by Ava Dellaira
Kristen had hijacked the iPod, and she and Natalie were dancing together and singing “Freedom’s just another word…” at the tops of their lungs. Hannah had brought Kasey along, and the two of them were sitting at the dining room table nearby, doing shots with some other guys. Natalie kept glancing over her shoulder at Hannah as she danced.
I was standing off to the side, thinking of calling Sky. He’d said he was tired and didn’t feel like coming out tonight. I wished I were somewhere with him, instead of there. I was feeling like some kind of strangely shaped balloon whose string he was holding, and if he let go, I’d float off into the ether.
I was thinking about that, how high a balloon could fly before it popped, and what the world would look like from there, when out of the corner of my eye, I saw Janey, my old friend from elementary and middle school. She was with that soccer player she’d been with when I saw her outside the supermarket. I tried to look for somewhere to hide, but it was too late. She’d let go of his hand and was walking over. Her already rosy cheeks were a few shades brighter than usual, and I guessed she’d been drinking.
“Laurel!” she shouted, throwing her arms around me. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but Natalie and Kristen were now dancing to “This Is What Makes Us Girls,” and Hannah was licking salt off Kasey’s wrist.
“Hey,” I said, and smiled weakly. “What are you doing here?”
“Same thing you are, I guess,” she replied, her voice turning suddenly curt. Then she added, “Landon’s older brother is friends with the guy who lives here.”
“Is Landon your boyfriend?” I asked, gesturing to the guy I’d seen her with.
“Yeah,” she said.
“That’s cool. He’s cute.”
“It’s so weird,” she said, “that I haven’t even seen you since … I mean, where have you been?”
“I’m sorry. It’s just, you know. I’ve been busy, I guess. With the new school and stuff.”
“So, you’re here with those girls?” she asked, pointing toward Natalie and Hannah, who she’d seen outside the supermarket.
“Yeah.”
“They seem sort of weird.”
“No, they’re actually, I mean, they’re really nice.”
Natalie and Hannah are obviously different from Janey, who now looked like a popular girl through and through, in her red-for-the-holidays minidress and matching headband. Janey stared at them for a minute. Natalie had stopped dancing and walked over to Hannah and Kasey at the table. She took the shot out of Hannah’s hand. Hey! Hannah mouthed. Natalie threw it down and then left and went back to dancing, dancing like if she stopped, she would collapse.
Janey leaned in and said, real soft, “Are they, like, in love or something?”
“Who?” I thought she meant Hannah and Kasey. “Oh, no. He just—I think he makes her feel safe or something.”
“No, them. The girls.”
I was really surprised that Janey had noticed this. I was impressed. They did a good job of covering it up. I think what Janey must have recognized is the look of hurt in Natalie’s eyes when she took the shot. I nodded, slightly. I made a shh finger over my lips. Janey nodded back, like, I get it.
Then she said, “Well, are you going to introduce me?”
“Yeah. Just don’t, um, don’t say anything about my sister or whatever, okay?”
Janey looked back at me, her face falling into a worried frown. Before she could say anything else, I led her over to the table where Hannah was.
“Hey, Hannah,” I said, “this is my friend Janey, from—”
Janey broke in. “From forever. Only she doesn’t talk to me anymore.”
Hannah nodded, studying Janey. “You’re pretty,” she said. “You look like a Disney princess or something.”
I think Hannah meant that as a compliment, but it didn’t quite come out that way. Janey let it roll off. “Thanks,” she replied. “I like your dress.”
Then Janey looked at Kasey next to Hannah, and she looked back at Natalie dancing, and she did something pretty great. She grabbed Hannah’s hand and said, “So, do you want to go dance or what?” and she pulled her away from Kasey and onto the dance floor.
I watched them, Hannah dancing with Natalie and Kristen now, and Janey doing more conservative moves on the edge of the circle. I remembered how actually wonderful Janey is. I felt a pang, watching her bobbing her blond head and remembering how there was a time when there was no secret I couldn’t tell her.
I needed some air, so I went out to the balcony. I was standing there, looking at the tangled fingers of the tree branches reaching for the winter-clear sky, when Tristan came out and lit a cigarette with his giant kitchen lighter.
“Laurel. What are you doing alone out here? Wait, let me guess. You are ‘thinking about things,’” he teased.
“Shut up.” I smiled.
With Tristan around, the sad I felt changed from sad like watching a balloon drift out of sight to sad in an it’s-good-to-know-your-soul-works way.
“How are you doing, Buttercup?” he asked.
“All right.” I shrugged. “I guess.” And then I asked him, because for some reason it’s easy to talk to him, “When you first thought you were falling in love with Kristen, did you ever get scared? Because I get that way with Sky, and I think that I might have sort of screwed stuff up.”
Tristan looked at me, and he said something I’ll always remember. “Let me tell you something, Buttercup,” he said. “There are two most important things in the world—being in danger, and being saved.”
I thought for a moment of May. I asked him, “Do you think we go into danger on purpose, so we can get saved?”
“Yes, sometimes. But sometimes the wolf comes down out of the mountains, and you didn’t ask for it. You were just trying to take a nap in the foothills.”
Then I asked him, “But if those are the two most important things, what about being in love?”
“Why do you think that’s the most profound thing for a person? It’s both at once. When we are in love, we are both completely in danger and completely saved.”
When he said that, it made sudden sense. “Thank you,” I said.
He stomped out his cigarette and ruffled my hair before he went back inside.
I took out my phone and dialed Sky’s number. His voice was soft with the edges of sleep creeping around it.
“Sky?” I asked.
“Yeah? Where are you?”
“I’m at this party. Could you come and take me home? I really want to see you.”
He agreed, so I said bye to my friends and blew a kiss to Janey, who was sitting on Landon’s lap by then. I waited outside until Sky’s truck pulled up. When I got in, I put my hands against the heater. He took them in his and rubbed them to warm them up. I leaned over and kissed the part of his shoulder that pushed against the threads of his sweatshirt.
When we pulled up outside my house, I asked, “Do you think I’m too messed up?”
“For what?” Sky replied.
“For you.”
“No.”
He said it so plainly that a flood of relief rushed into me. All I wanted was to lose myself in his body. I crawled onto him across the seat and felt his hands on me. I don’t mean we had sex, but we got closer than we have yet. As the neighborhood Christmas lights on their timers started to shut off, one by one the houses went quiet. The windows in the truck turned foggy, with patterns like icy feathers cracking across them. I let him keep me warm, and I promised myself I would be brave this time.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Judy Garland,
Today is the second day of break, and tomorrow is Christmas Eve. Luckily I got permission from Aunt Amy to stay with Dad the whole vacation. I know how much she’ll be all about Christ’s birth and salvation and stuff this time of year, and I’m not really up for it at the moment. It’s depressing at Dad’s, but the ghosts in the house are ours, and I just want to be with them. Even though
Aunt Amy and Dad are not exactly best friends, Aunt Amy will still come over on Christmas, because I don’t want her to be alone. I got her a super fancy advent calendar that you can use every year, all with Jesus-type pictures in it. Dad was harder, but I got him a basket of joke things to remind him of how he used to like that kind of stuff—whoopee cushions and plastic spiders and chewing gum that turns your mouth blue.
I watched Meet Me in St. Louis twice already this morning. I cried both times when you sang “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” with your voice full of longing. I wonder if when you had to sing the song for the movie you were remembering how Christmas was when you were little, singing “Jingle Bells” on the stage in your daddy’s theater. He died when you were only thirteen, just after you signed with MGM. He was so proud of you, driving you to the studio every morning, walking you into its one-room schoolhouse. While he was dying in the hospital, you were on the radio, singing to him. You never got to say goodbye. This will be my first Christmas without May.
After the credits rolled for the second time, I figured that at some point I should get out of my pajamas. Since Dad’s been too depressed, I think, to do anything Christmassy so far, I decided to try to cheer him up. I pulled the Christmas box out of the attic, and then I pulled Dad’s ladder out of the shed, and I was going to put the lights up outside the house so they could be glowing for Dad when he came home from work.
I was topsy-turvy on the ladder, trying to carry the bundle of lights up to the rooftop, when Mark, the neighbor boy, walked up.
I’ve known him and his twin brother, Carl, since I was born, because our parents would trade us for babysitting. When they were younger, their mom dressed them in different colors of plaid and kept their sandy hair swept across their foreheads. They smelled of chlorine from their pool, where we would all swim every summer, even after we got old enough not to need babysitting anymore. While they called “Marco Polo” or tried to dunk May under, I would tread water and try not to notice Mark in his swimsuit. I knew they were twins and supposed to look the same, but to me, Mark looked like nobody I’d ever seen. He was my first crush. But he and Carl were both in love with May. I was too young for him. Kid, they called me.
Carl and Mark went away to college this year, and I hadn’t seen them since May’s memorial. I remember them both dressed in suits, standing around our house with their parents. I kept staring, because for the first time I couldn’t tell them apart.
But now, I knew it was Mark. He called up, “Hey! Do you need some help?”
I climbed off the ladder. I could see his house down the street, where his parents were out with Carl, putting the final touches on their usual winner-of-the-block decorations, complete with a blow-up Santa Claus. Next to them, our old man neighbor, Mr. Lopez, was fiddling with his glow-in-the-dark manger scene, behind the bars of his wrought iron fence. “Jesus in jail,” May used to joke.
I wondered if I still had a crush on Mark, but I guessed that I didn’t anymore, now that there’s Sky. Still, it was comforting to see him, as if he were proof of a life that used to exist.
When he offered help, I said, “Sure,” laughing. “It’s sorta harder than it looks.”
So together, we strung up the lights, not having to talk about much other than how to get them in place on the hooks and where to run the extension cord.
When we finally climbed down from the roof, it was starting to get dark out.
“So,” I asked, “how’s college?”
“It’s good.” He smiled. “Harder than I thought. But no parents, so that’s nice. You’ll like it.” He looked me up and down. “Crazy,” he said. “You’re all grown-up.”
“Yeah,” I said with a smile. “I guess.”
I was really hoping that he wouldn’t say anything about May and how he was sorry, and, thank goodness, he didn’t. Instead, he said, “How’s your dad?”
“He’s all right. At work.” I gestured to the lights. “I’m going to surprise him with this. Thanks for the help.”
“Well,” he said, “come by if you want some cookies. Mom’s got the oven running twenty-four/seven.”
I nodded, although I knew I wouldn’t.
When Dad came home and saw the lights, he said that I’d put him in the Christmas spirit, so we went out and got a tree from the lot where we always go, in a rural neighborhood in the middle of the South Valley. The thing about traditions is that they hold up the shape of your memory. I saw May and me running up and down the aisles with our hands in our mittens, looking for the sort of tree that we thought would be left behind if we didn’t take it. I picked out the scrawniest tree again, and Dad and I laughed about it.
Then we took it home and started to decorate it. Dad put on Bing Crosby’s Christmas record—the one with “Mele Kalikimaka” on it—but as he sat down on the couch and watched me put up the ornaments, it might as well have been silent. Each one seemed to carry the whole weight of our family and what had become of it. The bells I made in first grade, with glittered foil over egg cartons and unraveling red yarn to hang them by. The Play-Doh stars, the animals, the pinecones. My favorite, which is a glass angel with May’s name etched on it. I hung that in front.
When I was putting the tinsel on, Mom called. I heard Dad’s voice strained as he carried the phone into the other room to talk to her. Then he brought it to me.
Mom said it’s strange to see it sunny and still warm at Christmastime. She said the light is bright and clear in California. I tried to picture where she was at the ranch and imagined horses with sleigh bells running around a field of palm trees. It didn’t make any sense. I told her I thought maybe I’d bake moon cookies. I thought that might make her wish she was home, because she always baked them every Christmas. The powdered sugar sounds like pushing clouds through the sifter and sticks to the cookies when they’re hot. I remember stealing them off the cooling rack with May.
“That’s great, honey. The recipe is in the brown box.”
“I know.” Then I blurted out, “When are you coming home?”
“I don’t know, sweetie.” She sounded tense. “This is good for me, okay?”
I was just quiet. I guess Mom decided to change the subject. “Dad says that you have a boyfriend now?”
“Yeah.”
Her voice turned excited, like a gossipy girlfriend. “So, tell me! What’s his name?”
“Sky.”
“Is he cute?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you being careful, Laurel?”
“Yep.”
Mom sighed a long sigh. “I mailed some presents. They should get there tomorrow.”
“Okay, thanks.” Then I asked, “Have you been to the ocean?”
“Not yet,” Mom said. And then, “Merry Christmas, Laurel.”
“Merry Christmas, Mom,” I said, and I hung up the phone.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear River Phoenix,
Have you ever heard of luminarias? They are a tradition in New Mexico for Christmas Eve. You fill lunch-size paper bags with sand from the sandbox, or if you don’t have a sandbox, you get some from one of the sand banks that are in parking lots around town for the holidays. You set up the bags outside your house, put candles in, and pull the wicks up to a flame.
I think they are most beautiful at the cemetery, where people leave them on graves. I went there alone tonight to see the ocean of light, which makes the quiet so much quieter. Each bag in the night was made by someone’s hands. Left for someone that they loved.
I brought a luminaria for May and found a place to leave it under a tree. I wanted to do something to show that she’s still glowing. We cremated her body. That feels so strange to say. We haven’t scattered the ash. I don’t want to see it. Honestly, it still feels sometimes like I’ll wake up one day and there she’ll be. That night plays in the back of my head like a movie where everything is out of focus on the screen so you can’t see what’s happening. The road races by. The river rushes on. I
try to turn down the volume and just focus on the ocean of light.
Above me, the stars twinkle like they want to be as bright as the candles, but distance dims them. I bet your brother and sisters miss you tonight. I guess I just wanted to write to say hi. Or Merry Christmas. Or maybe to see if you are up there, in the sky with the stars, and if from where you are, they look brighter than a flame or a bonfire or the dawn.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear E. E. Cummings,
Christmas night is practically the most silent time that could exist. Like the whole world is made up of memory. After Dad went to bed with the tree lights still on, Sky came and I crawled out my window. We opened the presents we got each other in the dark of my driveway.
The newspaper he wrapped my present with was fragile, so I opened it carefully, not wanting to tear. What I uncovered was a heart that he had carved out of driftwood. It had my name on the back. It was perfect. He had sanded the wood down so it was smooth, but the grains don’t go away. I told him it was my favorite present I’d ever gotten. He looked proud.
I’d gotten him a book of your poetry. I made a bookmark from pretty paper with geese on it and put it in to hold the poem “somewhere I have never travelled,gladly beyond.” We read it in English class, and I loved it. When Sky unwrapped the book, I read the poem out loud to him.
The line at the end that says, “Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands” makes perfect sense to me. It means they can go anywhere inside of you, because like the rain, like water, they find places that nothing solid could pass through. It explains the way that Sky gets into me, into places that I never even knew were there. How he touches a part of me no one has ever touched. We both have secret places in us.
“Thank you,” Sky said, like he meant it.
“I got you the book,” I explained, “because the poem reminds me of you. And also because of how you said that you might want to be a writer, that time after homecoming. I know that you’d write something really different from that, but it made me think of how sometimes when you feel so much, you have to find a way to let it out.”