Jingle Boy (11 page)

I actually reached my hands up to rub my eyes but mercifully remembered my injuries at the last second. It didn’t matter, anyway. Holly was approaching the car now and there was no denying it. She looked gorgeous. She looked . . . sexy. My best friend was capable of sexiness.

Holly opened the car door and lowered herself into the seat, tucking her high heels under the hem of her dress. The whole car filled with an unfamiliar flowery scent. She slammed the door, reached over, and touched my chin. It took a second for me to realize that she was pushing my mouth closed.

“You gonna drive?” she asked, grinning.

“You look . . .”

“I’m aware,” she said, blushing slightly.

She turned and faced forward and I put the car in drive. This was going to be a very interesting night.

“I gotta hand it to you, Paul, this is the coolest dance I’ve ever been to,” Holly said, fiddling with the stem of her plastic champagne flute.

“Hol, it’s the only dance you’ve ever been to,” I pointed out.

“Point taken,” Holly said.

She sipped her sparkling cider and looked out across the dance floor. For the millionth time that night I found myself staring at her in disbelief. Was this really my tomboy best friend? She looked even more beautiful in the dim light cast by the twinkling white Christmas tree strands that were draped all over the gym. And it wasn’t just me. At least ten people had gone mute when they saw her.

“How did you get all the trees?” Holly asked.

“My dad cut a deal with the manager at Treasure Island,” I replied, trying without much luck to stifle a proud grin.

However anti-Christmas I was feeling, I had to take at least one moment to revel in my success. People had been coming up to me all night telling me how amazing the gym looked. The walls under the basketball nets were lined with fake evergreens and we’d bought a couple of dozen cans of aerosol fir tree scent so that the room smelled authentic. Silver, white, and clear balloons packed the ceiling, with curly silver ribbons dangling down from each one. The refreshment tables were draped with garlands and paper Hanukkah and Christmas decorations. But my favorite touch was the tableau set up around the DJ’s table in the corner. The art club had been commissioned to make life-size cardboard replicas of the entire
Peanuts
gang, singing around the pathetic little tree that Charlie Brown brings home.

I always thought that particular TV special really brought home the meaning of Christmas. It was a holiday that made everything beautiful.

I looked at Holly and she smiled. Yeah.
Everything
was made beautiful.

But not anymore,
the little voice in my head pointed out.

I looked down at the silver-and-white tablecloth. Out of nowhere I felt very heavy and very sad. Like my best friend had just dumped me and left me forever. But that was ridiculous. It was just a holiday. I was practically an adult here. It was going to have to stop being magical sometime, right?

“Hey,” Holly said suddenly. “Wanna dance?”

My heart skipped a beat in surprise. A slow song had just started up and groups of people were moving toward the walls while all the school’s established couples went to the dance floor.

“You want to . . . dance?” I asked.
With me?
my brain added silently. This was a contingency I hadn’t planned for. We were only supposed to stick this thing out for half an hour, and I never thought Holly would want to actually dance. This was a girl who would rather watch
The NFL Today
than
TRL.

“Come on,” she said, standing. “It’s my first dance. We might as well . . . you know,
dance
at it.”

“Okay,” I said, fumbling to wipe off my appetizer-greased fingers as I stood.

I followed Holly over to the middle of the dance floor, hundreds of pairs of eyes marking our progress. I knew what everyone was thinking. We’d been teased since the third grade about being a couple. They all probably figured we’d finally given in to the inevitable. People were so stupid. Right. Me and Holly. Together. Ha!

Holly stopped and turned to me and I paused for a moment, my heart in my throat. Suddenly I couldn’t remember what to do with my hands. This was Holly. Was I really supposed to . . .
hold
her?

She slipped her arms around my neck and there was nothing I could do but lace my hands together around her waist. I was as stiff as a corpse and there were about two feet between us. I methodically moved back and forth to the music, starting to sweat. What was wrong with me? It wasn’t like
I’d
never been to a dance before.

“Are you okay?” Holly asked me. As she spoke, she inched a bit closer to me. My heart lurched, but then I realized it was actually better—more comfortable. I could bend my arms. I started to feel a little less awkward.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Paul, I—”

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said, looking away.

“Oh no!” I said. “Remember the Pact! That time you
did
start a sentence!”

“Forget it, okay?” she said, struggling to hold back a smile.

“No way! You would
kill
me if I went back on the Pact,” I said, laughing.

“Paul,” she said, turning her face toward mine again.

Something in her voice cut my laughter short. For the first time since we hit the dance floor, I looked into her eyes. An intense tingling feeling dropped from my heart all the way down through my toes.

Holly was giving me the Look.

The look someone gives you when they want you to kiss them. Eyelids kinda heavy. Green eyes somehow more intensely green. An unspeakable heat rushed over my skin and now my whole body was sweating under my suit.

Oh. My. God. She was going to do it. She was going to
kiss
me! How was this possible? And why, why,
why
was I suddenly thinking about my breath? It wasn’t like I was actually going to let this happen, was I?

Holly leaned in a little closer to me and my eyes started to close. I
was
going to let this happen, apparently.

In fact, from the beating of my heart I was starting to realize it might not be a half-bad idea.

Before I knew it, I was leaning closer to her, closing the gap between us. Our lips were about to touch. I was about to kiss Holly Stevenson. And then—

“AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH! Gross! Oh my God!
GROSS!”

Holly and I jumped apart and everyone else on the dance floor stopped as well. It was Sarah’s voice, and in the midst of the confusion I realized that I actually hadn’t thought about her all night. There was another shriek, followed by another, and then a bunch of people over by the Secret Santa table backed up as if they were trying to get away from something. They were all looking at the floor, and I saw a couple of girls turn their faces away and hide them in their boyfriends’ jacket lapels.

“What’s going on?” Holly asked.

“Scooby! This isn’t funny!” Sarah’s strained voice carried across the gym.

The crowd around the table parted enough for us to see Sarah, in a white strapless minidress, standing over a few crushed boxes on the gym floor. Scooby was next to her, wearing what I assume he thought was a pimped-out purple tux, holding his stomach and laughing.

I looked at Holly and we both shrugged.

“Sarah, what is it? What’s wrong?” asked Mr. McDaniel, one of our chaperones.

“Look!” Sarah wailed, pointing at the boxes on the floor. For the first time I noticed a smear of brown on one of her white shoes. “Someone replaced all the Secret Santa gifts with . . . dog poo ! ”

And with that, Sarah burst into uncontrollable sobs and flung herself into Mr. McDaniel’s arms. He patted her back and inched her away from the mess as Scooby grasped a chair for support. A resounding “ewww!” went out across the gym and everyone made their way toward the far wall. Coach Bullock, the football coach, started wrangling some of his team to dispose of the unopened gifts and start cleaning up the mess.

“I don’t believe it,” Holly said suddenly, a laugh in her voice.

“What?” I asked. I think I was still in shock.

“Look over by the equipment room,” Holly said, covering her mouth.

I glanced over without moving my head and saw Dirk peeking out the equipment room door. We locked eyes and Dirk suddenly twitched.

“Ew! Ewww! EEEEEEWWW! ” Lainie Lefkowitz shrieked as the janitor mopped up the poo, momentarily widening the smear.

I laughed and shook my head at Dirk in wonder. He and the other members of the Anti-Christmas Underground emerged from the equipment room in formal gear, blending in perfectly with the students and their dates. Then they quickly and unobtrusively slipped out the side door.

“Classic,” Holly said.

THEY’RE SINGING “DECK THE HALLS, ” BUT IT’S NOT LIKE CHRISTMAS AT ALL . . .

WHEN I WOKE UP ON SATURDAY MORNING, I HAD NO idea where I was. There was a lot of loud banging and gruff voices shouting and then something mechanical and totally inappropriate for morning operation whirred to life right outside my window. I wrenched my eyes open. All I could see was a mishmash of pastel. My forehead was pressed up against something hard, which was weird because my bed isn’t next to a wall. I blinked a few times, pulled back, and realized that I was on the pullout couch in the den and that I had slept right up against one of the arms of said couch. I reached up to feel my forehead and found the bumpy, crisscrossed imprint of the plaid couch fabric on my skin.

Someone walked by the window, startling me, and when I turned my head, a sharp pain slashed through my eyeball. I slapped my hand over my eye and saw, with the other one, a couple of big men in quilted coats, leaning a ladder against the house. The workmen. Right. But it was Saturday. Didn’t construction guys ever get a break?

I tried to lie down, but another stabbing eye pain killed that fantasy.
Ow!
—then it sliced through my head. And my neck. Ugh! What kind of freaky position had I slept in?

I sat up, rubbing my neck, and my eyes fell on the desk chair in the corner of the room. My suit jacket was flung over the back of it and my red tie had slipped to the floor during the night, where it sat in a little coiled pile.

Right. The Holiday Ball was last night. And afterward Holly and I had gone out to the diner with the rest of the Underground and gorged ourselves on cheese fries. And the night before that was spent running around destroying Christmas with no sleep to speak of. No wonder I’d slept all night in a weird position. My body was probably too tired to move. When I’d gotten home, I’d been so drained I’d practically collapsed. I hadn’t even walked Holly to her door when I dropped her off, a breach of etiquette that would send my mother’s mind reeling if she ever found out.

Holly.

“Oh
no
!” I said, my voice scratchy and dry. I brought my hands up to cover my face and tried to squeeze out the memory of my embarrassing behavior by scrunching my eyes shut. But it didn’t work. It all rushed back to me like a sledgehammer to the head.

I thought Holly was going to
kiss
me. Could I be any more delusional? Why would Holly ever want to kiss me? I mean, that would be like kissing her brother. If she had one. Which she doesn’t. But still. What was I
thinking
?

And forget about my vivid imagination, the even worse part was that
I
had almost kissed
her.
If Sarah hadn’t screamed when she did, I might have actually gone through with it. So I guess I owed Sarah Saunders one.

Yeah, right.

I held my breath, letting the wave of mortification pass over me. What would Holly have done if my lips had actually met hers? Would she have slapped me? Would she have laughed? Would she have kicked me in the Painful Place? Probably a combination of all three.

“Okay, but it didn’t happen,” I told myself, climbing out of bed. “It didn’t happen and everything’s fine and Holly is still your friend.”

Even so, the memory kept replaying itself over and over in my head and there was nothing I could do to make it stop. I grabbed my robe and started for the door, hoping a shower would snap me out of it, but I paused when I saw my reflection in the mirror. The eye looked much better this morning and yes, there was a plaid pattern on my forehead, but that would go away. I stared into my eyes and asked myself the question I’d been avoiding asking myself ever since the almost kiss.

“Did you actually want to kiss Holly?” I asked.

The second I said it out loud I got this warm sort of tingly, tight feeling around my heart and I watched my skin flush right in front of me. That would seem to indicate a yes. But what warm-blooded American guy wouldn’t have wanted to kiss Holly Stevenson last night? She’d looked downright hot. And besides, we were at a dance, there was all that atmosphere going on. I’d been sucked in, that was all. I’d simply fallen victim to dim lights, slow music, heady perfume, and raging hormones.

Holly was my friend. My best friend. And I wasn’t about to do anything to jeopardize that.

I took a deep breath and decided to hit the shower. After all, I did have a long day ahead of me. Last night Dirk had come up with the ultimate plan to expose Scooby for what he really was. That afternoon Rudy and I would put the plan into action. Today Scooby was going to get his. And nothing was going to stand in my way.

I peeked out the window of the Santa Shack, feeling like a fugitive from justice. Or a cat burglar. Or generally like someone who was doing something they shouldn’t be doing, which was exactly what I was doing. My mother walked by in her reindeer outfit, heading for the escalator to the food court, and seeing her only magnified the feeling. I glanced at the deserted North Pole. Scooby had gone on his dinner break, but I was sure that at any second, one of the elves was going to come back and catch us here and I’d be shunned like Rudolph from the reindeer games.

“You sure this is going to work?” I asked Rudy, glancing up at him over my shoulder. He was standing on a small stool in the corner, so he was even taller than he usually was.

“Sure, I’m sure,” Rudy said. He whipped a tiny screwdriver out of his pocket and used it to tighten the microscopic minicamera into place above the eaves of the Santa Shack. He was cool as a kumquat.

“Why are you so calm?” I asked. Somehow his chill attitude made me intensely nervous. A little stream of sweat ran down from my temple along the side of my face.

Rudy grinned down at me. “I’m just that good,” he said, waggling his eyebrows. He jumped down from the stool he was standing on and clapped. “All set. Let’s go watch the action.”

Rudy walked out of the Santa Shack without even trying to skulk. If anyone caught him, we’d both be subjected to another marathon interrogation in the mall offices, but this fact didn’t seem to bother Rudy, perhaps because he knew everyone who worked in this mall and they all seemed to worship the ground he walked on. Apparently in the six months that Rudy had been working at Radio Shack, he’d managed not only to introduce himself to the hundreds of clerks, custodians, and managers, but also to endear himself to them to the point where they all looked on him like a son. Or a brother. Or a really cool cousin.

“So we’re going to Sears?” I asked, my nerves calming more and more the farther we got from the North Pole without being accosted.

“That’s where I told everyone to meet us,” Rudy replied, nodding quickly. “It’ll be on, like, fifty screens!”

The mall was packed and Rudy was a fast walker, so I had to dodge and weave to keep up with him. I couldn’t wait until Scooby came back from break. This was going to be so perfect. And I owed it all to Rudy and his total AV geek status. We’d spent most of the afternoon planting remote receivers in Radio Shack, in the Sears appliance section, and in the Macy’s Juniors section, where TVs suspended over the clothing racks play cheesy pop videos 24/7. We’d even hooked one up behind the big screen in the back of the Disney Store. (The manager has a massive crush on Rudy and was easily convinced to let him “backstage.” Yeah. They call their stockroom “backstage.” Overcompensating much? News flash: You work in a mall!)

“This is gonna be so cool!” Rudy exclaimed as we crossed the threshold into Sears. “We are on a roll, baby! A roll!” He jumped on the escalator and took the steps two at a time. I ran after him and suggested he might want to take it down a couple of notches. We didn’t want anyone getting suspicious and it wasn’t so often that teenage guys were that excited to be hanging out at Sears.

“Good point, man,” Rudy said, slapping my chest as he looked around conspiratorially. “Good point.”

We walked inconspicuously over to the TV section, where Holly, Flora, Dirk, and Ralph stood waiting. My heart did a weird catch-skip thing the second I saw Holly and when she smiled at me, I quickly looked away. But not before I noticed she was wearing this green turtleneck that made her eyes go like . . .
boom!
Green! Anyway, if she saw the expression on my face, she would know something was up and would grill me endlessly until I told her what it was.

And Holly would never, ever know that I considered kissing her last night. Never, ever.

“Everything set?” Dirk asked, punctuating his question with a twitch. He had a black leather jacket on that made him look not unlike one of those skeezy guys from
Grease.
But still cool, of course.

“Good to go!” Rudy stage-whispered. He glanced at his digital watch. “The fox should be in the hole in less than two minutes.”

Ralph nodded and pulled a Twinkie out of his pocket, then proceeded to shove the whole thing into his mouth. Flora watched him in a sort of disgusted awe and he pulled out another Twinkie and held it out to her. She scoffed and looked away, so Ralph offered it to me, but I waved it off. I couldn’t even think about eating.

My heart was racing like a reindeer team on too much hot chocolate. If this actually worked, if we actually pulled it off, I was finally,
finally
going to get to see Scooby humiliated! I stared at the big screen in front of us, watching some Michigan running back celebrate a touchdown and waiting for Rudy to hit the button that would switch the feed over to the Santa Shack.

Come on,
I thought, glancing at my watch and willing time to move faster.
Come on already!

“Hey, Nicholas,” Holly said casually, stepping around Ralph to stand by my side.

The muscles in my neck instantly tensed up. “Hey,” I said, barely looking at her. Couldn’t she see I was holding my breath in anticipation here? She was supposed to know me better than anyone.

“So . . . last night was fun,” she said, rocking back and forth from her heels to her toes.

Rudy switched the feed over. Every TV in the place was now showing the empty Santa Shack.

“Yeah . . . definitely,” I said. I think. I was pretty distracted at this point.

“Listen, do you think we could, like, talk later or something?” Holly asked.

The door of the Santa Shack was opening. “Because I really think we need to—”

“Shhhhhhh!” I shushed her. Loudly. “I want to see this.”

Scooby was pulling off his T-shirt.

“I know, but Paul, last night we—”

“Holly! Can you just back off for five seconds?” I snapped. “I’m finally going to get Scooby!”

I threw both arms out toward the screen and all of our friends’ heads swiveled around to look at Holly. There were a few moments of silence as Holly turned bright, bright red. My heart was in my stomach, but then Holly turned to look at the television.

“Well, there you go, Paul,” she said. She lifted a hand, then let it slap back against her thigh. “Just what you wanted.”

I tore my eyes away from her and there, on the screen, was my good friend Scooby, wearing nothing but a pair of fire-engine-red boxers, flexing his nonexistent biceps. He turned to check himself out from behind and Rudy and Dirk doubled over laughing. Printed on the back of his boxers was a picture of a muffin with little steam clouds rising off it and the words
Stud Mu fin
scrolling over the top.

I had to cover my mouth to keep from laughing out loud. It was even better than I had imagined. Shoppers started to gather around the dozens of television sets, pointing, laughing, glancing around confused. Scooby looked over his shoulder into the mirror and clenched one butt cheek, then the other, then the other, then the other, smiling and nodding in appreciation of himself.

“Aw, yeah!” Rudy said, lifting his hand to slap mine. I put out my hand and he whacked me so hard it stung. I could just imagine the reactions in the Macy’s Juniors section right now and the little kids watching Scooby in the Disney Store. They were going to be scarred for life!

Hmmm . . . maybe we should have thought of that. But whatever. I decided not to dwell on it and to revel in our success instead.

“Gotta hand it to you, Dirk,” I said, reaching out to squeeze his shoulder. “This was one hell of a brainstorm.”

“Don’t touch the leather!” Dirk blurted out. He slipped away from me and let out a violent twitch.

“Okay, okay!” Holly said as Scooby started to wiggle his butt in the mirror and Rudy laughed so hard he had to grab the TV for support. “Have you had enough? Are you done torturing this guy now?”

“What?” I said. “Are you kidding? Not by a long shot!”

“God, Paul, what is wrong with you?” she demanded, stepping in front of the TV and blocking my view.

“What’s wrong with me?” I replied, totally confused. “What’s wrong with
you
?”

Holly looked at each of our expectant faces as if she was trying to decide whether or not to say what she had to say in front of the assembled parties. “What’s
wrong
with me is that you’re not working against Christmas here, Paul,” she said finally, keeping her stance in front of the television. “All you care about is getting to Scooby.”

I lifted my shoulders. “And?”

“
And
it’s pathetic!” she replied. Was it just me, or were there suddenly tears in her eyes? “It’s perfectly clear that the only reason you’re doing any of this is because you’re still hung up on Sarah! You’re not anti-Christmas, you just can’t accept the fact that you got dumped!”

“Hey—”

“No! Forget it!” She looked around at the group again. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve had it with the anti-Scooby campaign. I’m done helping you try to embarrass this guy.”

On TV, Melissa Maya burst into the Santa Shack and started looking around frantically, shoving the half-naked Scooby out of the way. Apparently someone had tipped off mall management. She threw Scooby’s costume at him and he quickly wriggled into it. I couldn’t help it. I laughed again.

But I stopped when Holly let out a strangled sort of groan.

“You know what else, Nicholas?” she said, suddenly getting right in my face. “I’m also done with
you.
”