by Caleb Huett
Moving through the tunnel with the wind blowing straight on me took twice as long. I couldn’t see when the tunnel ended, either, so I tipped over and started sliding straight down before I realized what was going on. At the bottom of this chute was a fire, and I accidentally breathed in some smoke and started coughing.
I shifted away from the cube into my outfit from before but covered up my face and the squirrel’s face so we wouldn’t choke on the smoke. I held out my arms and legs and dragged against the wall until I was wedged tight enough that we stopped, my feet just barely above the fire.
If there are any real chimneys like this, I don’t think I want to be Santa.
There was no way I could put out the fire with my shape-shifting suit. The fabric was heat-resistant but not fireproof. My bodysuit underneath was fireproof, but that didn’t protect my face and hands. The fire was too high for me to swing around it.
You’re stuck, Ollie. What are you supposed to do?
I was positive Celia already had a solution. I looked at the squirrel, who had stopped fighting my armpit hand out of fear for the fire, and decided I could at least save it. I extended my third hand down and around the edge of the flame, then let go. The squirrel ran away from the spitting logs, out of sight, and I closed my eyes. Maybe if I just hold myself here long enough, the fire will go away.
I heard a loud clang, along with several smaller clangs. Something had been knocked over in front of the fire—one of those things that holds the fire irons. The pokers. I focused really hard on stretching out a third hand again and reached down to grab the poker. The metal was heavy, and the suit couldn’t pull it up by itself, so I focused on wrapping around it and used my real hands to pull it up to me, like a rope. Without my hands holding me up, though, my legs started slipping a little.
I was running out of time, but I grabbed the poker with both hands and started pushing the logs out of the fireplace, taking the fire with them. I hope there’s nothing important in front of the fire.
Once the logs were out from directly under me, I landed in the warm soot and quickly jumped over the flaming logs. A living room?
I had finally reached the end of the chimney, and was in a really nice-looking living room that was on fire now, oh, yeah!!! I looked frantically around for something to put out the logs while the squirrel screeched loudly from the mantel. I found a pitcher of milk next to a huge plate of cookies and dumped the milk all over the fire. It didn’t work as well as water would have, but I was able to stamp the last few burning bits out with my foot.
I couldn’t slow down; Rudolph said I had to find the button under the tree. I glanced around the room and didn’t see any trees. There was a painting of a beach scene, a stressed-out squirrel, some chairs, a couch, a coffee table … wait a second.
The beach painting had a big palm tree on it. Could that be … ? I looked at the floor below the painting and didn’t see anything. I nudged the frame gently to peek behind it—there! Built into the wall was a small red button. I pushed it, and immediately a loud buzzer sounded from my box. The wallpaper below the painting split open and revealed a hatch that led directly up to the original chimney entrance. I turned my shoes into stilts again—the squirrel hitched a ride on my shoulder—and rolled myself out of the top.
Celia met me in the middle between our two boxes, and we started yelling over each other about what happened.
“The chimney just kept going around—”
“—and your suit was AMAZING I couldn’t even BELIEVE—”
“—I used the toolbox to build a—”
“—I hope squirrels don’t have rabies?”
“I’m pretty sure these don’t, at least.” Her squirrel was meeting my squirrel, and they were jumping around each other to say hello.
“You guys tied!” Buzz ran over to us. He had wiped most of the soot off of his face, but there was still some on his nose, so I reached up and rubbed it off. “Your boxes buzzed at the exact same time.”
Rudolph strode over to us, and glared down his nose. “I suppose that means you’re all safe. For now.”
Celia crossed her arms. “Good. This challenge was unfair anyway.”
Rudolph’s nose shone red, but I saw a little twinkle in his eye. “You could be right. Good work, wannabes.”
On the second day, the gray boxes were replaced with ten huge piles of gingerbread. Waiting for us that day was none other than The Gingerbread Woman. She was known throughout the North Pole for being exactly who you call when your gingerbread house is a fixer-upper. She was a master with the stuff and worked very fast. “The competition can’t catch me!” her TV promos said. “I’m The Gingerbread Woman!”
“Today you will be using the reclaimed gingerbread we’ve given you to build a full-scale house. Along with the gingerbread, you may order anything from my specialty catalog, Run, Run to the Deals as Fast as You Can. We’ll be touring the houses at the end of the day; the designer of the best house will receive a free shopping spree from my catalog, and the designer of the worst house will be eliminated from the competition. Judging is tonight. Ready, set, go!”
We all immediately took off running. The good thing about gingerbread was that it was soft and light—it was easy to hammer together and build a frame for the house. The worst thing was that it wasn’t super sturdy, and it was easy to snap if you weren’t careful with it. I grabbed some blueprint paper and drew out my design, but a lot of the other contestants just jumped right into building, which made me nervous.
This is a challenge I can win, I thought. I’m good at making things look good.
Every contestant was good at a lot of things, though. We were the final ten!
My idea was maybe a little overboard: I wanted to make a scaled-down replica of Claus Castle. The inside would look like a real house you could live in, but the outside would look exactly like the castle, except made of candy.
Ramp wasn’t doing so hot. He kept using marshmallow glue to stick gingerbread boards together without any kind of plan or foundation for the house.
“Back in the day, no one built houses,” he explained when I asked how it was going. “They sprang up out of the ground like trees! Us kids today, ruining the housing gardens just like we’re ruining everything else.”
After a few hours of work, The Gingerbread Woman came by to check on my progress.
“How’s it coming?” she asked, surprising me as I was adjusting a butterscotch lamp.
“It’s going well, you know.” I tried to think of some words from her show I could use to sound smart. “I’m thinking kind of an open-concept, ranch-style dream home with nice interiors and, for the final touch, a yard with room to grow, you know, as a family? We’re looking for something in our budget that isn’t going to break the bank, and I really think my husband is going to love it. Something modern and chic, but also with a traditional, classic feel. And I can’t stress this enough: Everything is a deal breaker.”
She nodded seriously. “It sounds like you’ve got this all under control. See you tonight.”
Nailed it, I thought.
That night, The Gingerbread Woman led us on a tour of the contestants’ houses, carrying a clipboard and making no facial expressions the entire time. She would scribble notes every once in a while or make an mm noise that could have been either positive or negative.
Andrea’s house was first, and while I hated to admit it, it was pretty cool. At first glance, it just looked like a boring barn, but once we were inside, she showed us all these amazing hidden compartments and passageways that made the house feel much bigger and more mysterious than it looked on the outside.
Klaus built a tower with a spiral staircase in the center and Claus flags all around. He was clearly very proud of it. I got some satisfaction watching him sweat when The Gingerbread Woman straightened one of his cotton candy curtains and said, “Mm.”
Frank made a house that looked like a submarine and was very spacious and comfortable for one person on the insi
de. The portholes even had screens behind them so it looked like you were really underwater!
“I didn’t know you were so into the ocean,” I said.
She scratched at the rash glowing red on her neck. “We’re not really friends. You don’t know a lotta stuff about me.”
Burn, I thought. But I guess that’s true.
Gadzooks built a giant birdcage where the space between the cage bars could open or close however you wanted, giving full control of the sunlight. Inside, she had released a lot of birds that pecked around at the gingerbread but looked cute. One of them pooped on The Gingerbread Woman’s clipboard, though, which I was sure would lose her some points.
Kurt just built a totally normal, cookie-cutter two-bedroom house. “It’s backward,” he explained. The rest of us looked around, confused.
“It just looks like a house,” Celia said.
“Yeah, I mean, it’s basically a house, except it’s backward.”
Klaus banged his forehead against a wall, dusting the floor with crumbs. “Everything you do is nonsense, Kurt.”
Ramp was having such a hard time making his house that I broke down and secretly helped him. I didn’t want to spend too much time on it, but I guided him toward a re-creation of the traditional witch’s house from “Hansel and Gretel.” It was classic: frosting lining the roof and walls, candy accents of a variety of kinds, and I even convinced Ramp to wear a big witch hat when he gave the tour. His grumpy face really sold it.
Why did the witch want to eat those kids? I wondered while I hammered a peppermint wreath above the door. She had a whole house made out of candy. She had so much food to fatten them up with. Are humans really that tasty? I watched Ramp pick his wrinkly nose and then eat the booger. They don’t look tasty.
Buzz built a gingerbread gym (“A gymgerbread!” I said, and Buzz punched me in the arm disapprovingly) with workout equipment and dumbbells of varying weights all built out of candy. I lifted a ten-pound weight, and I felt very strong. Buzz lifted a hundred-pound weight, and I felt very weak.
Celia made a secret lab. (“It would be secret, I mean, in real life. But obviously I have to tell you about it so you can judge for the competition.”) It was full of edible replicas of state-of-the-art science equipment. There were marshmallow lab rats, lab coats made out of gummy fruit candy, and even a cloning machine that would make a life-sized replica of you in the candy it decided was most like you. When I got in the machine, it just dropped a huge pile of gross-looking gummy worms.
Celia laughed. “I put that setting in as a joke just for you.”
“I hate gummy worms!”
“I know.” She scooped up a handful and tossed them at my face. I picked up a whole bunch of them and threw them back at her. A few hit The Gingerbread Woman in her glasses.
“Mm,” she said.
I was very, very proud of my house; the outside looked just like the castle. I analyzed pictures as I built to make sure I got it perfect, down to the last detail. On the inside, it was totally different because otherwise it would make you feel like a giant. I structured each wing of the castle as a big bedroom and turned the grand hall into a living room. For fun, I designed one bedroom to be perfect for me and the other to be perfect for Celia. (I made the third bedroom perfect for H.O.R.S.E. and put the prettiest and most majestic stallion stickers on the walls.)
The best part, though, was watching The Gingerbread Woman walk inside. She admired the replica, of course, made her notes and said her mm, but when she opened the door to the living room I had meticulously filled with the most Christmas spirit–y things I could find, she said her first word of the evening:
“Wow.”
My face turned bright red, and I tried really hard not to cheer. Celia grinned, and Buzz punched me in the arm supportively.
“Nice work, Ollie,” Kurt whispered to me. “For real.”
The Gingerbread Woman turned away from me to inspect one of the tiny portraits I had hastily drawn of an old Santa.
“Oh, and one last thing!” I remembered. I gave a thumbs-up to the squirrel, which had been following me around since the day before. It took a break from nibbling on a candy and pushed a button on the roof.
The chandeliers and overhead lights in the house flickered off, and red and green Christmas lights hidden in the wallpaper and in various places around the living room lit up and blinked on and off in a stunning pattern.
“I’ve seen all I need to see.” The Gingerbread Woman marched out of the house, making marks on her clipboard. It wasn’t another wow, but it was something.
The Gingerbread Woman brought out a trophy made, appropriately, of gingerbread coated in edible gold leaf. She presented it to me, and I broke off pieces to share with the other contestants (except for Klaus, who was too grumpy about losing to take a piece). It was delicious, because it tasted like victory.
The boy in the beige sweater lost, but The Gingerbread Woman didn’t say his name, of course.
“You lose,” she said while pointing at the boy in the beige sweater, “because your house was completely unmemorable.”
Come to think of it, I don’t remember his house, either.
The boy in the beige sweater nodded. “That’s fair.” He walked to the front of the group and waved at all of us. “Thanks everybody for this opportunity! I had a really great time with you all. And thanks especially”—oh no—“to my good”—please don’t—“friend”—this can’t be!!—“Ollie!” Why am I being punished?
The boy walked over and gave me a hug. I patted him on the head. He left, and I let out a deep sigh of relief.
A few minutes later, Ramp came up to me and asked, “Who was that kid?”
The nine remaining contestants sat on a long bench in front of a table piled high with nine cookie platters and nine jugs of milk.
“Alright, kids.” Chef’s metal hand morphed into a rolling pin, which he rolled along the table while he paced back and forth. “Time fer yer eatin’ challenge. Kids these days leave a lot of cookies and milk for Santa. A LOT.” He slammed his rolling pin on the table in front of Frank, who was too busy scratching her rash to pay attention. (I was sitting next to Frank, and it scared me more than her.)
“So yer gonna prove yeh can handle it. These’re some of the best dern cookies I ever made—but there’s two hundred of ’em fer each of yeh and a gallon of milk to wash ’em down. Yeh don’t gotta drink the milk because fer some reason the higher-ups think that’s ‘too dangerous,’ and would ‘get vomit everywhere.’ ” He spat on the ground.
Ramp added, “In my day, we drank a gallon of milk for every lunch, and we liked it.”
“Hear, hear!” Chef giggled his tinny laugh. “Yeh’ve got all day, but the last one to finish gets the boot. First gets free lunch for a year. And be careful, kids …” He rapped his rolling pin on the table. “They’re spicy.”
A loud buzzer sounded, and we dove in.
Buzz crunched into his cookie and made a confused face. “This isn’t spicy at all.”
“That’s just a thing he says,” I explained through a mouthful of crumbs. The cookies were really good.
This is going to be a breeze, I thought after the first two cookies.
This is absolutely not going to be a breeze, I thought after fifty cookies. This is going to kill me.
I looked around while I picked at a piece of macadamia nut that got wedged between my teeth. Buzz was doing better than most because he was bigger and stronger than everybody. Lucky. Celia was about as miserable as I was. Gadzooks looked like she was having the worst time, though; she was thin and long like a bird, so I wasn’t surprised. Frank was—
Hm, I thought. There’s something weird about Frank.
Frank didn’t look like she was uncomfortable at all. She was munching down on probably around her fiftieth cookie, too, but she looked like she was still hungry. She looked totally happy, even comfortable. Plus, her rash was gone.
“Where’d your rash go?” I asked her.
“Earlier. You had that big red rash, from your suit.”
“Oh, uh …” She shrugged. “It went away, I guess.”
I guess. “Have you always had that mole on your cheek?” I asked.
She poked the mole just to the left of her nose. “Yeah, always. Since I was born.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“We’re not really friends,” she said. “You don’t know a lotta stuff about me.”
I frowned. “Have we had this conversation before?”
She shrugged. “I don’t think so.”
Then things got even weirder when everyone was around one hundred and fifty cookies, a couple hours later. I was talking to Celia about how I never wanted to eat another snickerdoodle again in my life when I looked over and saw Frank coming back from the bathroom.
“Wait, where did your mole go?” I asked.
She caught a colorful candy that fell out of her mouth. “What mole?”
“The one you’ve had since you were born.”
She stared at me blankly and shoved another whole cookie in her mouth.
I struggled to nibble on mine. “And is your rash still gone?”
“I don’t know what rash you’re talking about.” She shoved a few more cookies in her mouth. “I gotta go to the bathroom.”
I waited until she was almost to the end of the table before getting up and sneaking after her. She walked down the steps off the eating stage and headed to the edge of where the stadium part met the spa part. (The spa part had the best bathrooms.) She turned to look behind her, and I jumped behind a tall human with a big white bathrobe.
“Oh, good. Are you the towel boy?” The man dropped his bathrobe on top of me and stood in just a swimsuit. “I need a new robe. That one fell in the mud bath.”
I felt mud dripping on my face and quickly shook the robe off me and onto the ground. I peered around the man just in time to see Frank coming out of a hole in the bathroom wall?! I watched her leave the bathroom and walk back toward the cookie table.