tried to guess who we were beneath our masks. We sat down together on the sidewalk, our feet in the gutter.
          "I wish we lived in California," said Sheryl.
          "Me too."

          "Do you think, when I'm older, maybe Tom Selleck will marry me?"
          "Probably," I said. "No reason why not. You could go live in Hawaii. That'd be cool."

          "Yea. Married to Tom Selleck and learning to surf. That's how I'd like my life to work out." Sheryl surveyed our pathetic collection. "Shall we give up and go home?" she asked.
          "Yea," I said. "Let's call it a night."

           My family moved cities after that; we always seemed to be moving. Sheryl and I wrote once or twice, and then we lost touch. I didn't hear of her again until many years later, when I was at university, studying entomology. Walking down the dormitory corridor one evening, I bumped into a girl who'd been to school with us.
          "Hey," I said, after we'd made the usual preliminary chit-chat

(I had, by this time, learned how to fake the social skills). "What ever happened to Sheryl?  Do you remember her?"
          "Sheryl Longely?"
          "Yea, Sheryl Longely.
          "She ran away from home when she was thirteen, became a street kid, then a hooker. A guy from our old school said he saw her on Karangahape Road one night, flashing her sorry wares; a poor soul, wretched."

                                                                                        

Halloween in the Antipodes     12

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