Personal Narrative: Halloween

Within the picture before me, I see myself. I was dressed in all black; black dress shoes, black pants, a black button-down shirt with a sleek black tie, a black suit jacket, black gloves, a black ski mask, and a black fedora to top it all off. I am not entirely sure what I was supposed to be. Was I a mobster, a thief, or even a personification of the night? The date was Halloween and I was sitting on a bench in front of my house, waiting to scare or give out candy to anybody who approached the door. That year, we had not decorated our house as well as previous years; but we still had a few last minute ideas implemented o let people know that they were welcome to approach. There was a rotating red beacon flashing, jack-o-lantern cutouts over the porch light, and creepy music playing loudly. Despite the decorations, not one person came to our house and hardly anyone had decorated for the holiday along my street. I remember feeling disappointment when I realized that nobody was going to¬¬¬¬ come and anger as people walked by our house without a second glance.

Halloween was not supposed to be like that, it was supposed to be more like when I was a kid. Houses would be decorated, jack-o-lanterns would be sitting near doors, and

people would go trick-or-treating making sure to hit every single house. I remember dressing up in several costumes including a skeleton, a crash test dummy, a ninja, and a mine. Even in ninth grade, the year before this photograph was taken; I still managed to go out for the holiday. I had a ton of homework that night and between Biology, Civics and Economics, and Math II, there was enough to keep me busy the entire night. As a result, I told my mom and sister to go trick-or-treating without me. Somehow, despite the constant ringing of the doorbell and the sheer amount of work, I finished early. Unlike previous years, I did not have a clue what to wear for my costume, consequently I ran to my closet to assess my options. Soon, a brilliant idea popped into my head and I quickly got dressed. When I emerged from my room, I was dressed in red shoes, white socks with red maple leaves, long red shorts, a shirt with word Canada displayed in bold letters over a maple leaf, a Canada facemask, Red sunglasses with Canadian flags on the lenses, a Canada baseball cap, and finally a Canadian flag cape. I was… “Captain Canada!” A few hours later, my sister and mom returned and I was able to go out with them. As we were walking down the street, I saw a kid dressed up as Captain America. “Hey Captain America, I am Captain Canada.” I said as I was passing by. My costume brought a lot of compliments, smiles, and laughs as I walked down the street that night.
Looking back at tenth grade, I am surprised that I even had time to participate in the holiday.

I was taking AP World History, my first AP class. Keeping up my grades in the class was one of my biggest concerns, but surprisingly, it turned out to be a relatively laid-back class without much homework. Throughout the year, the class was mainly notes and document analysis. The only difficult part of the class was the tests. They were long and arduous with several vague questions based on specific parts of the curriculum that we had only gone over lightly. The course became more vigorous as the exam date drew closer; we began writing more essays, the tests we took grew longer, there were after school study sessions, and even a mock

exam.
By the day of the exam, I was nervous about how I would perform on the test because I had not scored highly on the mock exam. When the exam started, I noticed that the questions were much easier than the practice; however, at five-minutes remaining mark I had only managed to answer sixty-four of the seventy-five questions. I quickly bubbled in my answers and managed another answer or two before time ran out completely. Next, it was time for the infamous essays. We had fifteen minutes to plan, and then two hours to write three essays; a DBQ (Document Based Question), a C&C (Compare and Contrast), and a CCOT (Changes and Continuities Over Time). I remember writing rapidly and managing to successfully complete two of the three essays with time running out just as I began to write the conclusion to my last essay. The rest of the day, my head felt like it was filled with cotton and my right wrist was noticeably sore.

To this day, I still find it odd that no one came to our house that night. Perhaps it was because it was a Saturday and people had other events to attend, maybe our house was not welcoming enough to attract anyone, maybe they skipped our street and decided to visit a more decorated neighborhood, or maybe they just grew up and decided not to trick-or-treat choosing instead to stay in or go to a friend’s party. Whatever their reason was, I definitely did not expect to get no trick-or-treaters.