by Kieran Scott
“Oh no,” I said when Holly pulled her VW Beetle to a stop at the foot of my driveway.
The transformation had begun. Boxes and crates of lights were lined up along the front path, each neatly labeled with a red or green Magic Marker. There were ladders strategically placed all around our two-story house and my dad’s elaborate harness-and-pulley mechanism was already fixed around the chimney. He’d even managed to outline all the front windows with lights already. I squeezed my eyes shut. How could I have forgotten?
Holly leaned across my lap and looked up through my window. “Where’s Father Christmas?” she asked. She’d been calling my dad that for as long as I could remember. Once she renounced the holiday, I thought we’d never hear it again, but she hadn’t stopped using it, which was good. My father’s kind of proud of the title.
“He’s probably around back,” I said. I couldn’t believe the intense aversion I was feeling to the whole process of light stringing. All I could think about at that moment was getting inside before my father emerged from the backyard and roped me into helping. There was no way I was going to be able to get up there and be all holly and jolly with the sucking chest wound I had in my heart area.
“I’d better go,” I said, yanking on the door handle.
“Oh . . . well, call me if you need to vent,” Holly said as I scrambled out of the car.
“Yeah, thanks,” I replied. I slammed the door behind me and strode up the driveway, clutching my Fortunoff bag. My utterly pointless, exorbitantly expensive Fortunoff bag. I had just about made it to the front door when I heard the whir of the pulley and climbing ropes and my father suddenly appeared beside me, falling out of the sky and stopping right at eye level like Spider-Man on a strand of web.
“Hi, son!” he said brightly. He bounced a couple of times, then settled, hanging there in his harness with his prescription ski goggles on and a pencil stuck behind his red-from-the-cold ear.
“Hey, Dad,” I replied, hand on the doorknob.
“Get on your gear and come on out,” my father said, all smiles. “I can’t wait to get this puppy up and running.”
“Yeah . . . I don’t know, Dad,” I said, my chest heavy with guilt. I looked away as his face fell. “I . . . uh . . . I guess I ate too much at the mall and I’m . . . not really feeling that well.”
“Oh,” my father said. There has never been one syllable filled with more disappointment. “Well, then take a rest and see how you feel. I’ve got some more preliminary stuff to do, anyway.”
“Great,” I said.
I slipped inside and closed the door, feeling like the worst son in the Western Hemisphere. I trudged up to my room, passing under the mistletoe that hung at the bottom of the stairs and the photographs from Christmases past that lined the wall along the steps. My father’s disappointment and shock were no surprise. After all, I’d begged for him to let me help him my entire young life until sixth grade, when he finally decided I was old enough to be strapped to our roof. Creating the lights extravaganza was always my favorite task of the year.
But what did I care about lights at that moment? I’d just lost the girl of my dreams. And I owed my mother more money than I’d ever seen in my lifetime.
I walked into my room and dropped the Fortunoff bag on my desk by the window, right on top of the minutes from our last Holiday Ball meeting. There was a lump in my throat the size of an orange. I pulled out the little silver box, pushing the receipt back down into the bag. I took out the pendant and chain, holding it up against the waning sunlight. It swung from my fingers, glittering delicately. Sarah would have loved it.
Suddenly I felt very, very sorry for myself.
Wrapping the thin chain around my hand, I dropped down on top of my bedspread and lay flat on my back, staring up at the stucco ceiling. I held the hand with the pendant over my heart and took a deep breath. I heard my father trudging around overhead and tried to make myself smile. It was Christmas. The lights were going up. On Tuesday, I was going to be Santa!
But on Monday, I was going to have to spend the whole day at school with everyone knowing that Sarah had dumped me. And on Tuesday afternoon, I was going to have to spend hours at the mall being Santa-trained by the dreaded Scooby.
Maybe I could go out and get run over by a reindeer. At least it would put me out of my misery.
“Misfit! Misfit! Misfit!”
Where is that coming from? A thousand little Alvin the Chipmunk voices chant inside my head. I whirl around in the darkness. I’m surrounded by trees, but they’re not like trees at all. Each one is like a series of green triangles stacked on top of one another, with plops of snow on them that look like melted Marshmallow Flu f. Something zooms by me to my right with a swoosh! leaving two tiny razor tracks in the snow. A sled. And the voices grow louder.
“Misfit! Misfit! Misfit!”
It’s cold. There’s a light in the distance. And suddenly, over the hill, an army appears. An army of blue-suited elves.
And they’re not just any elves, they’re the tiny, goateed, big-headed clay elves from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. They’re chanting, pumping their ball-shaped hands, and carrying flickering torches as they approach me. “Misfit! Misfit! Misfit!”
I can’t move. I’m too scared. What’s happening? Why have the jolly little elves turned on me? They form a circle around me, raising their torches high and continuing their chant.
“Misfit! Misfit! Misfit!”
Suddenly something cold and wet, jagged and hard, hits me on the side of the face. My eye feels like it’s going to explode from the pain. I look down, my vision blurred, to see the Snowman—Burl Ives’s narrator snowman— shake his umbrella angrily up at me, his choppy little eyebrows coming together over his eyes.
“You don’t belong here, Paul!” he shouts. “You’re a reject. Sarah dumped you for a scraggly loser! You don’t belong at the North Pole!”
“But . . . but I . . .”
It’s no use. The snowballs start coming fast and furious, pelting me from all sides. I raise my hands to protect my face and fall to my knees. The little dentist elf stalks through the snow toward me, brandishing his tooth-pulling pliers, the ones that left the Abominable Snowman smacking his gums.
“No!” I shout. “Don’t!”
“You’re a bigger misfit than I ever was,” Rudolph’s voice says in my ear.
I look up through the shower of snowballs to find the most famous reindeer of all sneering at me from his position at the front of Santa’s team. They take off into the night, Santa waving and calling out through all the horrible noise, “Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas!”
And the elves start to throw their torches at me. Closer and closer . . . I can feel the heat burning at my face. . . .
“No!” I shout out in vain. “This was supposed to be the best Christmas ever! Nooooo . . . !”
“Paul? Paul! For heaven’s sake, wake up! Paul!”
My eyes wrenched open as my mother shook me in my bed and I woke up instantly, bathed in a hot, hot sweat. The sounds of a crackling fireplace filled my senses, along with the scent of smoking wood. My eyes rolled wildly around in my head, trying to find the source of the eerie yellow-orange light that filled my room. And then I saw them—the flames licking at the outside of my bedroom windows.
“The roof is on fire!” my mother shouted, her face bright pink and her hair clinging to her sweat-drenched forehead. She had a streak of flour across her nose. She stood up straight, clinging to her messy apron. “Paul! Your father!”
I sprang out of bed, shoving the necklace, which was still wrapped around my hand, into my pocket. At first I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. But then I heard a siren in the distance and it snapped me into the here and now. A flame suddenly came to life in the corner of my room and started traveling toward the floor. My father was dangling outside my window, his head tipped back, his arms swinging at unnatural angles behind him.
“Dad!” I shouted. I jumped onto my bed and flipped the loc
k on my window. My mother was hysterical now, sobbing and gasping for breath. I reached out my hand into the cold night air and grabbed at my father, wrapping my fingers around the harness that circled his upper thigh. I swung him toward me, hearing the roar of the fire outside and behind me grow louder and louder.
“Mom! I need your help!” I shouted as I wrestled with the unwieldy bulk of my deadweight father, trying to pull him through the window. The fire was spreading across the front wall of my bedroom.
Don’t let him be dead, don’t let him be dead, don’t let him be—
My mother climbed up onto the bed next to me, wailing, and helped me drag my dad’s limp form through the window. I held his weight, supporting him with my knee, as my mom undid his safety harness. I yanked off his goggles and looked down at his face as she worked, searching for a sign of life. He was so pale he looked like a ghost of himself, and his lips were turning blue.
“Dad! Dad! Wake up!” I said, slapping him a few times on the cheeks as I’d seen done in so many movies. Nothing. Not even a blink.
The latch finally came undone in my mother’s shaky fingers. As we lowered him onto my bed, a burst of flame came to life just above my desk, crawling across my room and up to the ceiling.
“We have to get him out of here,” I said, my voice sounding inexplicably strong. “You get his legs, I’ll get his arms.”
My mother grasped his ankles, holding them on either side of her body, and started to back out of the room. I held my dad under his armpits, and his torso hung limply between us, like a hammock full of rocks. We got downstairs awkwardly but quickly and toddled our way toward the front door. I backed up to it, picked up my foot, and kicked it as hard as I could. The wood splintered and the door flew open. My mother and I ran down the walk and across the lawn, finally laying my father down on the dying brown grass near the curb. A fire engine skidded around the corner, sirens blaring, lights blazing, and screeched to a stop behind us.
“Oh, Paul, he’s not . . . ?” my mother said, kneeling next to my dad. She reached out to touch him but then pulled back her hand. “Is he dead?”
I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to find out. But I bent over my father’s mouth and listened. There was his breath, shallow and slow, but there.
“He’s breathing,” I said, relieved.
“Oh, thank God!” My mother collapsed on my father’s chest, clinging to him like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. (Mom made me watch it in the fifth grade.)
I tore my eyes away and looked up at my house. My house that apparently wasn’t going to be there much longer. The entire roof was engulfed in flames and the second floor wasn’t faring much better. The firemen shouted orders to one another and before long, a wide stream of water was blasted at the house, a couple of skinny guys not much older than me struggling with the dancing hose.
“What do we got here?” an EMT asked, seemingly appearing out of nowhere and dropping to the ground beside my mother. I looked around me for the first time and noticed that there were now three fire trucks, an ambulance, a few police cars, and a nice-sized crowd of neighbors gathered on the street.
“He’s unconscious,” she said as the EMT unpacked his bag. He slipped on a stethoscope and checked my father’s heartbeat.
“Any idea what happened?” he asked, his slick black hair gleaming in the light from the fire.
“I . . . I was in the kitchen baking and the lights flickered,” my mother said. “There was this loud buzzing sound, then a pop, and then I heard him shout.”
“Sounds like he may have been electrocuted,” the EMT said.
“Electrocuted?” my mother wailed.
“’Scuse me, kid!”
Dazed and light-headed, I stepped out of the way as two more emergency workers jogged through with a gurney and placed it beside my father. In a few minutes they had lifted him up and strapped him down and were loading him into an ambulance. I watched all of this happening in a sort of detached, spectatorly way, as if it were happening to someone on ER.
My mother beckoned to me from the back of the ambulance to get in, but I turned away from her. The fire was really quite mesmerizing. There was my room, going up in smoke and flame. Strands of Christmas lights dangled from the eaves. The Christmas wreath from the front door had flown off when I’d kicked the door down and it lay on the ground, a few tiny flames dancing around it.
“Oh, jeez, would you look at that,” someone said behind me.
My eyes traveled up from the sad-looking wreath and fell on Santa in his little flying saucer, his arm raised in a wave just like the Santa in my dream. As we watched, the flames took poor Santa, first melting the ship out from under him, then crawling up his body and pulling at his face. I couldn’t tear my eyes away as he morphed from the cherry-cheeked, twinkle-eyed jolly old Saint Nick into a sadistic painted clown, laughing maniacally down at me from above.
Misfit! Misfit! Misfit!
“Christmas really is punishing me,” I whispered.
“Paul! Paul!” Holly’s voice penetrated my descent into madness. “You’re okay!” she shouted. She shoved her way past a couple of policemen and hit me with the force of an avalanche, nearly knocking me over as she hugged me.
“Ugh! You’re okay!” Her hands whacked at my back as she clung to me.
When she pulled away, I could tell she’d been crying. Her whole face was white except for her very red nose.
“Come on,” she said, tugging at my arm. “We have to go. We’ll follow the ambulance.”
The ambulance. Right. My father. Right. What the hell was wrong with me? There were more important things than my stupid house and a melting Santa. I finally turned away from Santa and his spaceship, now a widening puddle of plastic goo on what was left of my roof.
Voices whispered as the crowd parted around Holly and me.
“That poor family . . .”
“And at this time of year . . .”
“They have more Christmas spirit than the rest of us combined. It’s just a shame. . . .”
Suddenly I heard a tremendous crash and the spectators gasped, inching a bit farther away from my house. I didn’t even look back to see what had happened, but as I ducked into the car, a little kid hid his face in the folds of his father’s coat, sniffling.
“Santa must be dead,” he said sorrowfully, his red mittens clasping his father’s leg.
I couldn’t help agreeing.
SANTA BABY, I WANT A YACHT AND REALLY THAT’S NOT A LOT
MY HOUSE LOOKED LIKE A PIECE OF ROTTING FRUIT. There was this big, black, gooey, bubbly, smoky hole in the top right side of it that made me think of the mushy spot on an otherwise perfect apple. We had been at the hospital for a few hours and most of the firemen had packed it in and gone home, but two large guys with soot-blackened faces met Holly’s car when we drove up. One of them had a clipboard. Neither of them looked very happy. I could relate.
“I don’t want to go in there,” I said from the backseat of the Bug.
“Paul, just remember, your father is going to be okay. Focus on that,” my mother said. But her face had gone whiter and whiter the closer Holly pulled to the house. She was holding herself together by a very skinny, fraying thread. My mother rarely, if ever, lost it. And when she did, it wasn’t pretty. Like the time I, purely by accident, drove her car into the pond at Van Saun Park? I really thought she was going to pop a vital organ. I hoped tonight didn’t turn out like that night had, because if she lost it, I was definitely going to freak. And without my father around to be all level-headed, we’d be in serious trouble.
Mom climbed out and started to talk with the firemen. I took my dear sweet time hoisting myself out of the low backseat. I was in wallow mode. I’ll be the first to admit it. Yes, it was true, my dad was going to be okay. He woke up at the hospital and even managed to tell a joke or two. (“The good news is, we won’t need a tree this year—you can just plug me in!”) But his body had been through a major trauma and he couldn’t move w
ithout pain. The doctors predicted it would take at least two weeks for him to recover.
Two weeks. That was half of December. Practically the whole Christmas season. Things would not be the same without my father around. But who was I kidding? Things weren’t going to be the same any way you looked at it. My house was barbecue. Blackened Cajun barbecue.
“We’d like to take you inside and show you the damage, ma’am,” the taller, older fireman said, attempting a polite smile. He had a bushy white mustache that had turned gray from all the ash, and his light blue eyes seemed tired.
Mom started up the walk between the two firemen and Holly stepped up beside me.
“That can’t be good,” I said, staring at the dent in the house where my room used to be. Beams and boards jutted out of the roof at unnatural angles, and one of my windows was just not there anymore. I couldn’t even imagine what it looked like inside. Tonight my mother’s favorite saying—“Paul, your room looks like a bomb hit it!”—had somehow come true.
“Look at it this way,” Holly said, shoving her hands into the back pockets of her jeans. “At least now you can redecorate!”
I snorted. It was a valiant stab, but all it did was bring home the worst part of this whole thing. “Let’s get this over with,” I said. Then I somehow made myself start walking.
The front doorjamb was ripped and splintered where I’d kicked open the door earlier, but other than that, the downstairs was okay. Aside from the muddy footprints of about a thousand boots, everything was intact. The kitchen was a wreck, but only because my mother had been baking when the fire started. A cookie sheet with uncooked blobs of dough sat on top of the stove, and the counters were covered with spilled flour, eggshells, and various bottles, boxes, and bags of ingredients. Even in her panic my mother had managed to turn off the oven.
“Cookie?” Holly asked, walking over to the cooling rack and picking up a Toll House. My stomach grumbled noisily. It had been a long night without food. But I didn’t think I was going to be able to digest.
