Shawn and ‘Ramella’ were also shrunken when the lights went out. They were in the middle of the dance floor, and though they tried to grope the girls in the dark, they wondered why they couldn’t knock anybody off their feet. That answer became clear as the lights suddenly flashed back on and they found themselves at the girls’ feet, small enough that they were eye-level in a sea of ankles.

“This can’t be good,” said the ever obvious Shawn. The girls were only standing now, but the lights were back on and the music was starting up again. Feet began to tap and bodies began to sway.

Ram craned his neck upward. So many of the girls were wearing outfits with short skirts that he found himself staring up at a cotton-clouded heaven. “Oh, God, you mean this couldn’t be better.”

“No, I mean… Move!” Shawn shoved his dazed friend forward as the sparkling foot of a gypsy girl landed between them. The foot continued over Shawn’s head and across the dance floor.

Ram let out a girly shriek as another foot crashed beside him. This one came from Ruby, one of Christie’s friends, who was dressed up as an Egyptian Cleopatra. But his biggest fear came from another one of the girls making his way towards him. She was dressed as a clown with shoes of about a size eighteen.

“It must’ve been that stupid ghost girl!” Ram yelled as he ran over to Shawn and threw his arms around him. “She shrank us!”

Shawn shoved him away. “Get off me, man! Not even in life and death circumstances do I want you touching me.”

“But we have to stick together if we want to survive!”

“Screw that! Every man for himself!”
 
Shawn took off, darting between the pounding waves of legs, and eventually disappeared amongst all the skin and fabrics and estrogen in the dance room.

Ram was alone. He stared up at the girls, both cute and scary in their various costumes, dancing all around him. The music played louder. There was no way they would be able to hear him.
Backing up towards the wall, he hugged the baseboard and slowly made his way out of the lounge. Footsteps thundered around the wooden floor and the blaring music caused his ear drums to shatter more than once, but he eventually just slapped his palms over his ears and sprinted the rest of the way. He found himself in the empty hallway. The cellar door was on this left and it suddenly swung open.
With his quick football reflexes, he dropped to his stomach and the door swished over his body. He lifted his head to see Christie appearing from the cellar and rolled towards the wall as she stepped on the carpet of where he had just been and wandered into the dance room.

As soon as she was gone, he leapt to his feet and raced across the hallway. The front door loomed before him, growing bigger with every quick stride. He was almost there.

But he had forgotten about the winding staircase to his left. Having found the camera, Leah was making her way down the stairs—leisurely, but her speed was still about equal to that of Ram. When she reached the bottom stair, she placed her next footstep on the floor in front of Ram. He slammed into her buckled sandals and fell backwards, staring up at the giant butterfly girl. She didn’t notice him. She stood still and looked around, apparently searching for somebody or something else. Little did either of them know that the one she was looking for was the one at her foot.

But the rumble of music was softer here (because rich people have soundproof walls built into every room) and Ram thought there was a chance she could hear him if he called out to her. And he did, knowing very well her name because she was quite recognizable in her costume that revealed more than it hid.

“Leah!” he cried. “Leah, down here!”

She flicked her blonde hair to the side, the antennas bouncing over her forehead, but made no sign that she had heard his minute voice. So he decided to try again.

“Leah, you stupid whore, look down!”

For some reason, whether she heard him or not, she chose at that moment to look down. The first thing she saw was Ram.

“Hey there, little guy,” she said with a glittery smile. “I hope you’re a lady bug. Christie doesn’t like guys at her party.”

“Lady, you don’t know the half of it,” Ram muttered, looking down at his dress and then back up at the enormous Leah, who put one knee next to him and knelt down.

She didn’t seem to hear or recognize him as a human being. “We better get you out of here. Even if you were invited, you’re only going to get stepped on if you stay.”

Before Ram could protest (as if it would matter), Leah plucked him up by the dress and set him in her palm. Then she stepped over to the door and opened it to the cool breeze of the night. The wind was enough to knock Ram over.

“Time to fly, little guy,” Leah said, giving the bug in her hand a little toss out the doorway. She lost him in the darkness, but she smiled knowing that she had done a good deed. She had saved an insect from a horrible death under somebody’s foot. That kindness made her feel good inside.

And so she shut the door, forgetting that some bugs can’t fly. And this one was one of those. Ram knew that. Ram knew that he couldn’t fly from the time he was born until Leah threw him out the doorway from a distance of some hundred feet to the ground. He still knew that as he sailed through the air, crying out Leah’s name. He forgot that somewhere, though, when his body collided with the stone pathway to Christie’s house and, after a few messy rollovers, he became a gooey stain amongst the rocks.

He wasn’t conscious enough to see the ghostly image of a little girl standing by one of the big oak trees, giggling.

Unfortunately, his buddy Shawn wasn’t having much better luck. He, like Pip and Ram, had been spotted, but rather than thinking he was a bug, the werewolf costume he was wearing made all the girls shriek out, “Rat!”

The dance floor became a crazed mob. All feet were surrounding Shawn and all eyes were drawn down to him.

“Squeak…” he said meekly. Then he slapped himself, remembering that these were girls he was dealing with. They were more afraid of him than he was of him.

“Fear me! Feeeeear me!” he bellowed to a group of cowering girls. They shrunk back, not because they could hear him, but because he was a filthy rat that was ruining their Halloween party.

“Why did the music stop?” Christie’s voice boomed from the back of the crowds.

“There’s a rat!” one of the girls shrieked. “It’s sooo ugly!”

“Get it away from me!”

“Ew! Ew! It touched me!”

“It’s looking up my skirt!”

“Pervert rat!”

Shawn laughed maniacally. He never had so many girls at his mercy before.

That is, until the crowd made way for Christie. She borrowed a broom from one of the girls dressed as a witch, slammed her boots down in front of Shawn’s hairy body, and raised the broom over her head. “Good-bye, you dirty rat.”

Shawn started to look up at her, but only got as far as her waist before the straw of the broom battered against his small figure. He hit the floor. The broom came down again. And again. In fact, it happened three more times before Christie slapped the broom against the wooden floorboards and pulled it back, winding up for a slapshot, and knocked the mangled rat against the wall. His bones shattered on impact. With one last squeak, his crumpled body lay motionless at the feet of the crowd, who all cheered as if Christie had made the winning goal in a game.

“That’ll teach you to crash my party,” Christie said to the ‘rat’, boldly picking it up in her bare hand and stepping through the clapping crowd. She headed for the kitchen, opening the trash can lid with her foot, and dropped the dirty thing in the garbage. The lid slammed shut behind him.