooped up her costume. As I walked down the stairs, I prayed that she hadn’t escaped to the backyard.

Grace was lying down on the sofa, all miserable. She refused to say anything to me and would play mute for the rest of the evening. She took the fairy costume from my hands and shamelessly undressed before me. But I wasn’t going to stick around for the pissy burlesque act so I went on a search for my cell phone and car keys. When I found them on the dining room table, I wrote a note reminding Mom that Grace, Jason, and Mary, and I were going trick-or-treating in the West part of the city. Then I returned to the living room sofa. Grace had transformed herself into a fairy, all gold and glittery.

“Good, we’re ready to go,” I said, “I’ll go warm up the car.”

Grace trailed after me to the family van. She sat in the back instead of shotgun; she did that when she was mad. I started the ignition and the car rumbled. I turned on the radio to break the tension between Grace and me. We didn’t exchange one word during the whole ride.

I was in a trance for the rest of the night. Jason and Mary ran out of their house as soon as I pulled up, each of them carrying two buckets instead of one. There was a lot of giggling for the next few minutes and then we arrived at the shopping mall. When we parked, I lectured my cousins about the usual Halloween safety guidelines and told them to stay with Grace. I brought a coupon book along so I could buy some of the things on Mom’s shopping list. The three of them spilled out and walked toward the shopping center but right before they entered, Mary handed one of her buckets to Grace. My stomach churned. I could smell the decaying candy already. 

“Damn it,” I muttered and dug through my purse for my cell phone. My fingers started dancing across the phone’s keypad. I texted Grace “Whatevr U don’t eat 2nite, we give 2 cuzins. No burying.” Then I closed my eyes and leaned back into my seat. It didn’t matter how many times I told her not to; Grace would likely burying candy for the rest of her life.

Everything was blurry for the next few hours as I wandered from store to store, catching sight of my sister and cousins every so often, sometimes from yards away. Around 8:00 or 8:30, I texted them to meet me at the car and saw them a couple of minutes later.

There was a lot of munching in the car and at home, where Mom was preparing dinner and Dad was tending to trick-or-treaters. We ate the pumpkin bisque and put on a scary movie. At some point, Dad drove Jason and Mary home. Grace disappeared, too, to her room, I thought. All I can do is summarize because I don’t really recall the details. 

I went to sleep, forgetting about the map, and treating the night like any other night. I venture to say that I even slept peacefully. I didn’t anticipate such a terrifying November 1st.

It wasn’t until I woke up the next morning that the eeriness caught on. I was usually the first one in the family to wake up but the house felt strangely empty. I scurried to the bathroom and splashed lukewarm water on my face because I didn’t have the patience to wait for the cool water to run. Unrefreshed, I walked to the kitchen to make coffee but dropped the carafe when I peered out at the backyard. Even the shattering of glass didn’t faze me as much as what I saw outside.

My sister, Grace, my strangely innocent, squirrelly sister Grace, swung back and forth from a pastel rope. Upon later inspection, the police discovered she had painted it. She---I wanted to believe that someone else had, but in reality, it was she---had hung herself from horrifically colorful tree-like form. 

Mary and Jason later admitted that they had given Grace half of their candy but they didn’t know why she wanted it. How could they? Most people don’t have it in their heads to spend months crafting a tree out of layers and layers of assorted metals and wire, superglue thousands of candies to the tree in a single night, and hang themselves from it. Judging from all of the holes in the backyard, Grace had unearthed at least several of her caches to cover up whatever areas the Halloween candies couldn’t.

Inside of her shoes, she was barefoot. Inside of her body, she was all bones. But in our minds, she was all chocolates and taffies, oddly sugary and sticky. She was Grace, the squirrel of dulces.