"It's your favorite holiday, man!" Justin would exclaim, and buy yards of orange and black crepe paper so he could decorate Chris' house. Joey and Lance would inevitably end up carving 5 pumpkins - "One for each of us," Lance had explained proudly the first time - and JC would spend hours in the studio looking for spooky sounds and monster music, and then he would hand Chris a CD labeled "Halloween, 2001" with little smiley faces on either side of the words. The smiley faces always had fangs, or bolts where their necks would be, or one eye.

Chris hated it.

At first, when they were just starting out and Justin had come up with the idea for a Halloween party and cajoled the others into it, Chris had felt unable to complain. Justin at 14 was someone you couldn't disappoint, and Chris knew it would disappoint him. Disappoint them all. And then it had become a thing, and they did it every year, even in Germany, even during the Year of the Lawsuit, and there was no way Chris could explain.

Because Justin had spent hours and hours decorating over the years, and Lance and Joey looked at pumpkin after pumpkin before picking 5 they thought could be acceptable, and JC. JC would hand him a new CD, every year, with bright blue eyes and a smile on his face that threatened to blind you, it was so brilliant. And if Chris told him the truth, that smile wouldn't just dim, it would disappear entirely.

So there was just no way to tell them that he didn't really like Halloween all that much, that he had just pulled it out of his hat when asked for a favorite holiday, because it was the only holiday he'd ever had. At Thanksgiving, if they were lucky, his mom wouldn't have to work, and there'd be enough extra cash to buy the girls cranberry sauce and make some stuffing. And Christmas, which the others loved so much. Chris could remember one time, when he was five or six, and his mother had tried to explain to him that even if you were the very best little boy in the world, Santa just didn't have time to visit everyone, because there was only one night, and so, so many houses. Chris had crawled into her lap, and told her it was okay. He didn't care if Santa hated him forever, as long as she loved him.

On Halloween, though, he could pull an old sheet over his head, and walk around the neighborhood, or the trailer park, or wherever they were, and people would give him free food. It worked pretty well when he was young, too. Because then the neighbors would look into his mother's eyes, and be embarrassed into giving him candy. By the time he was 10 or 12, though - well, what he did collect, he gave to his sisters. He'd have gone hungry forever if he didn't have to hear their stomachs growl at night.

But he didn't want the guys to know about that - they shouldn't *have* to know about that. About any of it. His childhood had been tough enough on him; he wasn't going to ruin other people with it. Justin didn't need to grow up any faster than he already was. Joey was too good-natured to be told that people denied him candy because he was The Neighborhood Bastard. Lance, who had grown up wrapped in the warm knowledge that charity was the work of God and a sacred duty for every Southerner, wouldn't have understand any of it. And JC. JC's beautiful blue eyes would have filled with tears, and his smile would have dimmed, and Chris was damned if he would be the cause of that. JC shouldn't be touched by tragedy. Not his. Not ever.

So Justin continued to come over with rolls of decorations, and Joey and Lance continued to carve jack-o-lanterns galore, and JC continued to stockpile scary sound effects.

And Chris continued to let them.
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