Trick or Treat

Excerpt

Trick or Treat
Sydney Blackburn © 2017
All Rights Reserved

I wasn’t as confident as the precise click-click of my heels on the floor of the almost empty store suggested. It wasn’t that I was uncomfortable being nearly naked in general—as a part-time model I’d lost whatever self-consciousness I might have had. It was because, along with the sassy black stilettos, I was wearing a pink-and-white calf-length tutu, cheap green fishnet stockings plucked from the dollar store shelves for just this occasion, and not a stitch more below the waist. The underbust corset I was wearing just seemed to make my bare chest more obviously masculine, though it was cold enough I had thrown on a jacket—a horrendously shaggy jacket of six-inch long fake fur dyed muddy pink and nicotine yellow.

Halloween was a free pass for tacky and tasteless outfits, granted, but this was a little much for the PharmaSave in suburban Stellarton.

I had been deciding what to wear to the Numbers Halloween party and this, of the many options strewn on my bed, was what I’d been wearing when my mother called for an emergency candy run. I wasn’t sure this would be my costume for the night, but Mom still lived in Royton Park, which used to be a separate community. If I was going to be at the club early tonight to get first dibs on any hot deliciousness, I might not have time to go back home and change. At least the tutu and the dusky pink silk brocade of the corset didn’t clash with the candy-floss pink and pearlescent white swirls of the nail polish on my fingers and toes.

Casual hookups weren’t my style as a rule, but my last relationship had broken up after barely six months and I was feeling unloved and unwanted. Tonight, my most favourite night of the year, I wanted to feel special.

The candy shelves had been ravaged to near emptiness, and I just grabbed what they had left. Served Mom right, sending me out last minute like this. The woman behind the cash register had a weathered face and a full head of short gray hair.

She gave me a double take, and then a third as she rang up the candy. “What are you supposed to be?” she asked, as if she didn’t really want to know but couldn’t stop herself from asking.

I grinned. “Can’t you tell? I’m a fairy.” I grabbed some tulle—carefully—and dropped a curtsey.

A laugh escaped her as she put the receipt in the bag. “This is for you,” she said, handing me a miniature Kit Kat. “I kinda love the tutu.”

I was still smiling when I got my car. Making sure all the tulle was inside, I pulled the door closed. “I hope you appreciate how much I love you, Mom.”

I’d been lucky, growing up. I’d never had to come out as I’d never really been in, thanks to her. She called me Drew, like everyone else, most of the time, unless she was angry. Then I was Andrew Lewis Urquhart, with an exclamation point. Or if she was feeling silly and I was looking particularly feminine, she’d call me Andrea in a teasing voice. The only label I’d grown up with was “freak” from my beloved school peers. I knew that was a privilege few others had.

I was feeling the nostalgia when I pulled into the driveway. Halloween was Mom’s favourite time of the year, too. She let me pick my costume every time. Oh for the days when there were no differences between girl bodies and boy bodies, and I could be Wonder Woman without radical sewing modifications. Although growing up with a fondness for wearing women’s clothes had taught me to sew, which in turn led me to where I was now.

Apprenticed at the Design Collective, I mean, not my mother’s driveway.

Since there were no kids there at the moment, I grabbed the bag and walked up to the front door. I knocked and called, “Delivery!”