All I Want for Christmas (Underlined Paperbacks)

by Wendy Loggia

I nod, nibbling on my lip. “And please don’t ask me any questions.”

  “Sure,” she says simply. “You can even like three people. Or four.” She chuckles. “Remember that crazy last season of The Bachelor?”

  I grimace. “Don’t remind me. Also, let’s not get carried away here.”

  “Well, in all seriousness, of course you can like more than one person,” Mom says firmly. “There are a lot of smart, funny, cool people in the world. And at your age, you don’t have to limit yourself to just one. When you’re in high school, it’s like a boy buffet. All you have to do is grab a plate.”

  I smirk. “But what if your eyes are bigger than your plate?” I say, remembering the Winnie-the-Pooh breakfast buffet we did a few years ago at Disney World where Liam piled so much food on his dish, Tigger covered his eyes in disbelief. “And…if you’re holding two plates, you have to put one of them down eventually,” I say, playing along with Mom’s analogy.

  “True,” Mom agrees, looking thoughtful. “But until you’re ready to eat, you can hold those plates for as long as you want to.”

  I reach over to my laptop and turn up the Kelly Clarkson Christmas song that’s playing in a not-so-subtle signal that I want no more talk of buffets. “I suppose.”

  Mom touches my cheek. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me about this other boy.”

  “Nope,” I say, scrunching my nose. “Besides, remember? It was hypothetically speaking.”

  Mom taps her chin. “Ahhh, yes, that’s right. It’s always good to have a couple of hypothetical boys waiting in the wings. Wing men. Or…wing boys.”

  “Not funny.” I stretch my arms. “I’m pretty tired.” I tilt my head toward the door. “Good night, Mom.”

  “Am I being kicked out?” Mom asks, getting up. “Fine, I can take a hint.” She kisses my head and makes to leave. “But wait, honey,” she says, hesitating in my doorway. “I meant to ask you. The other day you mentioned something about a gift exchange with the girls. What’s going on with that?”

  “Yeah, me and Phoebe and Mellie and Caitlin all drew names. I got Phoebe.”

  “Oh, she’ll be fun to shop for,” Mom says, her face brightening. “You could get her cute socks or gloves or a coffee mug filled with candy. I saw some nice ones at the Bee and Bonnet.”

  “Mmmmm, those all sound good,” I say, yawning exaggeratedly. Last year my friends and I all exchanged holiday gifts, but it got a little expensive, so this year, we decided to draw names and not tell each other who we have. We set a limit of fifteen dollars, which seems like a decent enough budget. “We’re doing it on Thursday, so I have to go out one night this week and shop.”

  Mom nods. “Okay. You can probably find something downtown, but if you want me to take you to the mall, that might be fun. I have some last-minute gifts to pick up. I like to have a few extra things on hand and surprise people who aren’t expecting a gift. We could make a night of it.”

  “Maybe,” I say, yawning again. I put my laptop on my nightstand and plug in the charger. “Okay, Mom. I need to go to sleep.”

  “Say no more.” She blows me a kiss. “Sweet dreams, honey.”

  “Sweet dreams.”

  After Mom leaves, I take off the Turbie Twist and shake my hair out. It’s still pretty damp, but I like to give myself a break from blow-drying. I slide under the flannel covers and pull the comforter up to my chin.

  I do some of my best thinking in the minutes before I fall asleep and tonight is no exception. Lying there, thinking about the day, I have an idea. I’m Phoebe’s Secret Santa, but there’s no reason I can’t be Jacob’s Secret Santa too. Nothing expensive or overly personal—just something that makes him feel the yuletide spirit. My mom’s plan to pick up some extra gifts sparked an idea. Maybe if he gets a surprise gift, it will remind him just how magical the holiday season really is. It’s the time of year when you can look back on the year you had—the good moments and the bad ones—and look ahead to a new year filled with fresh possibilities. I know it isn’t a guarantee, but maybe the right gift can help bring back his Christmas spirit.

  Because after our day together at Marleys’ Christmas Tree Farm, it’s clear that Jacob once had a lot of holiday spirit.

  And if anyone can help him get it back, it’s me.

  “So,” Mr. Cloverhill says, his hands clasped behind his back. He strolls down the aisles of the classroom, his thick black-rimmed glasses sliding down his nose. “What are some examples from the story that give it a dreamlike feel?” It’s third period English class on Monday morning and we are discussing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” It’s about this guy who heads off into the woods while his wife stays at home worrying about him. He meets up with all these different characters who test him and expose his true nature.

  We are in the middle of a unit on Dark Romanticism, and most of my class is pretty into it. Basically, the Dark Romantic writers lived up to their name. They wrote about the creepy and dark side of nature and how anyone can be evil. So far we have read a bunch of Edgar Allan Poe poetry, some Emily Dickinson poems, and The House of the Seven Gables.

  Yara Allen raises her hand. “When Faith says, ‘A lone woman is troubled with such dreams and such thoughts that she’s afeared of herself sometimes. Pray tarry with me this night, dear husband, of all nights in the year.’ ”

  I can relate. Last night I had tossed and turned, dreaming one strange dream after the other. In the morning I couldn’t remember any of them clearly, but I felt unsettled—and sleepy. I blink a few times and sit up straighter in my plastic chair. Mr. Cloverhill likes to call unexpectedly on people. I have to be awake.

  “I like where you’re going with this,” the teacher tells Yara. “Anyone else?”

  “When the narrator asks, ‘Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?’ ” Min Park says.

  Evan Gibson crosses his arms, his long legs sticking out from the front of his tiny desk. “But like, how are we supposed to know what part’s a dream and what part’s real?”

  Our teacher points at him. “Bingo. But even if it was a dream, Goodman Brown realizes that he can’t forget what the dream told him.”

  Mellie raises her hand. “Yeah, it’s like he can’t unsee it. Every time he looks at his neighbors, he’s going to always wonder about them.”

  Mr. Cloverhill chatters on about allegories and the Dark Romantics until the bell rings.

  Mellie and I head out together. “I didn’t finish the character analysis chart,” she says as we walk down the crowded hallway. “Can I see yours?”

  “Yeah, I’ll send it to you.”

  “Thanks.” She lifts her chin toward Kaylee Zimmer, who is filling her water bottle at the filling station. Kaylee is not our favorite—she picked on Caitlin back in middle school and we’ve never forgotten it. Kaylee is busy looking at her phone, her mouth hanging open as always. She doesn’t notice that the water bottle is overflowing onto her shoes. “What a dummy,” Mellie mutters under her breath as Kaylee jumps back from the fountain with a yelp, spilling even more water on herself.

  “Don’t you get the feeling that everyone was smarter back in Hawthorne’s time?” Mellie says. “Today we have to deal with people like her.”

  I nod. Sometimes I just want to read things for fun and not analyze everything. It kind of sucks the joy out of reading. “Why does everything have to be a symbol?” I ask as we dodge a freshman with an instrument case. Though I do like Mr. Cloverhill. He is always so enthusiastic about whatever we are reading, and he never does things like have pop quizzes or call on you when you are obviously trying to hide.

  Mellie sighs. “I wish people would just say what they’re thinking. It would make life a whole lot easier.”

  Suddenly I see Jacob across the hall. It totally catches me off guard, because I’ve never seen
him in this wing of the school after third period.

  “Hey,” he calls over to us, grinning. “Briggs.”

  “Oh, hi,” I say, giving him a little wave like a dork. I slow down for a second, wondering if he wants to talk, but he’s already gone. I look over my shoulder and see him joking around with Darius Baker, who is already over six feet tall and looks like he weighs as much as Jacob and me combined.

  I whip my head back around, hoping no one had seen my eyes following him. Of course Mellie had.

  “That is what I’m talking about,” Mellie says as we head into the stairwell. It’s hard to hear her in the echoey space. People jostle for room, bumping into us with their books and elbows.

  “What?” I say. My heartbeat has quickened, and I take a slow, deep breath, willing it to go back to my normal rate.

  “What are you and Jacob?” she demands as we reach the first floor. Normally this is where we split off. Mellie has anthropology and I have Foundations of Art. We move over to the side next to a bank of lockers.

  “What do you mean, what are we?” I ask, pretending I don’t know what she means.

  Mellie gives me the same look she gives Phoebe when she refuses to use a straw because turtles but buys a plastic water bottle. “You like him, he likes you—so are you guys dating or what?”

  I have been wondering this myself. “I mean—I’m not sure, exactly. We had a great time yesterday….” I trail off, my voice dropping. I texted my friends in our group chat about the Christmas tree farm with Jacob. I didn’t tell them everything—but I guess I told them enough to make Mellie jump to conclusions.

  “So you’re dating, then.” Mellie says it as a statement.

  I do a wishy-washy shrug. “I wouldn’t say that.” While my friends know about Jacob, they still don’t know that much about Charlie. He exists outside the walls of Bedford High, and I like it that way. I feel unusually protective about our time together—it’s almost like if I tell people about him, they’ll ask lots of questions that I can’t answer—like where he lives or if he’ll ask me out—and it will start to feel less real.

  And I want it to feel real.

  I am like Young Goodman Brown. What is a dream? What is real?

  Maybe analyzing things is the way to learn the truth.

  “You need to DTR this thing, Bailey,” Mellie says emphatically as she sends off a text.

  “Huh?” I ask, startled. “What are you talking about?”

  “Um, can I get in here?” a girl in a sherpa jacket asks, pointing to one of the lockers. She is holding a gigantic yellow binder with half the papers falling out of it.

  We scoot down a few feet.

  “DTR: Define the Relationship.” Mellie rattles off the words like she’s a life coach instead of a high school junior. “You have to ask him what you two are. Like, if you’re a couple or not.”

  “I’m not doing that,” I protest, grimacing. “That’s a terrible idea.”

  Mellie shakes her head as if I’m the weirdo. “Get with the program, Bailey. My mom said it’s a must.” Mellie’s mom is her go-to on relationships. Her parents got divorced when we were in fourth grade. Her dad ended up getting married to someone else, but her mom, Deirdre, has embraced the single life. She uses a bunch of dating apps, she teaches Zumba at the Y, and she always seems to be going out on a date. Deirdre dresses very stylishly, wears statement jewelry, and has hair longer than any mom I know. I’ve never seen her without her nails done.

  “My mom wasted a lot of time on different guys after she and my dad split up,” Mellie says. “You have no idea how many losers are out there. Now she’s really up-front about what she wants in a relationship. Once she has a few dates with someone, if she likes them, she asks them point-blank where things stand.”

  I frown. “But she’s an adult, Mellie. She doesn’t want to waste time on some guy who doesn’t like her as much as she likes him.”

  The girl with the yellow binder is lingering at her locker, and I have a feeling she’s eavesdropping on us. “Are you sure you’re not contagious?” I ask Mellie loudly. The girl scurries off and I turn back, lowering my voice. “We’re only sixteen years old.”

  “There’s no time like the present to DTR this situation,” Mellie argues, not backing down. “If you know what you want, you should ask for it, Bailey. You’re smart and funny and gorgeous, and any boy would be lucky to date you.”

  “You’re my friend. You have to say that,” I point out.

  “True,” Mellie says, looking down at her phone and texting. “But I also happen to mean it.”

  “I’m just really confused,” I confess, letting my guard down now. Keeping my feelings bottled up about Jacob and Charlie is starting to wear on me. I decide to tell Mellie about my sledding date. To my shock, she barely blinks an eyelash.

  “The way I see it, on the one hand, you’ve got an enigmatic Prince Charming with a British accent who seems to like you. On the other hand, you’ve got a guy you already know who is a bit of a dude but did take you to a Christmas tree farm and hold your hand, which means he likes you too.

  “I mean, if it were me, I’d go with the guy with the accent. But then again, Jacob is pretty hot.” Her eyes dart around. “Though I did hear a rumor we’re supposed to be getting a group of exchange students from Finland in January. I wonder what kind of accent they’ll have?”

  “You aren’t really helping me,” I grumble.

  “If you know what you want, you need to ask for it,” Mellie says, making it all sound so simple. “Not knowing where you stand with a guy happens only if you allow it to happen and you’ll be stuck in a situationship instead of a relationship. Okay, bye.” She abruptly takes off down the hall before I can respond. “Radical honesty! It’s a thing!” she shouts over her shoulder.

  I text her the eye-roll emoji before I spin on my boot heel and speed-walk over to my art class, just a few doors away from where we were huddled. For all the relationship advice Mellie dishes out, she has yet to have a serious boyfriend, unless you count this guy named George who she went out with the summer between freshman and sophomore years. They met on the boardwalk when she was on vacation with her mom at the Jersey Shore and had a long-distance relationship for two months before Mellie broke it off. So she’s hardly an expert. And while I appreciate that a lot of this is filtered through her mom’s situation, I don’t think it really applies to me and Jacob.

  We are less DTR and more MWD: Maybe We’ll Date.

  Besides, as much as I want to find a boy to kiss under the mistletoe, I don’t like the idea of pushing a romance on him—or on anyone, for that matter. Because what if I do it and he walks away? Isn’t it better to play it cool and leave the door open for a possible something rather than try to give it a label and risk him wanting nothing to do with me?

  I take my usual seat at one of the middle wooden tables and smile at the other people who are already in the room. We are working on a drawing unit, using graphite and ink and colored pencils.

  I share the Google Doc containing my character analysis chart for Hawthorne with Mellie, then find my art folder and take out the assignment I worked on last night. I smooth out the edges of the paper and add my name to the bottom corner. But while I am physically here in room 108, I am a million miles away in my mind. It’s hard to stop thinking about Mellie and her well-meaning advice, as much as I didn’t want to hear it.

  In a daze, I gaze out the smudged classroom window. A bright red cardinal lands on a bare tree branch, sits still for a moment, then flies away, his little wings flapping hard. He is so free. On a whim, he can take off for places unknown. While here I sit, trapped in a high school classroom with a bunch of art students…and my thoughts.

  “A lone woman is troubled with such dreams and such thoughts that she’s afeared of herself sometimes.”

  The lone woman…is me.
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br />   Jacob. Charlie. Jacob. Charlie. What if every time I look at Jacob, I start thinking about Charlie and his amazing British accent? And when I’m with Charlie, what if Jacob and his picture-perfect Christmas tree farm won’t get out of my head? DTR makes no sense. Because…how can I ask Jacob to define something that I can’t define myself?

  “Tell me why I thought this was a good idea a week before Christmas,” Victoria mutters as she stands surveying the scene with her hands on her hips. Tonight, Winslow’s is hosting an author event. A fairly popular mystery writer will be here soon to give a short talk and sign copies of her latest book, The Vermont Victim. Carl and I had set up about forty folding chairs in the back area of the store for customers—we’d presold about thirty copies of The Vermont Victim, and are expecting a full house tonight. Winslow’s has about seventy-five signings each year. Since I’ve worked here, we have had bestselling novelists, the former governor of Ohio, an athlete, some celebrities, and even a ten-year-old who wrote a book about American presidents. It’s always exciting to have an author visit the store.

  “Because it will increase foot traffic, a signed book is a great last-minute gift, and the last time Cressida White was here we sold out of her book?” Carl asks, making sure the mic at the podium is working. I put a glass of water next to it and a little cup of lozenges.

  “Yes, fine, okay,” Victoria says, frazzled. Bill is back preparing the “greenroom”—aka, the back room where we store boxes of books, eat meals between shifts, and leave our coats.

  Fred the basset hound is curled up asleep in his bed up near the cash wrap area.

  Tonight I’m supposed to be here as a gift wrapper, not a bookseller, but when I saw the frazzled look on Victoria’s face, Sam had shooed me away from our table. Normally Victoria overschedules the staff for author events, but with everything going on for the holidays, she had spaced out and forgot. Only Carl, Irish Bill, and Tim, a bookseller with an insane knowledge of manga and sci-fi, are here. And now me. It has been a real mix-up.