Happy Halloween!

So yeah, it’s Halloween and I’ve been trying to decide which story I should tell today. I thought about this time I was babysitting, and some guy kept prank calling, and the police told me he was calling from inside the house. Or maybe that other time I was babysitting, and this dude in a white mask showed up. Or that other time, at camp, when I was making out with some guy while there was a slasher on the loose.

But those stories aren’t so exciting, so I’ll just tell you about last year’s Halloween. Actually, it’s about the week after Halloween, but whatever.

When the kid moved out to Virginia to live with me last year, the first thing he did was test his boundaries. How far was Mom going to allow him to go? He started with his hair. The kid’s a blonde, but he decided he wanted to change that. He wanted to dye his hair blue-black, he said. I think he assumed I would say no because he seemed a bit shocked when I showed up with a box of hair coloring. A week later, he decided he wanted pink highlights. Again, I picked up the stuff. Again, he seemed shocked. Next, it was a Mohawk. He backed out when I took him to get it done.

Score one for mom.

Shortly before Halloween, he asked for black fingernail polish. And black lipstick. But instead of wearing them to school on Halloween, when all the amateurs were dressing up, my son decided to do it a week later. I helped him paint his nails (so he wouldn’t get black nail polish all over the carpet) and showed him how to put on the lipstick and I even helped him with some black eyeliner. It was one of those milestone moments that makes a mother proud, I tell you. The day you show your teenaged son the proper use of cosmetics.

Anyway, I sent the pink-haired, black-lipped, eyeliner-ed kid off to school and drove myself to work. I was pretty sure there would be a message waiting for me when I got there – an angry principal telling me I needed to come get my demon child and never send him to school looking like that again. We lived in the country then, and the school the kid attended . . . well, it was filled with country folk. The children of church-going, gun-toting, flag-waiving, we-don’t-take-to-your-kind-around-here country folk. And my child was doing everything he could not to fit in. So I was certain there would be a phone call. And I was prepared.

I spent my entire forty-five minute commute composing my response. My son is just trying to express himself, I would say. Nothing in the dress code prohibits black nail polish or lipstick, I would tell them. And if you’re going to let the girls wear make up, then you have to let my son. To tell him he can’t just because he’s a boy is sexist.

I was ready for the fight.

And, as expected, there was a message waiting for me when I got to my office.

But . . .

It wasn’t the conversation I expected to be having. Yes, my son was in trouble. Yes, he had been to the counselor’s office. Yes, he was being suspended. But not for looking like the spawn of Marilyn Manson and Pink.

There had apparently been a drill the previous day. They were practicing what to do in the case of a gunman in the building. This included closing the blinds of the classroom and hiding under their desks.

My stupid son, being one to find and acknowledge humor in the most inappropriate times and places, joked that closing the blinds didn’t seem all that smart. After all, if someone with a gun was outside, he could very easily deduce which rooms were in fact occupied.

Then, to make matters worse, after about fifteen minutes hunched under the desk, the oxygen apparently stopped flowing freely to his brain and he started to giggle. Before I tell you what happened next, I have to preface it by saying that my son is a fan of irony. And dark humor. And again, he finds humor in the most inappropriate of circumstances.

So when he said to the kid next to him, “Wouldn’t it be funny if a gunman came in while we were having this drill?” He did not mean, “I would like for someone to come into this room with a gun and start shooting.” He meant something more along the lines of, “That would make a great Quentin Tarentino/Wes Anderson flick.”

(I did punish him. There was grounding. There were lost tv privileges. There was even a researched report on Columbine, where I made him read the memorial sites of each victim. And there was a lot of talking about this. Just so you know.)

So the guidance counselor who called me didn’t seem too upset. She said she had talked to him, and he seemed to understand how what he’d said was worrisome to others and that he seemed like a good kid with an unfortunate sense of humor, but that they took these things seriously and he would have to be suspended. I assured her that we had no weapons in the house and he absolutely had no access to any weapons and that he really was, as she said, a good kid.

Then I had to talk to the principal. And to try to convince her that my son was not a menace and not depressed and not violent or anything other than a normal teenage boy.

Despite the fact that one day after making a “threat” to his classmates, the kid showed up wearing black nail polish and black lipstick and a black t-shirt with a bleeding skull on it.

Irony.