by Kieran Scott
“Go ahead,” I told her. After all, she was starving, too. We’d be better off if at least one of us wasn’t delirious with hunger. Holly popped the cookie in her mouth and grabbed a handful more.
The floor overhead creaked and I could hear the muffled voices of my mother and the firemen. They were in my parents’ room, just above us. I glanced at Holly. I really didn’t want to go up there. But there was no point in avoiding the inevitable. Holly smiled reassuringly, her cheek sticking out from a full mouth. We headed for the stairs.
It was a nightmare. My palms were sweating and my heart was pounding so hard it was nearly choking me as I climbed the stairs. I really felt like I must be asleep and that at any second I would sit up straight in my bed, realizing it was all just a product of my twisted imagination. But when I got to the top of the stairs, the first thing I saw was the miniature Christmas tree my mom and I had made when I was in kindergarten, toppled to the floor in front of the hallway table where it once sat. It was smashed and stepped on, the mini-Santa and snowman ornaments ground into the rug like tiny crushed corpses.
When I didn’t wake up from seeing that heinous sight, I knew for sure that I wasn’t dreaming.
Holly and I stood at the top of the stairs as my mother and the two firemen walked over to my bedroom. My mother gasped and her hand flew to her mouth.
“Mom?” I said.
She looked at me with this dazed, horrified expression, then stepped into the room ahead of me to make space for me to get through. I kind of wished she hadn’t.
I had never seen anything like it. It wasn’t my room. It couldn’t be.
“It’s pretty bad,” the fireman’s low voice rumbled.
The wall had collapsed on top of my bed, engulfing it in a pile of . . . well . . . crap. Wood, paper, plaster, roof shingles—all soaked and pungent—tumbled over the mattress and onto the floor. Everything was wet. Water dripped from the ceiling, ran from the window-sills onto the floor. When I stepped on my wall-to-wall carpeting, water bubbled up from under my feet and chilled the canvas of my sneakers. I pulled my sweater closer to me. You could see the stars through the gaping hole in the upper corner of the room.
I tore my eyes away from the bed and made the mistake of looking at my desk. The wallpaper had peeled all around it and hung down in limp strips. My computer screen was covered with hardened bubbles and the CDs that always littered the surface of the desk had become the surface. They had melted and congealed to the desk in pools of psychedelic colors. My school-books were charred and soaked and there was a pile of black ash that had once been a stack of notebooks.
And the smell. Ugh. I can’t even describe it. The usually comforting scent of burned wood mixed with this acrid, sour aroma that came from melted synthetics— plastics of all kinds that I never even realized I owned. I took a step toward the desk.
“Son, you don’t want to go over by the window.”
I ignored him. I had to see if there was anything salvageable. I lived on my desk. Almost everything that mattered was over there.
“Paul,” my mother said in a half-pleading, half-warning tone.
The floor squeaked and creaked under me, but I barely noticed. My hand was reaching out for the framed picture of Sarah and me that sat next to the keyboard. It was melted and crinkled and distorted. I almost wanted to cry when I saw it. It was the final nail in the coffin. Not only had I lost the girl, I’d lost the only photographic proof I had that the girl had ever been mine.
Maybe I could get some of those pictures Naho Nakasaki had taken for the yearbook at the last Holiday Ball meeting. Maybe she still had the negatives. If I could just get my hands on—
But then, what did it matter? Sarah had dumped me, right? Why did I want to remember what I couldn’t have?
“Come on, honey,” my mother said, stepping up next to me and putting her hands on my shoulders. “You can sleep in the den downstairs tonight and tomorrow we’ll figure out how to fix this mess.”
“Okay,” I said in a daze.
I didn’t want to be here anymore, anyway. It was too depressing. Ripped posters hung from their tacks, the totem pole from our trip to Arizona was tipped over and broken in half, my soccer uniform lay dirty and scorched atop my collapsing hamper. That morning I’d woken up all happy-go-lucky in this very room, and now it was destroyed. Just like I had been that afternoon by Sarah.
It would’ve been almost poetic if it hadn’t sucked so very, very badly.
As I turned to go, I caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye. There, on the sopping wet floor, trampled and ripped and deteriorating, was a crushed silver Fortunoff bag.
“No,” I said under my breath.
I dropped to the ground, tossing the frame aside, and picked up the bag. The whole bottom fell out, landing with a wet thwack on top of a twisted piece of fabric that used to be my favorite boxers. I sifted through the mottled paper and found the receipt, now nothing but a gobbed-up spitball. When I tried to unfold it, it disintegrated in my hands. Sitting in my pocket was a piece of jewelry intended for the girl I loved who could not care less about me. A piece of jewelry that I couldn’t afford. And I was stuck with it for the rest of my life.
I couldn’t have been more screwed.
“Wicked cool!” Marcus Seiler said, stepping into my bedroom. He pulled the hood on his sweatshirt up to cover his gelled hair against the cold, then bobbed his head as he surveyed the damage. He sniffed and made a disgusted face. “It stinks in here, man.”
Yeah, dude. That would be because of the massive fire. “I know,” I told him.
“Did you take pictures yet?” Matt Viola asked as he hovered by the door. He looked at the floor warily and decided not to take the risk of actually entering the destruction zone.
“Didn’t think of that,” I told them, resisting the urge to punch something. Didn’t they get that this sucked? They were acting like I’d torched the room myself—for fun. They might be my friends, but sometimes they weren’t all that bright.
“You totally should,” Matt said.
Yeah, I thought. I’ll get right on that. There was a rumble and a crash in my closet and Marcus jumped halfway across the room.
“What the heck was that?” he asked.
“Squirrel,” I replied. “He moved in sometime last night. Scared the crap out of me this morning when I came up to get my cell.”
“Cool,” Matt said. “Get a picture of that, too.”
Marcus and I just looked at him for a second; then Marc clapped. “We’re making a Mickey-D’s run,” he said. “Wanna come?”
“No thanks,” I said as I followed them back downstairs. I hadn’t told them about Sarah yet and if they stayed here for five minutes longer, I knew they were going to ask about her. I wasn’t ready to deal with questions and the obvious comments. (“But dude, she’s so hot! ” As if I didn’t know.)
I let the guys out through the front door and returned to the couch, where I had spent the entire morning. The television was still on and I sank back into position on the couch, flat on my back except for my head, which I propped up on a throw pillow. I picked up the remote and started flipping channels.
Saturday television is an abomination. The one day of the week when most people don’t feel guilty about sitting in front of the boob tube and letting their brain melt for hours on end, and what do they put on? Overboard, that totally pointless, totally humorless 1980s Goldie Hawn flick that they’ve shown at least fourteen hundred times. I practically have the thing memorized from watching it throughout my childhood when there was nothing else on. My other choices were a Law & Order marathon, some reality TV crap where they show weddings from beginning to end, infomercials, cooking shows, and, of course, college football. Who the hell cares about college football, anyway? A bunch of talentless scrubs running around the field and doing fifteen-minute-long celebration dances after sacking a guy who didn’t even try to get out of the way? It’s like, get drafted, make a real team, then we’ll t
alk.
My thumb was on autopilot. I was hitting the up button over and over and over again, as if scrolling through the channels for the fourth time was going to somehow change what was on. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and I had yet to change out of my pajamas—a Dave Matthews Band tour T-shirt, a pair of sweatpants, and my plaid flannel robe. (My dresser, being on the hallway side of my room, had miraculously survived. Thus I still had half my clothes and the box of practical joke paraphernalia I’d been hoarding since sleep-away camp, stuffed in the back of my underwear drawer.) My cereal bowl from that morning was on the floor next to me, along with a half-eaten box of doughnuts and four empty cans of Vanilla Coke. Considering my sugar intake for the day, I should have been running sprints around the living room, but just walking up the stairs with the guys had taken all the energy out of me. Somehow I felt like I couldn’t move a single muscle in my body. Except, of course, for that thumb.
Oh, if Sarah could see me now. She was such a neat freak she’d almost fainted when she saw my bedroom. She’d spent half an hour organizing my CD collection while she decided which ones she wanted me to burn for her. It was so cute. Of course, the next day those CDs had been completely disorganized again. Maybe if I weren’t such a slob, she wouldn’t have broken up with me.
“Okay, that’s it,” I said to myself, tossing the remote on the glass-topped coffee table.
Aside from the squirrel in my closet, there wasn’t another living thing in the house. Mom had left for work at the crack of dawn and the guys had only been here for two minutes. Other than that, I’d had no human contact.
I was acting pathetic, really. So Sarah had broken up with me. So she was dating some lame-o loser. So my room was a smoked-out haven for bushy-tailed rodents. So my father was in the hospital. So there was no conceivable way I was ever going to get my Jeep now. (A realization I’d come to in the middle of the night that had finally squeezed a couple of self-flagellating tears out of me.) That was no reason to sit around all day and feel sorry for myself. It was still Christmas, right? It was still, as the song goes, the most wonderful time of the year. And there was one thing that could always knock me out of any and all bad mood swings.
I pushed myself off the couch, prompting the head rush of the century, and staggered, half blind, over to the entertainment center. I braced my hands on top of the cabinet for a second and waited for the fog in my brain to clear, then dropped down and opened the deep drawer under the flat-screen TV. Inside were a couple of rows of videos that my parents had collected over the years. My mom’s favorites: Grease, Xanadu, Gone with the Wind, Mr. Mom. My dad’s favorites: Beverly Hills Cop, Star Wars, Zulu. (Don’t ask.) Then, of course, there was our Christmas movie collection. Everything from Christmas Vacation to Miracle on 34th Street (both the original and the newer one with that dude from The Practice and that woman from Big).
I slipped out the tape of It’s a Wonderful Life and popped it into the VCR, causing the screen to go blue right in the middle of the minigolf montage of Overboard. Grabbing up the remote as I backed into the couch once again, I started to feel a little bit better. I was taking control. I was being proactive. I was not going to let outside forces get me down. And I was not going to let my mind wander back to our night at the movies again just because I was watching a movie. No. This was the new me.
I picked up my cell phone just to make sure Sarah hadn’t called and the thing had neglected to ring (it happens!), then put it aside and hit the Play button on the remote.
I started to lie down again but stopped myself. No. I was going to sit up straight like a human being whose entire life had not been trashed less than twenty-four hours ago. I was going to watch my movie and cheer the hell up.
One hour later I was ready to put my bare foot through the television. This was supposed to be uplifting? What was wrong with Frank Capra, anyway? All poor Jimmy Stewart wanted to do was get out of his little nothing of a town and see the world! Why wouldn’t they let him do it? Couldn’t he just have gone on his little trip with his big monster trunk, come back, and then married Mary? And I have a hard time believing that a babe like Donna Reed ends up a lonely spinster librarian just because George Bailey doesn’t exist. Come on! Were the rest of the guys in town born without eyes or something?
This movie was so contrived! It was so false! It was clearly made just to snow the viewing public into believing that their tiny little coupon-cutting, lawn-mowing lives were something more than they actually were so that they would keep going back to their dead-end jobs making money for big business and stuffing the bank accounts of the wealthy—the people who actually knew better.
And for God’s sake, how the hell did Jimmy Stewart keep himself from strangling that annoying little Zuzu, anyway? I would’ve taken a shovel to her head somewhere in the middle of the first act.
I picked up the remote and flicked off the television in disgust. Maybe I would go to Blockbuster and rent The Nightmare Before Christmas. I’d always boycotted it on principle, but now I was kind of curious. Maybe Holly would let me borrow her copy.
Suddenly the front door opened and slammed and I sat up straight, startled. My eyes darted to the clock. It was only a little after three. My mother wasn’t supposed to be home for a couple of hours. I was about to get up and go into the kitchen when I heard the distinct sound of my mother weeping and I stopped, my heart seizing up. Like I said, my mother rarely lost it, so when she did, it was kind of a scary thing. A scary thing I wasn’t quite sure how to handle.
But my father, the one who knew exactly what to do in these situations, wasn’t available. It was going to have to be me.
I stood up shakily, letting the fleece blanket I’d wrapped around my legs fall to the ground, and tip-toed toward the kitchen, half hoping my mother would hear me and get ahold of herself. What was I supposed to do? I hated seeing my mother cry.
When I got to the kitchen, I hovered in the doorway for a moment. My mother had put a kettle of water on the stove and was pulling out the cocoa powder from above the microwave. She was wearing a knee-length skirt, a silk shirt, and heels, and she was all coiffed, just like she always was for work. Was there some problem with our insurance? Or was something wrong with Dad?
“Mom?” I said tentatively.
She dropped the measuring spoon into the cocoa can and turned around, wiping under her eyes with both hands.
“Paul! You startled me!” she said, faking a smile. Her eyes traveled down my body. “Are you still in your pajamas?”
Guilt settled over me like an iron blanket. “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry. I just—”
“It’s all right,” she said, waving her hand and turning back to her cocoa. “Maybe it’s a good idea. I just might join you. . . .”
And then she started crying again, her shoulders shaking. I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Mom? What’s wrong?” I asked, walking into the kitchen and leaning into the back of one of the wooden chairs around the table.
“Ooooh . . . I was fired,” my mother said. Actually, she almost sang it in her high-pitched voice. Like she was saying, “Ooooh . . . I’m so happeeeeeee!”
“What?” I blurted out. “Why?”
My mother shrugged as she measured out enough cocoa to warm a wagon train in the dead of winter on the plains. She shook her head as she talked, spooning powder into mugs. I wondered if she was expecting someone or if she actually had cracked. I had a sinking feeling it was the latter.
“That Awful Woman saw me taking your return without the receipt and instead of asking me what I was doing and maybe waiting for an explanation, she went directly to Mr. Steiger and told him she’d seen me taking an illegal return.” She dropped her spoon and turned to me, her eyes wide and red. “She used the word ‘illegal’! Like I’m some kind of common criminal!”
“I don’t believe this,” I said, my heart hardening into a heavy, cold stone. I pulled out the chair and dropped into it, resting my head in my hands. “That Awful Woman” was
the euphemism my mother used for Marge Horvath, the assistant manager who had made me pry the pendant out of her bony little fingers the day before. Well, actually, made Holly pry it out of her fingers.
“Mr. Steiger called me into his office and told me that my conduct was unacceptable, and then he started telling me that there has been some money missing from registers recently and he was going to call a meeting about it tonight, anyway, but that since the money is always missing after my shifts, they were pretty certain that they had their culprit and this solidified it.”
My mother was babbling now, her voice steadily rising in pitch until it could be heard only by mice and small dogs. All I could do was stare down at the holly-bordered place mats on the table and listen to the little voice in my head taunting me. “This is all your fault, all your fault, all your fault.” The voice sounded suspiciously like the elves from my prefire nightmare.
“They think I’m a thief, Paul! They think I’ve been stealing from them!”
Suddenly my mother seemed to realize that she had measured out half the can of cocoa and that there was nobody here to drink it. Her shoulders collapsed and she brought her hand to her head.
“It’s gonna be okay, Mom,” I said, even though I had no proof that this was in any way true.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” she said, sniffling. She sat down at the table right across from me and picked at the corner of the place mat in front of her, looking like a forlorn little girl. It’s pretty weird when you see your mother so vulnerable. It kind of makes you feel like you aren’t a kid anymore.
I got up, walked around behind her, and wrapped my arms around her back. She reached up and patted my forearms, then took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“What would I do without you?” she said quietly.
Then I really didn’t feel like a kid. I wanted to say something to make her feel better. Anything encouraging. But nothing came to mind. It seemed like the spirit of Scrooge had settled in over our once Christmas-spirited household and I had no idea how to make it go away.
