Jingle Boy (12 page)

Before I could even stifle my grin, Holly had turned on her heel, whipping me in the eye with her hair, and stalked toward the escalator.

Ralph whistled quietly.

“What just happened here?” I asked, totally baffled.

Rudy laughed and slapped me on the shoulder, hitting his remote at the same time to switch all the TVs back to the Michigan game. “She smoked you, my man!”

That night I showed up in Wooddale with my wool hat pulled tightly down over my ears and two scarves wrapped around my neck. It was the coldest night of the year so far, but that hadn’t stopped any of the residents from coming out to see their parade. Their pride and joy. Bundled into various coat/hat/mitten/ski mask/earmuff/glove/scarf combinations, people were lined up three rows thick along the sidewalk, breathing into their hands and wrapping their arms around one another for warmth. I saw more than a few thermoses being passed along and heard more than a few jolly laughs. To these people, watching this parade made any degree of frostbite worthwhile.

I used to be one of them.

I joined my friends on the corner in front of Starbucks, where Ralph had staked his claim after leaving the mall. He’d sat outside for a few hours, by himself, in this cold, reading comic books and drinking coffee.

When I walked up, Ralph was surrounded by Dirk, Rudy, and Flora. He had a wild look in his eyes.

“There are cops everywhere, dude. Everywhere!” he said, swiveling from side to side and taking up quite a large circumference. “They’re on to us, I’m telling you. They know.”

“Would you shut up, Ralphie?” Dirk said through his teeth. “You keep spouting off and they
will
be on to us.” Dirk, of course, still had on nothing but a T-shirt and his leather jacket and didn’t look the least bit cold.

“What’s with Ralph?” I asked Flora, who was sipping a cappuccino, cupping it with both hands.

“Too much caffeine makes him paranoid,” she answered matter-of-factly. “You should see him after he’s had two raspberry iced tea Snapples.”

“Ah,” I said, glancing around at the people in our immediate vicinity. I leaned back to crane my neck and get a better view into the coffee shop, but no one in there looked familiar.

“Looking for Holly?” Flora asked, raising her tiny eyebrows at me.

“No,” I lied.

“She’s not coming,” Flora said as if I hadn’t responded. She looked across the street at a couple of red-faced kids. “She called me a little while ago.”

“She called
you
?” I blurted out before I could double-think it.

“And she did not sound happy,” Flora said, her voice thick with it’s-all-because-of-you meaning.

I felt every muscle in my body coil, but I turned away and took a deep breath to keep from snapping. Who was this girl to tell me how my best friend sounded? Flora knew nothing about Holly and what her various vocal tones meant. And we’d only met these people this week! Now all of a sudden Holly was calling
them
to relay her plans? Why hadn’t she called me?

Of course I knew why. I’d yelled at her in the middle of the mall. Girls hated that. But this was where I got confused. Holly wasn’t a normal girl. We’ve had plenty of public arguments in our lives and it had never bothered her before. And when it came right down to it, today she’d yelled at me a lot more than I’d yelled at her.
I
was the one who should be angry. Yet she was bothered enough to miss the sabotage of the Wooddale parade? Here I thought I was going to get my chance to apologize and she hadn’t even shown up.

“Shhh! You guys! Shhh!” Rudy said, swallowing the ever-present laugh. “Something’s going on down there!”

Sure enough, most of the crowd was turning toward the park across the street, mumbling and grumbling to one another. After all, the parade was supposed to have started fifteen minutes ago and the people of Wooddale weren’t accustomed to being made to wait. A chunky man in a long overcoat climbed the steps to the platform set up at the edge of the park and tapped the microphone a few times, sending a loud screech of feedback across the town.

Dirk looked at me and grinned maniacally. This was it.

The chunky man took a deep breath and lowered his head. I could tell he was wishing he could be anywhere but here. As I looked down at the expectant faces of the kids around me, I kind of understood the feeling. Maybe disappointing half the populace of Bergen County wasn’t the best idea. After all, those kids hadn’t done anything wrong—it was Christmas we were out to destroy.

“Hello, everyone, and thank you for coming,” he said. “I’m Richard Lembeck, chief of the Wooddale police.”

A few clueless people who couldn’t feel the palpable foreboding in the air applauded for the man, thinking he was about to kick off the parade.

“I’m sorry to report that due to some technical difficulties, we will not be able to put on the parade this evening,” he continued.

An almost-in-unison “Oh no!” went up from the thousands of people lining the street and I suddenly had the feeling I was in Whoville. A heavy pit formed and hardened in the bottom of my stomach. Behind me, Rudy and Dirk exchanged quiet hand slaps and Flora let out a giggle.

“Keep an eye on the town bulletin board, as we may be able to reschedule,” Lembeck continued. “Again, thank you for coming.” Another screech of feedback and the hiss of the speakers was cut dead. Lembeck beat a hasty retreat to the police van set up on a closed-off street nearby.

The crowd groaned and immediately started to disperse. As anti-Christmas as I’d been feeling lately, the disappointment of the hordes of people around me couldn’t be ignored. It had all seemed like harmless fun the other night, but now I was starting to wonder what we’d been thinking.

I was about to voice this thought when I noticed my friends smiling secretively at one another and patting one another on the back.

They wouldn’t understand.

“This sucks,” a middle school kid said as he walked by us, kicking at a cup on the ground. “This night totally, totally sucks.”

Thinking of Holly sitting at home by herself, plotting ways to kill me, I couldn’t help agreeing. This night did totally,
totally
suck.

“All right, this is it. I ain’t takin’ no crap from nobody,” I told myself, rubbing my palms together as I approached the basement door at Dirk’s on Sunday afternoon. (Sometimes, when I’m trying to psych myself up, I sound like Sylvester Stallone in
Rocky.
)

I had spent most of the morning on the phone in the den, listening to the pounding, sawing, and shouting going on overhead, dialing and redialing Holly’s direct line and her cell phone number. Not only had she not picked up, but the machine in her bedroom wasn’t on, and the voice mail on her cell phone had reverted to that scary robot voice that says, “The person you are trying to reach is unavailable. If you wish, please leave a message at the tone.”

What the hell was going on?

Finally, in a fit of desperation, I’d called Holly’s mother’s line, which was strictly
verboten
. Whenever Holly’s mom got a call from one of her daughter’s friends, she very politely told the mistaken caller that she paid for a private line for her daughter for a reason and that if her daughter had not felt the need to give that number to the caller, then there must have, again, been a reason. This speech was normally followed by a deafening slamming down of the phone. Not that Mrs. Stevenson was bitter or anything.

Understandably, I held my breath as Mrs. Stevenson’s line rang, but I got the machine there, too. Happy to at least have the opportunity to speak, I told Mrs. Stevenson that I was very sorry for calling but that I feared some kind of debilitating disease had befallen Holly and I’d just like to know if she was okay.

Hadn’t gotten a call back. Unbelievable. Holly had suddenly become a master of the cold shoulder.

But she couldn’t avoid me forever. Dirk had called an Anti-Christmas Underground meeting and however much she ignored me during the proceedings, I was going to corner her the second it was over and give her a little piece of my mind.

Okay, and maybe I would also apologize. After all, I
had
snapped at her first.

I knocked on the door and it took Ralph a few minutes to get there. When he did, he simply opened the door, nodded, and walked back to the war room, as Dirk called it. I was so psyched for confrontation that when I entered the war room and saw that Holly wasn’t there, I deflated so quickly I instantly felt exhausted. I pulled off my hat and looked down at my feet.

“Yo, man! What’s up?” Rudy called out, his leg jiggling like crazy. “We weren’t doing anything. We were just sitting here waiting for you.”

Dirk shot him a look and a twitch. He picked up a piece of paper from the arm of his chair and casually folded it into the back pocket of his jeans, lifting himself up slightly from his seat.

“Holly’s not here,” Flora said, turning around on the couch so that she could see me. I stood there, my hat literally in my hands. It was nice how Flora was ever so helpful.

“Is she coming?” I asked, taking a seat across from Flora, next to jittery Rudy.

“Nope,” Dirk said. He stretched his arms out across the back of the couch on which he always sat alone and tilted his head—on purpose. “She’s gone over to the other side.”

Well, that didn’t sound too promising.

“What does that mean?” I asked. My jacket made a loud crinkling sound in the silence as I sat back into the couch. I couldn’t swallow, let alone breathe. I really didn’t like the vibe in the room. Something was going on, but I had no idea what it might be. Ralph’s eyes had narrowed to such thin slits I couldn’t even see the whites anymore.

“Apparently Holly called Flora here this morning and told her that last night, her mother announced that they were going to Aspen for Christmas,” Dirk said, lifting a hand toward Flora. “They left this morning.”

My mind started off on a tailspin. Holly hadn’t mentioned that she and her mother were thinking of going away. She couldn’t have just left. Not without telling me. Could she?

“It was a last-minute decision,” Flora told me. “Considering what Holly’s dad did to them, Holly’s mom doesn’t like Christmas much, either. Apparently she thought she could only make it merry again if they got the heck out of Jersey.”

“Make it merry again,” Dirk said with a scoff. “Like that could ever happen.”

“So they’re gone?” I asked, hardly able to process all the new info.

“Yep. Even as we speak, they’re on a whirlwind skiing vacation in good old Colorado,” Dirk continued. On the word
whirlwind
he lifted both hands again and waggled his head a little like he was doing a sarcastic happy dance. Then he twitched.

“I don’t believe this,” I said.

“Oh, you
better
believe it,” Dirk said with another quick twitch. “She’s somewhere over Nebraska right now.”

Ralph opened a can of Mug root beer with a pop as if to emphasize Dirk’s statement. I watched him down half the contents and felt my stomach churn. I was nauseous. Physically nauseous. And suddenly very, very hot. I ripped off my jacket and stood up, pacing in front of the semicircle of couches.

“So Holly’s . . . gone?” I asked, staring at the blinking lights on the police scanner. Holly. In a whole other state. I couldn’t even picture it.

“You all right, man?” Dirk asked. He hardly sounded like he cared.

But the answer was no. I was not all right. Holly had left town—nay, the state—and she hadn’t even bothered to tell me! Her mother had snapped out of a two-year-long funk and she hadn’t called to say, “Hey! Guess what?” And meanwhile my house had a hole in it, my dad was in traction, and we were in our first ever not-talking fight and she didn’t even seem to care! Didn’t our friendship mean anything to her?

“Holly doesn’t even ski,” I said under my breath.

“She did not sound psyched about the trip,” Flora said, slumping down in her seat. “She told me she just felt like she had to get out of here.”

Again, filled with meaning. This-is-all-because-of-you meaning.

But what had I
done
?

Suddenly, even in the presence of four other anti-Christmas brethren, I felt utterly and completely alone. I’d been deserted by my best friend and there was no way to get her back.

Christmas had just hit a whole new level of awful.

RUN, RUN, RUDOLPH

WHEN I WOKE UP ON MONDAY MORNING, MY BLACK eye was almost healed, which meant that soon I would be going back to work as Santa, which meant I was going to have to start hanging out with Scooby again. A lot.

The very thought of being forced to work with him made my skin crawl. After everything that had happened in the past couple of weeks, ending up with Holly deserting me, I felt like someone deserved to pay. Not only that, but I felt like I, just once, deserved to come out on top. But as long as I was forced to be around Scooby, I was the big fat loser.

There was only one logical conclusion—one of us had to go. And it was not going to be me. Scooby was a fake. A creep. A guy who used his position as Santa to sell his crappy CD. So getting him fired wasn’t just an act of revenge. It was the right thing to do.

After school on Monday, I drove straight to Dirk’s house. (When Mom found out Holly had skipped town, she let me use my dad’s car to drive myself to school.) This time I didn’t even wait to knock on the door. I tried the knob, it turned, and I walked right into the war room. I was filled with such a sense of purpose, such a seething hatred, that I was completely wound. I had about a million ideas on how to solidify Scooby’s fate and they were all bouncing around in my head like pinballs. I needed someone to help me sort it all out.

Dirk, Ralph, Rudy, and Flora were all gathered around the coffee table, looking at a large sheet of paper that was rolled out in front of them. The police scanner crackled away in the corner while Dirk talked in low tones. The others seemed to hang on his every word, nodding periodically. None of them even noticed my manic entrance.

“Everyone!” I announced, clapping and causing Flora and Rudy to jump. “I’m here to tell you I’m done messing around.”

Dirk shot Ralph a look and stood up to face me over the couch. Ralph rolled up the large sheet of paper and put it under the table as Rudy and Flora turned in their seats to face me.

“You didn’t knock,” Dirk said, pressing his fist into his palm. He was wearing a black tank top and his muscles flexed intimidatingly.

“So? I’m one of you now,” I said with a shrug. I saw Flora and Ralph exchange a dubious look, but I chose to ignore it. It didn’t matter if they were unconvinced of my anti-Christmas dedication. They would be convinced. Very soon.

“Look, I need to get Scooby fired and I need you guys to help me make it happen,” I said, walking to the front of the arc of couches. “I have a lot of ideas, but they pretty much all require us to break the law.”

Dirk frowned, pondering this, then twitched. “Which law would that be?” he asked, slowly lowering himself onto his personal couch.

I took a deep breath and paused dramatically. (Hey, I’m not immune to a little drama when it’s my turn in the spotlight. It doesn’t happen very often.) I smiled slowly and looked at each of my friends. Their eyes were trained on me, waiting. I knew they were all intrigued. I could feel it in the air.

“How would you guys feel about hiding out in the mall tonight until after closing?” I asked, raising my eyebrows as I shoved my hands in my pockets.

Flora and Rudy sat back in their seats and turned to look at Dirk. There was a long, might I say
impressed
silence as everyone mulled over my proposed act of juvenile delinquency. Dirk’s eyes slid from Ralph over to Flora and Rudy. He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and folded his hands together under his chin. Then, ever so slowly, he smiled, his brown eyes seeming to darken.

“I think hanging out at the mall until after closing is a fine idea,” he said.

I grinned for real now as pride surged through me. The Anti-Christmas Underground had my back. They knew what was important—what really mattered— and they were willing to break the law to help me. Who needed Holly when I had friends like these?

“This is so cool, man! This is so totally, totally cool!” Rudy stage-whispered as we lay on our stomachs on the grimy mall floor on Monday night. When Mom and I went to see my dad earlier that afternoon, I’d told them I was going over to Matt’s to watch
Monday Night
Football,
so I was covered until at least eleven o’clock. If all went as planned, I’d be home right on time.

Rudy, Dirk, and I were hidden under one of the lower valleys in the snowy hills that made up Santa Land. There was about two inches of space between our heads and the plastic and wood structure above us. With almost all the mall lights extinguished, it was pitch-black under there. If Rudy and Dirk hadn’t breathed, smelled, and talked so very differently, I wouldn’t have been able to tell who was on either side of me. And, of course, there was the fact that Dirk twitched every few minutes, his leg kicking out to whack me in the ankle. It was definitely leaving a mark.

“Rudy, you brought the pot, right?” Dirk asked, his voice coming from the darkness to my left.

Rudy giggled, earning a “shhh!” from Flora, who was a few feet away with Ralph, sitting under one of the higher hills.

“Yeah, I got the pot,” Rudy whispered. He elbowed me in the side and I could hear the rustling of a plastic bag as he pulled it from his pocket. “Rita’s gonna kill me when she realizes I took her stash, but it’ll all be worth it.”

“You better believe it,” I told him. “Dirk, you got the vodka?” I asked.

“Hey, who’re you talkin’ to?” he asked indignantly. “Of course I got the booze.”

I grinned in the darkness, happy that no one could see exactly how giddy I was. The Underground had loved most of my plans, but it was agreed that there was only one that was a surefire way to get Scooby fired. No one would want an alcoholic druggie listening to their kids’ Christmas wishes, so that was what we were turning Scooby into—a classic teenage burnout.

I’d taken one of my extra Santa suits, which could have belonged to either of us, and splashed enough alcohol over it to make it reek. Rudy had lifted a dime bag of pot from his aunt Rita’s closet and Dirk had swiped a bottle of vodka from his dad’s hidden stash in the garage. Once we were sure the coast was clear, we were going to sneak into the Santa Shack, plant all three offending items in Scooby’s locker, and leave an anonymous message on Papadopoulos’s voice mail, tipping him off.

For a moment I found myself wishing Holly were there to witness my ultimate triumph, but in truth she probably wouldn’t have even shown. If she thought the whole live broadcast from the Santa Shack was too much, she definitely wouldn’t be down with this plan.

“You guys, how long do we have to stay here?” Flora’s voice came from the blackness. “I think Ralph’s about to have a panic attack.”

As if to illustrate her point, a high-pitched whimper sounded from the corner.

“He’s claustrophobic,” Rudy explained.

“Well, I think we’re pretty safe,” I said, reaching down to grab the Santa suit. “We’ve been in here for over an hour.”

I started to shimmy out of my hiding place, but I felt a strong hand on my left shoulder. “Hold on, Paulie,” Dirk said. “We have a new plan.”

“Dirk!” Flora whispered. “I thought we decided not to tell him!”

“Well, I changed my mind,” Dirk shot back.

My heart started to beat with a fear/excitement cocktail. This sounded interesting. Dangerous. But somehow I knew that whatever Dirk had come up with to bring Scooby down had to be ten times better than my plan. He was an anti-Christmas genius.

“Flora, is there room for us over there?” Dirk asked, sliding away from me and moving in Ralph and Flora’s direction.

“Yeah, I think so,” came the exasperated-sounding response.

“This is gonna be so great!” Rudy said as we both crawled toward the more open part of the hills. My back twinged with every movement and I realized exactly how long we’d been waiting in the same position. Oh, the things I’d do to get to Scooby!

I felt the roof open a bit above my head and suddenly a flashlight flicked on. My heart got caught in my already constricted throat. But then I saw that Ralph was holding the light and I started to breathe again. Ralph sat with his back pressed up against the inside wall of the hill, dwarfing Flora, who sat next to him, her knee pressed against his. Dirk crawled into position next to Flora, and Rudy and I joined them, forming a very tight little circle, almost all our body parts touching.

Shadows cast by the sole light danced across my friends’ faces, making them look almost sinister. Everyone seemed to be watching me and sizing me up as if they’d never met me before. Clearly no one was sure how I was going to react to this new plan. It only made me salivate to hear it.

“Ralph,” Dirk said, never taking his eyes off me. “The plans.”

Ralph pulled out a large sheet of paper from behind him and unfolded it across all of our legs. I realized it was the same sheet they had been poring over earlier that afternoon when I’d surprised them in the war room. I studied all the lines and numbers and boxes and arrows, and it took me a couple of minutes to realize I was looking at a blueprint of the mall.

Wow. These people were organized.

When I looked up at Dirk, waiting to hear about the new plan, they were all still gazing at me. Suddenly I felt like I’d missed something. My heart slamming against my rib cage, I looked down at the blueprint again. That was when I noticed the words, written in neat block letters, across the top of the page near Sears.

Operation Mall Meltdown.

I looked at Dirk again.

“So?” I said. “What’s the plan? What’s Operation Mall Meltdown?”

“My friend,” Dirk said, reaching out and slapping a hand down on my shoulder. He gave it a little squeeze. “We are going to burn this mall to the ground.”

There was a moment of charged silence. And then I laughed.

“You’re funny,” I said. “What’s the real plan?”

“That
is
the plan,” Flora said, rolling her eyes. “We’re burning down the mall.”

“Isn’t it so cool?” Rudy blurted out, grinning.

I gave myself a moment to wake up from the nightmare. When that didn’t happen, I started to panic. It must have been written all over my face because Flora closed her eyes and tipped back her head.

“I told you he wouldn’t go for it,” she said. “We should have just left the goody-goody at home.”

“You can’t do this,” I said, looking at Dirk. “Do you realize what’s gonna happen if you get caught?”

“
We
are not gonna get caught,” Dirk said confidently.

“Come on, man,” Rudy said, nudging me with his knee. “We’re gonna make history tonight.”

I looked from face to shadow-blocked face and a cold, sick realization seeped through me. These people were freakin’ maniacs! I was mashed into a crawl space with a bunch of total lunatics!

Dirk started to roll up the plans and I suddenly knew what I had to do—grab the blueprint and run. I was closest to the little opening we’d used to get in here. If I snatched the paper, it would take them a couple of seconds to get over the shock, which would give me a good head start. All this contemplation took about half a second and I was just reaching out to grab the plans when I heard a door slam. Very nearby.

Everyone froze. I could actually feel Dirk’s and Rudy’s muscles tense up. Ralph fumbled and then cut the light and we were plunged into complete darkness again.

Voices. Muffled but close. My hands clenched into fists. Someone had seen our light or heard our voices. We were going to get caught. And I was going to get sent down the river with the rest of the loonies.

“Who the hell is still here?” Dirk whispered.

I listened to the footsteps, trying to discern how many people were out there. They were moving very slowly and I squeezed my eyes shut, willing them to just keep going. If they were late workers, maybe they would just leave. But after a few minutes that felt like days, I couldn’t take the waiting. Every second, it sounded like the voices were getting closer. If they were going to find us, I wished they’d just get it over with already.

“I’m gonna go look,” I whispered finally.

“No!” Flora’s voice protested.

I didn’t listen. I hit my stomach and crawled back toward the opening, using my elbows and hands to move along. As I went, a thousand thoughts fought it out in my brain. If it was mall security, maybe I could flag them down and turn the others in. Maybe Dale Dombrowski would believe me if I told him I was tricked into the plot. Then, at least, the mall wouldn’t be burned down. But could I do it? Could I really turn these people in? And what if Dale
didn’t
believe me?

Oh God. I was going to jail. A hot, acidy dread seared through my stomach as I came to the opening at the edge of the fake hills. I was going to jail and my parents were going to kill me, not necessarily in that order. Why had I ever gotten involved in this? Why?
Why?

I moved aside the white sheet that camouflaged the opening and peeked out ever so slowly. The first thing I saw made my blood boil so fast I started to sweat.

Scooby. He was the answer. He was the reason I had gotten myself into this mess. And he was standing less than five feet away. But that wasn’t even the kicker. The person he was talking to was none other than That Awful Woman. Marge Horvath herself.

My first instinct was to hurl myself out of my hiding space and tackle them both to the ground, using the element of surprise to pummel them as much as possible before they overpowered me. But as I watched them, my anger started to subside into suspicious curiosity. What were these two doing in the mall after hours, talking intently to each other, their heads bent close together? What could a talentless teenage rap artist and a vindictive, pinched jewelry store manager have in common?

As I watched, the pair started to move across the mall toward one of the exits. Part of me was itching to follow. But my survival instinct pulled my eyes toward the other exit—the one on the opposite side of the mall. The one that I could use to escape from the head cases hiding behind me. With any luck I could make it to my dad’s car and call the police from my cell while simultaneously slamming on the gas and peeling the heck out of here. I held my breath. It was time to make a break for it.