Ben's POV

. . . . .

Kai had a booth set up for a Halloween party, and she wanted me to stop by.

I tried my best not to be noticed as I looked for her.

All the booths were pretty ordinary, with people in costumes sitting behind them.

There were booths for bobbing apples, carving pumpkins, fortune-telling, and kissing.

Wait, what?

I stopped right in my tracks.

Apparently, someone painted a booth completely white and wrote on it:

Kissing BOO-th

"Why is there a kissing booth at a Halloween party?" I thought to myself.

I noticed that the booth also had a set of curtains and a little pull switch.

Maybe the pull switch'll open the curtains and some girl in a slutty witch costume would jump out and kiss me.

So I pulled it.

But the curtains didn't open.

Instead, something above the booth fell down in front of it:

A hideous giant head with puckered lips.

I fell backwards, screaming at the top of my lungs.

As I was catching my breath, Kai walked out from behind the booth.

"What the hell is that?!"

"You like it?" she jested.

I chuckled sarcastically as she helped me back up.

"It's a papier-mâché head I made for the booth. I call it, 'Amanda'."

The head slowly rose back up to its starting position, which Kai said she had done thanks to the computer she had behind the curtains.

"I put together this system that runs automatically so I don't have to constantly adjust everything. The head resets by itself, the camera goes off by itself, etc."

"Camera?"

"Oh yeah. There's a camera in its mouth that takes pictures of people's reactions."

To prove her point, Kai pulled up an image of my reaction.

She showed me how she could get the photos wirelessly, by means of the computer she was operating behind the curtains.

I admit that it would've been a lot funnier seeing anyone else's reaction, but her Wizard of Oz kissing booth definitely did its job.

. . . . .

We sat behind the curtains and talked while people came by the booth and left us with hilarious, schadenfreude-inducing photos.

"I didn't think you celebrated Halloween."

"I do," she told me, "just not with the family. What about you?"

"Eh," I shrugged. "Not anymore."

"Really? I imagined that you would look forward to it, since you have your own built-in costumes."

While that's definitely true, that also would've been unfair to other trick-or-treaters.

I explained, "You know when there's a TV show you loved as a kid, but then you grow older and looking back on it somehow feels weird? That's kind of what Halloween is to me. Sure, I loved trick-or-treating and carving pumpkins once upon a time. But that's the kind of thing people outgrow, like baby clothes or a fear of cooties."

Kai didn't respond; she just sat up in her chair and kept making eye contact with me.

"Besides," I continued, "I'm probably old enough to start giving out candy instead of trick-or-treating for it, anyway."

She still sat quietly.

"What?" I asked. "Does that bother you?"

"Nope, just as long as you're not celebrating Columbus Day."

She was joking, of course, and she assured me with a kiss.

For a moment, I loved Halloween again

. . . if only for the fact that I didn't get stuck with "Amanda."