Christmas in July

by Alan Michael Parker

  I want to make her look around, and then I want to see what she does with the twenty. Will she walk to the coolers along the back wall, turn, and then come down Aisle 3 again, and drop the bill where she found it? Will she pocket the cash? I don’t think she has any pockets, looking at her dress. Will she return the money to me, turn in the twenty, here you go, young man, this was on the floor? I worry that her life has taught her to skate moments like this, not to see a decision as important, and I want to change that, I want her to have to make the call, to think in a new way.

  Maybe I can see a little perspiration forming on her forehead, although I can’t see her face very well, and it’s possible she’s sweating in the small of her back, in her armpits. Her makeup was already pretty smudged when she came in, probably from dancing at the charity ball they went to, the silent auction where they bought that dumb watercolor they’ll never hang in their pool house. It’s been a hot July and tonight’s hotter. I’m making her be a different person in her life right now, even though she doesn’t give a cat’s crap about a measly twenty bucks, from the look of her, and she hasn’t had to think about paying in cash in forever. Her lipstick probably cost forty.

  My plan’s working. The guy in the tux cruises Aisle 3 without seeing the twenty, headed for the bargain Perrier, walking faster now that he’s got a goal, he’s a goal-oriented guy. He’s all about the game of life, Mr. Lexus. Got some cheese? He’s a good mouse.

  The woman’s slower, really slow behind him, maybe because of her dress and wrap, maybe she’s tired, she switched from Champagne to gin, and that couldn’t have been a good idea, she might even be a little wobbly. Yes.

  I see her see the twenty.

  Flash, I’m ready, I have my keys, I come out of my booth, pull the door shut behind me: in just a couple of strides, I catch up to her as she’s bending down to pick up the money, her back to me.

  When she puts out her left hand, for balance, clutching her

  purse, and straightens up again, I’m right there, close enough.

  “Ma’am?” I say. That’s all.

  “I…”

  I wait. Evil geniuses wait.

  For sure, she crushes and balls the twenty as she does a slow one-eighty to see who I am. She’s even older up close, not bad-looking, pretty mouth, her hair piled up like that, done up, a little dazzle in her eye, and clearly at least a little drunk. The way she looks at me, she looks smart—that’s even better, I think.

  “Ma’am. The two-for-one deal is good on chips too.” I point to the end-cap, make myself more invisible.

  She’s not going to show me the twenty.

  That’s it, how I run the world, change her life, reveal to her herself, her moral failings. Her guilt. I show her her fate.

  When he pays, she adds two bags of Lays (baked, of course) to go with the two Perriers. She’s twenty dollars richer, and she thinks that matters, it’s better for the buzz, which is life sometimes, its own buzz.

  Liana is coming over later, my roommate Anders is at work, and I’m playing Minecraft and Christmas is watching. Christmas is thirteen years old; that gets me. I can pretty much remember being thirteen years old, watching my older brother Bruce play Call of Duty before he went off to Iraq and got killed. We were in the playroom, and maybe one of my sisters was there too? Makes sense, but I don’t remember—there was usually a sister around, but maybe not. In my memory, it’s just Bruce.

  It’s not a memory I can control.

  Christmas says, “Do you have anything to eat?”

  “Hold on,” I say. Even though I’m in Survivor mode, and it’s early, I have to pay attention: the Creepers will blow themselves up, and then I’m dead.

  She sits on the couch with her legs crossed. She’s been here an hour; she came over just after I woke up. The air conditioning in the apartment’s been struggling, making a puddle on the floor, which I’ve got a towel on, and Christmas and I are both too hot. We’re drinking pop, that helps, but I can’t drink too much pop on an empty stomach, I get the acid.

  “I’m hungry,” she says.

  “Hold on, hold on.” I use my sword to kill a Creeper. “Bam.” I pause. “I’ll get us a pizza,” I say.

  “Pepperoni,” she says.

  “Pepperoni’s gross.”

  She slaps my shoulder. What a teenager.

  Hanging out with Christmas means I have to act like a thirteen-year-old boy, but I also have to treat her like an adult. It’s a challenge.

  “No hitting,” I say. “Remember?”

  “You’re a dick,” she says. “Pepperoni.”

  “You’re a douche,” I say. “Now…who’s the evil genius here?”

  Christmas giggles. “You.”

  “Right. Don’t you forget it.” I hit her shoulder.

  “NO HITTING!”

  Christmas likes to sit on my couch with her legs tucked under her, making her tall body short. She never takes off her boots, which bugs me, it’s hot in here. She can sit there for a couple of hours and write in her journal while I play Minecraft, and we don’t have to talk—impressive for a kid, I think. She’s super extra-skinny, scary skinny, and the chemo or whatever has made her hair fall out, I presume, so she wears a purple beanie that says “Meg’s Team.” It’s a dumb beanie, probably from the Salvation Army. That kind of makes the beanie cool, I guess, one of those hats that’s cool because it’s dumb. I never could figure out how to be cool by being dumb, but she’s got some of that happening, even being just a dorky teenager.

  I’ve only known Christmas for three weeks, but we’ve spent time together, usually like this, when I get up in the early afternoon and the kid just comes over and hangs out. She writes in her journal and then stuffs it in her dumb purse. It’s happened like four, five times.

  Mostly, Liana’s sympathetic, but she’s tough too.

  “Be careful,” Liana said last week.

  “I’ve never had a little sister,” I said.

  “You’re crushing on her, that’s all,” Liana said. She was getting ready to leave. She tells me important stuff right before she leaves. “I know you,” Liana said. “You’ll get over it. But she’s crushing on you too. And they’re unreliable at this age. I was…” Her thought went away, like she was remembering. “You’ll see. Just be careful.”

  I had my elbows on the counter in the kitchen, my face leaning on one hand. I stayed there.

  “Lula-Lu,” I said, 110% charm, Liana the only one. “It’s more than that. She’s here for a reason—it’s July, there’s no school, she doesn’t know anyone, her aunt’s a bitch…she’s a mess. She needs someone. She just sits there and I play Minecraft and we talk. That’s it. What if she dies, like, tomorrow?”

  Liana looked right into me. She can change what I feel with that look. “She’s not a puppy,” she said. “You can’t have a familiar.” The look done, she slipped her phone into her purse and put on her sunglasses, applying her lip gloss without using a mirror, the conversation over. She waited at the door.

  “That’s funny,” I said, coming around the counter to give Liana a peck on the cheek, my hand on her hip. “Bye, babe.”

  Bye.

  But I didn’t think it was very funny, actually.

  Letting Christmas know that I’m an evil genius became part of the plan before it was planned. I had waited a long time for someone else to help, but I didn’t really know that—until there she was, scarfing down those sandwiches in the MiniMart, stealing, and I had to do something to change her thinking, too. True, I didn’t know about Christmas when I made the plan, but now I’ve adjusted. I’ve got Christmas covered.

  The pizza arrives, half pepperoni, half pineapple and ham, and free jalapeño poppers. I give the guy a good tip. I’m a good tipper.

  Christmas doesn’t smile when she takes a slice, but I can tell she’s happy. “Mmm,” she says. Then she looks a little embarrassed to have made a yum-yum eating sound. She reaches for a popper.

  “Mmm,” I say too, to help.

&nbs
p; She’s so skinny. On top of being sick, she could have one of those eating disorders too, like she’s going to puke after. Christmas just bites and gulps her food, she’s awful, like she’s grunting or something. That kind of thing, my mom would rap my knuckles with her spatula—manners, Sammy.

  We eat some more, and I try not to watch. Then Christmas asks, “When are we going to do it?”

  Soon, I say.

  “She doesn’t know anything!” Christmas takes another too-big bite of pizza. Her mouth’s full, and the words garble. “Rhut’s her name arren?”

  “Deedee. Why can’t you remember that? Dee-deeeee. And she hasn’t thought about me in forever,” I say, thirteen years old too. “She’s totally into someone else.”

  “Evil genius,” Christmas says to her slice of pizza. “What are we going to do to her?” When I don’t answer, she does for herself, “I know, I know, you’ll tell me.” And then, looking toward the kitchen, she asks, “Is there more Pepsi?”

  “Lazy dweeb,” I say. I un-pause Minecraft. “Get it yourself. Get me one too, please. With ice, in a glass.”

  Minecraft’s cool. In Minecraft, if you choose Survivor mode instead of Hardcore mode, when you die, you can respawn. That means you get another life, you haven’t lost, you can go to the house you built and it will still be there, and when you find your corpse, you can rummage around and collect all of the resources you accumulated before dying, your minerals, meat, and sticks. Or you can go back to your farm and grow more pumpkins and cacti. So you get to start again from where you were, basically.

  I don’t believe in reincarnation, no way that’s true. I believe in fate, I believe in free will, I believe in evil, but not Satan. I believe in God but not the God my mom talks to at Mass, and not the Holy Virgin, and not the blood and the body, and not Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior.

  I don’t worship Minecraft, like some people do in the chat rooms, or the way the weirdos talk on their player blogs. It’s just a game. But I get what those weirdos are thinking. You don’t have to worship something to see it’s religious.

  I wonder, as she’s watching me play Minecraft, while we’re sweating in my crappy apartment eating pizza, what the hell Christmas thinks of all this. If she weren’t thirteen, I might ask. Her life’s like she’s bad at Minecraft without even playing.

  There’s more to being an evil genius and having a plan than anyone can know. Naturally, I have to make contingency plans—if she does this, I do that—but it’s more than just preparedness, this isn’t the Boy Scouts of America, good night, Felicia. There are levels of difficulty, ways to understand achievements in relation to aspiration and effort, it’s more experimental psychology than hard science. When I make an evil plan, I design three or four mini contingencies inside the possible outcome, I make goals for myself and my subjects, backup plans for my backup plans. I learned that in school, in Experimental Psych. What’s important, too, is to set a few goals that will never be reached by anyone, because the world’s not perfect, no world is. I’m not changing fate, I can’t do that. I’m showing Deedee what her fate has always been.

  The plan for Deedee includes two big bags of fireworks I bought three years ago at Phantom Fireworks, when they had a pop-up sale in the Big Lots lot. I’ve got a couple of packs of Blue Streak Rockets and Fiery Frogs, one rocking box of Shagadelic Mojo 16 Shots, and the pièce de résistance, a Bada Bing Bada Boom 19 Shot box. I don’t know very much about fireworks, aside from Googling the Grucci family, who turned out to be kind of cool. They’re good old Southern Italians, a thing my mom and dad always appreciate. The Grucci family did the fireworks at the Olympics in Beijing in 2008, and that was my favorite. They’re a sixth-generation family business, which I consider American by now, and I care a lot about America and what’s American and who, since my brother Bruce died for America. Then last year, holy hand grenade, Batman, politics went crazy, and then the government even changed who gets to be American. I can’t decide what I think about all that, especially since it’s changing again every day.

  I keep the fireworks in the basement of my building, in a corner storage area the landlord let me lock up, all of that gunpowder just sitting there. I like to think of the fireworks waiting, how they’re waiting there like me, getting ready. Like I’m gunpowder inside.

  Sometimes I wonder what would happen if the basement got too hot, like in weather like this, and the fireworks went off—I would be in trouble, but it would be an accident. I’ve also wondered what would happen if I went down there and lit the fireworks on purpose. I’d probably get caught, the investigators would be able to tell who did it from my DNA and they would CSI everything, and I’d probably go to jail, or at least pay restitution. I’ve done my research. Arson in Maryland is a misdemeanor, unless there’s over $1,000 in property damage or anyone gets hurt. There are other options: I could light it all, then turn on a hose to put out the secondary fires. I could save everyone.

  I’m not going to light the Bada Bing Bada Boom collection in a bag of dog shit on Deedee’s doorstep and run away. I’m not a child, which she conveniently forgot when she dumped me, when she called me an “immature little twerp.” We were at River Walk, and she shook me off, she wouldn’t hold my hand, she was really pissed, we were in the mall and everyone was watching us. I think we were standing in front of Old Navy. I hate Old Navy, I hated Old Navy even before that day, and she called me a little twerp and she screamed that she never wanted to see me again.

  When she ran away from me, I yelled after her like a moron, “I’m not a little twerp. I’m a…I’m a…” and then I yelled the dumbest thing ever: “I’M BIGGER THAN A LITTLE TWERP! I’M MATURE!” I was so confused. “FUCK!” I yelled.

  One of the aspects of fate that really gets me, one agreed on by the Catholic Church and the gamers who play Minecraft, is that fate’s both predetermined and in an individual’s hands. That’s stupid. You can’t change what happened, only what you think about what happened, not to mention the whole contradictory combo burrito Father Massima calls Confession and Absolution, forget that. You can’t wipe life out. I don’t know any decent video game that lets a player go back in time and change the past in order to make the present and the future different, like the Terminator movies or Continuum. In pretty much every game, if you’re reborn, you respawn, and then you start from where you were popped. Starting over is a new game.

  I would change the past, probably, even though I’ve got Liana now, and I want the future to include her. I’d change Christmas’ past, for sure. It would be enough, in life, to let that kid reboot.

  Which makes me think about Bruce again: he died in Iraq, he gave his life for me. I’m not so narcissistic to think he did it only for me, but he did do it for me. He told me that, kind of, I think.

  I don’t know Christmas well at all, Liana’s right, but the girl’s almost the age I was when Bruce joined, she’s only thirteen. What would I give for her? What would I do for her? What should an evil genius do for someone he barely knows?

  I haven’t been stoned in five days, and work has totally sucked as a result, what a snooze-a-thon, but it’s all part of the plan, being clear-headed. I’ve been working out, doing free weights in my living room, curls and all. My eye’s on the day, next Saturday—Deedee Day, I call it, although I’m not telling anyone that stupid joke. Part of being invisible is knowing not to share every dumbass thought, every joke or nasty comment I could make, or any emotions that can get a guy in trouble. I have emotions, but I only let them out a little, spin them out, and only one at a time. People can hurt you.

  Christmas is hanging out in my apartment again, sitting there on the couch like everything’s fine. I’m beginning to get that Liana’s right, the kid is crushing on me, but so what. There’s nothing dirty or creepy in how I treat her—in fact, I think it’s kind of the opposite, I treat her like an adult, even if Christmas wants me to behave like a little kid most of the time. Maybe we treat people really better when they’re almost dead. R-E-S-P-E
-C-T, that oldies song always seems to be playing at the MiniMart. I like that song.

  In Minecraft, there’s a mode called Creative, which I don’t like nearly as much as Survivor. Creative is like ultra Survivor, in a way, since you get unlimited resources and you don’t need a crafting table and there’s no crafting grid. You can destroy everything in Creative, which bothers me, since no one’s that powerful. Sure, I know people aren’t the same as games, and we’re not God, but rules teach us. In Creative, you can fly, and the coolest things can happen when you fly, which is why I sometimes play in Creative.

  There’s one sun in Minecraft, because it’s not such an alien world that the planets multiply or anything, although it’s not Earth either, since there are zombies and pigmen and dragons and Endermen. It’s a fantasy that’s like reality. There’s one moon, although you don’t ever go to the moon, or at least I’ve never been there. The coolest thing that happens, though, is that if you fly really high in Creative, you can fly above the clouds, and then there’s a moment when the sun and the moon look weird—it looks like there are two suns. I think it’s a glitch, even if the Minecraft Wiki says the illusion’s due to the render distance being too small. But on the Wiki, players also say that changing the render distance doesn’t have an effect on whether you see two suns.

  Two suns. I love that. Every day is two days. Maybe one of the days would be a secret.

  “Stop,” Christmas says.

  I didn’t think she was paying attention.

  “Right there. What’s that?”

  “It’s two suns. I’m in Creative. But it’s not really two suns, it’s just a bug.”

  “Whoa,” Christmas says. Then she writes something really quickly in her journal.

  “I know, like, dude.”

  “Don’t be such an old guy, Sam.” Christmas isn’t looking at me.

  “Whattaya mean?”

  “‘Dude,’” she quotes. “Like, dude? Like that’s really neat.”