by Kieran Scott
For the first time in my life, Christmas Sucked with a capital S.
“Make it fast, man. We gotta get to the gym before the rush,” Marcus told me as I jumped out of his car in front of the Foot Locker at Paramus Park on Monday afternoon.
“I’m gonna be two seconds,” I told him, slamming the door.
I ran around the car and dodged a few shoppers to get to the automatic sliding door. The last place in the world I wanted to be at that moment was the mall—the proverbial scene of the crime—but I’d promised my mother I would pick up her last paycheck. There was no way she wanted to face That Awful Woman or Mr. Steiger again and I was glad I could do something for her. I just wanted to do it as quickly as humanly possible.
The mall was packed, as it would be every day until Christmas from here on out. I tried not to pay attention to the Muzak playing overhead or notice any of the bright decorations all around me. It had taken two days to entirely change the way I felt about this mall. Friday I’d been, let’s face it, aglow. Today I was Mr. Sneer—the guy I hated. That person who stormed through the mall at Christmastime with that look on his face like it was a chore rather than a special yearly ritual to be savored and cherished.
I loathed myself.
I crossed the mall quickly, averting my eyes from the North Pole, and was about to duck right into Fortunoff and back to the counter in front of the office, but I stopped short, my sneakers squeaking on the linoleum. This was not happening. Sarah was not standing with Lainie Lefkowitz and That Awful Woman at the counter in the front of the store.
I stood there for a moment, unsure of how to proceed. Did I just walk by them, pretending they weren’t even there as Sarah had done to me all day long in school? (I’d tried to talk to her during choir, but she’d told me she wasn’t good with breakups and it would just be better if I left her alone right now. Please.) Did I act like the bigger person and just walk over there and say hello? Or did I, as the more sadistic part of my brain was prompting me to do, break open the emergency fire hose case next to me and douse all three of them with a nice, freezing-cold blast of water?
As I stood hovering, my decision was made for me by the none-too-subtle Lainie. She saw me standing there, elbowed Sarah on the arm, and lifted her chin in my direction. I quickly ran my hands through my hair and tucked in the front hem of my shirt. Sarah turned, paled, and swallowed.
“Uh . . . hi, Paul,” she said.
“Oh, so I guess I’m not invisible outside of school,” I said. Damn! Did I really say that? Way to act cool, buddy. I walked the few steps it took to join them and pointedly looked away from That Awful Woman. But from the corner of my eye I could see her with a wicked smirk on her pointy little face. Was she gloating over my booted mother or did she somehow, with her evil radar, know that I was a dumpee, standing next to my dumper?
“I heard about your house, Paul. I’m really sorry,” Sarah said, her blue eyes sympathetic. Ugh! Why not just shoot a poisoned arrow through my heart? “Were you able to save any of your things?”
“Some of it. Thanks for asking,” I said as I tried to avoid That Awful Woman’s amused gaze. “What are you buying?” I asked. There was a small silver Fortunoff box sitting on the counter in front of Sarah.
“Oh . . . well . . . Scooby gave me this present this afternoon and I was just bringing it back here to have it cleaned,” Sarah said, her skin growing attractively pink. (Stop thinking that way!) “It was a little smudged. . . .”
Against my will, my brain was skipping around, jabbering about how pretty she was, how sweet she was to ask about my stuff, and how cute it was that she was embarrassed to be caught with another gift. That had to mean she cared about me, right? If she cared about the fire? If it mattered to her how I felt about another Scooby gift? It wasn’t like she didn’t think about me at—
My happy-thought train hit a brick wall when Sarah opened the little box and pulled out a delicate gold chain with a one-of-a-kind gold-and-ruby heart pendant dangling from the end.
“Isn’t it gorgeous?” Lainie Lefkowitz gushed.
That was when I knew. Christmas wasn’t just punishing me. It was out to destroy me. And it was enjoying the process.
I turned and faced the counter, looked Marge Horvath directly in her dirt-colored eyes, and said, “My mom’s paycheck, please.”
“I have it right here,” she said, the smirk growing smirkier. She hit a few buttons on the register behind her and the drawer clanged open. She hadn’t even fully turned around again before I’d snatched the envelope from between her claws and was halfway across the mall.
I was shocked at my ability to walk away. I really thought that either my legs were going to go out from under me or my entire head was going to explode all over the Oriental Ornament cart. How was it possible that Scooby had bought the exact same necklace I’d chosen? There were about a million pieces of jewelry in that place. I mean, was he psychic? Was he some kind of sadistic mind-reading wanna-be rapper who’d been sent by Christmas to destroy me the moment I’d lost my Santa hat?
This time I wasn’t going to avoid the North Pole. I wanted to look my enemy dead in the eye. I wanted to see if he had a nice big 666 painted across his forehead that I had somehow missed. But the closer I got to the Santa Shack and Scooby’s velvet throne, the more my vision blurred. I had never felt such a surge of vindictive anger before in my life. I imagined myself morphed into a Godzilla-sized Paul, stalking through the center of the mall and crushing the Santa Shack, the whole North Pole, and Scooby underneath my massive feet.
There he sat with a couple of twin girls on his knees, bouncing them up and down and letting out a seriously lame excuse for a “ho ho ho.” My hands clenched into fists, crushing the envelope that held my mother’s paycheck. There was only one thought in my mind.
Santa must die.
I turned away from Scooby and all the fresh-faced, wide-eyed, clueless little kids. Soon, very soon, Scooby was going to feel my wrath. The wrath of a Christmas freak whom Christmas had forsaken.
Scooby was going down.
WHY AM I SUCH A MISFIT? I AM NOT JUST A NITWIT!
ON TUESDAY AFTERNOON I FINALLY SAW WHAT SCOOBY looked like outside a Santa suit, and I was not impressed. He was training me, so he was dressed in one of the elf costumes—big green shoes with bells on the curled toes, red-and-white-striped tights, a green jumper thing, and a white turtleneck. His cheeks had red circles on them and he was wearing fake pointed ears and a floppy green-and-red elf hat. He looked like a joke, but in my personal opinion, he would have looked like a joke even in street clothes.
Scooby had a large nose, blond hair that I swear was prematurely thinning, a few patches of unimpressive stubble, skinny little lips, and a huge, huge Adam’s apple. I mean, the thing was totally distracting. Every time he spoke to me, I found myself staring at it as it bobbed up and down, up and down, like a tetherball on its string.
What in the name of good Saint Nick did Sarah see in this guy?
“Hey, loser, you’re doing it wrong,” Scooby said to me through his tight fake smile. He was standing next to the Santa throne, where I sat under ten pounds of padding, waiting for the next overweight kid to climb onto my lap. I’m telling you, nine out of ten of these kids should have been asking for exercise videos and subscriptions to Weight Watchers.
“Doing what wrong?” I asked, the synthetic fibers of my beard sticking to my lips.
“You’re sitting all wrong,” Scooby said.
I felt my body heat rise, which seemed impossible considering the buckets I was already sweating in the heavy wool suit. Trying to smile at the little pigtailed girl who was tentatively approaching, I decided to bite my tongue, which wasn’t easy. Since I’d donned the Santa suit a few hours earlier, Scooby had managed to criticize my laugh, my belly, my posture, my walk, the twinkle in my freakin’ eyes, and now the way I was sitting ?
“And what’s your name?” I asked the little girl, who was now rocking back and forth in front of me, h
er tiny hands clasped behind her back and her lips pressed together so tightly they’d disappeared.
“Tameeka!” she blurted out.
“Well, come on up here, Tameeka,” I said in my best Santa voice.
I held out my arms to her and that seemed to be all she needed to come right out of her shell. She hurled her entire body at me, flinging her arms onto my chest and sort of dangling there between my legs. Trying not to groan, I adjusted her until she was sitting on my knee, grateful for the extra padding the suit had in the groin area. If it hadn’t been there, little Tameeka would have heard a stream of highly inappropriate expletives.
“I want a karaoke machine!” Tameeka announced, clapping. “And I want it to have all of Aaliyah’s songs, even though she died, and all of Britney Spears’s songs and all of Janet Jackson’s songs—”
“Ho ho ho!” I chuckled. “You sure know a lot about music.”
“My older brother Joaquin is a DJ!” Tameeka announced proudly. “He says I’m gonna be a star!”
“A DJ! Real-ly?” Scooby said, breaking the cardinal rule of elfdom—no talking to the kids unless they need to be pried away. Apparently most tiny tots were even more afraid of the elves than they were of Santa. “Is this brother of yours here?”
I was about to tell Scooby to back off when Tameeka turned around and gave him a look that could only be called sassy. “And who the hell are you?” she asked.
Scooby blanched and stood up straight and I had to stifle a laugh. “A karaoke machine,” I said to Tameeka. “Have you been a good girl?”
“You better believe it!” Tameeka said. “I do all my chores and my brother’s and I gave half my books to the needy this year. I didn’t want to, but my mom made me and I think that should count for something.”
“Ho ho ho,” I said. I liked this girl. “You’re quite right, Tameeka. I’ll see what I can do about that karaoke machine. Have a merry Christmas, now!”
“Thanks, Santa!” Tameeka said. She slid off my lap and gave Scooby one last scathing look before running off to her waiting parents.
“Why did you let her go?” Scooby demanded.
“What? She didn’t have a card,” I replied. If a kid’s parents pay for a picture with Santa, the kid is given a little card and that means Santa has to hold on to him or her and pose for the photographer elf, a depressed photography student named Quentin, who was dressed up as a reindeer.
“Forget the card, loser! You totally forgot to mention my CD,” Scooby said. “She was a prime target.”
“They’re not targets, Scooby, they’re kids,” I told him through my teeth.
“Well, la-di-freakin’-da!” Scooby said, bending back and waving his hands in the air. “Look at Mr. High and Mighty! Guess your Goody Two-shoes attitude didn’t get you very far with Sarah.”
I tried really, really hard to keep the angry flush from rising to my face, but there was nothing I could do. And the second Scooby saw it, he knew he had me. And once he knew he had me, it was all over.
“Aw! Did I hit a sore spot?” he taunted me. “You miss your little girlfriend, do ya? I guess I can see why. She is the best kisser I’ve ever had in my life and I’ve had plenty, if ya know what I mean. . . .”
Scooby had definitely mastered the single entendre.
I stared at the line of children and their parents in front of me, willing the little boy who was bawling and clinging to his mother to just get a grip and get the heck over here. He was holding up the line and if I didn’t have a kid on my lap soon, Scooby was going to keep going and eventually I was going to have to rip his head off. And I really didn’t think the management of Paramus Park was going to look too kindly on a Santa who traumatized his patrons with a bloody Christmas massacre.
“And that lip gloss she wears, man!” He inhaled slowly and closed his eyes in bliss as if he were smelling that strawberry goodness right then and there. “It tastes so good. . . .”
My hands clenched into big red fists on the armrests of the throne. I was going to overheat. I was going to melt out of my skin. My back stuck to the T-shirt I wore under my costume and every inch of my body was bathed in sweat. My eyes stung as I glared down at the screaming little boy and all the other kids grasping their mothers’ hands, jabbering on about what they wanted, what they had to have. Overhead, “White Christmas” poured from the crackling speakers for the fifth time that hour, raising all the hairs on the back of my neck with its unabashed optimism. What was Bing Crosby crooning about? This holiday was a joke. The decorations were garish and offensive, the kids were all greedy little monkeys, the guys in the Santa suits were pathetic teenagers who were trying to sell CDs to an unsuspecting public and fighting over girls!
“. . . and I don’t think it’s gonna be long before she gives it all up, if ya know what I mean—”
That was it. I snapped. I started to push myself away from the Santa throne and was about to turn and grab Scooby right by that Adam’s apple when—
“Okay, Paul, your shift’s over.”
I blinked. There, standing in front of me, was Eve Elias, the elf who had been working the line, her golden blond hair tied into two long braids. I cooled off the instant I saw her. Little did she know she’d just saved us all from appearing on the six o’clock news.
“I already put up the sign, so you can go in the shack and change,” she said, gesturing behind her at the red ropes and the little wooden sign that read, Santa Will Be Back in Fifteen Minutes. The screaming kid had calmed down now that his impending doom had been postponed.
“Thanks,” I said, shakily pushing myself out of the chair and trudging over to the Santa Shack. The second the door was closed, I yanked off the beard and hat and felt the cool mall air chill my wet scalp. I peeled off the suit and sure enough, my T-shirt and boxers clung to me. When I pulled the fabric away, the air rushed over my skin, chilling out my temper as well as my body.
Okay. Everything was going to be okay.
The door banged open and Scooby came in. He looked me up and down and let out a cackle.
“Been swimming?” he asked, popping open his locker and grabbing his Santa suit. I turned my back to him and hustled into my jeans and sneakers, then grabbed my sweater and bailed. The last thing I needed to see was a half-naked Scooby.
Holly was supposed to be picking me up in fifteen minutes, but I couldn’t wait. I went to grab my cell phone to see if she was on her way and stopped. Tipping back my head, I let out a strangled moan. My jacket. I’d left my jacket in the Santa Shack.
I stalked back to the North Pole and up to the shack, where I yanked open the back door. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw inside—Scooby, in all his scrawny paleness, flexing nonexistent muscles in front of the mirror, wearing a pair of black boxers with the words Love Machine printed across the butt in red glitter.
Much to my surprise, Scooby didn’t even flinch when he saw me standing there. He didn’t blush. He didn’t grab his clothing. He simply turned, did a bodybuilder tricep flex (again, nothing to flex), and looked up at me.
“You all right, loser?” he asked. “Now that you know what your girl is gettin’?”
I reached over to the chair in the corner, picked up my jacket, and left without a word. Scooby was, without a doubt, the biggest dork I’d ever come across in all my seventeen years. And somehow, for some reason, Sarah had chosen this sorry excuse for a human over me. Part of me knew I should just write them off right then and there. Scooby was obviously pathetic and Sarah must be harboring some kind of weird dork fetish.
But no. That wasn’t possible. Sarah was amazing. She was perfect. She loved my Jeep obsession and wore my sweater to bed and smelled like peppermint and didn’t mind publicly cuddling at the movies. This wasn’t the type of girl who wasted her time on dorks. Scooby had brainwashed her somehow. She never would have hooked up with him otherwise. She clearly had no idea what she’d gotten herself into. And the idea that Scooby was pulling one over on the love of my life only made m
e hate him more. I couldn’t let him get away with it. But the question was, what was I going to do now?
“You look like death,” Holly said when I got into her car.
“Thanks,” I replied, balling my jacket and sweater up in my lap. I popped the seat back until I was horizontal and closed my eyes.
“What happened to you in there?” Holly asked as she peeled out.
“I can’t believe I’m about to say this, and to you of all people, but I think I hate Christmas.”
Holly hit the brakes and my eyes flew open, my hands flinging out instinctively to brace myself for the impending crash. But when I sat up, there was nothing. No cars. No pedestrians. Slowly I looked up at Holly. She had a look of maniacal glee on her face not unlike the one the Grinch sports after he comes up with the idea to steal Christmas from the Whos.
Slamming on the gas again, Holly swung into a handicapped spot and put the car in park. “Are you serious, or are you just experiencing a momentary lapse of Paulness?” she asked as she twisted herself around and started digging for something in her canvas bag in the backseat.
“Oh, I’m serious,” I told her. “You know what’s been going through my head all day? Three words: Santa must die. I swear, Holly, I really think I’m losing touch here.”
“You’re not losing touch, you’re just . . . seeing things in a new light,” Holly said, flopping down in her seat again, now clutching a piece of wrinkled paper. “In the real light of day,” she added. She handed over the paper and watched me expectantly.
It wasn’t without reservations that I unfolded the page to read its contents. Holly was acting hyper and weird, even for her. But I have to admit, I was curious.
“The Anti-Christmas Underground?” I read from across the top of the page. The letters were big and black and two Santa feet were sticking out from under the d as if he’d been flattened like the Wicked Witch of the West. “Where did you get this?” I asked.
