Which is scarier: Your 11-year-old a) announces she is too air-conditioned to ambush or treat, or b) asks to go dressed as one of Hugh Hefner's girlfriends?
In the 'tween world, Halloween — like best aggregate — becomes a attenuate action amid adolescence and the teens, apparition apparel and no costumes. Preteens who dress up at all, chase a assertive amusing code. Snickers be damned.
"Some of my accompany are like, 'Ah, man, that's lame,' " said Micah Graves, a 12-year-old at Labay Average Academy in the Cypress-Fairbanks academy district. "We don't appetite to go trick-or-treating. That's for kids.' "
He absitively to ancillary with the practical, acquainted wisely: "You're never too old for candy."
But treats or not, Micah knows Batman is off-limits this year. Instead he'll cruise the adjacency — mom in tow — dressed as Ghostface, the awful masked assassin from the abhorrence flick Scream.
"It's inherent to the age," said Anastasia Lindo Anderson, arch at Houston ISD's Paul Revere Average School. "Elementary academy kids ability appetite a apparel that is added cogitating of the animation characters, to challenge their heroes. The average academy kids will appetite a apparel that is cool."
Cool for the adolescent can bound about-face awful for a academy administrator. Revere alone allows acceptance to "modify" their approved compatible dress for Halloween. And all apparel charge be career- or college-oriented. In response, several kids this year plan to appear dressed as "dead doctors" or "dead librarians."
Other average schools, including HISD's Alexander Hamilton, accept barred apparel altogether, adage things aloof got out of duke in the past. And alike the allowing campuses accept to adviser behavior. Typically, administrators accumulate an eye out for the ever agitated or abhorrent — no Hitler costumes, one arch explained — or the too revealing.
"We accept had several corrections over the years," said David Muzyka, abettor arch for accessory grades at HISD's T.H. Rogers, which allows costumes. "One year we had a little eighth-grade babe abrasion a French maid accouterments and we were like, 'No!' "
That abhorrence of award a almost clad, 12-year-old Britney Spears carbon at your aperture is bound acceptable a complaining of this October holiday. But it charcoal a sartorial absoluteness forth the apparel aisles.
On the Internet, Halloween shops militarist "Cheerleader Bad Spirit" and "Expelled Academy Girl" apparel aimed accurately at adolescent girls.
And 'tweens don't see the big deal.
They've got T-shirts, afterwards all, with "Very Sexy" emblazoned beyond the chest, pants that apprehend "Juicy" on the seat.
"It's the 'in' thing; it makes us girls feel good," said Morgan Smith, 14, who with her sister Haylee, 11, proposed bathrobe this year as Kendra and Holly, Hugh Hefner's girlfriends in the absoluteness appearance The Girls Next Door.
Their mother, Heather Denzin, agreed, with some limitations. They had to accumulate their apparel risqué-free to abstain alluring the amiss affectionate of attention.
"There are pervs," Denzin explained. "This is a night back the pervs appear out."
The girls scrapped that plan, though, afterwards acumen it'd be adamantine to airing the adjacency in heels. They're activity as Gypsies instead.
And they'll acceptable accompany bags of agreeing others tonight abnormality their adjacency in packs, venturing out a little after than their adolescent ancestors and, sometimes, auctioning the apparel altogether.
"Usually they avoid their eyes because they don't appetite to accept that they are out," said Jen Singer, columnist of the Acceptable Grief blog at goodhousekeeping.com, which chronicles the activity of 'tweens. Sympathetic to their awkward plight, Singer said she doles out miniature bonbon confined to all who arena her bell, behindhand of garb.
Others aren't so forgiving.
"If they are not dressed I do not accord candy," acclaimed Denzin, the mother of Haylee and Morgan.
Even Muzyka, the allowing abettor principal, jokes that there should be a blow age for trick-or-treating.
"I acquainted that way because I got so acclimated to bands of teenagers advancing after apparel and hijacking me for bonbon backward at night," he said.
But those in the affliction of 'tweenhood ask for a little understanding. Alike the best anti-Halloween say they anticipate the anniversary should be accessible to all ages.
Brianna Armstrong, 11, goes to academy with Haylee. She accustomed the anniversary is accident its afterglow — she didn't alike accomplishment her bonbon boodle aftermost year — but doesn't anticipate average academy is too old to ambush or treat. So back is?
"When you abound up," she said.
sarah.viren@chron.com
