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At a friend's Halloween party in sixth grade, her dad and uncle jumped out of the woods with chainsaws, and my brain just screamed, "You're gonna die! And you didn't even get to trick-or-treat!"

A small group of us were gathered round a bonfire listening to a scary story when we heard the chainsaws revving in the woods, and I quickly jumped behind the others in order to have the best chance of escape, hoping to hit up distant neighbors for candy before the bloody end.

The whole afternoon leading up to that bizarre saw climax was uneasy for me. I got straight off the school bus at my friend's house, my parents' assurances that they would still take me trick-or-treating - if there was time - echoing in my mind. As we walked down her lane to her door, I wasn't sure why I was there. After all, I was pretty certain this dark-haired girl had given me lice in the fifth grade, and she loved to tell tales that got me in some awkward spots. Yet here I was at her semi-secluded home in the boonies, her only guest at an intimate Halloween party.

It was an evening of scary thoughts. What if I never get to go trick-or-treating again? What if these backwoods wackos are really going to slice me up with heavy machinery? What if I can't get this aluminum foil out of my hair?

Yes, I had aluminum foil in my hair. It was my own fault; I had shown up without a costume, so my friend's mother decided to weld long sheets of aluminum to my head with hair gel and a blow dryer, covering everything but my face, and I would be...well, some kind of Star Trek alien queen monster, I guess. My extreme anxiety that the foil wouldn't come off, that I would have to be scalped, made the color drain from my face. I was a pale, nervous creature the whole evening.

When my parents finally picked me up, admiring my metallic do, I asked desperately, "Can we still go trick-or-treating?"

"No, sweetheart. It's too late."

Like Sally in It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, I got jipped.

But the next year things worked out the way they sometimes do when you have a big sister taking up your cause.

I was the youngest. My siblings were done with Halloween, too mature for the costumes and candy parade. But seeing the longing of a girl who was still telling herself stories in the bathroom mirror, my oldest sister, Vinca, decided to take me trick-or-treating one last time.

Costumes were quickly decided. She was going as a dame. A lover of antiques, she had the intricate shawl, fingerless gloves, silver cigarette case, glasses and large poufy dress. I was going as a gentleman. People say I look like my mom now, but we all thought I had more of Dad in my features then. We painted a moustache on my face, found a hat for my head and a neglected sports coat or something, and I borrowed one of Dad's pipes that he only smoked at Christmas. I don't remember how suitable my costume was, but I remember how Vinca looked; it was a grand costume.

Mom and Dad dropped us off in one of the old Dickson, Tenn., neighborhoods, and we went door to door. It wasn't like the old days when we four kids would conspire all together to build mountains of candy on the living room floor, but it was special. We even stumbled onto the doorstep of one of Vinca's old high school teachers who was throwing a party. Always a favorite student, Vinca joined in the revelry; she wasn't embarrassed at all to be caught red-handed trick-or-treating. I was, however, when her teacher asked, "So, this is your little brother?" It wasn't the first time someone had said that. We had been telling our "last hurrah" story to curious strangers as we went, and not one person saw the little girl behind the pipe, baggy coat and pencil-thin facial hair.

Vinca laughed and said, "No! This is my little sister."

"Oh, good job! I wouldn't have known."

I shook his hand, but I vowed never to masquerade as a guy again.

I don't remember our "haul" that evening. It really wasn't about the candy. Before I knew quite what had happened, my sister was married to a Marine, and Halloween was just a night when we'd find boozy teenagers slinking down our long, spooky lane for some chills and thrills.

But I like to think Vinca recaptured a bit of her own childhood that night, even as I was struggling to hold on to mine.

- Hillary Ibarra

Hillary Ibarra is a mother of four and a writer at No Pens, Pencils, Knives or Scissors.