***
When Mum came into my bedroom the next night, I immediately closed my math books and started rooting for my wallet on my dresser. But she hadn’t come for a money order this time.
“So your boss called here tonight,” she told me.
“Sandy called? Why? What did I do?”
Mum laughed. “Nothing, nothing. We didn’t even talk about your performance at work. And she actually sounded quite fond of you. I think that’s probably why she wanted to be sure we both knew there’s going to be alcohol available for the adult staff members at your Christmas party this Saturday.”
I winced. Crystal had told me people would be unwrapping gifts of alcohol but she hadn’t said anything about them cracking the bottles open and dumping the contents into their paper cups of cola right there at the party.
“Dang,” I said. “Stupid alcohol. I honestly didn’t know that, Mum. But you know there’s no way I would ever touch alcohol, right? It’s not like I’m stupid.”
“I know,” Mum hurried. “I know that. And Sandy said they’d do whatever they could to make sure none of the under-aged kids drink any of it. But I’m not stupid either and...” Her voice trailed off as she decided to let me lead the conversation. This was important.
Though I’m not sure how well they understood it, resisting alcohol was an area where my parents could trust me completely. I don’t know what it is about me, but I have no desire for alcohol. As far as temptation goes, alcohol is as beguiling to me as trying to commit some kind of elaborate investment fraud scheme. I don’t see how either broken promise could leave me feeling anything but sick and confused. I hoped Mom believed that about me. But even if she did, I still felt unsettled about going to the party.
I sat on my bed while Mum waited. “You don’t think I should go to the staff party,” I said for her.
“Would you feel safe around people who are drinking?” Without agreeing yet, she was leading me closer to the answer I knew she wanted.
I thought about it. “It’s hard to say.” I shook my head. “I guess I don’t know. But I do know I don’t even want to find out.”
Mum let out her breath. “So you’ll willingly stay here with us in Upton on Saturday night instead?”
“Sure,” I said.
Unfortunately, staying home also meant singing in my new alto voice in Sister Giles’ youth choir. The thought left me cringing. And since I wouldn’t be at the staff party, I would have to brace myself for a few days more before getting Darren’s mysterious Christmas gift. Worse than that, Crystal would be disappointed to be at the party without me. But, without question, I would be safer and cleaner if I simply stayed away from it altogether.
Crystal moaned into the telephone when I told her I wouldn’t be going to the party. “As if, Mack. Sometimes this Mormon best friend thing is a huge pain.”
I rushed to clarify what was happening. “It wasn’t a dogmatic decision. It was a personal decision. It’s a me thing, remember? My parents didn’t force this choice on me – no one did.”
I could almost hear her eyes roll from across the phone line. Maybe she wasn’t exactly sure what ‘dogmatic’ meant – or maybe she just didn’t believe me.
When Saturday night came, Crystal and the rest of my friends were at the staff party without me. And I was backstage at the Pioneer Memorial Auditorium, dressed in a black skirt and a red sweater, just like Sister Giles ordered. I had to borrow the red sweater from my mom’s wardrobe. It wasn’t a colour I would have chosen for myself, no matter how festive the occasion was supposed to be. Mum’s sweater was too big for me and I felt awkward and restless inside it. At least it smelled like her. All that was left to complete my transformation into a jolly, singing elf was to tuck my silver locket inside the sweater and replace it with a sprig of faded plastic holly pinned onto me like a prickly little corsage.
While my neck was still bent, trying to see the pin as I worked, I heard Ben Jones beginning to speak behind me. The sound of his voice – one of the few Upton voices I considered genuinely friendly – usually brought me a flash of relief and comfort that was a lot like happiness. But tonight, there was something peevish and cool about his voice.
“So you’re here with us after all,” Ben Jones observed, still standing behind me where I couldn’t see him. “And I thought the biggest event of the Upton Christmas season would be no match for the allure of tonight’s TacoTown Christmas fete.”
Why did he have to talk that way – all formal and full of disdain for everything?
From behind me, Ben Jones could only see the baggy back of my sweater and long curtain of my hair hanging over it. My face was out of his sight so I let my features tighten with the anger I felt at his words. Tonight, even more than usual, my nerves were particularly tuned to be offended by that smug, amused approach people in Upton often took towards my job in a city fast food restaurant. They acted like work was some kind of funny, misguided hobby of mine instead of a vital spoke on the wheel of my family’s day-to-day finances.
Of course, I wasn’t about to explain the true nature of the situation to them. It was none of their business why I worked – especially since the reason was kind of humiliating for my dad. But I thought Ben Jones understood better. The last thing I wanted to do was satisfy him now with an explanation about how the staff party was too boozy for me. It would just have fuelled that enraging attitude I often encountered when people in Upton asked me about Crystal and my other friends from work. It was the attitude that my closest friends were sub-standard company. They weren’t. They were just kids like the rest of us who were trying to do their best with the knowledge and values they’d been taught in the families where they’d been born.
I didn’t turn around to answer Ben Jones. I just glanced quickly over my shoulder before looking straight ahead, into the wall. “Yep, here I am,” I agreed as I walked away.
It was more like wandering than walking. Backstage at the Pioneer Memorial Auditorium, I had nowhere to go and nobody to talk to. Maybe I’d give Melanie a chance to be nice to me. “Why does this thing look so stupid on me?” I asked her, tugging at the plastic holly drooping from a pin jabbed into my borrowed sweater.
“Oh, come here,” she frowned, pulling at the pin. “I can fix it.”
“Thanks a lot. I’m so bad at this kind of thing.”
She shrugged. “It’s just the same, traditional stuff here every year. After all this time, I could pin on my holly and perform this concert in my sleep. Oh, be sure you give the sprig back at the end of the night or they’ll hunt you down for it. Ben’s a nice guy, eh?”
I shook my head as if I was waking up. It was embarrassing to realize I’d been looking at Ben Jones from across the crowded backstage space but it was positively mortifying to realize Melanie had noticed me doing it. I hoped I hadn’t been glaring at him.
“I guess he is,” I capitulated.
Melanie leaned a little closer to me. “I try to invite him on at least one date every four months – just to be sure he gets out. He’s not much of a dater, obviously.”
Fortunately, there was no time for me to react. Sister Giles was bustling around waving us all into position. I fell into line and stepped onto the stage, standing in the front row with the short girls – most of whom were way younger than me at about thirteen years old. As I droned the harmony for the sopranos, I could hear my Carrie holding her own with the other singers. My little sister was making this work. Maybe being two years younger was a big advantage when it came to fearlessly paddling between the dragons and adapting to a new world.
Amid all the solid, confident voices of the boys in the chorus I thought I could hear Jeff bravely hacking away. As usual, he was switching between the tenor and bass parts, trying to stay within the five note range of his voice. I didn’t know the bass version of Ben Jones’ voice well enough to guess which one of the rumbles from the back row belonged to him. Maybe
I did need a special microphone to hear it after all.
The audience was invisible behind the brightness of the footlights. But I trusted they were out there, waiting silently like sea monster swimming under the surface of a calm ocean – sea monsters threatening me with nothing but the promise of a polite applause.
How did I get here? I wondered. Sister Giles’ heart-warming Christmas concert storyline was moving toward the exact opposite place from where she had intended it to go. I wasn’t sure if anything could have made me feel more like Upton’s official hopeless misfit than standing on the stage in that chorus at that precise moment in time.
“Where are you going?” Jeff asked when the song was over and he saw me abandoning my artificial holly sprig on a backstage table. Since our number was finished, I was just about to crack open the rear exit and slip away. “If you leave now, you’ll miss the finale,” he reminded me.
“It’s okay. I’m jumping overboard,” I answered. “I’m going home.”
“You’re walking? With nothing on your feet but those skimpy dress shoes?” He frowned.
It wasn’t like Jeff to notice what I was wearing and it made me smile in spite of my mood. I turned my ankle, looking down to the flat, pointed-toed show on my foot. “I’ll be fine. No one will miss me. Don’t forget to tell Mum and Dad they don’t need to wait around for me.”
The sidewalk outside had been scraped clear of snow before the concert. But as the night grew colder, the concrete was becoming covered in frost crystals. They were newly formed from the moisture in the air freezing solid and clinging to whatever was closest to it. I minced along the sidewalk, taking small, precarious steps in my silly, slippery shoes. Maybe I should have waited until the whole family was ready to leave at the end of the concert, after all the performers were brought out on stage to sing one final carol together. It would have been “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” – the inane verses about “figgy pudding” included, of course.
My toes were starting to ache with cold inside the tips of my shoes. I slowed down on the sidewalk. I wasn’t even a full block away from the Pioneer Memorial Auditorium when a car pulled up to the curb beside me, driving as slowly as I walked – gliding beside me like an unwelcome life boat. The sight of it made me sigh and I turned to wave the car down the street.
“I’m fine,” I called as the driver cranked the window down. “I don’t mind walking.” But as the frosted glass sunk into the door, I realized I knew the driver. Inside the life boat was Darren.
I stopped. “What the heck are you doing here? Why aren’t you in the city, at the staff party?”
He opened the passenger door of the car. “Get in. It’s freezing out there,” he called.
I clambered into the little car – stunned and relieved to see a friend. I kicked my shoes off, pulled my feet up onto the seat, and started to warm my toes with my hands. “How the heck did you find me?” I asked.
He was pleased with himself and grinned at the windshield. He hadn’t started driving again and we sat parked against the sidewalk in front of the dark windows of the Harbin Gardens Chinese restaurant. “Well, Crystal told me you’d be at the auditorium so I was waiting over there. I thought I might go in and hear you sing, or whatever. But when I saw a girl making a break for it out the back door, I knew it had to be you. It was too perfect.”
I scoffed. “You were stalking me?”
Darren scoffed right back. “I was looking out for you. And it’s a good thing too or you would’ve frozen your toes off in those shoes.” He tossed a pair of gloves at me. “Put these on your feet like socks.”
“Thanks but I’m fine now,” I said, slipping my feet back into my shoes. “And you still haven’t explained what you’re doing out here in Upton tonight. You’re missing the staff party right now.”
Darren coughed. “Well, my assignment for the party,” he began, “was to give you a gift. But you’re not making it easy for me.”
I swallowed. Here it was: Darren’s Christmas present to me – the one I’d been bracing for. Only, I wasn’t going to open it in the phony Mexican ambiance of the crowded, raucous TacoTown staff Christmas party. He was going to get me to open it here – alone, privately, without the safety of other people watching us. My pulse beat in my throat and I glanced out at the closed sign in the restaurant one more time.
“You could have just left it under the tree in the office,” I protested. “I’m coming in on Tuesday night, as usual.”
Darren shrugged. “Whatever. I’m already here.”
He flicked the handle of the glove box and it banged open above my knees. Inside was a small, rectangular package wrapped in shiny red foil that glinted in the glove box light. I saw it. I knew it was meant for me. But I didn’t touch it.
“Take it your present,” he pressed.
I pulled in a deep breath and moved the box onto my lap, clicking the glove box closed with my other hand. I delicately tore an opening at one end of the package and slid out a blue box embossed with the name of a jewellery store. When the lid came away from the box, I found a short length of twisted gold braid lying on a bed of white cotton batting inside.
“It’s a bracelet,” Darren said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Wow. Thank you. I can’t believe you found something this nice for ten dollars.”
Darren laughed. “Well, I kind of interpreted Sandy’s ten dollar price limit as being more of a guideline than a rule. It’s made of real gold so, uh...”
He wouldn’t say it but he’s spent a lot of money on it. The chain shimmered even in the dim light of the streetlamps on Upton’s main road. The bracelet was beautiful. No one had ever given me anything so beautiful – not even my silver locket. “You really shouldn’t have,” I said – sincerely, even though that tired old expression always sounds insincere and canned.
“I can afford it,” he said, trying to sound flippant. “All the money I make at TacoTown is disposable income for me. My mom covers my essential expenses. But you – I know you help your parents a lot and I was afraid they might not be able to show you how great you are this Christmas. You deserve it. So wear it.”
I was skeptical. “You did this to take the holiday pressure off my parents?”
“I did it for you.” Darren looked down at the steering wheel. “You’re – special. You should have something special for Christmas.”
“Everyone’s special these days, Darren –” I began, my comfortable old cynicism rising up to protect me.
“–So the word doesn’t mean anything anymore. Yeah, I know,” he finished.
“But – but thanks anyway.”
I finally reached into the box and pulled out the bracelet itself. The metal was warm from the heat vents in the dash. The chain was closed with a clasp but its diameter looked suitably wide so I rolled it onto my hand like a bangle.
“Is it too big?” Darren fretted.
“Nope, just nice and loose,” I answered.
“Let me see it.”
I hiked up the sleeves of my coat and my mother’s sweater and held my arm in the glow of the orange light coming through the windshield. Darren reached out and placed one of his hands on either side of where the bracelet sat on my wrist. “It looks great,” he said. “I told Wayne you had cute wrists.”
His arms started to bend, drawing me toward him from the passenger seat. It was slow, like warm water rising and closing over my head. I was lonely, awkward and misunderstood at the concert that night. Right now, even Crystal was annoyed with me for not going with her to the party. I was famished for some acceptance – some assurance that I didn’t need to be lonely. I was so close to him already. It would have been easy to let Darren’s hands move me even closer, to rest my head on his shoulder, and feel an arm close around me. He smelled as clean and well-laundered as the treasured only-child he was. And what’s more likeable than knowing someone really, really likes you?
The beams of a pair of blazing pickup truck headlights tore through the inside of Darren’s car. We both jumped and my arm came free of his hands. I coughed. “Look at the traffic,” I said when I found my breath again. “The concert must be letting out.”
Darren cleared his throat. “Yeah.”
“My family knows I left early and they’ll panic if they get home and I’m not there yet –”
Darren raised an eyebrow. “They’ll panic if you go missing for a little while – in Upton?”
“Yes, they will. Big city parenting habits die hard, apparently,” I said, pulling my sleeves down over my wrist. “So are you going to drive me the rest of the way home or should I hop out and try to run there myself?”
Darren frowned as he steered the car into the street, following my directions to my grandparents’ house. “See you Tuesday,” was all he said as I pushed open the door to leave.
I wondered how he was going to report the whole story to Wayne – something he was certainly going to do one way or another. I would have liked to hear him explain it – because I wasn’t really sure what had just happened myself.