Chapters (58)
- Cover
- Praise for Abbi Waxman and her novels
- Berkley Titles by Abbi Waxman
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Summer
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- Fall
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- FORTY-THREE
- FORTY-FOUR
- FORTY-FIVE
- EPILOGUE
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- Readers Guide
- Questions for Discussion
- About the Author
- What’s next onyour reading list?
Polly replied, “It’ll distract you from Bob. There’s easy pickings, if you like divorced dads and/or hunky pumpkin farmers who come to town for the month of October and make enough money to live like kings the rest of the year.”
“How does a pumpkin farmer live like a king? What would that look like?” Nina wanted to know.
“Gilded tractors?” Polly hazarded.
Laura shook her head. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I’m not a big Halloween person.”
“Not even Reese’s peanut butter pumpkins? They’re the best of the shapes,” said Nina. “It’s the perfect ratio of chocolate to peanut butter.”
Laura looked at Nina with interest. “You really do spend a lot of time thinking about things, don’t you?”
“ ’Fraid so,” said Nina cheerfully, nodding. “It’s what keeps me from gnawing my own fingernails off.”
“Ew,” said Laura. “And have fun at the festival.”
“We definitely will, and so will you,” said Polly.
FORTY
Polly wasn’t wrong. The Larchmont Halloween Festival took place in a small empty lot at the northern end of Larchmont Boulevard. Whatever unicorns are responsible for it do a thorough job, and there were literally dozens of small children rushing about as high as jaybirds on sugar, hallucinating in polyester Disney costumes. There were face painters, bouncy castles, disaffected tweens trying not to have fun—it was bedlam, but fantastic if you didn’t have any kids and wanted an excuse to dress up.
Unsurprisingly, Polly was a huge fan of dressing up, Nina was not, and Laura was somewhere in between. This resulted in the following disparity: Polly was dressed as a banana, complete with a giant foam costume and shoes made of fake banana leaves; Laura was dressed as a monkey holding a banana, which simply meant she was wearing a giant onesie with ears and a tail she’d bought on Amazon; and Nina was eating a banana and making fun of the other two. However, Nina was 100 percent down for the candy and had very strong preferences that were too complicated for Laura to understand. She herself wasn’t a sugar person, so generally speaking Halloween had always been a bit of a bust, plus her parents hated the amount of candy dropped on the street, making the pigeons fat and giving the squirrels ideas.