Silent Night:
A YA Christmas Story
By Rusty Fischer, author of A Town Called Snowflake
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Silent Night
Rusty Fischer
Copyright 2014 by Rusty Fischer
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This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Cover credit: © jeffwqc – Fotolia.com
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Author’s Note:
The following is a FREE short story edited by the author himself. If you see any glaring mistakes, I apologize and hope you don’t take it out on my poor characters, who had nothing to do with their author’s bad grammar!
Happy reading… and Merry Christmas!
Enjoy!
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Silent Night:
A YA Christmas Story
“I can’t believe you’re going through with this.” Mercy’s voice is high and shrill, like the collar of her ugly Christmas sweater.
I stare at her over the chipped linoleum counter of the Spin Cycle Laundromat. “Then you don’t know me very well, Mercy.”
She frets and paces, biting her nails. “Don’t,” I tell her. “You just had them done for the party.”
She looks down at her nails, then back up at me. “Thanks,” she says, for a moment sounding like my old BFF and not the glass shattering shrew who cares more about what her friends might think than what I’ve gone through in the last ten months.
Her boyfriend, Benjy Wilcox, sits on the bench outside, staring in dolefully under his shaggy black mane. He’s wearing one of those tuxedo T-shirts and big red glasses and skinny gray jeans and purple high-top sneakers and I can never tell if he’s so un-cool he’s cool or if he’s simply so un-cool he’s, you know, just not very cool.
Mercy doesn’t care. He’s in a band and dedicates every song to her and in the two months they’ve been dating, she says, they’ve fallen madly, hopelessly in love.
I’d tell her I know the feeling but she wouldn’t believe me and, what’s more, she wouldn’t agree with me.
She looks back up from her nails, as if remembering why she’s here. “But seriously, Grace, just… rethink this.”
I stare back at her. “Why? Rethink what? He said he’d be here, he’ll be here…”
She looks over her shoulder, at Benjy, who seems to be in no hurry to go to Mia Heidi’s annual Christmas Eve house party. She turns back to me, frantic.
“They all know about this,” she says, leaning in, like somebody from the party might actually hear. “They know that, at midnight, you think your dead boyfriend is coming to visit you for Christmas. They’re all planning on being here. They’ll tape it, with their phones, and put it on ViewTube and… and it’ll go viral and the whole world will see…”
I’d yawn, if I wasn’t so anxious. I mean, I should yawn; I haven’t slept for two days straight, thinking about tonight. “They’ll forget, Mercy. Or they’ll get too drunk, or too bored, or they won’t. It doesn’t matter anyway, can’t you see?”
“No, Grace, I can’t. I really can’t…”
I sigh and look past her, out at Benjy, now smoking a cigarette, because he’s so cool-slash-un-cool-slash-cool. “Okay, well, let’s say Benjy were to get up and poke his head in and say he’d be right back, only… something happened to him and he never came back—”
“Don’t,” she interrupts, inching closer, voice creeping up a whole other octave. “Don’t you do that to yourself and don’t you dare do that to me. You know how superstitious I am…”
I throw my hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay, but let’s just say… you never saw him again. That this moment, right now, was your last together and you never even knew it and you wasted it, standing here badgering me all night. But then you had this one chance, every year, where you could see him again. Wouldn’t you take it? Wouldn’t you take it and not care what anyone else said?”
“That’s not what this is,” she shouts, forgetting all about who might hear. “He never said he’d come back. And even if he did, which he didn’t, this isn’t some Christmas movie on the Lifeline Channel. He won’t… he can’t… come here, Grace. Not tonight, not any night…”
I shake my head, coolly, biting off each syllable as I hiss back at her, “You. Don’t. Know. That.”
She hears it in my voice, the resolve, the determination, and she stops. Just stops. “Okay, fine Grace. Whatever. I can’t waste my breath anymore. I just… I hope he does come, okay?” She starts walking for the door, clutching her little candy cane purse to match her figure hugging sweater.
“You do?”
She stops, midway to the door, and turns around. “Yes, Grace, I do.”
“That’s funny,” I snort. “Because you never liked Grady in real life.”
“That’s because he was kind of a dick in real life,” she huffs, and I shrug because… she kind of has a point.
“So why do you hope he comes then, Mercy?”
She’s nearly to the door now, standing there, under the mistletoe I hung at the start of my Christmas Eve shift three long hours ago. “Because then you’ll have something to live for next year, Grace.”
She turns, stomping out, only to turn again and stomp right back in. “In the meantime, what am I supposed to do if Mia Heidi and all her friends show up and try to record you acting the fool tonight?”
I chuckle. “Why don’t you be a real BFF for once and punch her lights out for me,” I suggest.
She rolls her eyes and whips her auburn hair around and stomps back out, snatching Benjy off the bench as they shuffle off to his beat-up wannabe rock star tour van.
It’s 1972 orange with splotchy gray primer spots plastered all over it. Mercy says he’s going to have a mural painted over them one day, a skeleton horse with a pale rider on top of it, like the name of his band: Pale Rider.
Or Skeleton Horse.
Or Ugly Van.
Or Tuxedo Shirt, I can never remember what his stupid band is called.
I sigh and watch them drive away, exhaust gushing out of Benjy’s tailpipe, but at least he uses a blinker as he turns onto Forest Street and then again up Maple Drive.
With Mercy and her shrieking gone, I can suddenly hear the canned Christmas music the owner, Mr. Graves, pumps in over three loudspeakers hanging throughout the Laundromat.
As I do another walkthrough, checking for stray socks in the dryers and clumps of powder detergent in the washers, I have a hard time figuring out what song is playing until I’m tossing the last crinkly fabric softener sheet in the trash: “Silent Night.”
It’s nice, kind of jazzy, soft and mellow, with a saxophone wailing in place of the singer’s voice. Mr. Graves never struck me as a classy guy, per se, but maybe he’s got good taste in music.
Or maybe I’ve got bad taste, who knows.
The place is festooned with cheap tinsel streamers and even cheaper cardboard cutouts, the kind you get in a pack of five at the dollar store: old-fashioned Santas and cheesy reindeer and snowmen with smoking pipes.
I pass by them in a blur, tidying the place up over and over again as the slow shift passes. Nobody comes in, nobody has come in, since I clocked in hours ago.
Mr. Graves warned me it was a real “graveyard” shift, said he’d rather shut the place down and save the money than pay me to work for no reason, but I said I’d work for half-pay, for FREE even, if only he’d just let me keep the place open.
He blushed and shook his head and said, “No, no, it’s Christmas, I’ll pay you regular like, just… don?
??t stay open past midnight, because there’s no way I’m paying you overtime.”
I lied and said, “Of course not.”
Mom had said kind of the same thing, just before I left for work that night. “We’d like to see you for Christmas, too, Grace.”
“We” meaning she and my new stepdad, the one with the fuzzy black moustache and racy red sports car, which I don’t know how he pays for since he hasn’t worked since the day he met Mom three years ago.
And even as she said it, Mom was standing there in the kitchen, making all of Pete’s favorites… and none of mine. She was on her second glass of wine, the winter sun was streaming in the kitchen window, Pete was fiddling with his Christmas playlist beneath the tree and I knew they were planning a romantic Christmas for two.
Not three…
And I’m good, that’s great. Good for her. But am I going to rush home just to catch them all googly eyed – or worse – under the Christmas tree? Not tonight.
I check the round black and white clock on the wall above the long, gleaming row of washing machines for the hundredth time – 11:45. Fifteen minutes until Christmas.
I gulp and swallow, reaching for the broom.