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October had arrived in Stonybrook, Connecticut, which meant it was time for the annual Scarecrow Contest. Claudia Kishi decided it would be the perfect occasion to showcase both her artistic talent and her unique fashion sense. Since her mother was the head librarian at the public library, the Scarecrow Contest Committee gave Claudia the telephone pole right by the library parking lot to display her entry.
Claudia went all out. She dressed the scarecrow up in her wildest outfit to date. The scarecrow wore her purple and white striped unitard, a magenta blouse with uber wide dolman sleeves, metallic gold ankle boots, a black fringed vest, a neon green fedora and matching gloves, giant zebra earrings, approximately one thousand bangles, and a 5-inch round holographic button that said CLAUDIA!
When Alan Gray and Trevor Sandbourne caught sight of the scarecrow, they couldn’t stop laughing. Alan was always looking for something to poke fun at, and Trevor was sore because Claudia opted to take Austin Bentley to the Halloween Hop. “Hey, ScareClaudia,” Alan asked the scarecrow, “how did reading out loud go in class today?” And in a slow, bimbo voice, Trevor spoke for the doll. “Very slowly.” They cracked up, and went on their way.
The boys treatment of ScareClaudia only got nastier as the Halloween season went on. Trevor wrote a scathing review of the piece in the school paper, calling its look “Thom McCan? More like Thom McCAN’T” Alan took to tossing the backwash of his Ecto Cooler on the thing every morning. One day, after Alan had splattered the doll with the green punch, ScareClaudia growled.
“Did you hear that?” Trevor asked.
“It was ScareClaudia,” Alan replied. “What a freakazoid!”
Trevor scoffed. “It’s made of straw, Alan. You’re hearing things.”
The boys took a different route to school for a few days. But the following week, they were back at it, posing the Claudia doll in embarrassing ways for polaroid photos, and putting rude signs in her neon-gloved hands.
One night, Trevor saw something that spooked him. “Alan, I think ScareClaudia just moved.”
“I dunno,” Alan replied. “Maybe we’ve just had a few too many Turtles Pies.”
The next morning, when the boys approached the library, ScareClaudia shimmied off of her post and walked up to the library roof. That morning and that afternoon, she stared down the two boys as they walked too and from school. The boys had no idea what he would do next. They were totally chicken.
The next morning, at the library, they saw that ScareClaudia was nowhere in sight. They felt as if they had escaped a great danger and high fived. But when they had gone only a mile or two, they realized they had forgotten their science project at Alan’s. Neither one wanted to go back for them, but they’d get a failing grade if they didn’t bring it in. "There's nothing to be afraid of," they told one another. "After all, what could a doll do?"
They decided to draw straws to see which one would go back and when they did, Alan drew the smaller straw. Alan told Trevor that he would catch up with him, so Trevor walked the rest of the way to school.
But Alan never showed. At recess, he looked around and around for Alan. He couldn’t find him.
But he did find ScareClaudia. The doll was on the roof of the middle school. As Trevor watched, ScareClaudia kneeled and stretched out a bloody skin to dry in the sun.