My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories (21 page)

I have never seen him sleeping before. I have never seen him like this, enfolded in an unthreatening somewhere else. My heart is drawn, almost involuntarily, toward him. I see him asleep and feel I could love him for a very long time.

But here I am, standing outside of it. Even as I love him, I feel self-conscious. I am the interruption. I am the piece that’s not a dream. I am here because I climbed through the chimney instead of knocking on the door.

I take off my hat and unstick my beard. I take off my boots and move them aside. I unfasten my stomach and let it fall to the floor. I pull the red curtain from around my body, pull it over my head. I shed the pants, feel the cold air on my legs. I do this all quietly. It’s only as I am folding Santa’s clothes into a safe red square that I hear Connor say my name.

It should be enough as I step over to him and see the welcome in his eyes. It should be enough to see his hair pointing in all different directions, and the fact that there are cowboys on his pajama pants and he is telling me he can’t believe he fell asleep. It should be enough that he is beckoning me now—it should be enough to join him in the bed, blanket pulled aside. It should be enough to feel his hand on my shoulder, his lips lightly on my lips. But something is not right. I still feel that, in some way, I should not be here.

“I’m an imposter,” I whisper.

“Yes,” he whispers back. “But you’re the right imposter.”

Without my Santa suit, I am shivering. Without my Santa suit, I am just me, and I am in his house after midnight on Christmas Day. Without my Santa suit, I am real, and I want this to be reality. I want this to be the way things are, or at least how they will be.

Connor feels me shiver. Without a word, he wraps the blanket around us. Our home within his home. Our world within this world.

Outside, there may be reindeer that fly across the moon. Outside, there may be questions with the wrong answers and lies that are better to tell. Outside, it may be cold. But I am here. I am here, and he is here, and everything I need to know is that I will hold him and he will hold me until I am warm again, until I know I belong.

Fairmont’s second annual
Krampuslauf
felt a little bit like a parade and a lot like a zombie crawl, except instead of the undead, we were dressed up like Saint Nick’s creepy buddy, the Krampus. Fairmont wasn’t a place where we’d usually spend the afternoon. It was full of overpriced boutiques, overpriced coffee, and Mossley Academy, which was full of overpriced assholes.

Everything wrong with Fairmont was exemplified in the
Krampuslauf.
It was for charity and came with free hot chocolate. They had turned the whole thing into something
completely against
the true spirit of
Krampusnacht,
which ought to be about scaring the living shit out of people, running around with torches and whips, screaming in the faces of crying children so they’d be good for goodness sake. Not hot chocolate. Not charity. The Fairmont
Krampuslauf
was exactly the kind of thing that rich people like Roth did. They took something awesome and sanitized it until it became something godawful.

Despite how Roth thought all Penny’s friends were ignorant, scum-sucking dirtbags because we went to an overcrowded public high school, I was smart enough to research Krampus. He’s an interesting guy, the son of Hel in Norse mythology. Older than the devil, too, so if they seem alike, it’s because the devil bit Krampus’s style. I bet Roth doesn’t know any of that. I bet Roth just likes him because he looks cool.

I had hoped Penny would realize me and her and definitely Wren didn’t belong, and then we could go home or maybe do some holiday shopping at the good mall, since we’d driven all the way over. But, of course, Penny didn’t. She craned her neck, looking for Roth and his
other
girlfriend, the one who was rich and went to Mossley Academy and who Penny didn’t want to believe actually existed.

“This is a perfect chance to find out,” she’d said when she’d explained to me about the flyer she’d seen in Roth’s room, with the date circled in Sharpie. “We’ll be in disguise.”

That part was fun. We made horns out of papier-mâché—ripping up old newspapers and mixing them with flour and water. The resulting gluey slop had stuck in our hair, clumped on our clothes, and made six sweet-looking horns.

Penny’s were the sharp, spiky kind that stuck up from the forehead. Wren’s were the curved kind that formed part of a spiral, like a ram. And mine were the kind that shot straight back over my head. We painted them silver, tipped with red, and raided our closets for demonic clothes. I found my grandmother’s weird old shaggy fur cape. Wren has some crazy spiked shoes that don’t have heels and look like hooves. And Penny has a red thrift-store Venetian mask with a long, phallic nose to keep Roth from recognizing her. I thought we looked pretty damn festive.

*   *   *

When I was a kid, I didn’t understand that Santa’s elves weren’t the kind from storybooks. I thought his toy shop was staffed with fauns and boggarts, sprites and trolls, goblins and pixies. Before Mom left, when I made lists to give to Santa, they were always full of magical things. I wanted a cloak that could make me fly. I wanted a tiny doll, no bigger than my finger and as perfectly jointed as a living person. After Mom left, I wanted crystal balls with which to scrye my mother and magical chalk that could draw me a doorway to her, and a magical potion I could make her drink that would make her care about us.

Finally, someone explained to me that Santa’s elves weren’t those kind of elves and the list was just so Dad and Grandma didn’t have to think too hard about what to buy for me. After that, I started putting normal stuff on it, like skinny jeans and new sneakers.

*   *   *

We lined up in front of a desk where a nice lady let us write down our names. I could tell she wasn’t really impressed with our costumes.

“Season’s beatings!” yelled one guy in a green fur suit, with horns crafted out of red Solo cups and painted black. He wore colored contacts that turned his eyes yellow and saluted us with hot chocolate swishing back and forth in a massive earthenware goblet.

Maybe some of these folks knew how to scare people after all.

Wren and Penelope and I all got numbers that the registration lady called “race bibs” that we were supposed to safety pin to our clothes. Once we managed that, we waded into the fray.

“There he is,” Penny said, pointing over to the chocolate line.

Roth was standing in a group of prep school Krampuses. Three girls in short tight red satin skirts with plastic horns from the costume store, big glittery fake lashes, and high heels. Two boys with Krampus masks pushed up onto their heads so they could drink from the white Styrofoam cups.

They looked clean and mint-in-box, the way rich kids somehow managed. Like the blond girl Roth had his arm around. My hair is blond, too, but that’s because I bleach it with stuff from the beauty supply store. Her hair grew from her head bright as spun white gold.

“That’s his girlfriend?” Wren frowned. “You could totally take her.”

“I’m not going to
fight
some girl from Mossley.” Penny’s curly black hair was a gorgeous nimbus around her face, and the carnival mask made her dangerous looking, but her black-lipsticked mouth trembled like she was about to cry. “She doesn’t even know about me. She probably thinks she’s his real girlfriend.”

She probably
was
his real girlfriend. The one he told his parents about. The one he took to dances and out for pizza and to places that weren’t the backseat of his car or Penelope’s bedroom. Penny had clearly not wanted to believe the girl existed, somehow convincing herself that we were dressing up and coming all this way to prove an unprovable negative.

Wren shrugged. “I’m just saying.”

Wren had been more or less raised by her grandparents, on whose fold-out couch she slept. They taught her to skin squirrels, knee guys hard enough to rupture their testicles, and roll cigarettes as tight as ones in the store. She had no patience with the rest of us.

“Let’s go get hot chocolate,” I told them. My job was to be the negotiator and sometimes the tie-breaker, an ambassador to both their nations. In return, they didn’t call me crazy when I dreamed up stuff like papier-mâché horns, so even though I sometimes wanted to quit that job, I never would.

“No,” Penny said, with a little sob. “I don’t want him to see us. What if he recognizes me?”

Wren grabbed her arm. “Then either he’ll introduce you to his friends or he’ll stand there awkwardly until his friends introduce themselves to us. Either way, he’s busted. This is what you came for.”

Penny wilted, even though she’d come up with this plan herself. That’s why Wren and I were along—to force her to go through with her own scheme.

As we waded through the crowd toward Roth, a guy passed me. He was wearing an amazing outfit, the best I’d seen. He had on fur leggings, tight to his calves, tapering to the most amazing hooves, so good that they didn’t look like a costume. A black Utilikilt covered his waist, so the transition between fur and flesh was hidden, and despite the cold, his very fine chest was bare. He had big beautiful horns like those of a springbok rising up from his head. They were so real that I figured they were either resin molds or actual horns that he’d managed to attach to some kind of hidden hairband. His tanned skin was smeared with the deep gold of old mirrors, and his eyes were lined with black kohl.

“You look awesome,” I called to him, because he really did. If all Krampuses looked like him, naughtiness would rule.

He turned and gave me a mischievous, toe-curling smile. It was like he’d stepped out of a different, better story than the kind I knew—not the one that Roth was in, born to be a rich jerk and to reap the rewards of never rising above that. Not the kind Penny and Wren and I were in, either, where we had to be
realistic
all the time, whatever that meant. No, the boy with the goat legs seemed to distort reality a little in absolutely fantastic ways.

Wren had to drag me away. I grinned on as Penny and I were hauled to the hot-chocolate line.

“You guys are the worst,” Penny said in a muffled voice.

“You mean the best,” Wren told her, and then elbowed me in the side.

“Hey,” I yelled to Roth, waving. I wasn’t sure if that was what I was supposed to do to avoid getting elbowed again, but I figured Wren would be happy with any forward momentum.

Penny gave me an evil look, which looked extra evil from behind her mask.

For a moment, Roth seemed confused, then he realized how he knew me and I saw the beginnings of panic. After months of watching Penny suffer because of him, it was satisfying. “I don’t think I know y—” he started.

“Hi,” Wren said to the blond girl, interrupting him. “You must be Roth’s girlfriend. He’s told us so much about you.
So much.
Don’t worry—all good stuff.”

The girl smiled, which was pretty damning. None of the other kids looked at all surprised, like of course Roth would tell a bunch of people about how cool his girl was. Roth began turning a tomato red, shut his mouth and ground his teeth.

I knew Penelope was considering escaping—we were at a
run,
after all, so if she just ran, it wouldn’t look crazy or anything. I hoped Wren had a good grip on her.

“We’re having an
absolutely brutal
New Year’s party,” Wren continued, and this was why you shouldn’t bring Wren to things if you didn’t want chaos. She loved chaos above all other things. “You should all come. Roth knows how hard we go. I guarantee you’d have a good time. Right, Roth?”

Roth stammered something affirmative. He knew he couldn’t afford to piss us off.
Call us scum-sucking dirtbags now,
I thought.
Double-dog dare you.

There was just one problem. We hadn’t been planning on having a New Year’s party. The last party I remember one of us having involved birthday cake, candles, and a Slip ’n Slide.

The blonde looked intrigued, though. We were townies and, to her, that meant we had drugs and booze and enough space to party without getting in trouble. The first one was silly, because, sure, we
could
get drugs. Anyone could, if they had the cash and the hookup. But at Mossley, dealers stopped by and
delivered
drugs straight to their door.

She was right about the other two, though. We had booze, because we had older siblings and cousins who would buy it for us, and liquor cabinets in our houses that our parents never bothered to lock, and because, compared to drugs, booze was dirt cheap.

And we had freedom. We could stay out all night for the price of a sloppy lie. No one was concerned about where we were for hours at a time and sometimes a lot longer than that. Theoretically, all of the Mossley students went home for winter break, but most of them drifted back the first week of January. After all, they spent most of the year here. Who did they know at home?

“Okay, yeah,” the girl said, looking from her friends to Roth, to me and Penny and Wren and smiling her oblivious smile. “That sounds like fun.”