Connect With Your Pre-Teen Self This Halloween

If you’re anything like us, someone would have to pay you a lot of money (Board Plus times a million, really) to go back to middle school. But with Halloween fast approaching, we’ve come to realize that being 12 has one major perk—the right to trick-or-treat without being asked if you’re “too old” to demand free candy from your neighbors.

In honor of the trick-or-treating we hope you do next week, Flyby came up with some ways to connect with your pre-teenage self on Halloween.

1. Pull out that prep-school uniform. Nothing screams 12 more than an ill-fitting skirt and a polo.

2. Pre-game doing your makeup. It will look like the way you did it when you were 12.

3. Pull out that cape and mask so no one notices the stubble on your face. Maybe you can pass as that tall 12-year-old.

4. Wear excessive amounts of vanilla body spray or AXE. There is nothing like the smell of teen spirit.

5. Pull that retainer your mom made you bring to college out of the back corner of your closet. We know you have perfect teeth now after a bunch of hellish years of braces. We also know that pre-teens can’t get enough of those metal works of art.

6. Wear your new “high-heeled” shoes that you would now consider a day-to-day height. At age 12, you thought one inch was high.

7. Stay with a group of friends and talk only in text lingo and lol after, like, every, like, other, like, word. You hate to admit it, but you once did this, too.

8. Seem as unexcited as possible when you are out trick-or-treating. College kids know it’s a treat, but pre-teens don’t.

9. When you get candy, make sure you don’t get short-changed—comment that “I’m a big kid” when they tell you you can only take one piece. Don’t these people know that, proportional to your size, one piece of “fun-sized” candy is nothing?

10. When the night is over, hang out in Starbucks gossiping over some hot chocolate. Twelve-year-olds aren’t old enough for coffee.