My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories (22 page)

*   *   *

My dad was fond of bringing home stuff he thought was still usable. Slightly moldering books from the local college, damaged sports equipment and used furniture he spotted leaning against dumpsters. He was responsible for the book that confused me about the faeries—and also got me to leave milk curdling in the sun outside Grandma’s trailer in the hopes of attracting a brownie to clean my room—and there was another book with devil stories.

The devil stories were a lot like the faerie stories. The devil was always a trickster, always seemed up for a good time, and was usually defeated in the end. In the stories where he prevailed and dragged a soul down to hell, the person usually deserved it.

He punished the naughty and rewarded the nice. Just like someone else who wore a lot of red. Scramble the letters in S-A-N-T-A and you get S-A-T-A-N.

*   *   *

It turned out Roth’s girlfriend’s name was Silke, which seemed completely improbable, but apparently was the kind of Nordic name that went with naturally ice-blond hair and swimming-pool blue eyes.

Wren plugged her number into my cell. Roth watched Penny like she was a dangerous animal who might suddenly bite him. I wished she would. Behind her mask, Penny was probably red-nosed and blotchy from crying, but from the outside at least, she looked like an avenging devil. Roth was right to be afraid.

Then Wren gave an address for this New Year’s party. My dead grandmother’s not-as-yet-sold trailer.

“Wren—” I said, trying to inject myself into the process. But Wren kept talking until it became too late to stop her. Which was, I reminded myself, the problem with Wren’s brand of chaos. She was always making the trouble the rest of us had to wriggle out of.

I had no idea what she was thinking. How would this help Penny?

I couldn’t picture anyone from Mossley at a trailer park, no less Roth and his friends. I was sure that was part of what Wren thought would be awesome about it, imagining Silke’s distress as she wobbled around the pickup trucks and plastic reindeer in her high heels, Roth on her arm. And Grandma’s trailer wasn’t a bad spot for a party, per se. I could volunteer to clear it out, a job that my dad had been avoiding. It might be fun to have a party.

But not a party with Roth and the kids from Mossley. Not a party that we couldn’t even pretend was cool, because they’d be there reminding us that it sucked.

I glared at her.

Wren’s grin only got wider.

“You can invite him, too,” she turned and pointed. When I pivoted, I realized she was talking about the hot Krampus boy I’d called to earlier, who was behind us in line, close enough to have heard her. My cheeks scorched, and I probably looked as ridiculous and sputtering as Roth had. The bare-chested, gold-streaked Krampus tipped his head toward us, in acknowledgment of being noticed.

“Want to come to a New Year’s party?” I called to him, in an act of uncharacteristic daring. It was only November fifth—officially
Krampusnacht
—so it was remotely possible he hadn’t firmed up plans.

“It would be my pleasure,” he said in a voice that shivered down my spine, a voice that seemed to come from a reality that had gotten a little bent.

“Bring all your friends,” Penny said with a vengeful smile in my direction, as though messing with Roth at the
Krampuslauf
was our fault and not her idea. As though maybe there was something wrong with the hot Krampus boy bringing his friends to a party in a trailer park. As though I had something to be ashamed of.

A few minutes later, we got our steaming Styrofoam cups of marshmallow-strewn chocolate and started the
Krampuslauf,
loping along for a half mile as Penny cursed out us, cursed out Roth, and cursed out love. Then we ditched and headed for the good mall.

*   *   *

It wasn’t like I didn’t understand about crappy boyfriends. I’d had one too. His name was Nicandro, and he’d been way too old for me. After we broke up, I was so messed up that instead of dating anyone else, I made up a boyfriend with an equally extravagant name.

Joachim.

I wrote his name on my notebooks in Sharpie, like he was a real person. So yeah, I understood how Penny could pretend that Roth loved her. After all, I’d pretended a whole person into being.

*   *   *

I figured the New Year’s party wouldn’t turn into a real thing, but I was wrong. The more time passed, the more the idea came alive in my mind. Even though it had started to goad Roth, and maybe even get Silke and him to come, it became more than that.

Although it was definitely still that, too.

“No, they’re coming,” Pen said, lying on my floor, scrolling through the messages on her phone. “Roth swears. And he said that he was sorry about not introducing me to Silke, but he’d just been so surprised to see us. We probably should have told him we were going.”

“So she’s not his girlfriend?” Somehow the toad had convinced her not to dump him yet again.

Penny sighed, long-sufferingly. “Kind of. I mean, I guess he never said we were exclusive.”

“He said
you
were his
girlfriend,
” Wren said. She sat in front of the pieces of cracked mirror I’d glued to the wall and ran her fingers over her half-shaved head, checking for too-long pieces.

“Not his
only
girlfriend.” She answered this too quickly, like maybe she was parroting back excuses Roth had given her. “Anyway, he promises that he’s going to drop her after the holidays. Before New Year’s Eve. He just doesn’t want her to be sad when they go home. Their parents know one another.”

Wren snorted. “Whatever. He’s a liar. So about the party…”

No one we knew had the kind of fancy New Year’s parties I was imagining. Not like the kind in black-and-white movies. The kind where people wore long, glittering silver gowns and drank champagne out of coupe glasses and kissed one another at midnight. The kind I was determined to somehow throw, despite our limited resources and even more limited experience.

“Probably someone has those,” Penelope said when I explained my vision.

“Roth’s parents,” Wren said. “State senators. Movie stars. People who get cars for Christmas. People who spend Christmas at ski chalets. Not us. You can’t have one of those parties in a trailer.”

“Sure I can,” I said, gripped by compulsion. Sometimes I felt like I was waiting for my life to begin and more than anything, in that moment, I wanted to force some kind of beginning. I wanted things to be different than usual. I wanted to bend reality. “Sort of. We all dress up. And we make, like, canapés instead of onion dip.”

Wren started to laugh. “Canapés? What the hell are those?”

“Finger food,” I said. “Crackers with stuff on them. If you want us to use my dead grandmother’s place to throw a party, it has to be the kind where we wear a gown and drink out of real glasses. No plastic cups or bags of chips or ripped T-shirts. It has to be nice. Otherwise, I’m out.”

They agreed, which I later realized meant that I not only needed to finagle the keys to the trailer, but that I had to actually throw a party worthy of all my big talking. When I volunteered to clean out Grandma’s trailer, Dad looked at me like he could see exactly what I was planning, but he gave me permission all the same.

“She had a lot of junk,” he said, from his chair in front of the television. A crime show was playing, and he had a big cup of tea balanced on his stomach.

“Some of it was nice,” said my stepmother, Anne. She was sitting on the couch, our pit bull, Lady, resting her box of a head on Anne’s lap. “Don’t throw out anything nice, okay? We could have a garage sale.”

“You’re not going to have a garage sale,” Dad snapped at her. “It’s all just going to rot in our basement.”

Lady blinked, roused from her nap. She let out a gentle wuff of concern.

“We could get the good stuff appraised,” Anne said. She and Dad had been together too long for her to pay attention to his moods. “Sell it online.”

“Oh, yeah, and who is going to pack up those boxes?” He threw up his hands, making the tea slosh in his cup. “Who is going to take them to the post office? It won’t be you!”

And just like that, my party was forgotten. I escaped with the keys and no particular instructions. I went over to the trailer, sat on Grandma’s worn velveteen sofa, and schemed. My grandmother had been the kind of lady who loved to drink and smoke and tell stories about being a nurse and the wild times she got up to before she married my grandfather. I hoped that if her spirit watched over the place, she’d be glad to be watching over a party.

*   *   *

My dad always said that I was a good kid with a great imagination, but also that I was a little bit of a space cadet. Anne told him he couldn’t say stuff like that to me. That it wasn’t good for my self-esteem.

When he first married her, I wasn’t sure how things would be, but she was sweet and normal and not at all like my real mom, who’d been fond of flying into rages and throwing things and who was off somewhere in New Mexico, committing credit card fraud. Our first Christmas together, Anne sewed me a tiny doll with jointed cloth limbs and thin embroidery floss for hair. I guess Dad had told her about my old Christmas lists.

I didn’t let her know, but I’d teared up when I saw the doll. I was too old for it, but I didn’t care. I carried her around in my purse, until she got so sticky with Jolly Ranchers and marked up by pens that I had to retire her to a bookshelf in my room. For a few months after that Christmas, I pretended Anne was my real mother.

I guess that’s what gave me the idea of pretending about Joachim.

*   *   *

No matter where I looked, there were things piled neatly upon piles of other things, deceptively tidy until I started dismantling them. Shoeboxes stacked under the bed. A closet crammed full of clothes. A dresser so full the drawers didn’t open. A glass-fronted cabinet piled with two sets of dishes and seemingly endless glassware. The ironware bowl she would let me put milk in for the faeries, which she called by the Sicilian name,
donas de fuera.
The glass terrarium arranged with succulents, marbles, and a few of my old
Star Wars
figures. The Santa Claus plate for cookies. Dozens of hand towels and napkins and bath towels. Boxes of jewelry, boxes of holiday decorations, unlit themed candles from decades back, and dozens upon dozens of ceramic figurines.

It was a treasure trove.

I found cookbooks from the sixties and seventies with pictures of people in front of trays of crackers or pots of fondue. I found champagne coupes, shot glasses, aperitif glasses, and highballs. I found long sparkly dresses in silver and pink and gold, with shoes to match. I found rhinestone necklaces and even a half-full bottle of Scotch.

Wren came over with her friend Ahmet, and we worked on hauling out stuff we didn’t need for the party. I kept all the old photos for Dad, the sets of china and some of the jewelry for Anne, and some of the clothes for me. We took the big wooden cabinet down to a consignment shop and managed to trade it for more glassware, including a little ice bucket. We threw out loads of slips, towels, and greeting cards.

Then I started to really plan.

We needed food.

We needed booze.

We needed music.

We needed décor.

And we needed guests.

We pooled our Christmas cash, and I borrowed Dad’s Costco card. We bought a whole wheel of Brie, a block of cheddar, a bunch of grapes, and tiny, individual quiches that cooked in the oven. We also got chips, crackers, hummus, and salsa, and fancy glass bottles of Coke. It wasn’t exactly my dream of canapés, but I figured that once it was all arranged on trays surrounded by grapes, it would look pretty nice.

Then we arranged for the drinks. Penelope had a cousin we could pay extra to get booze for us. I would make a big vodka punch in Grandma’s punchbowl, and then hopefully we could pool our funds and get some bottles of Korbel, a few more of André, and a case of supercheap beer. I know that over at Mossley, they probably guzzled capital-C champagne, the kind that comes from the Champagne region of France. But no matter how classy I wanted our party to be or how much I read about fancy things, I knew Korbel was stretching the limits of my budget.

It would have to do.

Ahmet agreed to make a playlist on his phone and had the stuff to run it through Grandma’s ancient sound system. We texted our crew from school. Wren even asked a guy she liked from the local coffee shop if he’d come. He said he had another party to go to, but he’d try to stop by, and ever since she’d been trying to play like the possibility wasn’t on her mind a lot.

For décor, I fished through all the Christmas decorations and picked out the strings of fairy lights. Wren, Penny, and I hung them from the ceiling of the trailer and from the trees outside. We stuck candles in silver snowflake candleholders, covered the furniture in white sheets, and polished trays until they gleamed.

It took a week and a half of work to get the place shipshape. Some nights I would stay overnight at the trailer, stretched out on the scratchy sheets of Grandma’s bed, a brightly woven afghan over my feet. I thought that maybe I’d dream of her, but instead I dreamed of the gold-smeared Krampus. In my dreams, he flayed off all my skin with his whips, and underneath I was made from pressed glass, like one of Grandma’s pretty trays. Then the glass cracked and fell, sharp shards of ice melting in the torch fire, and my real self was underneath, a self no one had ever seen before.

You created me,
he said, eyes bright and hot as coals.
But once you create a thing, you can’t always control it.

I was raw and trembling in front of him. I opened my mouth to speak, to beg for him not to hurt me or maybe to hurt me more, I wasn’t sure which—and then woke, sweat cooling on my skin.

After that, I tried not to sleep so much. After all, there was lots of work to do.

The night before New Year’s Eve, I moved on to fixing up the outside of the trailer. I arranged some lawn chairs around an outdoor table and lit some more candles to make a smoking parlor. I hung silver Christmas-tree ball ornaments from the trees with fishing wire. Then, finally, I took a step back and looked around. It was beautiful. Glimmering. Magical.