Jingle Boy (4 page)

Maybe I could go out and get run over by a reindeer. At least it would put me out of my misery.

“Misfit! Misfit! Misfit!”

Where is that coming from? A thousand little Alvin
the Chipmunk voices chant inside my head. I whirl
around in the darkness. I’m surrounded by trees, but
they’re not like trees at all. Each one is like a series of
green triangles stacked on top of one another, with plops
of snow on them that look like melted Marshmallow
Flu f. Something zooms by me to my right with a
swoosh!
leaving two tiny razor tracks in the snow. A sled.
And the voices grow louder.

“Misfit! Misfit! Misfit!”

It’s cold. There’s a light in the distance. And suddenly,
over the hill, an army appears. An army of blue-suited elves.

And they’re not just any elves, they’re the tiny, goateed,
big-headed clay elves from
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
They’re chanting, pumping their ball-shaped
hands, and carrying flickering torches as they approach
me. “Misfit! Misfit! Misfit!”

I can’t move. I’m too scared. What’s happening? Why
have the jolly little elves turned on me? They form a circle
around me, raising their torches high and continuing
their chant.

“Misfit! Misfit! Misfit!”

Suddenly something cold and wet, jagged and hard,
hits me on the side of the face. My eye feels like it’s going
to explode from the pain. I look down, my vision blurred,
to see the Snowman—Burl Ives’s narrator snowman—
shake his umbrella angrily up at me, his choppy little eyebrows coming together over his eyes.

“You don’t belong here, Paul!” he shouts. “You’re a
reject. Sarah dumped you for a scraggly loser! You don’t
belong at the North Pole!”

“But . . . but I . . .”

It’s no use. The snowballs start coming fast and furious, pelting me from all sides. I raise my hands to protect
my face and fall to my knees. The little dentist elf stalks
through the snow toward me, brandishing his tooth-pulling pliers, the ones that left the Abominable Snowman
smacking his gums.

“No!” I shout. “Don’t!”

“You’re a bigger misfit than I ever was,” Rudolph’s
voice says in my ear.

I look up through the shower of snowballs to find the
most famous reindeer of all sneering at me from his position
at the front of Santa’s team. They take off into the night,
Santa waving and calling out through all the horrible
noise, “Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas!”

And the elves start to throw their torches at me.
Closer and closer . . . I can feel the heat burning at my
face. . . .

“No!” I shout out in vain. “This was supposed to be
the best Christmas ever! Nooooo . . . !”

“Paul? Paul! For heaven’s sake, wake up! Paul!”

My eyes wrenched open as my mother shook me in my bed and I woke up instantly, bathed in a hot,
hot
sweat. The sounds of a crackling fireplace filled my senses, along with the scent of smoking wood. My eyes rolled wildly around in my head, trying to find the source of the eerie yellow-orange light that filled my room. And then I saw them—the flames licking at the outside of my bedroom windows.

“The roof is on fire!” my mother shouted, her face bright pink and her hair clinging to her sweat-drenched forehead. She had a streak of flour across her nose. She stood up straight, clinging to her messy apron. “Paul! Your father!”

I sprang out of bed, shoving the necklace, which was still wrapped around my hand, into my pocket. At first I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. But then I heard a siren in the distance and it snapped me into the here and now. A flame suddenly came to life in the corner of my room and started traveling toward the floor. My father was dangling outside my window, his head tipped back, his arms swinging at unnatural angles behind him.

“Dad!” I shouted. I jumped onto my bed and flipped the lock on my window. My mother was hysterical now, sobbing and gasping for breath. I reached out my hand into the cold night air and grabbed at my father, wrapping my fingers around the harness that circled his upper thigh. I swung him toward me, hearing the roar of the fire outside and behind me grow louder and louder.

“Mom! I need your help!” I shouted as I wrestled with the unwieldy bulk of my deadweight father, trying to pull him through the window. The fire was spreading across the front wall of my bedroom.

Don’t let him be dead, don’t let him be dead, don’t let
him be—

My mother climbed up onto the bed next to me, wailing, and helped me drag my dad’s limp form through the window. I held his weight, supporting him with my knee, as my mom undid his safety harness. I yanked off his goggles and looked down at his face as she worked, searching for a sign of life. He was so pale he looked like a ghost of himself, and his lips were turning blue.

“Dad! Dad! Wake up!” I said, slapping him a few times on the cheeks as I’d seen done in so many movies. Nothing. Not even a blink.

The latch finally came undone in my mother’s shaky fingers. As we lowered him onto my bed, a burst of flame came to life just above my desk, crawling across my room and up to the ceiling.

“We have to get him out of here,” I said, my voice sounding inexplicably strong. “You get his legs, I’ll get his arms.”

My mother grasped his ankles, holding them on either side of her body, and started to back out of the room. I held my dad under his armpits, and his torso hung limply between us, like a hammock full of rocks. We got downstairs awkwardly but quickly and toddled our way toward the front door. I backed up to it, picked up my foot, and kicked it as hard as I could. The wood splintered and the door flew open. My mother and I ran down the walk and across the lawn, finally laying my father down on the dying brown grass near the curb. A fire engine skidded around the corner, sirens blaring, lights blazing, and screeched to a stop behind us.

“Oh, Paul, he’s not . . . ?” my mother said, kneeling next to my dad. She reached out to touch him but then pulled back her hand. “Is he dead?”

I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to find out. But I bent over my father’s mouth and listened. There was his breath, shallow and slow, but there.

“He’s breathing,” I said, relieved.

“Oh, thank God!” My mother collapsed on my father’s chest, clinging to him like Scarlett O’Hara in
Gone with the Wind.
(Mom made me watch it in the fifth grade.)

I tore my eyes away and looked up at my house. My house that apparently wasn’t going to be there much longer. The entire roof was engulfed in flames and the second floor wasn’t faring much better. The firemen shouted orders to one another and before long, a wide stream of water was blasted at the house, a couple of skinny guys not much older than me struggling with the dancing hose.

“What do we got here?” an EMT asked, seemingly appearing out of nowhere and dropping to the ground beside my mother. I looked around me for the first time and noticed that there were now three fire trucks, an ambulance, a few police cars, and a nice-sized crowd of neighbors gathered on the street.

“He’s unconscious,” she said as the EMT unpacked his bag. He slipped on a stethoscope and checked my father’s heartbeat.

“Any idea what happened?” he asked, his slick black hair gleaming in the light from the fire.

“I . . . I was in the kitchen baking and the lights flickered,” my mother said. “There was this loud buzzing sound, then a pop, and then I heard him shout.”

“Sounds like he may have been electrocuted,” the EMT said.

“Electrocuted?” my mother wailed.

“’Scuse me, kid!”

Dazed and light-headed, I stepped out of the way as two more emergency workers jogged through with a gurney and placed it beside my father. In a few minutes they had lifted him up and strapped him down and were loading him into an ambulance. I watched all of this happening in a sort of detached, spectatorly way, as if it were happening to someone on
ER.

My mother beckoned to me from the back of the ambulance to get in, but I turned away from her. The fire was really quite mesmerizing. There was my room, going up in smoke and flame. Strands of Christmas lights dangled from the eaves. The Christmas wreath from the front door had flown off when I’d kicked the door down and it lay on the ground, a few tiny flames dancing around it.

“Oh, jeez, would you look at that,” someone said behind me.

My eyes traveled up from the sad-looking wreath and fell on Santa in his little flying saucer, his arm raised in a wave just like the Santa in my dream. As we watched, the flames took poor Santa, first melting the ship out from under him, then crawling up his body and pulling at his face. I couldn’t tear my eyes away as he morphed from the cherry-cheeked, twinkle-eyed jolly old Saint Nick into a sadistic painted clown, laughing maniacally down at me from above.

Misfit! Misfit! Misfit!

“Christmas really is punishing me,” I whispered.

“Paul! Paul!” Holly’s voice penetrated my descent into madness. “You’re okay!” she shouted. She shoved her way past a couple of policemen and hit me with the force of an avalanche, nearly knocking me over as she hugged me.

“Ugh! You’re okay!” Her hands whacked at my back as she clung to me.

When she pulled away, I could tell she’d been crying. Her whole face was white except for her very red nose.

“Come on,” she said, tugging at my arm. “We have to go. We’ll follow the ambulance.”

The ambulance. Right. My father. Right. What the hell was wrong with me? There were more important things than my stupid house and a melting Santa. I finally turned away from Santa and his spaceship, now a widening puddle of plastic goo on what was left of my roof.

Voices whispered as the crowd parted around Holly and me.

“That poor family . . .”

“And at this time of year . . .”

“They have more Christmas spirit than the rest of us combined. It’s just a shame. . . .”

Suddenly I heard a tremendous crash and the spectators gasped, inching a bit farther away from my house. I didn’t even look back to see what had happened, but as I ducked into the car, a little kid hid his face in the folds of his father’s coat, sniffling.

“Santa must be dead,” he said sorrowfully, his red mittens clasping his father’s leg.

I couldn’t help agreeing.

SANTA BABY, I WANT A YACHT AND REALLY THAT’S NOT A LOT

MY HOUSE LOOKED LIKE A PIECE OF ROTTING FRUIT. There was this big, black, gooey, bubbly, smoky hole in the top right side of it that made me think of the mushy spot on an otherwise perfect apple. We had been at the hospital for a few hours and most of the firemen had packed it in and gone home, but two large guys with soot-blackened faces met Holly’s car when we drove up. One of them had a clipboard. Neither of them looked very happy. I could relate.

“I don’t want to go in there,” I said from the backseat of the Bug.

“Paul, just remember, your father is going to be okay. Focus on that,” my mother said. But her face had gone whiter and whiter the closer Holly pulled to the house. She was holding herself together by a very skinny, fraying thread. My mother rarely, if ever, lost it. And when she did, it wasn’t pretty. Like the time I, purely by accident, drove her car into the pond at Van Saun Park? I really thought she was going to pop a vital organ. I hoped tonight didn’t turn out like that night had, because if she lost it, I was definitely going to freak. And without my father around to be all level-headed, we’d be in serious trouble.

Mom climbed out and started to talk with the firemen. I took my dear sweet time hoisting myself out of the low backseat. I was in wallow mode. I’ll be the first to admit it. Yes, it was true, my dad was going to be okay. He woke up at the hospital and even managed to tell a joke or two. (“The good news is, we won’t need a tree this year—you can just plug
me
in!”) But his body had been through a major trauma and he couldn’t move without pain. The doctors predicted it would take at least two weeks for him to recover.

Two weeks. That was half of December. Practically the whole Christmas season. Things would not be the same without my father around. But who was I kidding? Things weren’t going to be the same any way you looked at it. My house was barbecue. Blackened
Cajun
barbecue.

“We’d like to take you inside and show you the damage, ma’am,” the taller, older fireman said, attempting a polite smile. He had a bushy white mustache that had turned gray from all the ash, and his light blue eyes seemed tired.

Mom started up the walk between the two firemen and Holly stepped up beside me.

“That can’t be good,” I said, staring at the dent in the house where my room used to be. Beams and boards jutted out of the roof at unnatural angles, and one of my windows was just not there anymore. I couldn’t even imagine what it looked like inside. Tonight my mother’s favorite saying—“Paul, your room looks like a bomb hit it!”—had somehow come true.

“Look at it this way,” Holly said, shoving her hands into the back pockets of her jeans. “At least now you can redecorate!”

I snorted. It was a valiant stab, but all it did was bring home the worst part of this whole thing. “Let’s get this over with,” I said. Then I somehow made myself start walking.

The front doorjamb was ripped and splintered where I’d kicked open the door earlier, but other than that, the downstairs was okay. Aside from the muddy footprints of about a thousand boots, everything was intact. The kitchen was a wreck, but only because my mother had been baking when the fire started. A cookie sheet with uncooked blobs of dough sat on top of the stove, and the counters were covered with spilled flour, eggshells, and various bottles, boxes, and bags of ingredients. Even in her panic my mother had managed to turn off the oven.

“Cookie?” Holly asked, walking over to the cooling rack and picking up a Toll House. My stomach grumbled noisily. It had been a long night without food. But I didn’t think I was going to be able to digest.

“Go ahead,” I told her. After all, she was starving, too. We’d be better off if at least one of us wasn’t delirious with hunger. Holly popped the cookie in her mouth and grabbed a handful more.

The floor overhead creaked and I could hear the muffled voices of my mother and the firemen. They were in my parents’ room, just above us. I glanced at Holly. I really didn’t want to go up there. But there was no point in avoiding the inevitable. Holly smiled reassuringly, her cheek sticking out from a full mouth. We headed for the stairs.

It was a nightmare. My palms were sweating and my heart was pounding so hard it was nearly choking me as I climbed the stairs. I really felt like I must be asleep and that at any second I would sit up straight in my bed, realizing it was all just a product of my twisted imagination. But when I got to the top of the stairs, the first thing I saw was the miniature Christmas tree my mom and I had made when I was in kindergarten, toppled to the floor in front of the hallway table where it once sat. It was smashed and stepped on, the mini-Santa and snowman ornaments ground into the rug like tiny crushed corpses.

When I didn’t wake up from seeing that heinous sight, I knew for sure that I wasn’t dreaming.

Holly and I stood at the top of the stairs as my mother and the two firemen walked over to my bedroom. My mother gasped and her hand flew to her mouth.

“Mom?” I said.

She looked at me with this dazed, horrified expression, then stepped into the room ahead of me to make space for me to get through. I kind of wished she hadn’t.

I had never seen anything like it. It wasn’t my room. It couldn’t be.

“It’s pretty bad,” the fireman’s low voice rumbled.

The wall had collapsed on top of my bed, engulfing it in a pile of . . . well . . .
crap.
Wood, paper, plaster, roof shingles—all soaked and pungent—tumbled over the mattress and onto the floor. Everything was wet. Water dripped from the ceiling, ran from the window-sills onto the floor. When I stepped on my wall-to-wall carpeting, water bubbled up from under my feet and chilled the canvas of my sneakers. I pulled my sweater closer to me. You could see the stars through the gaping hole in the upper corner of the room.

I tore my eyes away from the bed and made the mistake of looking at my desk. The wallpaper had peeled all around it and hung down in limp strips. My computer screen was covered with hardened bubbles and the CDs that always littered the surface of the desk had
become
the surface. They had melted and congealed to the desk in pools of psychedelic colors. My school-books were charred and soaked and there was a pile of black ash that had once been a stack of notebooks.

And the smell. Ugh. I can’t even describe it. The usually comforting scent of burned wood mixed with this acrid, sour aroma that came from melted synthetics— plastics of all kinds that I never even realized I owned. I took a step toward the desk.

“Son, you don’t want to go over by the window.”

I ignored him. I had to see if there was anything salvageable. I
lived
on my desk. Almost everything that mattered was over there.

“Paul,” my mother said in a half-pleading, half-warning tone.

The floor squeaked and creaked under me, but I barely noticed. My hand was reaching out for the framed picture of Sarah and me that sat next to the keyboard. It was melted and crinkled and distorted. I almost wanted to cry when I saw it. It was the final nail in the coffin. Not only had I lost the girl, I’d lost the only photographic proof I had that the girl had ever been mine.

Maybe I could get some of those pictures Naho Nakasaki had taken for the yearbook at the last Holiday Ball meeting. Maybe she still had the negatives. If I could just get my hands on—

But then, what did it matter? Sarah had dumped me, right? Why did I want to remember what I couldn’t have?

“Come on, honey,” my mother said, stepping up next to me and putting her hands on my shoulders. “You can sleep in the den downstairs tonight and tomorrow we’ll figure out how to fix this mess.”

“Okay,” I said in a daze.

I didn’t want to be here anymore, anyway. It was too depressing. Ripped posters hung from their tacks, the totem pole from our trip to Arizona was tipped over and broken in half, my soccer uniform lay dirty and scorched atop my collapsing hamper. That morning I’d woken up all happy-go-lucky in this very room, and now it was destroyed. Just like I had been that afternoon by Sarah.

It would’ve been almost poetic if it hadn’t sucked so very, very badly.

As I turned to go, I caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye. There, on the sopping wet floor, trampled and ripped and deteriorating, was a crushed silver Fortunoff bag.

“No,” I said under my breath.

I dropped to the ground, tossing the frame aside, and picked up the bag. The whole bottom fell out, landing with a wet
thwack
on top of a twisted piece of fabric that used to be my favorite boxers. I sifted through the mottled paper and found the receipt, now nothing but a gobbed-up spitball. When I tried to unfold it, it disintegrated in my hands. Sitting in my pocket was a piece of jewelry intended for the girl I loved who could not care less about me. A piece of jewelry that I couldn’t afford. And I was stuck with it for the rest of my life.

I couldn’t have been more screwed.

“Wicked cool!” Marcus Seiler said, stepping into my bedroom. He pulled the hood on his sweatshirt up to cover his gelled hair against the cold, then bobbed his head as he surveyed the damage. He sniffed and made a disgusted face. “It stinks in here, man.”

Yeah, dude. That would be because of the massive
fire.
“I know,” I told him.

“Did you take pictures yet?” Matt Viola asked as he hovered by the door. He looked at the floor warily and decided not to take the risk of actually entering the destruction zone.

“Didn’t think of that,” I told them, resisting the urge to punch something. Didn’t they get that this sucked? They were acting like I’d torched the room myself—for fun. They might be my friends, but sometimes they weren’t all that bright.

“You totally should,” Matt said.

Yeah,
I thought.
I’ll get right on that.
There was a rumble and a crash in my closet and Marcus jumped halfway across the room.

“What the heck was that?” he asked.

“Squirrel,” I replied. “He moved in sometime last night. Scared the crap out of me this morning when I came up to get my cell.”

“Cool,” Matt said. “Get a picture of that, too.”

Marcus and I just looked at him for a second; then Marc clapped. “We’re making a Mickey-D’s run,” he said. “Wanna come?”

“No thanks,” I said as I followed them back downstairs. I hadn’t told them about Sarah yet and if they stayed here for five minutes longer, I knew they were going to ask about her. I wasn’t ready to deal with questions and the obvious comments. (“But
dude,
she’s so
hot
! ” As if I didn’t know.)

I let the guys out through the front door and returned to the couch, where I had spent the entire morning. The television was still on and I sank back into position on the couch, flat on my back except for my head, which I propped up on a throw pillow. I picked up the remote and started flipping channels.

Saturday television is an abomination. The one day of the week when most people don’t feel guilty about sitting in front of the boob tube and letting their brain melt for hours on end, and what do they put on?
Overboard,
that totally pointless, totally humorless 1980s Goldie Hawn flick that they’ve shown at least fourteen hundred times. I practically have the thing memorized from watching it throughout my childhood when there was nothing else on. My other choices were a
Law & Order
marathon, some reality TV crap where they show weddings from beginning to end, infomercials, cooking shows, and, of course, college football. Who the hell cares about college football, anyway? A bunch of talentless scrubs running around the field and doing fifteen-minute-long celebration dances after sacking a guy who didn’t even
try
to get out of the way? It’s like, get drafted, make a
real
team, then we’ll talk.

My thumb was on autopilot. I was hitting the up button over and over and over again, as if scrolling through the channels for the fourth time was going to somehow change what was on. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and I had yet to change out of my pajamas—a Dave Matthews Band tour T-shirt, a pair of sweatpants, and my plaid flannel robe. (My dresser, being on the hallway side of my room, had miraculously survived. Thus I still had half my clothes and the box of practical joke paraphernalia I’d been hoarding since sleep-away camp, stuffed in the back of my underwear drawer.) My cereal bowl from that morning was on the floor next to me, along with a half-eaten box of doughnuts and four empty cans of Vanilla Coke. Considering my sugar intake for the day, I should have been running sprints around the living room, but just walking up the stairs with the guys had taken all the energy out of me. Somehow I felt like I couldn’t move a single muscle in my body. Except, of course, for that thumb.

Oh, if Sarah could see me now. She was such a neat freak she’d almost fainted when she saw my bedroom. She’d spent half an hour organizing my CD collection while she decided which ones she wanted me to burn for her. It was so cute. Of course, the next day those CDs had been completely disorganized again. Maybe if I weren’t such a slob, she wouldn’t have broken up with me.

“Okay, that’s it,” I said to myself, tossing the remote on the glass-topped coffee table.

Aside from the squirrel in my closet, there wasn’t another living thing in the house. Mom had left for work at the crack of dawn and the guys had only been here for two minutes. Other than that, I’d had no human contact.

I was acting pathetic, really. So Sarah had broken up with me. So she was dating some lame-o loser. So my room was a smoked-out haven for bushy-tailed rodents. So my father was in the hospital. So there was no conceivable way I was ever going to get my Jeep now. (A realization I’d come to in the middle of the night that had finally squeezed a couple of self-flagellating tears out of me.) That was no reason to sit around all day and feel sorry for myself. It was still Christmas, right? It was still, as the song goes, the most wonderful time of the year. And there was one thing that could always knock me out of any and all bad mood swings.