When I got home that night, I noticed the smiling jack-o-lantern in my front yard was crushed. You might be wondering how, exactly, I could tell. In all honesty, I couldn’t explain it to you myself. Maybe there was a tarnished look to his usual cheerful glow. Maybe that familiar jagged smile had something ever so slightly strained about it — I really don’t know. But when you’ve been friends as long as Jack and I have — and we’ve been friends a long, long time, all the way back to drama school — you can read each other instantly. And I could see at once that he was devastated.

“Jack, mate, what happened?” I said, flopping down on the porch steps and trying hard to coerce my booze-bleary eyes into something resembling concern. Of course, I knew before he told me. It would only be one thing: the audition. He confirmed it with a sad shake of his head. A disaster.

“But Jack, that’s impossible. You were made for the part. I mean, you were literally made for the part,” I protested. I wasn’t exaggerating: this was his niche. A low-budget teen horror flick, set at Halloween. Jack was going for the part of a jack-o-lantern, for God’s sake. His entire CV was one long stream of impeccably performed jack-o-lanterns, barring a sole piece of experimental theatre in which his portrayal of Macbeth scored a rave review from Time Out. Jack had hoped it would open more doors for him in the industry, get him out of the typecasting trap, but obviously it didn’t. I could have told him that, but I hadn’t the heart. The arts world just wasn’t ready for jack-o-lanterns to play anything that wasn’t, well, expressly written for the part of a jack-o-lantern. But now one of these rare roles had actually sprung up, and he’d lost out. How could that be?

“They gave it to some guy from the Strasberg school,” Jack muttered. “Method actor. Apparently his jack-o-lantern interpretation was flawless. I mean, I thought it was kind of cringey and inauthentic, but what the hell do I know? I’m only an actual fucking jack-o-lantern, after all.”

We sat in silence for a while, Jack glowering in the darkness beside me, rage cooking him from the inside out. I wished there was something I could say, something that would inspire him to keep battling on towards his big dream, but nothing rang true. I turned my head away so he wouldn’t see my eyes misting over. I knew how this would turn out; it was always the same. Jack had sworn blind he wouldn’t go the same way as our friends, giving up on his art and settling for Starbucks, but it was only a matter of time. He wouldn’t tell me, of course: he’d be too ashamed. But one of these days I’d walk past the gleaming panels of glass and there he’d be, preening for the flash of an Instagrammer’s iPhone. Five seconds of fame on a newsfeed as a carefully arranged mug of Pumpkin Spice Latte. And then, down the gullet, he would be gone.