She looks back at her house, to see if Stan has turned the lights on yet. Flannery is not Stan the Man’s biggest fan, but she has to admit he puts on an impressive Christmas light show. It is probably the best one in the neighborhood, but that might be because there are two families on their street where the parents always travel for work and never decorate anything, which cuts down the competition, and then there’s that old lady with all the rosebushes, whose house is always dark at night, like maybe she goes to bed at five or something. She is definitely not the type to put up Christmas lights.
Stan puts up his lights the day after Thanksgiving. Flannery knows her mom wishes that he would wait. Her mom is the sort of person who thinks you shouldn’t get your Christmas tree until the week before Christmas. But Stan is not the sort of person who takes other people’s opinions into consideration. He does things his way, because in his opinion, his way is the best and only way.
Flannery stoops to scoop up a handful of small white stones from somebody’s rock garden. She wonders if you could get arrested for stealing rocks. It might make Christmas more interesting if she spent it in jail.
The problem with being thirteen, Flannery thinks, is that Christmas isn’t that fun anymore. “Santa Claus” still visits her house, but what he brings is clothes Flannery’s mom hopes like anything she’ll wear (she won’t) and a few books that a bookstore salesclerk has recommended for girls Flannery’s age, and gloves and a new wallet, stuff like that. Flannery doesn’t care. She doesn’t even bother making a Christmas list anymore. She can get all the music she wants off the Internet, and music is pretty much all she cares about anyway.
There are a few lights on at the Fabers’, so Flannery figures somebody is probably home. She gets a little excited thinking about her guitar and wonders why she’s waited so long—since the beginning of school, she realizes—to ask for it back. It’s not like she’s been so busy studying. Flannery doesn’t have to study very much, though her mom tells her that will change when she goes to high school. Flannery doubts it.
No, Flannery knows why she hasn’t asked. Because her dad, Hawaii Bob as she’s come to refer to him, promised her a new guitar last summer, when she’d had lunch with him at the airport. He had a layover of two hours, and he and Flannery had spent it at a crowded hamburger place, the floor littered with scrunched-up napkins and decimated French fries. That was the only time she’d seen him all year, but she figured the guitar would make up for the lack of real face time.
If she’d asked Kate for her old guitar back, it would be like admitting she didn’t think the new guitar was coming. And Flannery believed it was. In fact, she could hear the rumbling of a UPS truck on the next block. Her guitar might be on it, sitting on the seat next to the driver, HANDLE WITH CARE scrawled across the box.
Flannery realizes as she rings the Fabers’ doorbell that she is no longer holding the little white stones she’s stolen. Turning around, she can barely make out a trail of them behind her, where she has dropped them one by one. Like she would need a trail to follow to get home, she thinks. Like getting back home is so important.
It is Christmas Eve, and Matthew Holler is sitting on the living-room couch watching Frosty the Snowman with his little sister. Sarah is addicted to Christmas specials, and she refuses to watch them by herself. His older sister, Carrie, took the early afternoon shift—Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Rudolph’s Shiny New Year, The Little Drummer Boy—and now it is Matthew’s turn. He doesn’t mind Frosty the Snowman so much, but he hates the other one that’s on the same DVD, Frosty and the Environmental Disaster, something like that. It’s a bunch of bull, in Matthew’s opinion, just something they did so somebody could make a bunch of money.
People ruin everything, he thinks, at least the greed-heads do. They make sequels to shows that don’t need sequels. There should only be one Rudolph story and one Frosty the Snowman story and one Charlie Brown Christmas story.
It occurs to Matthew that this is a pretty stupid conversation to be having with himself, but he can’t help what he thinks about. The thoughts pretty much show up whether Matthew wants them to or not. Besides, he is bored with Frosty the Snowman, bored with sitting around the house, bored with Christmas. His parents are out making the rounds of Christmas open houses and won’t be back until nine. Matthew, Carrie, and Sarah could have gone with them, but Matthew and Carrie didn’t want to, and so Sarah didn’t want to either. She is nine but considers herself to be Matthew and Carrie’s equal, both socially and intellectually.
When the phone rings, Matthew jumps up to get it. He is not usually a phone guy, but suddenly he’s hoping it’s one of his friends, Sam, maybe, or Evan or Kate, anyone to talk to. Maybe it’s Kate, and she wants to play guitar over the phone. They do that now a few times a week, mostly just one playing, and then the other, but the other night they played a song together, a Pink Floyd song he’d learned from Sam called “Wish You Were Here.” He even sang, which was not something he did a lot, not with other people, at least.
It’s not Kate, however, or Sam or Evan. It’s Emily. A thought darts through his mind that he’s not quick enough to grab hold of, but it comes back a few seconds later, and this time he catches it: He is sorry it’s Emily, not Kate, who has called him. Emily talks too much, for one thing, and what she has to say isn’t all that interesting. Sure, she’s hot, and no one’s ever said Matthew Holler didn’t have a thing for hot girls. But after a few weeks of hanging out, sometimes Matthew is filled with the desire to smash something when he hears Emily’s voice, not because she makes him angry, but because he feels like it’s a waste of time. Maybe hotness isn’t everything, he thinks as Emily recites a list of what she wants for Christmas. It’s a high percentage of everything, just not 100 percent.
“Oh, yeah, hey, listen—there’s my mom. I’ve gotta go.” Matthew hangs up the phone before Emily even has a chance to say good-bye, which he realizes is a pretty harsh thing to do, especially on Christmas Eve, but if he stayed on the phone one more second, he is pretty sure his brain would have exploded.
Looking into the family room, he sees that Sarah is totally absorbed in the second Frosty, the one Matthew can’t stand, so he sneaks upstairs to his room. It’s a complete and impressive wreck, and he’s supposed to have it cleaned up before his parents get back. Like what, they’re going to cancel Christmas if his bed isn’t made? He closes his door, grabs his guitar, and sits on the edge of his bed, working out the solo that comes in the middle of “Wish You Were Here.” He could go online and print out a chart—there are only two hundred thousand Pink Floyd fan sites where you can find tabs and barre chords—but he’d rather do it himself.
He’s almost got it worked out when his brain flips from “Wish You Were Here” to “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” which has always been Matthew’s favorite Christmas carol. Can you even play that on guitar? he wonders. He listens to it in his mind and then slowly starts translating the notes in his head to his guitar. E minor, he’s pretty sure, then C, then B—no, B-7.
He gets it worked out, then plays through it a couple of times until he’s happy with his strumming. It sounds good, he thinks, then looks around his room and thinks that playing Christmas carols by yourself is beside the point somehow. He suddenly imagines himself walking down the middle of his street, his guitar strapped on over his winter jacket, singing all the Christmas songs he knows. He can’t help himself—he starts working out the chords to “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
You’re not really going to do this, he tells himself as he’s figuring whether “Frosty the Snowman” starts out with a G or a C. There’s no way.
Definitely no way would I ever do that, he thinks, standing up and looking around his room for his coat and the scarf his mom knitted him last Christmas. That is so completely not what I’m about.
He is careful to not let the screen door slam behind him as he sneaks out of the house and heads toward the
road.
It is Christmas Eve, and Kate is trying to string popcorn, which turns out to be an amazingly hard thing to do. The only reason she’s doing it is that her mom and dad had this big, nostalgic conversation at lunch, about how they were too poor to afford ornaments for their bare, scraggly tree their first Christmas as a married couple; all they had to decorate it with was long strands of popcorn, which made the tree look like it was covered with freshly fallen snow.
So now Kate is stuck trying to run a needle threaded with dental floss through piece after piece of microwave popcorn. So far she has gotten six pieces on the floss and destroyed seventeen. It is, she thinks, a losing battle, but she can tell it makes her mom happy that she’s trying, and since Kate is not sure her mom will like Kate’s Christmas present to her, she figures this could be a kind of present too.
When the doorbell rings, Kate jumps up to get it. “Anything to stop stringing popcorn” is becoming her motto of the day. She thinks it is probably the UPS man, since she just heard the truck out on the road, and the presents from her Uncle Simon and Aunt Kim still haven’t arrived, even though Aunt Kim swore up and down on the phone to Kate’s mom that she’d mailed them a week ago.
Instead, it’s Flannery. “Bad news,” Flannery says the second the door is open. “I have to take my guitar back.”
Adrenaline surges through Kate’s stomach and up and down her legs. She realizes she has pretty much forgotten that her guitar is actually Flannery’s guitar. When Flannery first lent it to her at the end of the summer, Kate had thought a lot about how she could save up money for her own guitar, but after weeks, then months went by, and Flannery never asked for her guitar back, Kate had sort of convinced herself that Flannery didn’t actually want it back.
“Come on in,” she says to Flannery now. “I’ll go get it.”
Flannery follows Kate to her room. “I’m probably getting a new guitar for Christmas from my dad,” she says, “so if it was up to me I’d let you keep it. But my stepbrother’s here, and he lost his guitar on the plane, and apparently he can’t live without a guitar in his hands every minute of the day.”
“How’d he lose it on the plane?” Kate asks as she pulls the guitar case out of the closet. The guitar itself is on a stand next to her bed.
“Not on the plane. I mean all of his luggage got lost, including his guitar. They think it’s probably in Atlanta. The fact is, he’s a terrible guitar player. I don’t know why everyone’s acting like if he doesn’t have a guitar to play, the world will be deprived of his great talent. Believe me, we’d be better off if no one let him near a guitar ever again.”
Kate is careful as she lays the guitar in its case. She wonders what she’ll do without her guitar. Without Flannery’s guitar. She was going to spend her whole vacation writing new songs, maybe even recording some. Matthew said that he might be able to get them into the audio lab over Christmas, that the audio lab director, Mr. Norris, was going to open it up a few hours a day for anybody who was interested. They were going to try to record something together, just for fun. But she isn’t going to be able to record anything without a guitar.
Worse, she realizes suddenly, she isn’t going to be able to give her mom her Christmas present. Every year Kate’s mom said, “Don’t buy me something for Christmas, make me something,” and every year Kate and Tracie went to Target and bought something their mom totally didn’t need, electric coffee grinders and rice steamers, fancy little soaps for the downstairs bathroom. But finally, this year, Kate has actually made something. She’s written her mom a song.
A word springs into Kate’s head. It is a word she isn’t supposed to say, a word she’s never heard her mom say, and has only heard her dad say a few times, when he was driving in bad traffic. Kate says it now, under her breath at first, and then louder, and then four times in a row.
And then, to her embarrassment, she starts to cry. “Sorry,” she apologizes to Flannery. “I just, well, I was going to a play a song on it. I mean, for my mom, in the morning. For a present. I didn’t really get her anything else.”
Flannery looks at her a long time without saying anything, and Kate feels like an idiot. It is Marylin who understands about moms and Christmas presents. Kate has come to believe that Flannery is a decent human being, but that doesn’t mean she is sentimental or actually cares about what Kate’s mom gets for Christmas.
To Kate’s surprise, Flannery shrugs. “Hey, that’s cool. Ellis can play the guitar my dad’s sending me for Christmas. The UPS guy is probably dropping it off right now. I kind of hate to let Ellis get his grimy little paws on it, but he’s only here three more days.”
Kate does not hug Flannery. She does not sob grateful tears of joy. She knows that she has exceeded the limits of Flannery’s tolerance for emotional displays already with her crying. So all she does is say, “Thanks.” And then, “You don’t happen to want to string some popcorn with me, do you?”
Flannery shrugs again. “Okay, yeah, sure. I could use some big excitement in my life right now. Besides, anything’s better than hanging out with Ellis.”
Just as Kate’s settled into her seat and picked up her strand of mutilated popcorn, the doorbell rings, and she is saved again. It is the UPS man, with two big boxes—one from Uncle Simon and Aunt Kim—and the other, a long, flat box, from the Guitar Center. Kate’s mom rushes up behind her.
“I’ll get those, honey, you just run along!” she says, clearly trying to sound nonchalant. She pokes her head out the door and calls, “Thanks! Merry Christmas!” to the retreating UPS man. Then she says to Kate, “Oh, honey, I forgot to check the mail today; run and get it, would you?”
Kate walks down the driveway to the mailbox. She waves to the UPS man as he drives in the direction of Flannery’s house. She waits for the truck to stop, so she can watch the UPS man carry Flannery’s guitar up to the front door. She thinks it would be nice to go back into the kitchen and say, “Hey, Flannery, guess what! I think your guitar has arrived!” It can be like a little present she gives Flannery, in exchange for the present Flannery has given her.
But the UPS truck does not stop in front of Flannery’s house. It lumbers down the street and turns left onto Sagebrush Drive.
When Kate returns to the kitchen, she doesn’t say anything about the UPS truck or guitars. She just picks up her needle and begins her attack on the popcorn. When she glances over at Flannery, Kate is amazed to see that Flannery has already strung two feet of dental floss. “That’s amazing,” she says. “How did you get so good at that?”
“I was a Brownie in third grade,” Flannery replies, “and my Brownie leader was totally into stringing popcorn. We did it for, like, three weeks in a row. I was the champ.”
“You were a Brownie?” Kate asks. Of course, what she wants to ask is, They let people like you in Brownies? but it’s Christmas Eve, so she doesn’t.
Flannery grins. “I was an amazing Brownie.” She looks up from her popcorn. “You might not know this, but I was a really nice little kid.”
“Pretty hard to believe,” Kate jokes, and Flannery throws a piece of popcorn at her. Kate pops it into her mouth. She plucks another piece of popcorn from the bowl and pokes her needle at it. The fact is, she can believe that Flannery was a nice kid. About 90 percent of people are nice kids up through second grade, and then the percentages start to dip. By sixth grade, it’s probably down to 40 percent. A picture of Mazie Calloway pops into her head, and Kate revises her estimate to 30 percent.
But maybe things get better, Kate thinks, glancing up at Flannery, whose face is squinched in concentration, like the only thing that matters at this very minute is guiding that needle through the popcorn. Maybe even Mazie Calloway will turn nice one day.
Okay, Kate actually doubts that Mazie Calloway will ever be anything besides a horrible human being. But it’s Christmas, and she is in the mood to feel hopeful about everything.
Especially about that long, flat box with the Guitar Center return address.
It is Christmas Eve, and Marylin is putting eyeliner on an angel. “Hold still, sweetie,” she says, and tries to remember what Rhetta has told her about applying eye makeup. Smudged lines are better than thin, sharp lines. You are creating shadows and light. Subtle is good. No clown faces.
Marylin thinks she’s sort of good at this. Not as good as Rhetta, who right now is transforming the girl playing the Virgin Mary from a pale, slightly cross-eyed ten-year-old into the serene, graceful-looking mother of Jesus. Makeup is magic is another thing Rhetta likes to say, and Marylin is starting to believe it.
Reverend Mayes sweeps through the room, looking strange to Marylin in his white robe. She has gone to church twice with Rhetta, and both times Reverend Mayes was dressed in a polo shirt and chinos. He is the most laid-back minister Marylin has ever met. But now he looks a little nervous, like if this Christmas pageant’s a flop, God might get mad at him.
“I see only two wise men,” he says, surveying the room, which is filled with sheep, shepherds, angels, and various farm animals. “Where’s the third one?”
The Kind of Friends We Used to Be Page 12
