by Caleb Huett
“Oh, wait! Here! I found it.” Andrea must have pushed some kind of button, because the noise got quieter and farther away. Crasher powered us forward, and I cranked the engine up as high as it could go. As soon as we broke through the snow cloud, we landed back down on the ground.
“Thanks, Andrea,” I said. “Good luck on the rest of the race!”
There was another brief second of silence.
Then she said: “Hey, Crowley?”
There is no way she is not doing this on purpose, right?
“My name is, to be honest—”
“I’m sorry about this.” A click and a beep from the other side of the mic … but nothing happened. “What?” A click again, and then the beep again. And then another click and a beep. Clickbeepclickbeepclickbeep—“Why isn’t it working?” Her voice sounded a lot harsher than it usually did. Meaner.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Are you not wearing the button?”
And suddenly everything made sense. The jokes were a lie. The apology was a lie. The thing the button did to Goldie was supposed to happen to me.
I was too mad to think very hard about what I did next. I slowed down our sleigh to let her get right up on our tail so I could see the first of her reindeer. I pulled out Sally’s bag of marbles and flung them all out at once—hundreds of marbles slipping under the reindeer’s feet and, past them, into where the spinning spikes met the ground.
And then I sang, “JINGLE BELLS.”
The marbles, which were basically invisible before, all jumped up to the size of regular marbles.
“JINGLE BELLS.”
“What are you doing?” Andrea sounded suspicious. I ignored her.
The marbles grew even bigger, like tennis balls. I saw a couple of reindeer stumble over them.
“JINGLE ALL THE WAY.”
Beach balls now. I saw the first of them meet the spikes of the sleigh and could hear the WHHHRRRGGG get louder as it tried to push over them. Celia, who must have looked out to see what was going on, started singing with me. Slammer and Jammer made instrument sounds with their voice boxes and Rocker started improvising vocals over the top.
“OH, WHAT FUN IT IS TO RIDE IN A ONE—”
“HORSE!”
“OPEN!”
“SLEIGH!” It took Rocker an extra few seconds to finish because she added a riff at the end. By then, Andrea’s sleigh had been totally gummed up by marbles of different sizes, since I guess some of them didn’t hear us as well. The biggest were two or three times my size, and they were heavy. They blocked the track, they broke her spikes, and they tripped her reindeer. Nobody was hurt, but she was totally stuck. We sped away.
“My name is Ollie!” I yelled. But we were already too far for her to hear.
“HORSED FOURTH PLACE!”
“Nice!” Celia cheered.
“SHOOT FOR THE HORSE,” H.O.R.S.E. whinnied helpfully. “EVEN IF YOU MISS, YOU’LL LAND AMONG THE HORSE!”
I looked at the map: Up next it said KURT was very close behind BUZZ and KLAUS, tied for first.
Before I could ask Celia about strategy, we were coming up on a mostly normal sleigh led by five reindeer with interesting haircuts and faux-leather jackets. The back of their jackets, and Kurt’s, said TREASON 4 THE SEASON with a picture of a reindeer in heavy makeup sticking out its tongue.
“Blimey!” Rocker exclaimed over the chime of H.O.R.S.E. connecting us to Kurt. “Don’t tell me he joined that terrible band.”
“Just a big fan,” Kurt said over the headset. Rocker looked down at the ground, embarrassed. “Especially their first album. Obviously.”
The reindeer didn’t say anything. One of them flipped hair out of his eyes.
Kurt took a candy stick out of his dashboard and stuck it in his mouth. Now that we were riding alongside him, I saw that his sleigh was totally covered in stickers. A big one close to me said Honk If You’re Jolly!
“Honk!” I said cheerfully.
Kurt looked at me blankly. “You some kind of goose?”
I was immediately very embarrassed. “You know, the sticker? I don’t think we have an actual horn.”
He snorted, smirked. “Oh, right. I forgot. There are a lot of stickers.”
There were. While trying to look everywhere but at him I noticed a big yellow triangle that said Baby New Year on Board!
He wasn’t going very fast, and we could easily outpace him. Why wasn’t he trying to catch up to Buzz and Klaus?
“You see that?” He must have figured out that I was wondering. He pointed at Buzz’s sleigh (car) and Klaus’s sleigh, which looked straight out of a Kris Kringle storybook. They were neck and neck and kept bumping into each other. “They’re gonna tear themselves apart. And we’re all hitting top ten at this point. Why get in the middle of it?”
“Because you’re so close to winning!” I said. “Don’t you want to beat them?”
Kurt shrugged. “Nah. This is good enough.” He reached over and patted down a sticker that was starting to peel off. My Other Car Is a Sleigh.
“Let’s go, Ollie.” Celia sounded exasperated. “The finish line is coming up any second.”
“Have fun.” Kurt chomped down on his candy stick as I started speeding up our sleigh.
“See you after the race, Kurt!” I said, still hoping that one day we’d be friends. He did a little two-finger wave as our radios disconnected.
“HORSED THIRD PLACE.”
Klaus and Buzz were already too close for comfort, and in the not-so-distant distance was a checkered finish banner stretched across the whole track.
Seeing this, Celia pushed the speed lever all the way to the front, launching us like a rocket at the two big sleighs.
“Celia, they’re still slamming into each other!” I shouted. “I don’t think they realize we’re coming!”
“They’ll have to.” The engine popped and banged. “Or we’ll all blow up, I guess.”
I stared at her, alarmed. “I think I am going to warn them we are coming.”
“Don’t! If you do that, they’ll have time to—”
H.O.R.S.E. connected me to their sleighs.
“Buzz, Klaus, we’re coming straight for you very, very fast. Please get out of our way or Celia says we’ll all explode into a million tiny pieces and then nobody will be Santa.”
Celia put her head in her hands. “Now we don’t have the element of surprise, and they’re going to—”
The big sleighs split apart, away from the center, giving us lots of room to power through. We kept up our speed and barreled in between them. Nothing was between us and the finish line now. I took a deep breath, Celia stuck something back onto the engine—
Klaus slammed into our left side, and Buzz slammed into our right. I was knocked to the floor of the sleigh, then grabbed onto one of the screens and pulled myself up. Buzz looked out his open window and grinned down at me.
“Nice move, Dollie! We’re gonna tear your sleigh apart.”
Celia frantically tried to catch pieces as they flew off of the giant engine. Klaus, meanwhile, didn’t say anything to us. His eyes focused forward, and his foot tapped on the floor of his sleigh like the world was moving too slowly for him. He pressed into Celia’s side of the sleigh, and more pieces flew off of the engine that she couldn’t catch.
“Faster!” he yelled at his reindeer. “My father didn’t hand-select you for me to lose. Can’t you go any faster?!”
“Yikes,” Crasher said. “Double yikes.”
What are we going to do?
I turned to the side, reached my arms up to the edge of Buzz’s window, and pulled myself inside head first. He didn’t push me out immediately—I think he was confused about what was going on—and I flipped around to sit in the seat. Buzz is big, but I’m pretty tiny; it was easy to sit down next to him inside the car. I leaned my head against his arm, closed my eyes, and hummed.
“Wh—what are you doing, Dollie?”
I took a deep breath, en
joying his windshield blocking the wind from blasting in my face for a minute. “I just figured I should get out of my sleigh if you’re going to tear it to pieces,” I said. “And I also wanted to ask why you’re so mean.”
Celia’s voice came onto my headset. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Ollie, because I sort of have my hands full down here?”
I took my earpiece out and moved my head from Buzz and rested it on the dashboard.
“Mean?” he asked. “What do you … uh, mean?”
“I tried to be friends with you, but you’re always ignoring the rules at the shop. And bullying me and Celia, and everybody, with your mean crew. And you cheated in the first challenge. If I win this challenge, I get to do the next challenge with my actual, for-real mom. But if you win the challenge, and then win the Trials, I’m going to have to move to Florida.”
After a second, he said, “Why?”
“Because you’ll make the whole North Pole a mean place, and I don’t want to live in a mean place. Even a mean place where I was born, and my family lives, and my best friends live. The North Pole should be for everybody, not just you and your squad of rude jerks.”
Buzz opened his glove box and handed me tissues wrapped up in plastic. I used one to wipe off my eyes, and another to blow my nose.
“Get out,” he said, and reached over me to push open his door. I looked down with my puffy eyes and saw Celia working extra hard to keep the engine going. “Klaus is still gonna tear you to pieces,” he added, looking away from me and fidgeting uncomfortably. “So it doesn’t really matter. Besides, if I won, I’d have to work with your mom. That’s super lame, and also she’d probably make my suit blow up or whatever.”
I laughed. “She’s too proud of her work to do that. But she might use a really itchy fabric.”
“Yeah, see? And I’ve got … sensitive skin, so …” He looked up at the ceiling, and then at the chair next to him, and then out the window. Everywhere but at me. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “Get out, please?”
I put my headset back in.
“—would really like an update on what’s going on, best friend, best buddy, best pal!!!”
“Thanks, Buzz.”
“This isn’t over, Dollie.”
“Maybe you can be nice.”
“Okay, I didn’t mean—this part, right now, is over. So if you could—”
I swung out of the car and landed on the floor of my sleigh with a thud. Buzz moved out of the way and fell back a little to give us some breathing room. I steered us away from Klaus to stop the scraping sound, but he kept pushing. It wouldn’t work for long; eventually we’d be run off the track.
The finish line was close, though.
“HORSED SECOND PLACE.”
“Can we make it, H.O.R.S.E.?”
“CALCULATING … CALCULATED ZERO PERCENT HORSE OF SUCCESS.” She whinnied, then pulled up a helpful little animation of what would happen if we kept pushing forward; either our engine would blow up completely or we’d be run off the track.
“Come ON!” Klaus yelled at his reindeer again. “We should have won by now. This is ridiculous.”
I had an idea. “H.O.R.S.E., do Klaus’s reindeer have headsets?”
H.O.R.S.E. neighed affirmatively.
“Can you connect me to their leader but not Klaus?”
Instead of answering, she did it. I heard a chime as we were connected, and then heavy reindeer breathing.
“Uh, hi. This is Ollie, your race neighbor. What’s your name?”
“Prancer XII.” The answer came quick, no-nonsense. “What do you want?”
Oh, wow. A direct descendant of the original reindeer. They were usually reserved for Santa sleighs.
“I just wanted to see how you were doing,” I said. “It seems like he’s working you pretty hard.”
“It’s our job,” Prancer XII said.
“Okay, but, did you know that he’s already qualified to make it to the next round?” I asked. “Right now he’s basically only pushing you this hard for bragging rights.”
Klaus pulled the sleigh away briefly, then slammed it back into ours, jostling us and knocking a huge chunk off the engine.
“He’s our commander. It’s up to him.”
“Yeah, sure, but if you were to keep him from blowing us up, and he got second place, it wouldn’t be a big deal.”
“Santa is his father. I want to be on the sleigh team someday. I can’t disobey a direct order.”
“FASTER!” Klaus yelled. I winced.
“Okay, then how about this? Celia and I are trying to be Santa, too. If you don’t disobey orders, but maybe act a little more tired than you are, we’ll promise to put you on our sleigh team one day, too. You can make it look like you’re doing your best, and then you’ll have tripled your chance to be on ‘the sleigh team.’ ” I held my breath. Let this work, let this work, please let this work.
A moment later, Klaus’s sleigh started lagging behind us just a little. I took the opportunity to swerve us away from him. As we pulled ahead, I got a look at all the reindeer—they were gorgeous, tall, long-antlered, and strong. A traditional nine-reindeer team with Prancer XII at the front. They even had bells attached to their reins, jingling and jangling.
“What?!” Klaus yelled.
I heard Prancer respond to him: “We’re trying, Commander, but we’re exhausted. We’re doing our best, but you’ve had us flying full speed since the beginning.”
“Thank you,” I said, and disconnected us. Our engine was crumbling to nothing, so Celia jumped onto my sleigh and slammed down on some buttons to shift all six reindeer to my sleigh. She disconnected hers, letting it tumble off behind us. It burst into flames, and we both winced and looked away.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“Talked.”
Our existing momentum kept us going, and the engine of my sleigh alone kept us from falling behind. Crasher pushed through the yellow tape of the finish line, and suddenly we were in the center of an enormous, cheering crowd.
We won.
There was another month before the next challenge. We got another email explaining that we needed our suits to be “prepared for anything,” so we had until the beginning of November. We went to work.
Part of work was being on TV. Celia still didn’t enjoy it, so most of the time I did interviews and events for both of us. We weren’t the only ones, either; everybody was trying to convince the North Pole they should be Santa. Klaus even hired a whole campaign team.
I never thought I’d get tired of seeing my own face on TV. Before this, the only time my face had been anywhere on a screen was when the camera crews around big Christmas events would pan over the crowds. Actually, that’s not totally true; I was also on the Jumbotron once during the Reindeer Games because I had painted my face with the colors of my favorite team, the Abominable Throwmen, when they were competing in the Big Game against the Grim Wreathers.
Now Maria Duende had my face on the news every hour, when she did her “Contestant Countdown.” She made all of us film “catchphrases” while a big computer-animated banner with our name and rank flew by in the background.
Ollie Gnome: #1. “I’m here to make friends!” (I couldn’t think of anything else in the moment.)
Celia Pixie: #1. Hers is actually just fifteen seconds of uninterrupted glaring at the camera.
Klaus Claus: #2. “Wait, you’re just going to let Kurt plug his merchandise on the air? He’s not even taking this seriously. I refuse to participate in something so ridiculous, and furthermore—”
Buzz Brownie: #3. “I’m gonna win this competition, and none of those dorks are gonna stand in my way.” (His heart didn’t sound like it was in it anymore, though.)
Kurt Claus: #4. “Buy my T-shirt, if you feel like it.” (They said I Don’t Care Who Wins on the front, and Kurt for Santa on the back.)
Frank Fae: #6. “My brothers will be avenged.” (They didn’t die or anything. She was just being d
ramatic.)
Gadzooks Gremlin: #7. “I’ll make your chances … disappear!”
Ramp Claus: #8. “Is the light on? Am I supposed to talk now?”
Andrea Claus: #9. “I came all the way to the big city to win, and I’m gonna do anything it takes!” Tell me about it.
And the big surprise: Sally Claus: #10. “I’m glad I still have a chance. I guess.”
I never caught #5 when it came on. I wasn’t even sure who it was.
Celia and I tied for first, which was awesome, but because we worked together they punished us by giving the both of us only one tailor: my mom. That freed up the number-ten spot, which pushed Sally (who had successfully stayed at number eleven) into the running again. She was definitely not happy about it.
The worst thing, though, was that Celia’s feud with Maria apparently extended into the reporter’s professional decisions; there was an entire segment analyzing whether or not we cheated in the race and lots of live interviews with the Klaus Claus Fan Club. Somehow Maria had recorded a clip of Celia talking to Bertrand before the race, and instead of drawing attention to his invention, which would have been the nice thing to do, she took the opportunity to play Celia yelling “Who cares about winning?” over and over, without context.
“Why do you think Celia Pixie would say such a thing, and then go on to win the Trial?” Maria asked a man on the street with very shiny teeth and no eyebrows.
“I think, and this is just my opinion,” the man said, his teeth so bright they caused a lens flare, “that she acted like she didn’t care so everybody else wouldn’t try as hard.”
“That’s not true!” I yelled at the TV, but Maria Duende was nodding seriously.
She said, “I think you speak for most of us with that one, sir.”
“Uh, well, it’s just my opinion, but—”
“You heard it here first,” Maria interrupted. “Did Celia Pixie knowingly trick the competition, including our Santa’s own son, Bertrand? Use the hashtag below to cast your vote!” At the bottom of the screen #trickypixie flashed on and off in bright letters.
