It started when I made my entrance. Everyone else was already lined up in the school playground. I came down the stairs alone, feeling great.

But the one thing I hadn’t taken into account when I made my costume was the size of the door to the playground in relation to the size of my tabletop. Let me just sum it up this way. The door was smaller than I would have hoped for. Much smaller. The fact is, I couldn’t fit through it.

I tried it frontways. No go. I tried it sideways. No go. Finally, I had to slant the tabletop practically straight up and down so I could fit through the door. I turned sideways, held my breath and squeezed through. But even then, I slammed into the door on the way out and knocked off the left part of the tabletop. Or maybe it was the right part. I can never tell. And in this stressful situation, it was impossible. Anyway, whichever side it was, it was hanging down like a bird with a broken wing.

“Hi, Hank,” said Mason, who was dressed up as a pirate. He’s my little pal from kindergarten. “Is that a cape you’re wearing?”

“I’m a little busy right now, matey,” I said. “Can we talk later?”

“Sure,” he said. “I like your cape. But it smells weird.”

At first, I couldn’t figure out what he meant. Then it hit me. The smell, I mean. As I was trying to squeeze through the door, I had knocked over the bottle of garlic-scented olive oil that was taped on to the tabletop. The olive oil had spilled all over the place. I could feel it seeping into my T-shirt and running down my arm.

You know how they say garlic is supposed to keep vampires away? Well, let me tell you, it also works on second-, third-, fourth- and fifth-graders. As I walked into the playground, everyone backed away.

And about the breadsticks. Just as I joined the line of kids in the parade, I bent down to scratch my ankle and the breadsticks slipped right out of the plastic glass that was taped to the other side of the table.

Crunch! I stepped on them, at which point they were transformed from breadsticks into breadcrumbs. I tried to scrape them up from the tarmac and put them back in the glass. I couldn’t get most of them, but the few I did get looked like ground-up greyish crumbs at the bottom of the glass. Even I have to admit, they had lost a little of their Italian appeal.

“Check out Zipperbutt!” Nick McKelty was the first to yell. “What are you supposed to be, creep?”

McKelty was decked out in Gruesome, top to bottom. He had a bleeding eye pasted to his forehead. He had a bleeding scar pasted to his cheek. He had bleeding bandages wrapped round his arm. He had bleeding knees, bleeding elbows, bleeding toes, bleeding guts. He was, as I had always thought of him, an open, disgusting sore.

“Unlike you,” I said, “I have used my creativity to come up with an original, if smelly, costume.”

“You stink like a garbage truck,” he said.

“For your information, I am a table in a great Italian restaurant.”

“What’s that got to do with Halloween?” the Great Brain asked.

“I think Hank had a very clever idea,” Ashley spoke up. She was dressed in a dolphin costume, which she had covered with turquoise, grey and white rhinestones. She waved one of her fins at me and whispered, “If you walk around a little, the air might tone down some of the smell.”

“An Italian restaurant!” McKelty shouted. I guess the idea had finally seeped through his thick skull into his brain. “That is so lame. Only a kindergartner would think that’s funny.”

“I’m a kindergartner,” Mason said. “And I don’t think it’s funny.”

“See that! Not even a dumb five year old thinks it’s funny,” McKelty hooted.

“You’re very mean,” Mason said to McKelty, and ran back to where the kindergartners were gathered.

“Good riddance!” McKelty hollered after him. Then he turned back to me. “Check me out, Zipperhead. My Halloween costume is cool. Blood and guts. That’s where it’s at.”

“I think Nick’s costume is the greatest,” Joelle Atkins chimed in. You have to think everything Nick does is the greatest if you want to be his girlfriend, which I can’t imagine anyone but Joelle ever wanting to be.

“Of course you do,” I said to her. “He’s bleeding everywhere and you’re dressed as a plaster.”

“I am not a plaster,” she said. “I am a mobile phone. Can’t you see the numbers written on my back?”

Joelle is totally in love with her phone. She walks around with it strapped to her wrist at all times, which is weird, because no one ever calls her. I guess she’s hoping someone will. It didn’t surprise me that her costume was a mobile phone. She turned around and sure enough, there was a mobile phone pad constructed on her back.

“I bet if you dialled her number, there’d be nobody home,” Frankie whispered to me.

I didn’t even have time to laugh, because just then I heard Emily calling to me from across in the playground. I looked around and saw her on the handball court, where the fourth-graders were lining up. She and Robert were leading the pack in their flu-germ costumes. They both waved at me, looking really proud of themselves. Geeky as they were, you have to give them credit for bravery and originality. There wasn’t another flu germ on the playground, except maybe the real ones living in Luke Whitman’s nose.

Suddenly, Emily and Robert bolted out of line and ran up to the little stage that had been set up with a microphone for Mr Love.

“Hi, everyone!” Emily yelled into the microphone. “We’re flu germs.”

“Don’t come too close,” Robert added, “or you’ll catch us! Get it? Catch us!”

Then he snorted his geeky hippo laugh into the microphone. The microphone made it sound way geekier than it is in real life, if that’s possible.

“You two are disgusting!” McKelty shouted out. “You make me sick. Get it? Flu germs make me sick!”

A bunch of kids laughed. Emily looked really hurt and poor Robert just looked confused. I felt red-hot anger rise up from the bottom of my tablecloth all the way past my butt chair and into my head. Who did that McKelty think he was? I mean, it’s one thing to embarrass me in front of everyone. But only a total bully would pick on Emily and Robert.

I spun round and started over to him. I wasn’t going to let him get away with that. But I was stopped dead in my tracks by Frankie.

“Ow!” he said. “Watch it, Zip.”

My tabletop had butted him right in the head and got caught in the face mask of his football helmet. He was going as Tiki Barber, his favourite player on the New York Giants American football team. But in the war between my table and his football helmet, the helmet won. As he disconnected his face mask from the cardboard, a chunk of my table collapsed under me. I watched helplessly as the plastic bottle with the candle slid down the table and on to the playground. Ryan Shimozato came running by and stepped on it. I heard it crunch beneath his foot.

“Sorry, dude,” he said. “I didn’t mean to break your … uh … whatever this is.”

At that moment, Head Teacher Love stepped up to the microphone. “Attention, students. I now declare the PS 87 Halloween Day Parade officially open. As I always say, a parade is an occasion for parading.”

Head Teacher Love likes to say everything twice. I looked down at the smashed bottle and waited.

“So join me now,” he went on, “as I lead you into the world of celebratory spirits and marauding goblins. Yes, a parade is an occasion for parading.”

Bingo! There it was.

He waved his banner, which was black with orange pumpkins on it. Then he leaned into the microphone and let out what he thought was a scary laugh. It turns out it was actually very scary, because it caused so much screeching feedback over the loudspeaker that a bunch of the kindergartners started to cry.

Mr Love wasn’t even aware that he had frightened the little kids half to death. He just set off marching around the playground, waving the banner. A lot of kids lined up to follow him. Pretty soon, we were all marching in a circle, with the teachers and the parents of the little kids surrounding us and applauding as we marched.

I had to pull myself together and try to march with confidence. True, I had got off to a bad start. The garlic-scented olive oil had spilled, the breadsticks had turned to dust, the candlestick was crunched and my tabletop was definitely drooping. But I reminded myself that I was the only Italian table in the parade. So I put my shoulders back, held my chin up and took off with confidence … until …

… I marched past the kindergarten teachers, Mr Zilke and Ms Warner.

“I wonder who’s eating garlic bread?” Mr Zilke said.

“Boy, that’s a strong smell,” Ms Warner agreed. “Smells like someone took a bath in garlic cloves.”

As I walked by, I saw them both hold their noses. That didn’t help my confidence at all. Call me crazy, but I don’t like to think I smell so bad that people have to hold their noses around me.

I noticed that many of the locals who were looking through the chain-link fence were pointing at me and laughing. And not necessarily in a good way.

Why hadn’t I listened to Frankie and Ashley? They had tried to warn me that this wouldn’t work out. Sometimes I really hate my brain for not being able to listen when smart people are giving me good advice.

Here’s a tip for you to remember next time you’re in a parade: you shouldn’t be thinking about other things while you’re marching, especially when you’re wearing a large, almost square tabletop.

Boom!

I hadn’t noticed that the line had stopped while I kept marching. The boom I’m referring to was me crashing into Head Teacher Love’s balding head.

“Oww!” he screamed as he dropped the school banner and fell face-first into the punch bowl that was waiting for everybody at the end of the parade. Without going into detail, let me just say that when he came up for air, he was shouting my name.

“Mr Zipzer!” he gargled. “Your costume is a menace!”

“It’s stupid, too!” McKelty yelled.

“And smelly,” Joelle added.

“But it was a great idea,” I said.

“Do us all a favour, Zipzer,” McKelty said. “Next time you get a bright idea, just remember, it’s probably really stupid like everything else you do.”

For once, I had to admit that maybe McKelty was right.

Halloween was all about gushing blood and gory guts.

And me? Well, I was all about stinky olive oil and broken breadsticks.

I looked over at McKelty, who was still laughing at me. And all I wanted to do was disappear.