The least successful Halloween costume of my entire life was my 2014 Peter Pan costume. Instead of just replicating the outfit from the Disney movie, I insisted on making my costume true to J. M. Barrie’s original description in the book. So, my mom and I went to JoAnn Fabrics in late September to buy some patterned green cloth for the leaves, and my ama helped me sew the leaves onto my t-shirt. At school, I changed into the leafy shirt after recess and then draped over it a long, brown cloak borrowed from my old Jedi costume.
Despite my best efforts to embody Peter and explain my getup to everyone around me, when it was the fourth graders’ turn to go onstage in alphabetical order at the school assembly, the principal saw me—straggling towards the back of the procession—and announced, to my humiliation:
“And look, a tree!”
A few weeks earlier was the first time my mom took me bra shopping. At the time, before it had been replaced by a Forever 21, there was a Justice in the nearby mall, filled to the brim with unicorn plushies, frilly hot pink skirts, and glittery crop tops emblazoned with vaguely empowering messages. As my mom beelined towards the training bra section, I felt the urge to both drag my feet and run as fast as possible to minimize the amount of zebra print in my visual field. “Hurricane” by Bridgit Mendler blasted on the speakers.
The morning of the school Halloween procession, I begged my mom to let me go without a bra for my costume. My argument was as follows:
- Peter doesn’t wear a bra.
- Peter is the boy who never grew up and, if he were real, he would not want me to feel literally and figuratively restricted in my portrayal of him.
- Anyone who would notice a difference, especially under all the leaves, is being a creep and a weirdo.
- Maybe I don’t want to think about creeps and weirdos staring at me. Maybe I don’t want to grow up yet.
- This will be my last day of freedom, I won’t complain ever again, please please please please please…
After the Peter Pan mishap, I slowly lowered my expectations about, and emotional investment in, DIY Halloween costumes. I went as El from Stranger Things in middle school, borrowing my ye ye’s old leather jacket, slicking my hair back with gel, and trusting in my best friend and her eyeshadow palette for El’s “bitchin’” punk look in season 2; in high school, I simply pinned a Starfleet officer badge on my black turtleneck and called myself a Section 31 secret agent. Yet, Halloween was still secretly one of my favorite holidays of the year, even as it soon came to mean giving candy out to trick-or-treaters and hearing them talk about the characters they dreamed themselves up to be.
When my first Halloween at Yale rolled around, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to buy just anything off of Amazon, but I also didn’t have space to make anything in my tiny Bingham double, nor the time to go through the training at the CEID. As the date inched closer, bunny ears and devil’s horn headbands began popping up on my Instagram feed, and I debated whether to attend the LGBTQ Center’s Monster Mash without a costume, or even whether to show up at all.
It took a trip down memory lane, sparked by a music-video-watching homework assignment, for me to find my answer. I’d become a BTS fan in high school, and I distinctly remembered trying to wear my cloth headband the way V wore his bandana in the “Mic Drop” music video. I then suffered from intense forehead acne for a week. But “Blood, Sweat, and Tears” was also on my playlist—trippy, gothic, and eerily off-kilter. Amidst spooky paintings, a dramatic organ interlude, and a winged statue crying green wax, what stood out to me in the video most were the fits, paired with the smokiest eye makeup looks.
Something clicked. Sifting through my closet, I found my mom’s paisley tank top and the navy blue blazer I had bought, to my mom’s chagrin, at the questionable thrift store near our favorite ramen place in Brookline. I brought out my eyeshadow palettes—one a freebie that came with my ama’s anti-aging cream, the other a tiny one I’d bought for senior prom—and looked back to the face on the screen.
When I arrived at the Monster Mash, the party was already far too loud for me. I hung back in the lounge area, away from the “charspookerie” board in the kitchen. As I took out my phone to take a selfie to send to my high school friends, eyes comically wide, the front door swung open and a friend I’d just met a few weeks ago walked in.
She squinted at me from next to the front desk. “Wait. Is that—”
“Jimin, from BTS,” I interjected. I had no idea if she knew what I was talking about and immediately started wondering if I should have said anything at all. But then—
“From ‘Blood, Sweat, and Tears,’” she added, nodding. “Hell yeah.”
