Approximately Yours (North Pole, Minnesota)

by Hammerle, Julie

  He was actually excited about a North Pole Christmas event. It was like he’d wandered into a new dimension.

  “What are you doing for the showstopper?” he whispered across the counter to Elda.

  Her eyes went wide, and she blushed. She opened her mouth to say something, but Holly kicked her under the table. As if remembering herself, Elda put a finger to her lips and pointed to the mayor, who was still talking. Danny turned to watch, even though he knew all this already.

  “All materials must be edible, though they may be store bought,” Mayor Sandoval was saying. “The structures must stand upright on their own. You may work in teams of no more than two this year.”

  Danny grinned at the girls. “I don’t need a partner.” He was always good for some trash talk.

  “Neither does Elda. I’m just the eye candy.” Holly licked a bit of whipped cream off her straw. She’d ordered the special drink Danny’s mom had created for this event—a ginger apple cider. She’d ordered it as advertised, not asking for special non-sugar sugar or unsweetened whipped cream, which Danny respected. This girl could probably wrap herself in literal garbage and he’d find it hot, simply because it made her an “individual.” He’d compared her to Star before, but other than the whole “looking at Danny with disdain” thing, Holly and Star were polar opposites. Holly didn’t seem to care what other people thought, which was certainly not the case for Star.

  He leaned across the counter, making sure to speak directly to Elda, even though he hoped Holly understood this was meant for her, too. “If you ladies want to get together to practice your piping work, you know where to find me.” That sounded dirtier than he meant it to. His good knee buckled when Danny realized what he’d just said. He straightened up, pretending not to have noticed the double entendre.

  Elda had noticed. She blushed.

  “You just want to spy on our showstopper.” Holly raised a thick, perfectly arched eyebrow.

  “That’s absolutely why.” He couldn’t suppress the smile. He tried, and he failed.

  “At least you’re honest about it,” Holly said with a very slight grin, almost as if she didn’t totally despise him.

  And that was the best thing to happen to Danny all day.

  “Maybe we should exchange numbers.” He directed that at Holly. Logically, he should be setting his sights on Elda, but apparently he was a glutton for punishment.

  Holly held out her hand. “Give me your phone.”

  He unlocked it and handed it over, watching as she typed her info into his contacts like a total boss. Holly’s hands weren’t pristinely manicured like Elda’s or Star’s. She had short, uneven fingernails. Why? Did she not bother doing her nails because she worked with her hands? Was she in between manicures? Whatever the reason, Danny wanted to know. He needed all the info. He’d opened the book of Holly, and he couldn’t put it down.

  She handed the phone back, and Danny checked his contacts under “P” for Page. He found an entry for Elda. Not Holly. Elda. Danny’s heart sank, but he forced an enthusiastic smile. Even Holly herself was telling him to forget about her and go after Elda. Maybe he should listen.

  He grinned at Elda. “I’ll text you later.”

  Again, her face went bright red, and she said nothing. It was like someone had glued her lips shut.

  Once the mayor ended his spiel, Danny was back on duty making drinks. Their last customer finally left after nine-fifteen, leaving only Danny, Brian, their mom, and Jamison in the shop to close up.

  “I saw you talking to the Page girls,” Brian said. He was restocking the fridge while their mom did the receipts and Jamison cleaned the front of the shop. Danny remained on his stool, wiping down the espresso machine and making sure to prep everything for tomorrow. Having a broken leg sucked for many, many reasons, but at least it got him out of sweeping, mopping, and taking out the garbage.

  “They seem nice,” Danny’s mom said.

  “They are nice.” All the blood in his body rushed to his cheeks. He wasn’t sure he’d call Holly “nice,” but she was definitely something.

  Brian squeezed Danny’s shoulder. “And one of them is maybe the hottest girl ever to set foot in North Pole.”

  Yes, she was.

  “You say that about a different girl every season, Brian.” Jamison swept some garbage into a dustbin. “Who was it last summer?”

  “The gymnast,” Danny said.

  Their mom looked up from counting fives. “Gymnast? Didn’t you like Sam’s friend? That Jane girl?”

  “Jane and the gymnast were cute,” Brian said, “but the Page girl is hot. What’s her name, Dan?”

  Danny started to say “Holly,” but Jamison cut him off. “Which one?” She leaned on her broom, challenging Brian. Jamison and Brian had always bickered like siblings, ever since she started working at the store. “There are two Page girls.”

  Brian rolled his eyes. “You know which one. Don’t be dense.”

  “I only want you to recognize how big a dick you’re being.” Jamison glanced at the boys’ mother. “Sorry, Maggie.”

  Maggie Garland shook her head. “I’m on your side. Girls are more than their appearances, boys.”

  “I know, Mom,” Danny said. Holly was hot, yes, but she was more than that.

  “All I’m saying is,” Jamison said, “don’t go after Elda just because you think she’s pretty.”

  “Elda?” Danny asked. Who was talking about Elda?

  “Yeah.” Jamison said. “I mean, you dated Star.”

  “And?” Danny had wandered into a completely different conversation from the one he’d thought he was having.

  Jamison shrugged. “And Star was—is—gorgeous, but she took you for granted, Danny, and she wasn’t very nice. I don’t want to see you make the same mistake again.”

  “I don’t either.” Though that was exactly what he was doing with Holly. She didn’t like him. She’d made that clear both by looking at him like she couldn’t possibly be more unimpressed and by physically typing her cousin’s number into his phone. She’d basically handed him off to another girl, so she obviously didn’t want him.

  “I’m just saying.” Jamison tied up a garbage bag. “Picking the quote-unquote hot Page over the other one, maybe that’s just you picking style over substance again.”

  Brian tossed a wadded-up paper towel at her. “Now you’re jumping to conclusions. Just because someone’s not hot doesn’t mean they’re automatically a good, interesting person. And vice versa.”

  “True, but I’m just saying maybe Danny should get to know these girls before jumping into anything—”

  “And I’m just saying maybe he should do whatever the hell he wants because he’s single for the first time ever, and also it’s a free country.”

  Danny hopped up from his stool, and Brian handed him his crutches.

  “Jamison, it pains me to say this, but Brian’s actually right on this one. Sort of,” Danny said. “Both Page girls are cool, but Elda’s the ‘nice’ one. Holly—” Is hot and sexy and frustrating and doesn’t like me and would probably end up hurting me like Star did. “Holly wants absolutely nothing to do with me.”

  Jamison shook her head. “I don’t buy it. I saw you interacting with both of them, and I definitely saw sparks between you and the one with the glasses.”

  Any sparks, if they existed at all, had come from him. Holly had made her position extremely clear. “I don’t know.” Danny shrugged. “I’ve talked to both of them, and Holly looks at me like I’m only slightly less disgusting than gum on the bottom of her shoe. I just got out of a relationship like that, and, frankly, I don’t want to do that again.”

  “Fair enough,” Jamison said.

  Brian put an arm around his brother. “And you know what? Since you called dibs on the hotter Page, I’ll go after the other one.”

  “You’re disgusting,” Jamison said.

  “You actually are.” Danny nudged his brother’s arm off his shoulders. Brian was not going
to make Holly Page one of his Christmas break conquests.

  “I’ve never claimed otherwise,” Brian said.

  Danny rolled his eyes hard at Jamison.

  “I hope you strike out spectacularly,” she said.

  “I’m with Jamison,” Maggie added.

  “I bet she laughs in your face,” Danny said. If Danny underwhelmed Holly, Brian Garland was going to physically repulse her. At least that’s what Danny was counting on.

  Brian held out a hand. “I’ll take that bet.”

  Danny shook his brother’s hand, making sure to add an extra-firm squeeze at the end. Holly Page had to say no to his brother. She simply had to.

  …

  Monday, December 18

  “This is all new to me,” Elda said, rubbing her hands together. “What do we do first?”

  Holly sipped her coffee and glanced down Main Street, which buzzed with tourists. Grandma’s house was a zoo, but it was nothing compared to downtown North Pole at ten o’clock on a Monday morning the week before Christmas. The girls had stopped in for caffeine at Santabucks, but Danny hadn’t been working. His brother, Brian, was there, and he’d written his number on the side of Holly’s cup.

  “Maybe we can double date,” he’d said with a nod toward Elda.

  Holly had rolled her eyes so hard she nearly strained a muscle.

  That’s why the two of them were standing outside on this cold, gray morning, instead of sitting on warm, padded chairs listening to Christmas carols in the coffee shop.

  “First we’ve got to buy the candy.” Holly took the tiniest sip of her blazing hot mocha. “Since it’s the morning after the gingerbread kickoff party, people are going to be storming the candy shop and grocery store today, grabbing everything they can. We need to fight like hell to get what we need. No mercy.” She nodded toward her cousin’s hands. “Good thing you’ve got those nails. We’ll need them.”

  Holly headed down the street toward the candy store. The showstopper was taking shape in her head already. They were going to build a gingerbread model of their grandma’s house. It was something she and her grandma had discussed doing once, the year before the Pages stopped coming back to North Pole for Christmas. Since she and Elda were already using Grandma’s day planner as a guide for their time in town, they’d channel her brain for the contest. They were going to need gumdrops and licorice whips and some kind of fruit leather for the wooden slats on the outside of the house. Holly hadn’t gotten that far yet in her plans, so their best course of action was to simply buy everything they could get their hands on and sort it out later.

  “Maybe we should double date,” Elda said.

  “Well, that’s a non-sequitur.” Holly glanced inside the bakery as they passed the window. She noticed some giant lollipops and fancy cookies on the shelves, plus who knew what else. Holly was open to inspiration. She had some really cool, unorthodox ideas for decorations—like making wrought iron fencing out of dried spaghetti and royal icing, which was something she’d seen on a website and was desperate to try.

  “It’s not, really,” Elda said. “We should all go out—me and Danny and you and his brother.”

  “Oh. That…no. That’s not going to happen.” Brian came off as smarmy and kind of dumb. He reminded her of the guys from her neighborhood at home who seemed to believe that knowing their way around a hockey rink counted as enough personality to get them through life. Plus, did Elda really think Holly would go on a date with her and Danny? That hadn’t been part of the plan, had it?

  “I just thought…I mean, I’ll totally blow it if it’s just the two of us.” Elda held up her phone. “I can’t even handle texting.”

  Holly rubbed her left temple. Elda was dead right. She’d tried texting Danny last night after the gingerbread kick-off thing, and it had been a near catastrophe. Holly had been down in the kitchen helping her mom pack up Grandma’s china, and she’d left Elda alone upstairs with her phone. Danny had texted her: “What’s your recipe for royal icing?” and Elda had totally flubbed it, sending Danny a dictionary-sized pile of babble—going from her favorite kind of frosting to the time her brother Sal had tried to hide the evidence that he’d eaten part of their dad’s birthday cake by shoving it down the garbage disposal, fork and all, and Elda had to take the whole sink apart. She’d even managed to sneak something in there about Sal’s issues with clogging up the plumbing. The whole conversation was a disaster. It was like The Coffee Shop Incident on steroids.

  Holly had to perform triage. She took the phone from Elda and wrote, “OMG! Sorry. My little cousin got a hold of my phone and was being a jerk.” Holly shot Elda an accusing eye.

  “You had me wondering…” Danny wrote back.

  “So embarrassing! And shame on you for trying to steal my royal icing recipe!” She sent him a gif of Veronica Mars wagging a finger. Then he sent her a gif of some basketball player doing it, too, and then the whole thing devolved into a thirty-minute gif off.

  The time flew by. Holly’d planned on ending the conversation right away, just kind of shooting him a quick “good night” or something, but then he sent her a gif of a little girl crying while her gingerbread house crumbled with the caption “you,” and Holly couldn’t back down from that challenge. She summoned everything she ever knew about Danny Garland, remembering that he was a big LEGO dork as a kid, so she sent him the same caption attached to a gif from The LEGO Movie of a guy running around with no pants.

  Holly was texting Danny Garland. Yeah, he thought he was talking to Elda, but she, Holly, was talking to him, as herself, really. Her stomach fluttered every time the phone buzzed with a new message. Holly lost track of time and space. She tuned out the sounds of her extended family playing cards downstairs. She forgot that Elda was in the room with her. All that mattered in the world was impressing Danny with her gif recall.

  Holly ended the conversation by pulling out the big guns—Madeline Kahn from Clue saying, “Flames on the side of my face”—and handed the phone back to Elda, who had fallen asleep on the pull out couch during Holly and Danny’s text exchange. “You do not even think about texting him without consulting me first,” Holly’d said. “Got it?”

  Elda had nodded. “You’re the boss.”

  Correct. Holly was the boss.

  “I think you’re right, though, about needing a buffer.” Holly checked out the other people walking up and down Main Street this morning. She guessed most of them were on candy-finding missions. “Maybe I should come with, at least on the first date. But I’m not going out with that Brian guy. We have to find somebody less objectively awful.” She was willing to do practically anything for her cousin, but dating Danny Garland’s brother was a bridge too far.

  “I will help you find that guy,” Elda said. “I’ll be your wingwoman. I’m way better at talking to guys when I’m not pursuing them myself. I promise.”

  “Fabulous.”

  Holly pulled open the door to the candy shop, into which about half the population of North Pole had crammed itself. Yelling and screaming muffled the Bing Crosby Christmas soundtrack pumping through speakers on the walls. It was like the candy version of one of those wedding dress clearance sales on sitcoms. A girl with long, curly, blond hair had about sixteen packages of M&Ms in her arms, and she protected them like a running back, Heisman pose and all. Some guy was stuffing bags of gummy bears into a garbage bag. “Wow,” Holly said, as a box of Twinkies sailed past her face. Then she snapped into gear and tossed her coffee in the garbage. It would only slow her down. “Grab whatever you can.” She saluted Elda. “I’ll see you on the other side. Good luck!”

  Holly dashed down the nearest aisle and started pulling stuff off the shelves, without stopping to think—she got the licorice she needed plus Skittles and Fun Dip and every color of Sixlet available. She hadn’t thought to bring a bag, so she pulled off her sweater to use as a sack.

  She dodged a couple arguing about gimmicky Oreo flavors as she took a hard right into the next aisle. T
here she saw them. The Take 5 bars. They transported her back to the gingerbread contests from when she was a kid. Danny Garland had loved Take 5 bars. He’d said once, after receiving his blue ribbon, that he never used them in his showstoppers, but he’d always buy a few to eat. A full box of them sat on the shelf a few feet away.

  She dove for them just as some guy—a dude in his twenties with acid-washed mom jeans that may or may not have been worn ironically, Holly couldn’t tell—lunged for the same box. Holly threw her body between the guy and the candy and grabbed the Take 5 bars.

  “Off-sides!” he yelled, rolling away from her on the floor. “You can’t bogart all the supplies.”

  “You snooze, you lose.” Holly tucked the box of Take 5 bars safely into her sweater.

  A red flush of anger crept up his cheeks. “You’re going down, you know that?”

  “Craig.”

  Both Holly and the guy spun toward the end of the aisle. Another dude, about the same age as Craig but wearing a uniform from the arcade, stood there, hands on hips, one dark eyebrow raised. He looked like a superhero. A nerdy superhero, but a superhero nonetheless.

  “She stole all the Take 5s, Dinesh,” Craig whined.

  “She stole nothing. This is a store. Those bars don’t belong to you. Besides, I have some candy at home you can use.” Holly didn’t know who this Dinesh guy was, but thank goodness he showed up. Elda appeared behind Dinesh at the end of the aisle.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked.

  Dinesh nodded. “Everything’s fine. Just keeping the peace.”

  Craig and Dinesh left, and Elda came running over to Holly. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Holly triumphantly held up the box of Take 5 bars. “I’ve got your ticket to Danny Garland success right here.”