the girl who dressed as a turd

by McKenzie Watson-Fore

EVERY YEAR, WHEN GUTTERS FILL with candy-corn-colored leaves and disemboweled pumpkins slouch on brick lampposts, my body tingles with a familiar cocktail of excitement and trepidation. It’s about to be Halloween, and once again, I don't know what to be.

I’ve never been good at Halloween. When I was a little kid, it didn't really matter because instead of trick-or-treating, my parents took me to the Fall Harvest Festival at our church. We got to wear costumes and go for hayrides in the back field and play carnival games in the church gym to win candy—just like secular Halloween minus the devil worship!

Plus, I loved going to church. Its tall stucco walls meant safety. When I was at church, it didn't matter that I was a weird, buck-toothed girl with a boy’s haircut and grandma glasses (and grandma hobbies: knitting, crosswords, watching Shirley Temple movies). My best friend Hannah and I played freeze tag in the hallways and hide-and-seek during Coffee Time, and I didn't feel pressured to be anything other than myself. It didn't matter what I dressed up as for the Fall Harvest Festival because Jesus loved me for what was on the inside.

One year, I wrapped myself in fleece and pinned on some knitted scraps and said I was a piece of yarn. The next year, I wore my gray sweatpants and sweatshirt inside-out and claimed to be a nub of dryer lint. This was a family tendency, inherited from my father, who once duct-taped a bunch of multicolored cardboard bricks to his body and christened himself “Brick Man.” We drank our apple cider shaken, not stirred. We were literalists: Biblical literalists. We looked for "plain meaning" in Halloween costumes the same way we looked for it from Genesis to Revelation. In hindsight, I’m surprised I never used Halloween to witness to my neighbors by dressing up as a biblical motif like Original Sin or The Curse of Childbirth. In Bible college years later, I would learn to prioritize the context behind the ancient stories rather than the most obvious contemporary reading. In that interpretive framework, I could've gone for the “conceptual costume” by throwing on whatever I could grab and labeling myself Procrastination. But such an ideological development had not yet come to pass, so I reveled in the comfort and simplicity of church, where I didn't have to worry about demons or ghouls or monsters under the bed.

Nevertheless, as my elementary school years waned, I grew anxious in ways I didn't know how to express. Middle school lurked like a hungry predator just around the corner. I could practically hear saliva dripping from its fanged mandible. Soon enough, I would be transferring from my small Christian elementary school to a K-12 college prep charter school that was basically a normal public school, and everyone I knew believed that public schools were filthy dens of iniquity, which begged the question: What would become of me in that sullied arena?

So it makes sense to me, in retrospect, that around that time I became chronically constipated. Could it have been the stress? Or a parasite I picked up on a family mission trip to Mexico? Or both? Gone, in any case, were the carefree happy-go-lucky attitudes of childhood and the comforts of regularity that came with it.

Hannah had already been attending the charter school for years. On Sundays at church, she told me it wasn't so bad. She’d even made new friends to go trick-or-treating with. Envy and fear of abandonment iced my veins, and I yearned for greater horizons than the church's Fall Harvest Festival. I longed to prove myself as more than a scrap of lint.

When I was nine, I wrapped myself in brown butcher paper decorated with red circles: an Italian sausage. I came home hoarse because I spent the whole night singing at the top of my lungs, “Oooooooooh, I wish I were an Oscar Meyer Weeeeeenierrrrr!” There’s something tragic about a girl who, given the chance to be anything in the world, still chooses to dress up as something that wants to be something else.

In eighth grade, I was finally invited to go trick-or-treating with Jenny Yang, the girl who'd been inviting Hannah over every year since second grade. By then, Hannah’s public school friends were my friends, too—allegedly. Throughout middle school, I felt stuck in the role of the New Girl, Hannah's less-funny tagalong. Hannah and I filled the same social role—Quirky Christian Girl—but she had red hair, better taste in music, and a biting sense of humor. She listened to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and made sarcastic quips about our lame teachers and seemed to have found her niche in the social-pressure-cooker of middle school, whereas I listened to Contemporary Christian Music and the oldies station and spent my free time knitting brightly colored finger-puppets of my own design (I called them Finger Kings and considered registering a patent). But Halloween was a chance to present as something other than my dorky, socially hobbled self. I would show them. I wasn’t yet sure exactly how, but I knew the right idea would come out of me when it was ready. I would show them all.

On Halloween night, Hannah’s dad drove us across town to Jenny’s neighborhood around dusk. In the dark chamber of her parents’ minivan, Hannah sat in the bucket seat and bopped to songs playing through the headphones we shared. Her face is a map of the world, is a map of the world. You can see she’s a beautiful girl, she's a beautiful girl…

I didn't feel beautiful. Panic rose in my throat like bile. I didn't even have a costume yet—Jenny had said I could borrow something from her—and the minivan exuded the faint acrid scent of brass, the lingering aroma of Hannah's saxophone. That was another way the other girls related that I didn’t: Hannah played in jazz band and Jenny was first-chair violin in the orchestra. Her best friend, Emily, who would be there too, played viola. Instead of band, my niche was theatre, which definitely amplified my congenital uncoolness. I tried to play an instrument once. Even worse, I tried to make an instrument once, inspired by a Crafts for Kids book my mom (who always dreamed of homeschooling and 4-H) brought home from the local library. I appropriated an old Kleenex box and strung rubber bands across the hole to construct a trash-banjo that sounded like a duck being strangled to death. The other crafts in the book were similarly eccentric, but that didn’t stop me from cherishing them. My favorite was the bone dolls: dolls I made out of chicken bones. “Making them” mostly involved drawing faces on their knobby, cartilaginous joints with a Sharpie and dressing them in scraps of old dishtowels and assembling bedrooms for them, again, in old Kleenex boxes (apparently my go-to art supply). I was so proud of my bone dolls I brought them to school with me—and because it was Christian elementary school, no one even made fun of me.

Hannah stayed quiet in the car, absorbed in the music and her own thoughts. I glanced at the full moon gleaming outside the minivan’s fingerprint-smudged window and wondered if my bone dolls could come back to life, and if they did, if they would be my friends. I fiddled with a hangnail the shape of a new moon. Blood flowered at the edge of my cuticle, and I realized I’d peeled my nail to the quick. The song on the iPod switched from KT Tunstall to the All-American Rejects. Hannah hummed along to the chorus: “I’ll tell you my dirty little secret.”

Jenny Yang was smart, funny, and pretty: a triple threat. She would earn a perfect score on her SATs and be our high school valedictorian. I didn’t know much about her life at home, but I knew she had a creepy older brother and her family didn’t go to church. That’s how I made peace with my earthly inadequacies: even if I was awkward and girls like Jenny and Emily were smarter and more talented than me, at least I was going to heaven when I died. The truth was, this religious consolation did little to assuage my middle-school-girl insecurities. The afterlife in heaven would be one thing, but middle school felt like its own version of eternal conscious torment. For example: in seventh grade, Jenny, Emily, Hannah, and I had all competed on our school’s Brain Bowl team together. Right before the championship round, the other girls chose me to be the team alternate. They figured Hannah knew everything I knew and I was superfluous, so I sat in the bleachers and gnashed my teeth. I had to watch our team—their team?—lose on questions I could’ve answered: “What’s a two-syllable word that starts with R and means ‘unwanted waste’?” I knew everything there was to know about unwanted waste. Our team placed second. I took home a wariness about my tenuous social position and a sore jaw.

Don't tell anyone, the Rejects sang, or you'll be just another regret. Hannah tapped her knockoff-converse-clad toes. I couldn’t let the other girls choose Hannah over me, as they had once before. The full moon lit up my face like a spotlight. Halloween was my chance to prove myself: to borrow a costume that revealed who I truly was.

My stomach was churning by the time Hannah’s dad dropped us off. Hadn't I wanted this? The houses on Jenny’s block all looked the same, ominous and bland. I paused on the sidewalk, unsure which way to go. On top of everything else, I was nervous about running into Jenny’s lurky older brother, who was rumored to have lost his virginity to a vacuum cleaner.

A brisk wind blew from the north. Snow was coming. A full moon shone down on Hannah and me, and the air carried the comforting, familiar cow-pie scent of the countless beef farms up on the Northern Great Plains.

Emily was already waiting in Jenny’s bedroom. We all knew Emily would be drop-dead gorgeous once she took care of her mustache. She and I did theatre together, but she had perfect pitch and would get every leading role in the spring musicals throughout high school. By contrast, I would be cast as an old woman who expired mid-performance, a preteen with cystic fibrosis, and an epileptic divorcée. Emily’s characters got happy endings; mine died. If Jenny was a triple threat, with her musical talent, smarts, and general likability, Emily was a quadruple threat—and their threat levels were compounding. As high school seniors, Emily would model for Jenny’s AP Photography portfolio. Jenny would produce breathtaking photos of Emily staring ruthlessly into the distance. Later, Emily would graduate from college with dual degrees in neuroscience and opera.

But at the beginning of eighth grade, we were all just gangly girls, unaware of what we would grow into or how the world perceived us. Emily still wore floor-length prairie skirts to school every day (those would disappear about the same time the mustache did—shortly followed by the appearance of her first long-term boyfriend). But that night, she looked elegant and sophisticated, in a silky white blouse with her waist-length, chestnut hair scooped back.

“I’m the girl with the pearl earring,” Emily said. “Like the Vermeer painting.” Forget diamonds and pearls, I thought. I just wanted to be a girl with friends.

“Hey, Jen,” I said, “I still haven’t picked a costume. You said you have stuff I can wear?"

“Help yourself,” Jenny said. She tipped her head toward the closet without looking away from the vanity, which she was using to sprinkle a sheen of glitter on top of pale foundation. She was dressed as Edward Cullen, the vampire from Twilight. In Jenny’s closet, I flipped through dresses, sweaters, and a series of traditional Chinese outfits, before stopping at a chocolate brown ensemble: a calf-length wool skirt and matching long-sleeve top. I stepped into the bathroom to squeeze into it. The skirt was tight and made my stomach bulge. In the mirror, I looked lumpy and brown. Perfect, I thought. When I waddled back into the bedroom, the other girls looked at me as if waiting for a splash of realization.

“What are you?” Jenny asked.

“A turd!”

The girls cracked up. They couldn’t keep it in; the laughter exploded out of them. My costume released some unseen pressure valve among us. I was an iconoclast who would never again be dismissed as redundant. No one could embarrass the girl who dressed as a turd.

Fifteen minutes later, I was the last one to squeeze out of Jenny’s distended entryway. The moon sulked low in the sky. The night was dark and drafty, but municipal streetlamps cast domes of piss-colored light every couple hundred feet. Groups of trick-or-treaters floated up the street in clumps. A cohort of undead mummies sauntered past, dangling luminescent bottles of Mountain Dew from their incongruously animate fists. Toilet-paper-like strips of cloth unfurled behind them in the nighttime breeze.

At one house, we queued up behind a gaggle of children. A pint-sized Indiana Jones was their fedora-sporting ringleader, flanked by a pirate, a princess, and a kid wearing a gray orb with an exaggerated teardrop. When the woman at the door asked what he was dressed as, the kid answered, “I’m Pluto, and I’m sad ‘cuz I’m not a planet anymore.” The woman chuckled, but her reaction was tinged with pity. The weird ones always reveal themselves early.

We approached the door and the mom handing out candy inquired about our costumes. Jennifer went first, which gave us an air of elevation and refinement. I hung back and waited for as long as I could to emerge. I knew my costume choice would be hard to defend under the woman’s expectant gaze. I started to feel queasy from holding it in.

“And what are you?” she asked. She spoke to me in the same viscous tone she’d used with the children before us. I wondered if the voice was a kind of disguise.

“I'm a turd.”

The other girls didn't giggle that time. They slunk beyond the porch light’s glow. A scowl tugged down the woman's penciled-in brows, and I felt the fumes of her disapproval radiate out of the atrium and settle on me. Heat crawled up my neck. The woolen outfit suddenly felt very scratchy and far too tight. The woman's judgment was like a pungent smell I couldn’t shake off. Were the other girls even still there, I wondered, or had moved onto the next house without me, trying to distance themselves from me?

By the fifth or sixth house, I started wondering what other monochromatic brown thing I could say I was. Pollution—the brown cloud? Somewhere in there, I noticed my boot was squeaking. Not squeaking exactly. My boot had volunteered a soundtrack to accompany my costume. My boot was farting. It tooted along like a sign from the universe telling me that I couldn’t deny what I was: the girl who dressed as a turd.

Other roving cliques—ghouls and monsters, witches and cats, firefighters and cowboys—crossed our path and threw us curious looks. None of their costumes struck me as particularly scary. Maybe adolescence wasn't so much about the changes happening inside of us as the changes in what we feared. Instead of monsters and heights, I was starting to fear low standardized test scores, rejection, unplanned pregnancy. None of us were used to turning boys’ heads yet, but that night, everyone who saw us looked for a bit longer than necessary.

Emily, ever elegant with her blue scarf and pearls, was leading us up one serpentine walkway when a pile of flame-orange leaves under the dry skeleton of a tree leapt toward her. We all jumped back. I released a brief, involuntary scream. A high school boy in a trench coat and jeans shook off the lawn detritus and cackled at our reaction. He’d been hiding in the leaves and scaring trick-or-treaters. We scuttled away from the house, annoyed that he’d managed to startle us. Unwilling to miss out on the candy—and loathe to concede territory to his cruel, predatory fear campaign—we decided to loop the block and hit the house again.

Twenty minutes later, we approached from a different angle. The subdivision streets connected in what struck me as an inscrutable, intestine-like maze, dividing and reconvening, splitting and merging, until I could barely track where we were in relation to where we had been. I couldn’t tell what counted as progress and what was regression. When I saw the bulging pile of leaves in which the high schooler had concealed himself—and was likely still lurking, awaiting more unsuspecting marks—I immediately recognized my chance to redeem myself. I acted on instinct.

“Oooh, leaves!” I squealed—my best and loudest impression of a child delighted by fall. I took a running start and slide-tackled the guy. I was turd-turned-vigilante. I shot like a brown rocket into the leaves, where I collided with the rogue teen. He yelped, and I feigned surprise at finding a body there. He shuffled, bruised of ego and probably femur, to the other side of the driveway and pouted.

“Kenz, you’re a hero!” Jenny crowed. Hannah and Emily cheered. My turd exterior turned translucent in the adulatory glow of their praise. A prouder poop there never had been. I brushed the collision-crinkled leaves off my outfit, almost reticent to discard the evidence of my glorious triumph. I had defended our docile cohort. I’d kept us safe in the face of our most vehement threat: not razor blades in apples, as Mom had warned, but humiliation at the hands of a sneering teenage boy.

Jenny draped her arm over my shoulder. The other girls crowded in, suffused with a spirit of fellowship, and we approached the door proudly, confident we would not be accosted. Our individual costumes seemed to shimmer and change in the hazy, nighttime aura: they were the Three Musketeers and I was d’Artagnan; one for all and all for one.

Every house after that, I led our party to the front door. When I announced what I was, my friends laughed with me, not at me. Even some of the parents handing out treats laughed, and at the houses where they didn’t, I realized their reactions weren’t mine to manage. When our pillowcases grew heavy and the northern winds chilled our fingers to the bone, we made our way back to Jenny’s house. The route back seemed obvious, somehow. All of my directional confusion had evaporated. I’d learned which way to go by going.

Jenny unlocked the door. Her brother was nowhere to be seen, but if he had been around, we knew how to handle that now. I kicked off my flatulent boots by the front door and the four of us sprawled on the living room carpet and dumped our candy haul onto the floor and set to cataloging our spoils.

“Does anyone have any Twix they don't want?” Hannah asked. “Or Snickers or Butterfingers?” We bartered and traded for what we wanted most. When it came to Halloween, all the best things resembled turds. Hannah touched my arm to let me know her dad was on the way, and I slipped away from the group and changed back into my own clothes, relinquishing the costume that allowed me to be seen.

“Thanks for having us, Jenny,” I said on the way out.

“I’m glad you came,” she said. I felt a whole inch taller than at the beginning of the night.

“Bye, Hannah,” Emily and Jenny called. “Bye, Kenz! It was fun trick-or-treating with you!” Being a turd was good while it lasted.

About the author:

McKenzie Watson-Fore works at the liquor store in Boulder, Colorado. She writes about growing up evangelical and dating atheist boys and is currently at work on a memoir titled This Is Exactly What My Mother Was Afraid Of. McKenzie’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in The Offing, Belmont Story Review, Bridge Eight, and elsewhere. You can keep up with her here.