When all the performances are over, townies gather in the Sophie’s gymnasium, where black and orange streamers hang from the ceiling and balloons bounce across the floor. In one corner, a group of townies wielding knives is all set to enter the pumpkin-carving contest. Disco music plays on a hi-fi system set up under one of the basketball hoops, and a group of green-faced Frankenstein’s monsters do a spastic dance that looks like a conniption fit. Do-gooders—they wear their usual purple armbands over their costumes—pass around trays of a fruit punch called blood. The chunks floating in the drink are not tumors from a witch’s heart as claimed but pieces of maraschino cherry.

Some old threadbare sofas and armchairs have been moved into the gymnasium. I sit on a love seat, and Johnny and Esther cram in on either side. I feel their body heat even through the sheet. I can be close to one person briefly without discomfort, but two people simultaneously are hard to bear unless those two people are you, Father and Mother. I wiggle in my seat, and Johnny says, “Oh, I forgot you can’t stand being touched.”

“Because you got murdered?” Esther asks.

“No,” says Johnny. “Even back in America, he hated it. Remember, Boo, in gym when we did wrestling? You were paired with Jermaine Tucker, and when he grabbed you, you went limp like you fainted.”

I get up and pull off my ghost sheet. My hair stands straight up from static (or maybe I saw a ghost, ha-ha). The lights are so dim in the gym that in the unlikely event Gunboy is gyrating on the dance floor to “Disco Duck,” he will not see us.

I tell Johnny and Esther the story of Uncle Seymour’s funeral to explain why I do not like touching others. As you will remember, Mother and Father, his friends and relatives stood around his open casket and talked, mostly about his bakery and how he was famous for cinnamon buns, which were served at the gathering.

Uncle Seymour had always been kind to me. He was an artistic fellow. For my eleventh birthday, he gave me a pretty cake decorated not with eleven candles but with eleven test tubes.

When I saw Uncle Seymour lying in his casket, I realized at once that my dislike of touching applied only to the living. People are ecosystems. The pumping of blood. The dividing of cells. The growing of bones. The killing of cancer cells by soldier cells. It is dizzying all that goes on simultaneously in the human body. To me, two people touching is akin to two galaxies colliding. (Okay, I exaggerate a touch, ha-ha.)

Maybe you will say, “But, Oliver, a decomposing body is also an ecosystem, a kind of dying galaxy.”

Still, I felt an urge to touch Uncle Seymour. He had such an unusual nose, a bulbous schnozzola with tributaries of purplish capillaries and a field of tiny craters.

I was trailing a fingertip along the cool bridge of Uncle Seymour’s nose when Cousin Maureen slapped my hand, called me a ghoul, and shoved me away. As you will recall, I knocked into Aunt Rose and overturned a tray of scones.

“So what you’re telling us,” Esther says, “is you can touch people if they’ve kicked the bucket.”

“Preferably.”

“But we’ve all kicked the bucket,” Johnny says.

“Passed is not the same as dead,” I say, echoing Thelma. I scan the crowd for her. I want to commend her for her riveting reenactment.

Johnny rises, grabs hold of my shoulders, and sits me back down on the love seat. Then he plunks down in my lap and throws an arm around my shoulders.

Such proximity is horribly unpleasant.

“Get off me, Johnny.”

“Five more seconds.”

“Stop it,” Esther snaps at Johnny.

“Up yours,” he says to Esther. Then Johnny races through his countdown—“five, four, three, two, one”—and stands up again. “You need to get used to it. With practice, you can turn into a normal human being.”

Esther gets up from the couch and kicks Johnny in the shin. “Maybe, doofus, we don’t all want to be normal,” she says.

“Look, if he acts like a freak here, kids will sh*t on him just like they did back in America.”

Rest assured, Mother and Father, that Johnny is speaking figuratively. Nobody actually ever defecated on me (though, as I said earlier, I was urinated on).

Three costumed boys standing nearby must have been watching because one of them, a clown with lipstick and a line of pompoms down his front, yells, “Pile on!” and then they all jump on the love seat. They squirm and wiggle on top of me. Their touch is horrendous, their weight excruciating, and their body odor torture. I almost expect my lungs to deflate, my limbs to snap, and my brain to lapse into a coma.

“Get the f*ck off him!” Johnny yells.

A shoulder blade presses against my face, an elbow strikes me in my side, and a knee jabs me in the groin. I whimper.

Johnny pulls off two boys, a vampire and a scarecrow, and then yanks the white-faced clown off by the boy’s curly red hair (his real hair, not a wig).

I pant as the clown yells at Johnny, “Cool it, assh*le!”

A Halloween song, “Monster Mash,” plays on the hi-fi. The singer sings about a graveyard smash as Johnny balls up his fist and punches the clown in his middle pompom. The clown doubles over and falls to his knees. His face distorts, his mouth gapes, and his fingers claw at the floor. He has the wind knocked out of him (medically speaking, his diaphragm has gone into spasms, thus preventing him from inhaling).

Half a dozen do-gooders rush over.

“No fighting!” they yell.

Reginald Washington carries his little bullhorn. “Have you no shame!” he thunders into it. “This is a time of merriment and celebration, and punks like you always ruin it for the rest of us.”