Jingle Boy (13 page)

I put one hand outside the opening and then heard Marge’s voice carry across the empty mall, echoing against the walls, as clear as a bell.

“I still can’t believe they blamed the whole thing on that Nicholas woman,” she said, causing my blood to instantly run cold. “Like she possesses the imagination to pull something like that off.”

They laughed, both of them, and my mind reeled. Blamed what on my mother? She couldn’t be talking about the money skimming, could she? Marge
knew
my mother didn’t do it and she hadn’t said anything?

“Her son’s a moron, too,” Scooby said. “Must be in the blood.”

My jaw clenched in anger and suddenly I forgot about Operation Mall Meltdown. I forgot about the rest of the Anti-Christmas Underground, sitting a few feet back through the tunnel, plotting arson. I glanced at the door to freedom and made a snap decision. If Marge knew something that could clear my mother’s name, I was going to find out what it was. And maybe I really would tackle Scooby to the ground and kick his butt—if the opportunity presented itself.

As soon as Scooby’s and Marge’s backs were to me, I slipped out of the crawl space and flattened myself up against the nearest support beam in the center of the mall, the
Mission Impossible
music playing in my head. The sheet over the opening moved and Dirk stuck his head out.

“What are you doing?” he whispered.

I shook my head and lifted a finger to my lips, casting my eyes in Scooby and Marge’s direction. Dirk saw them and we locked eyes for a moment before he disappeared again. I knew he thought I would signal them when the coast was clear, but that wasn’t my plan. My plan was to follow Scooby and Marge wherever they went and find out what was going on between my archnemesis and my mother’s.

Marge and Scooby walked through the inner doors of the exit by the courtesy counter and I stepped out from my hiding place to follow.

“Hey!” someone shouted, his voice filling the entire deserted mall. “Don’t you take another step, young man.”

I stopped, my foot suspended in the air, and my arms instinctively flew up over my head. I couldn’t have breathed if I’d tried.

“Okay. Turn around slowly.”

I hopped on my one foot awkwardly, afraid to let the other touch the ground, until I had turned around and was facing Dale Dombrowski. He was standing a few feet away from me, legs about two feet apart and bent at the knee, and he was wielding a stun gun.

“Aw, Paul,” he said, standing up straight and shaking his head. “I really didn’t want to believe it was you.”

My heart sank at the disappointment in the man’s eyes. What had I done? How had I gotten here?

“You’re gonna want to have a seat right there and put your hands on your head,” Dale said. “The police are on their way and your friends will be with you shortly.”

There was a sudden scuffle and a few loud thumps and I heard Dirk yell, “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me, you stinkin’ rent-a-cop!”

“All right! Everybody out!” Dale shouted, walking over to the crawl space and lifting the white sheet.

Rudy crawled out first and pushed himself to his feet, hands raised as he looked around wildly. Flora shimmied out after him. She crossed her arms over her chest in irritation. Finally Ralph and Dirk appeared, walking around from the other side of Santa Land, three mall security guys behind them. Dirk shot me a look that could have melted the whole North Pole in seconds.

“Nice to tell me there was another opening on the other side,” he said, sitting down next to me. “They ambushed us.”

I’d had no idea there was another opening, but I didn’t bother saying it. What was the point? We were all snagged and we were all going down and I hadn’t even done anything wrong. Well, except hide out in the mall after hours plotting to get someone fired.

One of the younger, pudgier security cops held up Dirk’s blueprints. “Dale, you’re gonna want to take a look at this,” he said.

Ralph hung his head and Flora rolled her eyes, then closed them, leaning back against the support beam. Dirk started to twitch wildly. I glanced at Rudy and I could swear he was starting to cry.

“Very interesting,” Dale said as he looked over Operation Mall Meltdown. He turned and gazed at us sadly. “Looks like you kids are in a whole heap o’ trouble.”

At that moment, just when I thought things couldn’t possibly get worse, Scooby and Marge walked in from the parking lot again.

“See, Dale? I told you your stakeout would be worthwhile,” Scooby said, smirking. “This kid is, like, stalking me!”

“Between him and his money-skimming mother, they’re like a crime
family,
” Marge said, laughing at her own lame joke.

Looking as triumphant as could be, Scooby and Marge turned around once again and practically floated out of the mall, their laughter echoing through my head. My heart clenched into the tightest of tight little balls as what Scooby had said sank in. He had called for the rent-a-cop stakeout. If not for his tip, Dale might never have caught us.

“He set us up,” Dirk said, glaring at Scooby’s retreating back. “The jolly bastard set us up.”

I’LL HAVE A BLUE, BLUE, BLUE, BLUE CHRISTMAS

“THE IMPORTANT THING IS WE GOT OUR MESSAGE OUT there. Tomorrow this is gonna be in all the papers—the
Record,
the
Ridgewood News, Community Life.
They might even pick this story up in Rockland or the
Post
or something. Everyone will hear about the Anti-Christmas Underground. They can’t ignore us anymore. . . .”

I lifted my head out of my hands and looked over at Dirk. He was sitting on a hard wooden bench, exactly like mine, across the cold gray cell from me. As he rambled, he rocked forward and back, his hands pressed into the bench at his sides, his head twitching every few seconds. Rudy lay on the bench next to me, his arm crooked behind his head, his eyes closed, more still than I’d ever seen him. Flora sat on the floor in the corner, her legs crossed in some yoga pose, her eyes closed in meditation. Ralph sat next to Dirk, playing quite beautifully, actually, on a harmonica. I do not know now, nor will I ever know, where the heck he got it from.

“Nope, they can’t ignore us anymore. We’ve brought our message to the world and now disenfranchised kids like us all over the globe will be validated. They will rise up and join our cause. This is a fine day for our organization, gentlemen. A fine day . . .”

“Dirk!” I shouted, silencing him and surprising everyone in the cell, including myself. “Has the fact that we’re in jail right now escaped your attention?”

Dirk stopped rocking and glared at me. “What’s your point, Paulie?” he asked, his head twitching so hard I swear I heard a snap.

“My point is, we’re in JAIL!” I shouted, standing up. “There is no other point. That, in itself, is a pretty large point!”

“Everyone has to make sacrifices for the cause,” Dirk said, rising to face me. “It’s about time you learned that.”

“Yeah? Well, I’ve already made plenty of sacrifices,” I told him, taking a step closer to his short but powerful frame. “I lost my girlfriend, my best friend, my bedroom, and my Jeep. My father’s in the hospital and by now I’m sure my mother has had a nervous breakdown, so don’t talk to me about sacrifices.”

My last words hung in the air and for a moment I thought I’d gotten through to Dirk—that he would back down—but then Flora broke the silence.

“This is all your fault, you know,” she said. This seemed to be her favorite sentiment when it came to yours truly. Her feet scraped against the floor as she pushed herself up. “If you hadn’t wanted to get back at Scooby so bad, you wouldn’t even be here. Holly was right. You’re not anti-Christmas, you’re anti-Guy Who Stole Your Girlfriend.”

“You couldn’t be more wrong,” I said, stung.

“Oh yeah? Then why were you trying to follow him out of the mall tonight instead of helping us with Operation Mall Meltdown?” Rudy asked, turning his head but otherwise not moving. “I saw you, man. I watched you from the opening. You weren’t sticking around. You just wanted to see what that scrawny freak was up to.”

I swallowed hard.

“If it wasn’t for you and your Scooby obsession, none of us would be here,” Flora said. “You never would have crawled out of the hills and we never would have gotten caught. Think about
that.
”

She reached up and flicked me on the forehead. She flicked me hard.

“Paul Nicholas?” There was a loud clattering of keys and we all looked over to find Sergeant Pie, our arresting officer, whose face seemed to represent his name, unlocking the cell door.

“Yeah?” I said, happy to have an excuse to take a step away from Flora, who suddenly seemed more dangerous than the rest of them.

“You made bail,” Pie said, sliding open the barred door with a clang. “You’re free to go.”

I glanced at Dirk and Rudy and wiped my palms on my jeans. “Well . . . see ya,” I said.

“That’s right, traitor,” Dirk blurted out. “Go home to your mommy now.”

My brain was void of comebacks. I did feel like a traitor, but I couldn’t figure out why. These people were out of their minds. I should be glad to be rid of them. But something in what Flora said rang true. If it hadn’t been for my selfish act, maybe none of us would have been here. Maybe I could have found another way to stop their little arson plot and we’d all have been sitting at the Suburban right now, laughing over what we’d almost done.

Part of me wanted to apologize, but that didn’t seem right, either. So all I did was duck my head and slip through the door, leaving my so-called friends behind. As I walked off, Ralph played the classic theme of humiliated defeat on the harmonica: “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey! Good-bye!”

I followed Pie into the outer office and stopped in my tracks. My mother sat in a battered wooden chair in the corner, her face wet, her skin so pale it conjured images of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. When she saw me, she stood up shakily, gripping my jacket, which they’d taken from me, in both hands.

“Mom,” I said, my voice cracking.

She walked over and gave me a quick hug, but when she pulled away, all I could see in her eyes was anger and disappointment. The pain in my chest was excruciating. I don’t think I’d ever disappointed my mother in my life. I didn’t like it.

“Mom, I—”

“It would be better if you didn’t talk right now,” she said.

I looked down, ashamed, and glimpsed the edge of a little green envelope sticking out of her pocketbook. She saw my face and quickly shoved the envelope farther into her bag, but not before I realized what it was. Her Christmas gift fund envelope—the place where she kept the money she’d saved all year for gifts.

My mother had used her gift fund to bail me out of jail.

“Let’s go,” she said, grabbing my arm and nudging me toward the door. She looked at Sergeant Pie and forced a smile. “Thank you, Officer. Merry Christmas.”

My heart split in two when she said that. My mom. She never let the spirit die.

The moment we hit the cold night air, something seemed to snap within my mother and all the words she was holding inside came pouring off her tongue.

“I just don’t understand it, Paul. I just don’t understand it,” she said, speed-walking over to the car. “I think you’re watching football with your friends and I get a phone call from the police—the
police—
telling me they have you in custody for attempted arson?”

I looked at her over the top of the car and her eyes were so wide she could have been looking at the Abominable Snowman over my shoulder.

“Mom, I—”

“Didn’t I tell you not to speak?” she asked.

My mouth snapped shut and we both got in the car.

“Known hoodlums!” she exclaimed as she started the engine. “You’ve been consorting with known hoodlums! Do you know that Officer Pie told me that all of those kids you were caught with have rap sheets as long as an AK-47—which they probably keep under their beds?”

Even in the insanity I almost laughed.

“Is something funny, Paul?” she snapped, her hand on the gearshift.

“No, Mom,” I said. “I swear I didn’t know they—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” she told me, shaking her head. “I just want to drive home in peace.”

My mother pulled the car out into traffic, taking long, deep, steady breaths. I was dying to ask her what, exactly, my “friends” had on their rap sheets, but at this point I definitely knew better than to try to talk. I looked out the window at the decorated houses flying by and sank down in my seat.

This was it. This was the moment I hit rock bottom.

I had no idea what was going to happen next, but I was definitely going to get fired from the mall. And losing my job was going to make it a lot harder to bring Scooby down.

The second this thought crossed my mind, I felt sick to my stomach. Bringing Scooby down? Was that all I could think about? Was that what really mattered to me? I mean, come on! What was destroying Scooby really going to accomplish?

Would it make Sarah come back to me? Probably not. Would it make Holly come home? Definitely not. Would it get my mother her job back, get my father out of the hospital, or restore my room?

No, no, and no.

Here I’d been focusing all my time and energy on getting back at Scooby and where had it gotten me? Nowhere. Oh, besides
jail.

My mother turned onto our block and pulled the car to a stop in front of our house, where a huge industrial waste bin stood on the lawn, full of roofing and jagged boards. I looked up at my dark, undecorated, lonely old house and sighed.

This was, without a doubt, the worst Christmas ever.

My mother got out of the car and stalked inside. I followed as slowly as possible, anticipating another reaming, but when I closed the door behind me, I heard her banging around in the kitchen. I stopped with my hand on the doorknob, feeling like someone had taken a spoon and hollowed me out.

When the Christmas tree is up, my mother always,
always,
without fail, walks right into the living room and plugs it in whenever we return to the house. Always. The fact that she was in the kitchen at that moment and the tree was still dark brought home exactly how much I had hurt her.

I stood at the open entryway and watched her make herself some hot chocolate. I was trying to think of something to say. Something that would make my mother feel better. That was when I remembered what Marge had said earlier in the evening. It was a long shot, but maybe . . .

“Hey, Mom, I don’t think Marge thinks you took that money from the store,” I blurted out.

My mother paused. “What do you mean?” she asked, her back facing me as she braced her hands on the counter.

“Just that . . .” And then I realized that there was nothing to what Marge had said. All she’d done was tell Scooby she thought my mother was too stupid to skim money from the registers.

“Just that I think she thinks you’re innocent,” I concluded lamely. So much for making her feel better. Nice one, Paul.

“Well, it’s nice to know someone does, even if it is That Awful Woman,” my mother said, turning to face me. “But let’s get back to the subject at hand. I’m not going to tell your father about this. Not yet. I’m afraid it might make him worse.”

“Mom, I know you don’t want me to talk, but I just want to say that I really am sorry,” I told her.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly through her nose, facing the counter again. “I know you are, Paul,” she said, turning so that I could see her profile. “But I think that right now you should just go to your room.”

“I . . . I can’t,” I told her. “My room is—”

“Finished!” she said with false brightness. She turned completely around now and braced her hands behind her on the counter. “I was going to surprise you when you got home tonight. They finished your room this afternoon.”

My throat swelled up with emotion. There was no way I could speak.

“Merry Christmas,” my mother said flatly. Then she turned away from me again. “We’ll talk about all this in the morning.”

Slowly I walked over to the stairs. I could see from where I was standing that she’d tied a huge red bow on my bedroom door. I didn’t know exactly what was inside, but if I knew my mother at all, I could bet she’d had a new bed delivered and had spent half the day at Bed, Bath & Beyond picking out sheets and pillows. She’d probably worked on the place for hours while I was plotting to break the law—and her heart.

I climbed the stairs, each step feeling heavy enough to shake the house, and walked over to my room, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t open the door and have it thrown right in my face—what a great mom I had and what a bad son I was.

Next to my bedroom door there’s a niche in the wall to display figurines or photographs. Every day during the Christmas season my mom puts little treats there so that if I get hungry while studying or if I have friends over, there’s always something to eat. Today, standing in the little indentation was a statue of Santa Claus, made out of Rice Krispies treats. His little arm was raised in a wave, and his mouth was drawn up like a bow, just like in “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”

Before I could even breathe, I was overcome with a violent rage. I braced my hands on the wall above the indentation and glared down at Santa.

“I hate you,” I said through my teeth. “I lost my Santa hat and you turned against me. You turned all of Christmas against me. If it wasn’t for you, none of this would have happened!”

I grabbed Santa, ripped off his head, and stuffed it into my mouth.

“You’re going to pay for what you’ve done to me,” I said through my sticky teeth. “You are going to pay!”