by Marni Bates
I might have been hired to prance around in this ridiculous outfit, but no one had said anything about vomit duties—I checked.
“Holly!” Jen practically growled my name. “We don’t have time to search for someone! We can’t let a pervy Santa near these kids! We have to do something now!”
“Okay. I’m not disagreeing with you, Jen. I’m just not sure how you expect us to fix it.”
Santa chose that moment to ask me blearily, “So tell me, have you been naughty this year?”
Another happy round of cackles followed that witticism.
“Just stay here and try to cover for me,” Jen said, marching over to the long line of kids who had been tugging on their parents’ sleeves and asking if it was time yet. “Um, I’m sorry, folks, but Santa just got an urgent message from his toy shop, so he needs to head for the North Pole straight away. But he’s really sorry for the inconvenience and he wishes you all a Merr-ry Christmas.”
“But he’s sitting right there!” an indignant mother snapped. “We’ve been waiting in this stupid line for over two hours and my son is going to see Santa!”
And that’s when all hell broke loose.
The disgruntled parents, children in tow, charged past Jen and headed straight for the highly inebriated Santa, who wasn’t so smashed he didn’t recognize the danger in a stampede of determined parents.
“Holly!” Jen yelled. So I did the only thing I could think of—I stood right in front of pervy Santa and waved my arms in the universal signal for Please don’t crush me! Please!
For a brief moment it looked like it might work too. The mob slowed, and I cleared my throat to make some inane promise of a replacement Santa right away, when Santa lived up to his pervy reputation by reaching out and copping a feel of my short, green-clad butt.
And that’s why I slapped Santa across the face in front of a whole line of impressionable young children.
Hard.
One second I was seeing red and mentally cursing the stupid commercial holiday and its tacky decorations and repetitive music and the general crappiness of my situation and the next a little boy was yelling, “You can’t hit Santa! You’re a bad elf!” at me.
Then he charged.
The blow to my stomach hurt like hell and forced the wind out of me. I stepped away from the little maniac and promptly tripped over the stair of the Santa platform, crashing into St. Nick, who was the one who had started this whole nightmare. But everyone in line apparently seemed to think that I was trying to commit Santa-cide, so what started as a minor tussle turned into a full-on brawl, with Jen screeching for mall security while attempting to shove her way over to me. Santa, half a dozen enraged shoppers, and I were all rolling around the floor, scrambling, and struggling to breathe given the number of elbows we had received (on purpose and accidentally) right in the gut.
And things only got worse as I went crashing into the mall’s fake Christmas tree, which tilted, then toppled over, causing dozens of shiny glass ornaments to shatter upon impact. Everyone—Santa, shoppers, Jen and I—all stopped moving and absorbed the wreckage we had created in a matter of minutes. I was still staring in horror when I felt a firm tug on my arm as mall security started dragging my skanky, elf-clad posterior away while Jen trailed behind us chattering the whole time.
“Well, good riddance! I never really wanted that job in the first place. Too many crazies.” Her face brightened. “And now we get to enjoy the holiday without ruining it with work!”
I just glared at her. “I’ve got a security escort. I’m wearing a slutty elf costume and Santa just groped me. Now might not be the best time to tell me it was all for nothing!”
I knew murder was against the law and that killing Santa at Christmas was wrong. But I didn’t remember any regulations against elf-icide.
Jen turned her puppy-dog eyes on me. “I’m sorry. Let’s go to my house, get out of these stupid clothes and see if I’ve got something you can wear on the cruise. I’m really sorry, Holly. I’ll make it up to you.”
Except we both knew that she couldn’t when I heard an all too familiar voice yelling out my name.
My grandpa. With my whole family—aunt, uncle, cousins—the lot of them staring at me as if ... I had just gotten into a fight with Santa.
He shook his head, and I knew it wasn’t because he was admiring my chutzpah this time. “We wanted to support you on your first day of work.”
Well, that plan had definitely backfired.
It was only then that I noticed Alison and Claire both had their iPhones out and had obviously taken photos of the whole thing.
Alison grinned at me maliciously, flicking her eyes over my barely there skirt. “Ho. Ho. Ho.”
’Tis the season, all right.
To make me want to crawl under a rock and die of mortification.
And don’t miss Jane’s story
INVISIBLE,
coming next year!
There is nothing surprising about my life. Seriously. The list of things I haven’t done far exceeds the coming-of-age things I have experienced. I’ve never been bad. No tagging graffiti on my high school walls, no toilet-papering my neighbor’s house, no long make-out sessions with a boyfriend until the car windows become foggy. I practically come with a PG-13 rating stamped on my forehead. The one remarkable thing about my past sixteen years of life is the complete lack of things to remark upon. Probably because I’ve made being invisible an art form. I can hide in plain sight just by being too boring to notice. It helps that everything about me is average: from my murky blue eyes and chestnut-auburn hair to my pale, gangly body.
And I know that I’ve got it good: the all-American life that most people only see in Gap commercials. White picket fence, bagged lunches, loving parents, perfect older sister—the whole package. Even my name is a cliché: Jane Smith. It also comes with the standard “you Jane, me Tarzan” jokes, which thankfully stopped early on in middle school. Unfortunately, the only time I’m noticed in most of my classes is when a teacher says, “See how the date of this essay is double spaced beneath Jane Smith? Oh. We have a Jane Smith here, now, don’t we? Isn’t that funny! Don’t try to turn this paper in, Jane!” I’ve gotten really good at faking smiles when teachers chuckle over the sheer coincidence that an example and a student share the same name.
Anyway, most of the time I am fine with my “averageness,” or whatever you want to call it. My mantra has always been, “Better ignored than ridiculed.” When you attend Smith High School, in Forest Grove, Oregon—a stunningly mediocre school in a seriously lame town—you have to accept that things can go one of two ways: boring or brutal.
Just because I’ve managed to live drama free doesn’t mean it’s easy to escape scrutiny from the effortlessly cool crowd. Out of my friends I’m the only one who has maintained a low profile. That’s how I’ve survived three years of high school without making a single enemy. I’m never harassed in the hallways, mocked in the gym locker room, or ridiculed to my face. Not everyone, including my best friends Kenzie, Corey, and Isobel, can say the same. But now that Corey is dating the lead singer from ReadySet and Kenzie is in a relationship with Logan, being invisible tends to be ... lonely.
Anyhow, you would think that I’d avoid the madness, the three-ring media circus in the wake of the YouTube video. And in some ways, you would be right. For the most part I stayed in the shadows. But that’s because the story, not the writer, gets attention. So even though I’m the girl who wrote an article for her school newspaper that nobody—not even the dedicated snoops at People magazine—saw coming, I remained Invisible.
Except ... I did accidentally snag the attention of some celebrities. Turns out, people tend to get really upset when their innermost secrets are splashed all over the front page. When you outrage the rich, the powerful and the famous, they tend to come at you with everything in their arsenal. Not exactly a fair fight for a puny high school student. That’s the part of journalism class that I wasn’t warned about: it’s a n
arrow line between byline and headline.
It’s just too bad I didn’t realize before I began writing how one story could fully blast my well-ordered, well-regulated, well-planned life to hell.
K TEEN BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2012 by Marni Bates
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
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K Teen is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.
ISBN: 978-0-7582-7772-5
ISBN-10: 0-7582-6937-4