It was October 31 of English teacher Mark Hernandez’s senior year of high school and he and his friends did not know what they wanted to do. They did not want to do the typical thing and go to a party, however. They wanted to go out with a bang. “We decided to finish our time in our neighborhood in a positive way so we decided to be those jackass high school seniors who went out trick-or-treating,” Hernandez said.

They were so excited by their idea that they forgot one of the most essentialparts of Halloween — costumes. They scrambled to the last minute for costume ideas and eventually decided they had no time to be creative. “We decided to just wear whatever we had in the car. So, one of us was crazy shoe-on-the-head man, I was crazy sleeping-bag man, and one of my friends was crazy baseball-glove man,” Hernandez said.

However, their attempt at a fun night was not as amusing to others as it was to them. “We would ring the doorbell and then be glared at by these parents who were like ‘get out,’ some people gave begrudgingly and one person just said ‘no,’” Hernandez said.

Their trick-or-treating rejections were not the last of the chaotic events that unfolded that night. In the midst of everything that was going on and last-minute planning, Hernandez and his friends forgot that they had told their mutual friend Jeff that they were not going to do anything for Halloween. However, as he and his friends approached the door of a house, they immediately realized they had made a mistake. Before they could run, a familiar face opened their door to the mortified faces of Hernandez and his crew. “We accidentally trick-or-treated at [Jeff’s] house, and he was the one who opened the door,” Hernandez said. “He sees us acting like total jackasses [and] looks at us like we were total jerks. It was just so dumb and stupid.”