The Bake Sale Bunch #40: Liz and the Scariest Halloween Ever

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(I think we can all remember the first time we read a Bake Sale Bunch book. If you're anything like me, you picked one up a few days after you came out as a trans woman, excited to finally dig into why everybody else was talking about the adventures of Zoe, Alice, Sophie, and Liz, four trans women who love to bake. The much-loved series, published by reclusive author Anna Aardvark, released over 1,600 installments between 2018 and 2025. Here are some excerpts from the 40th book in the series, Liz and the Scariest Halloween Ever.)

CHAPTER 1

"Hold that elevator, please!" Liz shouted as she ran through the front doors of Ferndale Memorial Hospital. She had a vase of flowers in one hand, her purse over her shoulder, and a container full of fresh-baked cookies in the other hand. She had tied the string of a balloon that read "IT'S A CHILD" to her purse strap, and it bounced along with her. Cornelius, her pet corgi who had an incredible sense of smell, ran just behind her, following her footsteps exactly.

It was just after sunset on Halloween night. Down the street, children dressed as witches, ghosts, and goblins went trick or treating. The hospital's lobby was festooned with cardboard cutout pumpkins and orange streamers. ("Festooned" means "bedecked" or "adorned." You usually use it to describe decorations.) Yet all Liz had eyes for was the open elevator door. She was holding so many things. She didn't want to wait one second longer than necessary.

The kindly older woman who had held the elevator door with her umbrella looked down at Cornelius with a frown. "Do they let dogs in the hospital?" she asked.

"This dog is special," Liz said. "When the hospital almost shut down because of that infestation of crickets last year, Cornelius sniffed out all the crickets and caught Tommy Terwilliger, the boy who had left them in the vents. They gave Cornelius a golden stethoscope!" She nodded to the little dog, who looked up to reveal the golden stethoscope he wore in place of a collar. "It means he's granted access to all hospital areas whenever he needs it."

"Does he perform surgeries?" the woman asked with a smile. She was joking, but Liz missed jokes sometimes.

"Oh no," Liz said. "He's just a dog. But I do believe he can smell diseases. He should get into preventive care." (Preventive care is when a person maintains their health by catching conditions before they become serious. It is painfully difficult to afford in the United States unless you have the very best insurance or a dog like Cornelius.)

The woman nodded toward Liz's balloon. "Do you know someone who's had a baby?"

"Not yet! But the Oeys will have a baby any second now! Oh. Those are my friends Zoe and Chloe." Zoe was one of Liz's best friends, her boss at the T4T B&B, and the unofficial president of the Bake Sale Bunch. Chloe was an incredibly talented attorney who, like Cornelius, had gotten the Bake Sale Bunch out of many a jam. Zoe and Chloe had been married for over a decade. They had gotten married before Zoe came out as a trans woman and began transition. Chloe had been admitted to the hospital that afternoon when her water broke just after 2 p.m. The baby would be their first child. Zoe and Chloe were called "The Oeys" for obvious reasons.

"Oh, I know all about the Oeys!" the woman said. "I'm Rebecca. I'm Zoe's mother." She smiled up at the balloon. "It's nice to see that you aren't forcing gender performance on the baby, but my understanding is the child will be assigned male at birth. We'll have to wait and see what gender the baby is once he can say so for himself, of course, but you'll forgive me if I use he/him pronouns until he corrects me otherwise. I'm very old-fashioned." (As Liz knew all too well, many trans women were not blessed with mothers who seemed so aware of the complicated realities of gender. She did not think Rebecca was old-fashioned at all.)

Liz's smile soured slightly like someone had tried to color over it with a frown but only half finished the job. Imagine! A mother like Rebecca! When she saw Rebecca looking at her quizzically, she quickly smiled again, even bigger this time. "A Halloween baby!" she exclaimed as the elevator doors opened.

She exited into the waiting room, where the other members of the Bake Sale Bunch already sat, careful not to let any of the tears that had almost slipped out actually fall.

(The early chapters of Scariest Halloween Ever mainly concern themselves with the Bake Sale Bunch's growing concern for Chloe as Halloween evening lingers into the wee hours of All Soul's Day. The book also touches on Liz, Sophie, and Alice's jealousy over Rebecca's seeming support of her daughter, as well as frequent complaints from guests that an unknown entity is writing messages in the fogged-up mirrors at the B&B. At the end of chapter four, the members of the BSB are surprised to see Zoe exit the labor and delivery area, get in her car and drive away. In chapter five, they draw straws — after Alice has to explain several times what drawing straws means — before everyone realizes that Cornelius's excellent nose is the best way to find the now-missing Zoe. Liz and Cornelius are on the case.)

CHAPTER 6

Cornelius barked three times to signify that he had found the scent he was seeking. He looked back at Liz from where he hung out the passenger side window of Nick's Nissan Leaf. There, in the parking lot of the T4T B&B, was Zoe's car. Why was she here when Chloe was having a baby?

Liz let herself into the little ground-floor apartment she shared with her boyfriend, Nick. He had opted to stay at the B&B rather than crowd into the hospital. He wanted to finish his real-person slashfic in which the United Nations recruited Neil Armstrong, Sir Edmund Hillary, and Ernest Shackleton to explore Olympus Mons. (Olympus Mons is a large volcano on Mars. Human beings have never set foot upon it in reality.) There, Nick had said, with a gleam in his eye, the three would discover the dangerous and erotic secret of the mountain and the even larger one in each other's hearts. (A dangerous and erotic secret is something for adults, but few adults ever encounter such a thing. Pity.) In the pages Liz had read, the explorers had yet to reach Mars, much less discover any dangerous and erotic secrets. She had doubts Nick could finish the story in one evening.

"Hey, babe," Nick said. He looked up from his computer, a lollipop wedged in his mouth. "You're home sooner than I expected."

"Have you seen Zoe? She left the hospital without saying why."

"No! But the power's been weird all night. After the power went out the third time, I lit a bunch of candles for period authenticity."

Liz doubted Neil Armstrong had lit candles to better illuminate his trip to the Moon, but she smiled and gave Nick a thumbs up.

"If you were looking for Zoe, I might try the basement. She's probably messing with the circuit breakers down there."

"The basement's so spooky!" Liz said. In addition to being a very good baker, Liz thought she might be just a little bit psychic. Her powers told her the basement was haunted, though she did not believe the ghosts were mean. Still, if there were ghosts present, they would be especially active on the night between Halloween and All Soul's Day, that was for sure.

"Then take Cornelius," Nick said, returning to his manuscript.

"Take Cornelius and not my brave, handsome boyfriend?" Liz made a face that hopefully found a middle ground between "I am playing at being a helpless girlfriend to be amusingly hetero" and "The basement is really spooky, and I'd rather not go down there."

Her face didn't work. Nick shook his head. "The basement? I'm not going down there. It's really spooky."

The lights in the house flickered, and Cornelius growled. Liz could swear she heard the laughter of a girl. She was the only girl in the room, and she hadn't laughed (that she knew of). Something was seriously scary in the T4T B&B!

She scowled and headed toward the basement. Nick thought about following her but instead returned to his story where Ernest Shackleton had just set out a beautiful candlelit dinner for the trio of explorers as they drifted toward Mars.

(Aardvark's oeuvre is famous for its occasional, shocking dips into experimental fiction. These detours have often been questioned by critics, who believe these chapters are too advanced for most middle-grade readers. Still, even Aardvark's harshest critics had to hand it to her when they read The Bake Sale Bunch #40: Liz and the Scariest Halloween Ever. The seventh chapter of the book, which Aardvark titled "Oey,"  breaking with her standard chapter naming conventions, consists of a single sentence that begins and ends midthought and sprawls over nearly 75 pages.

"Oey" follows the hallucinatory wanderings of Chloe while she remains suspended in a dream state between life and death. The chapter was only the third time Aardvark had written from Chloe's point of view. According to The Horn Book's Alexander Whiting, it was a clear repudiation of the harsh criticism that The Bake Sale Bunch #21: Chloe and the Local Easement Laws had received.

"In 'Oey,'" Whiting writes, "Aardvark is in conversation with Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov and its famed Grand Inquisitor chapter. Chloe questions gendered expectations around parenthood and the fact that she, the cis woman in a lesbian relationship with a trans woman, must carry the child when her trans partner would be more temperamentally suited to it. She is then visited by and enters into dialogue with three guests who form a sort of holy trinity of trans femininity.

"The first guest will be a happy surprise for longtime readers of the series, as it is none other than Jodie Opera, whose death was the subject of The Bake Sale Bunch #32: A Bummer of an Independence Day. The second is a pre-transition Zoe, whose deadname is blacked out and redacted throughout. The third is, of course, Reese from Torrey Peters's novel Detransition, Baby. The conversations among these four women are beautiful, profane, and often intensely spiritual.

"'Oey' is masterfully written and underscores Aardvark as one of our chief prose stylists. However, younger readers might struggle to remember what Liz was up to when the plot resumes in chapter eight. Similarly, they might be scared by mentions of the black dog on the horizon who grows larger every time Chloe looks at him and whose only line of dialogue is 'IN MY JAWS, I BEAR THE FUTURE. WITNESS THE BLOOD.'

"Still, there's much to enjoy here, even for those who are only casual fans of the series." [Whiting, 67])

CHAPTER 8

The lights in the basement were all out! Liz had to light a match to be able to see because she had left her phone at the hospital. Despite how frequently Sophie suggested doing so, the T4T B&B had yet to install torches throughout the building. Liz now deeply regretted not siding with Sophie on the torch proposal!

"Zoe?" she said, her voice barely a whisper.

At her feet, Cornelius still growled, angling his whole body toward the darkness. She took another step down, but Cornelius would not budge. She would have to carry the little dog! Yet when she stooped to pick him up, he growled and snapped and raced away upstairs.

She sighed and lit another match. "Zoe, this isn't funny!"

"Zoe?" said a girl's voice from the darkness. It sounded like the last blizzard of February, all ice and misery. It seemed to be everywhere and nowhere and only in Liz's ear all at once. "Is that my name?"

Liz turned and ran! She nearly passed out when she ran smack dab into someone at the top of the basement stairs.

CHAPTER 9

Zoe stood at the top of the stairs. She held a ratty stuffed elephant in her hands. She looked like she had been crying. "Liz? What are you doing here? You look like you've seen a ghost!"

"Heard one," Liz said. "I knew it. The T4T B&B is haunted."

Zoe sometimes got a look on her face like she wanted nothing more than to ask you a dozen questions about the strange thing you had just said. At the moment, however, that look disappeared when her eyes turned heavy again, wet with tears. "Well, if we had a ghost, we could promote it on the website..."

"Is everything okay, Zoe? I came here looking for you."

"I just had to get this." Zoe held up the elephant. It looked as though it had been well-loved. "Chloe and the baby are lost in the dark. The doctors don't even know what to do. So I thought..." She laughed and reached up to wipe her tears. "I don't know what I thought. I thought maybe Mr. Banjo could help find her in there."

"Zoe, I had no idea." Liz threw herself forward into a tight and desperate hug. All night, she realized, she had been jealous of Zoe's relationship with her mother. (Liz hadn't spoken to her mother in years.) Yet Zoe had been going through one of the hardest things a person can!

"We got in a fight, too. Right before Chloe went into labor, she was complaining about something painful about being pregnant. And I jumped right in with an apology about how I wasn't the one carrying the baby. She got mad at me for centering myself, and I got mad at her for not realizing that this whole experience has deeply triggered my dysphoria, and... then her water broke. And now she might die."

"She's not going to die," Liz said. Things this bad just didn't happen to The Bake Sale Bunch. They just didn't!

Zoe gripped Mr. Banjo more tightly in her hands. She looked down at the floor and rubbed the toe of her shoe on a knothole. "I hope she doesn't," she finally said.

"You shouldn't feel bad about expressing your feelings," Liz said. "Maybe it wasn't the right time, but I don't think Chloe is in danger because of fighting with you. And if I know Chloe, she could argue God to a standstill."

"I did have the thought that she challenged Death to a Lincoln-Douglas debate," Zoe said. She relaxed her grip on Mr. Banjo and laughed.

"I have some idea how hard this is for you," Liz said. "I would love to have kids with Nick, and I'd love to actually carry them. But will I get to? Maybe I could get a uterine transplant, but I don't think a bake sale will raise enough money to cover those expenses."

Zoe didn't say anything. She gave Liz a side hug.

"You know you can talk to your friends, right? You can tell us how hard this is. You can let us help you carry that. I don't think Chloe is mad at you for sharing your pain with her. I think she's mad she's the only person you share your pain with."

"Maybe," Zoe said. She nodded toward the door. "I should get back there with Mr. Banjo. See if it works. You should go and check out our ghostly friend."

Liz waited until Zoe was almost gone. She knew she shouldn't say it. She still couldn't stop herself from saying it. "Your mom seems really cool."

"Now," Zoe said, stopping in the door. "She wasn't always." And then she was gone.

(The narrative follows Zoe back to the hospital, where she, Sophie, and Alice perform some of Chloe's favorite songs for her, and Alice reveals that she has a killer Mr. Banjo impression. [Aardvark does not clarify what, precisely, Mr. Banjo is meant to sound like.] Chloe squeezes Zoe's hand, and her eyes open. She begins to explain her strange dream, and the book cuts back to Liz at the B&B. She descends into the basement, but now, all the lights work. Then, just as she's about to go back upstairs, she looks in a mirror and sees the face of someone who isn't her.)

CHAPTER 12

From her youngest girlhood, Liz had become familiar with all of the elements of her face that did not seem right to her. In particular, she hated her hairline and her Adam's apple. (An Adam's apple is a lump in the throats of some people, many but not all assigned male at birth, that seems to move up and down when they talk. Many trans women find theirs dysphoria inducing.) She would look in a mirror and try to imagine a different face. Instead, she would only better commit the face she had to memory, the cruel voice of her mother in the back of her brain.

Now that she really was looking at a different face in the mirror — one that seemed to belong to a girl — she surprised herself by doing the same thing she always had to her own. She found all the ways the person didn't match up to some standard of "what a woman looks like" in her head. She found herself growing critical of the nose, the cheekbones, the sunken eyes. Maybe the ways her mother broke her would have persisted regardless of the life she had lived.

The mirror image tilted her head to look at Liz. Liz did the same. "It's you," Liz said. "You're the ghost."

"Am I?" the possible ghost said. "I don't think I'm a ghost." She frowned. "I think I'm here to do something other than be dead."

"What else is there for a ghost to do?" Liz said.

"Oh, I know," the not ghost said. "I'm a pre-haunting. I'm the opposite of a ghost. I haven't even been born yet. I think I was supposed to be, but I got down here and realized I wasn't sure what I wanted to be! So I bailed and came here to hang out. Pretty cool, right?"

Liz suddenly realized who the pre-ghost reminded her of. They reminded her of Chloe. They looked so much like Chloe that Liz could just about scream. (She didn't. She suspected ghosts or pre-ghosts would find that offensive.) "I think you're supposed to be my friends' child," Liz said. "You have everybody very worried."

"Do I? Rock."

"No, you don't understand. My friends have been waiting to meet you a very long time, and you've put one of your mother's lives in terrible danger." Liz remembered what Rebecca had said in the elevator. Zoe and Chloe had always believed they were having a boy, but they had also been careful to say that their child would ultimately get to pick what was right for him. Or her or them or any number of neopronouns.

"Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't mind being alive, but I don't know." In an instant, the face shifted to become more masculine, despite belonging to the same person. "Being a boy seems pretty limiting. I'd rather be... someone else. I guess I could try it?"

"I promise you that my friends will let you be whoever you need to be, even if that's a bunch of different people across your life," Liz said. "They will always love you. They're going to be wonderful mothers."

"Rock," the pre-ghost said.

"Maybe try to stop saying that," Liz said. "It's not 1987." She thought for a second. "Wait. Are you being reincarnated?"

"I don't really know. I don't remember much before this conversation. Maybe?" The pre-ghost thought for a moment. Their face rippled through what felt like dozens of possible selves, dozens of futures they might get to live, should they be born. "Okay. I think I'm gonna do it. I think I'm gonna be born. There are a lot of different things I could be! I can't wait to find out which one I am." They thought again. "But one thing's for certain: I'm not gonna stop saying 'Rock.' I'm gonna make it my thing."

"I can't wait," Liz said. "But you should hurry over to the hospital to be born. We're all so excited to meet you."

"Cool. See if you can get them to name me something kinda gender-neutral, so I can figure out what I want in my own time. Okay?"

"Okay," Liz said. She smiled.

The mirror seemed to ripple, and then Liz was only looking at her own face again. It was a good face, even if she hated certain things about it. It was a face that Nick found beautiful and that her friends found welcoming. It was a face that Cornelius licked all over and that people who visited her bake shop would confess everything to.

It was not the face she had always wanted, and the things she hated about it were perhaps too familiar to her. But it was a face that many people (and dogs) loved. Some days, like today, that could be enough.

(When Liz returns to the hospital, it's to the news that Chloe and Zoe's son has been born. They have named him Joseph but plan to call him Joey — for obvious reasons. Aardvark usually keeps the details of her universe's supernatural cosmology hazy and indistinct, and so it goes here. Liz can no longer quite remember her encounter with the pre-ghost, so it falls to the audience to wonder what will become of little Joey in future books. As of book #1600, Joey is still figuring out Joey's gender identity, and Joey's mothers are more than happy to love and support their child.)

CHAPTER 15

"I think we've all learned something today," Zoe said. "You should never, ever say anything that runs counter to a pregnant woman when she's so close to giving birth."

"Pregnant person," Rebecca said. She smiled down at little Joey, and she looked so very happy. Nobody in the room could stop smiling. Joey was such a cute baby!

"Thank you, Mom," Zoe said. "But since I was referring to a specific pregnant person who is, indeed, a woman, I think that my use of the term 'pregnant woman'—" She stopped because everybody was looking at her.

"Zoe, sweetheart, take the L," Chloe said. She smiled and hugged Mr. Banjo a little more tightly, then ran a hand over Joey's sleeping forehead.

"On the other hand," Zoe said, "I was speaking generally, so, yes, 'pregnant person' is appropriate."

"I'm so glad you read the style guide I sent around," Alice said.

"You keep asking us if we've read the style guide," Sophie said. "Is that all you've been doing the last six months?"

"It's very important that we use the right language in written communication!"

"But this is informal conversation! It doesn't have to be—"

Liz couldn't hear the rest of Sophie's argument because she had left the room to go and get a snack. She was starving. She could catch up later.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the glass of the snack machine, and for just a moment, she thought she could see somebody else. She had the vaguest of notions that it had been the scariest Halloween ever, but in more of an existential sense than anything else. (An "existential" fear pertains more to your sense of self than your immediate safety. Being afraid of getting old is an existential fear. That might not seem as scary to you as a vampire, but trust me, dear ones, you'll understand what I'm saying in time.)

For just a moment, the reflection in the snack machine's glass seemed to ripple, but it was only the candy bar Liz had purchased falling into the dispenser. Once it was gone, she could see her face again, a face that, even when she hated it, other people loved.

She grabbed her candy and went back to see if she might get a turn holding the baby.

Emily corner: When I started writing this a few weeks ago, I did not anticipate that I would be in the hospital with my own child, but here we are. As I publish this, Libby and my baby is a little under two days older than the Oeys' baby. Thank you again for reading, and we will see you in several months.

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