The last night Jimmy had walked Laura home, it was just a few days before Halloween. The neighborhood was very well decorated and thousands or orange leaves were falling all over the decorations and in the street, making noise when they walked. It was impossible not to walk on orange leaves everywhere, as even the people who raked assiduously could not keep up with the number that had fallen.
But it was the decorations that she remembered the best. Skeletons with blood on them, a bride-scarecrow with blood on her wedding gown, a Santa with his head cut off. People were going all out. There were a lot of the balloons - balloon ghosts, balloon dragons, balloon vampires, that kind of thing. But the scarecrows, handmade people, were a lot more realistic. And whatever they were using for fake blood, or the red blood-appearing subtance on all the clothes, it worked. These exhibits were getting more sophisticated every year.
Jimmy was depressed; she already knew that. It wasn't just that she'd just broken up with him about a week ago. They'd gone over that, her reasons, her need for some space, her need to not be taking care of him just at this point of her life; she was trying to graduate from high school. He was depressed because his parents had apparently failed him. They told him that since he was nineteen, he had to either go to college or get a job, and as he'd made it clear he was pretty much unable to do either one. He couldn't take college, couldn't study, couldn't sit in another single class. As for jobs, yes there were plenty around, but those terrified him. He couldn't bring himself to even apply. Just thinking about it gave him terrible panic attacks.
So his life had become quite uncomfortable, and he didn't quite know what to do about it. He had moments of happiness. He would smile at Laura and tell her she made him laugh. He would say that the days they went together as boyfriend and girlfriend were the best days, the ones he'd always remember. He said that the best thing about high school was the classes they'd been in together though there were only a few of them. As they walked he kicked a few branches in the street and sometimes she'd see in him that boy side of him that she'd known just about forever, and she wondered, what happened, did life take most of his spirit away? What does he mean he can't get a job? Of course he could! He was just terrified of the next step, growing up.
As they walked up the brick street, through the leaves, a car came along facing them and stopped. They recognized Vern, a friend of theirs from high school. Vern was joining the army and leaving in about a week, he said; he'd stopped noisily and rolled down his window to talk to them. He'd decided that his girlfriend, Gwen, would just have to wait back here for him to finish; he'd be in the Army a couple of years. Maybe he'd be able to marry her and bring her along with him, but that was a long shot, he said, and he felt like he was too young to marry. He asked Laura about her plans, but her plans hadn't changed: she wanted to finish high school and go on to be a nurse. He asked Jimmy about his plans, though, and Jimmy was stuck in his tracks. He had absolutely nothing to say. He had no plans. Vern tried asking him if he wanted to join the Army; they could go off to boot camp together. No, the Army held no appeal to him.
To Laura, what she remembered best was not Jimmy's absolute refusal to have a plan, or see any hope, or see anything in his future, but rather the dancing lights on the skeletons in the yard nearby. This particular house had set up a moving light display so that all the tombstones, and the skeletons with their blood and their poses, would be bathed in moving light, and the moving lights danced around them all evening apparently, making a kind of light show for passersby like Laura and Jimmy. Even Vern for a minute seemed to appreciate the amount of work they had done to fix up their yard; it seemed much more elaborate than the Christmas displays of yore or the other kinds of displays that had been a running feature of the neighborhood. Laura wondered if they were trying to get more trick-or-treaters on Hallowe'en night or something, as if the light show might somehow draw them in.
On Hallowe'en night Vern's little brother Adam came around trick-or-treating and told Laura that Jimmy had killed himself, jumped off the Commander Avenue bridge over the interstate, just as Vern was driving by, and Vern himself had hit him. Vern was pretty shook up about it, said Adam, but everyone knew there was nothing he could have done and besides, it was unlikely that Jimmy had even known that it was him coming, as he'd jumped off the bridge. It was a cruel thing to do, the night before Hallowe'en, but Jimmy had done it and Laura hadn't even heard about it until Adam had come around trick-or-treating. She quickly made some calls and found out that it was true. Somehow she'd been left off the "inform immediately" list and the family was still dealing with the shock of the tragedy.
Vern eventually got over it and went off to the Army in three or four days as was his original plan. The problem was, he'd had Gwen with him in the car, and what they'd seen was a horror that they would remember forever. It did some damage to his car, but not much; his car would be alright in the end, and fortunately, traffic on the interstate had not accordioned up and killed anyone else, but it was still a frightening image that Gwen would never be able to live down. Gwen really didn't know Jimmy at all; he was just a guy who fell out of the sky while she was driving with her boyfriend at night.
Laura and Gwen became fast friends, but after a few weeks they stopped talking about it altogether and talked about other things. They each held their last memories of Jimmy close and they had that in common, but the rest of the world seemed to go on as if nothing had happened. Finally snow came, and the leaves blew away or were raked out of the way, so that the town had a peaceful wintery feeling. But the Christmas displays didn't hold a candle to what Laura had seen at Halloween. It was like people just didn't have all the decorating inspiration for the displays, or maybe they were worn out from having gone totally overboard at Hallowe'en. By Christmas and Hannukah, it seemed more like they were ready to hide in their houses until spring, and just keep the light shows to a minimum.
