Merry Random Christmas (9 page)

“Now what? What are you guys up to?”

“Tuesday,” Sam whined. “I think I’m up to
puking
meals from last Tuesday.”

Amy winced. “I think we’re going to have a very quiet Christmas. I already called my mom and told her I wasn’t sure Sam and I would make it to
morrow. And then there’s this crazy trip to D.C. that she planned for us to visit my aunt, and...”
 

Sam groaned.

“I think we’ll just binge watch something on Netflix instead.”

“Do we have to watch Outlander
again
?” he moaned.

“No,” Amy said, smoothing the hair off his forehead. She perked up. “We can watch Black Sails!”

Charlotte burst out laughing.

Sam just sighed and sipped his soda.

I looked around the room. The seven of us
were in various states of disheveled glory. Darla had been arrested, I got in a fight with my mom, Liam and Sam were recovering from food poisoning, Trevor had a magic pinkie up his ass, and Amy and Charlotte were caretaking for their sick boyfriends.
 

Merry Fucking Christmas.

On the other hand, I had two grand I never expected, the
most awesome
girlfriend in the world, an amazing best friend I could depend on, and I’d just rooted out yet more hovermotherfuckery from my parental unit and called her on it.

“Can we go home?” Darla whispered, cozying up to me like a baby kitten seeking serenity.

I wrapped my arm around her and sank my nose into her thick, blonde hair.

It smelled like pee.

“Yeah, we can,” I said, pulling back.

What I didn’t
add
was:

So you can take a shower.

Because if I said that aloud, Darla would find a plastic baby Jesus and beat me with it.

And on a night like this, I wasn’t about to tempt fate.

Trevor

We left Sam and Amy’s place with waves
—
no hugs
—
because who wants to hug people who’ve been puking their guts out all day?
Especially on Christmas Eve.
 

Nobody was really desperate to hug us, either.

We walked toward the T, to take the Red Line home. I hoped the subway was still running this late, and as I started to worry we’d have to find a rare cab in the middle of the night, I was distracted by the sight of Santa Claus jacking off.

And a really strange sound, like a woman’s
muffled
high-pitched groans.

“
It came upon a midnight clear is the name of a fucking Christmas song, man. Not an order,” I shouted to the guy behind the dumpster as we confronted him. I turned away from the shot of spooge I knew was next. That homeless dude was choking the chicken like it was about to shoot hundred dollar bills.
 

Chicken.

Mavis.

Aw, fuck.

An actual chicken on a leash dart
ed
by, between a dumpster behind the vegan restaurant and a Tesla
Model X
parked next to it.

Ah, Cambridge. Don’t ever change.

“
Nothing I do will ever make her happy
,” Joe declare
d
,
clearly deep in his own thoughts,
his voice tight with worry and fury. I’m not sure how he manag
ed
both, but he d
id
.

“
Who, Mavis? She just ran behind that recycling dumpster.”
 

 “Are you high? You only see Mavis out in public when you’re on something.”

Just as I was about to defend myself, the chicken ran right over Joe’s foot, dragging its leash.

“
Fucking hell, Trevor, you’re not kidding. That’s Darla’s chicken!” he shouted.
 

“Darla has a chicken?”

“No! It’s Tortilla’s chicken! The guy she was arrested for giving a blow job to behind th
is
vegan restaurant!”

I placed my hands on Joe’s shoulders. His eyes tracked the chicken. I forced him to make eye contact with me.

“Joe? Joey?”

“Don’t call me Joey!”

“Joseph!”

That got his at
t
ention.

“What the hell are you on?” I peered closely at his face. “
Spice
?”

“I’m not on anything.”

“Popsicle!” Darla cried out, appearing from the alley. She lunged, going face down in a wet puddle of half-melted snow, her Santa pants dragged around her hips as the chicken pulled at the leash, making a strange gag-cluck.

Was this really my Christmas?

“Got her!” Darla crowed.

“If I’m not on anything right now, I really need to get high after all this,” I said to no one. Joe had broken away from me and picked up the chicken, his face beaming with joy at Darla.

“You found Popsicle! She’s real!”

“
Of course she’s real.”
 

I reached down and carefully slid my hand under the trembling chicken. She flapped her wings, the leash getting caught unde
r
one wing, her throat tight and ble
a
ting with a
bizarre
cluck that transported me back to Mavis.

Two and a half years ago I ate a bag of peyote and stole a chicken. I proposed to her and called her my fiancée. Last year, after Darla broke up with us, I performed a repeat, except the second time I declared Mavis a candidate for president. In Nashua, New Hampshire at a rally.

On YouTube.

A
year
long
suspension from Harvard Law later, here I was again, holding a chicken that wasn’t mine and—

Not
proposing to it.

I shuddered, but not for the reasons most people would.
S
haking off the sensation of warm caring that inhabited me as soon as I cradled that damn, filthy chicken in my arms
was harder than you’d think.
 

Monster. I was some sort of monster who was weirdly cosseting
a homeless guy’s pet chicken.
 

A homeless guy who had
just
shot his wad and
now
smoked a cigarette next to the urban composter in the alley.

“You wanna give Popsicle a little lick there?” Tortilla asked me with a wink. When he closed his eyes, a star of David appeared on his eyelid, a crude tattoo that had faded to the color of corroded copper.

I set the chicken down, animal musk lingering on my clothes.
A flashback flirted at the edges of my conscious mind. I willed it away.
 

“We need to borrow your chicken,” Darla said
to Tortilla
.

“You wan
t a
turn with my cock?”

“That joke ain’t funny no more,” Darla said with a sigh.

“I never joke about my cock,” Tortilla said somberly.

I had to give him that. No guy wants his wang to be considered the butt of a joke.

Up a butt, on the other hand...

Darla reached into her Santa pants pockets (how the hell did she end up wearing Santa pants? I’d forgotten to ask) and pulled out a few grimy dollars. She thrust them at him.

“Tortilla, I gave you a sleeping bag the other day. Here’s a few bucks.
P
lease go tell the cops I wasn’t sucking you off.”

“How about you suck me off and I’ll tell the cops whatever you want?”

Joe and I were in front of Darla instantly, a wall of protection. Joe’s fingers threaded through the guy’s filthy shirt,
fist
woven into his scraggly beard like
it was
knitting the hair.

“Don’t you ever,
ever
fucking talk to her like that. You hear me?” He was lifting Tortilla up a good six inches, and the man stared at Joe with a bewildered, rheumy look.

“I was kidding!” he choked out.

“
No shit
you were.”

My arm was behind me, holding on to Darla, ready to keep her safe. Without planning or prior agreement, Joe and I had slipped easily into these roles. Joe the aggressor.
T
revor the protector.

Easy.

It had come so
easily
.

The stakes were pretty damn high, too.

Joe let the guy go. On high alert now, my senses were sharper. Keener. Blood pumped through me like an adrenaline bath, and I carefully studied Tortilla’s face. His skin was marked with nasty acne underneath that bushy overgrowth. Grease and a layer of caked-on dirt littered every portion of him not covered by clothing, and the clothes were even worse, like an archive of every stain, smear, and encounter he’d had with anything that could rub off.

He was, to my surprise, actually about our age. The beard had no grey in it.

This guy was a homeless street dude in his mid-twenties.

“I’m sorry, Darla,” Tortilla groaned. “I really am. You’ve always been good to me. Remember when you gave me those cayenne toothpaste samples?
T
hat was nice.
And those neck pillows you blow up were great when I got that big hemorrhoid and needed something soft to sit on while I took a shit after eating all those gummy bears you gave me.
”

Darla’s eyebrows folded inward as I watched her watching him.

“
But
that sleeping bag sucked because in the rain, the candy cane melted and the piping got all sticky, but the bag was warm.
I
t was nice to wake up a little warm, for once. Reminded me what it was like when I had a bed.”

“Oh,” she said softly.

Joe bent down and picked up Popsicle’s leash.

“
I was just joking about the blow job,” he said, eyeing Joe with genuine fear, palms out in a gesture of submission to the alpha dog. “I’ll go to the cops and tell them whatever you want. I was high as a kite when you were helping dig Popsicle out of that dumpster, so I don’t remember much, but I sure as hell know you didn’t blow me. A man would remember that.” His eyes shifted from me to Joe, gauging whether he’d said the wrong thing.
 

Joe’s shoulders flared up and out in a hyper-masculine anger, but he said nothing.

“You ever joke about her sexually and I’ll—” Joe left the threat undefined.

“I swear! I swear!”

“He’s harmless, Joe,” Darla said in a weary voice. “Really.”

“I know he is,” Joe said, eyes still on Tortilla. “But I’m making myself clear.”

Darla’s mouth went shut, her face a battleground for conflicting emotions.

Joe reached into his jacket pocket, peeling off a thick stack of twenties, fives, tens and ones.

“Here, Tortilla. You and Popsicle go get a hotel room or a nice, warm bed for the next few nights,” Joe said as he handed the guy an amount of money that could either get him a hotel room for a few nights or buy him enough drugs and booze to knock him out for an equal period of time.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” Tortilla exclaimed, eyes suddenly big and bright. It occur
r
ed to me that they were the same color as my own.

Jesus. He really
was
like me.
I looked again at his hair and noticed he didn’t have dark brown hair like I’d first thought. It was just so oily it looked dark. Based on his beard, skin tone and eye color, he was probably a blonde.
 

L
ike me.

“How much is that?” Tortilla asked Joe.
H
e seemed hesitant to count it out,
a certain shyness emerging
.

“Two hundred bucks.”

“I can get a bed for a week down at—well, anyhow.” He looked sadly down at Popsicle. “Problem is, I can’t take her with me. No shelter will let me have her. No hotel will, either.”

Popsicle began pecking lightly on Joe’s foot.

Tears in Tortilla’s eyes made it clear he was torn. Living on the streets of Cambridge couldn’t be easy. That was an understatement. I had no ideas to offer. This was one area of life where I couldn’t contribute one iota of effective advice, because I’d never, ever been exposed to anything quite like this.

Joe just looked down, as if he was out of ideas, too. Offering up all that money to the guy had probably been his problem-solving gesture.
I
n our world, if you throw enough money at a
n obstacle
, it goes away.

Our world didn’t involve street people whose only emotional support in their entire world was a chicken on a leash.

“Joe,” Darla said quietly. “You’ve got chickens at your parents’ house. Any chance your mom will babysit Popsicle for a week?”

Darla

“I can’t leave Popsicle,” Tortilla said in a mournful voice. “I’m all she’s got.
She would be lost without me.
”
He gave Popsicle a pitying look. The damn chicken just stared with one eye like it didn’t give a shit in the world.
 

W
hich was pretty much true, because I’m sure that chicken was about as emotionally attached to Tortilla as I am to a
used condom
.

Joe and
T
revor exchanged a look, then Joe closed his eyes and shook his head with disgust. When he
peer
ed at me, and not Tortilla, I realized who the disgust was aimed at.

“You want me to call my mom and ask her to take on a chicken?”

“You can’t take my Popsicle away!” Tortilla shrieked, snatching the leash from Joe’s fingers.

“Not away,” Darla explained in a soothing voice. “Joe’s mom has a mini farm. Just outside the city. Popsicle could go on a little farm camp week for chickens.”

“Farm camp,” Joe groaned.

“Like a spa,” Darla added. “Give Popsicle a little freshening up.”

Popsicle was in Tortilla’s arms and looked like she was about as interested in a spa as Joe was in
reading One Direction fanfiction
.

“
No. It’s a kind offer,” Tortilla said, squeezing the chicken so tight it started squawking. “But no.” he shoved the wad of money into one of his Santa pants pockets and took off, his wire basket cart squeaking as he rolled it away from us, muttering to himself.
 

And with that, we were alone.

“Oh, man,”
T
revor said with a long sigh, as if he’d been holding his breath. “That was depressing.”