I also want my red notebook back,
so leave it, with your memory included,
in my stocking on the second floor.
I opened to the first available blank page in the Moleskine and started to write.
My best Christmas was when I was eight. My parents had just split up, and they told me I was really lucky, because this year I was going to get two Christmases instead of one. They called it Australian Christmas, because I would get presents at my mom’s place one evening and at my dad’s place the next morning, and it would be okay because they would both be Christmas Day in Australia. This sounded great to me, and I honestly felt lucky. Two Christmases! They went all out, too. Full dinners, all the relatives from each side at each Christmas. They must have split my Christmas list down the middle, because I got everything I wanted, and no duplication. Then my father, on the second night, made the big mistake. I was up late, way too late, and everyone else had gone home. He was drinking something brown-gold—probably brandy—and he pulled me to his side and asked me if I liked having two Christmases. I told him yes, and he told me again how lucky I was. Then he asked me if there was anything else I wanted.
I told him I wanted Mom to be with us, too. And he didn’t blink. He said he’d see what he could do. And I believed him. I believed I was lucky, and I believed two Christmases were better than one, and I believed even though Santa wasn’t real, my parents could still perform magic. So that’s why it was my best Christmas. Because it was the last one when I really believed.
Ask a question, get the answer. I figured if Lily couldn’t understand that, there wasn’t any reason to continue.
I found the spot on the second floor where they were selling the personalized Christmas stockings, making a wide berth around the Santa stand and all of the security guards. Sure enough, there was a hook of Lily stockings, right before LINAS and LIVINIA. I’d leave the red notebook there …
… but first I had to go to the AMC to buy Lily a ticket to the next day’s 10 a.m. showing of Gramma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.
four
(Lily)
December 23rd
I have never gone to a movie by myself. Usually when I see a movie, it’s with my grandpa, or my brother and parents, or lots of cousins. The best is when we all go at once, like an army of interrelated popcorn zombies who laugh the same laughs and gasp the same gasps and aren’t so germ-phobic with each other that we won’t share a ginormous Coke with one straw. Family is useful like that.
I planned to insist that Langston and Benny accompany me to the 10 a.m. showing of Gramma Got Run Over by a Reindeer. I figured it was their responsibility to take me, since they started this whole thing. I woke them up promptly at 8 a.m. to let them know and to give them enough time to figure out their ironic T-shirts and tousled I-don’t-care-but-actually-I-care-too-much hairstyles before we headed out for the day.
Only Langston threw his pillow at me when I tried to get him up. He didn’t budge from bed.
“Get out of my room, Lily!” he grumbled. “Go to the movies by yourself!”
Benny rolled over and looked at the clock next to Langston’s bed. “Ay, mamacita, it’s what o’clock in the morning? Eight? Merde merde merde, and during Christmas break, when it’s like the law to sleep in till noon? Ay, mamacita … GO BACK TO SLEEP!” Benny rolled over onto his stomach and placed his pillow over his head to get started right away, I guess, on dreaming in Spanglish.
I was pretty tired myself, since I’d gotten up at 4 a.m. to make my mystery snarly friend a special present. I wouldn’t have minded taking a nap on the floor next to Langston like when we were kids, but I suspected if I suggested such a thing on this particular morning, in this particular company, Langston would repeat his standby refrain:
“Did you hear me, Lily? GET OUT OF MY ROOM!”
He actually did say that. I wasn’t imagining he might say it.
“But I’m not allowed to go to the movies by myself,” I reminded Langston. At least, that was the rule when I was eight. Mom and Dad had never clarified whether the rule had been amended as I’d aged.
“Of course you’re allowed to go to the movies by yourself. And even if you’re not, I’m in charge while Mom and Dad are gone, and I hereby authorize you. And the sooner you leave my room, the sooner your curfew gets bumped from eleven p.m. to midnight.”
“My curfew is ten p.m. and I’m not allowed to be outside alone late at night.”
“Guess what? Your new curfew is no curfew, and you can stay out as long as you want, with whomever you want, or be alone, I don’t care, just make sure your phone is turned on so I can call you to make sure you’re still alive. And feel free to get wasted drunk and fool around with boys and—”
“LA LA LA LA LA,” I said, my hands over my ears to block out Langston’s dirty talk. I turned around to step out of his room but leaned back in to ask, “What are we making for pre–Christmas Eve dinner? I was thinking we could roast some chestnuts and—”
“GET OUT!” Langston and Benny both yelled.
So much for day before the day before Christmas Eve cheer. When we were little, the Christmas countdown began a week in advance and always started with either Langston or me greeting each other at breakfast by saying, “Good morning! And happy day before the day before the day before the day before Christmas!” And so on until the real day.
I wondered what kind of monsters lurked in theaters to prey on people sitting by themselves because their brothers wouldn’t get out of bed to take them to the movies. I figured I’d better get mean real fast so I could be prepared for any dangerous scenario. I got dressed, wrapped my special present, then stood in front of the bathroom mirror, where I practiced making scary faces that would ward off any movie monsters preying upon single-seated persons.
As I practiced my meanest face—tongue wagging out, nose crinkled, eyes at a most hateful glare—I saw Benny standing behind me in the bathroom hallway. “Why are you making kitten faces in the mirror?” he asked, yawning.
“They’re mean faces!” I said.
Benny said, “Look, that outfit you’re wearing is gonna scare papi off more than your mean kitten face. What are you wearing, Little Miss Quinceañera Gone Batshit?”
I looked down at my outfit: oxford uniform school shirt tucked into a knee-length lime-green felt material skirt with a reindeer embroidered on it, candy-cane-colored swirled stockings, and beat-up Chucks on my feet.
“What’s the matter with my outfit?” I asked, smiling upside down into a … *shudder* … frown. “I think my outfit is very festive for the day before the day before Christmas. And for a movie about a reindeer. Anyway, I thought you went back to sleep.”
“Bathroom break.” Benny inspected me head to toe. “No,” he said. “The shoes don’t work. If you’re gonna go with that outfit, you might as well go all out. C’mon.”
He took my hand and dragged me to the closet in my room. He perused through the heaps of Converse sneakers. “You don’t got no other types of shoes?” he said.
“Only in our old dress-up-clothes trunk,” I said, joking.
“Perfect,” he said.
Benny darted over to the old trunk in the corner of my room, pulling out tulle tutus, yards of muumuus, #1 FAN baseball caps, fireman hats, princess slippers, platform shoes, and an alarming number of Crocs, until finally he grabbed for our Great-aunt Ida’s retired tasseled majorette boots, with taps still on the toes and heels. “These fit you?” Benny asked.
I tried them on. “A little big, but I guess.” The boots spiced up my candy-cane-colored stockings nicely. I liked.
“Awesome. They’ll go great with your winter hat.”
My winter head-warming accessory of choice is a vintage red knit hat with pom-poms dangling down from the ears. It’s “vintage” in the sense of being a hat I made for my fourth-grade school Christmas pageant production of A Christmas Carol(ing) A-go-go, the Dickens-inspired disco musical I had to heavily lobby our school principal to
allow to be staged. Some people are so rigidly secular.
My outfit complete, I walked outside toward the subway. I almost returned inside to change my shoes from the majorette boots to my old familiar Chucks, but the tapping noises from my feet hitting the pavement were comfortingly festive, so I didn’t, even though the boots were too big and my feet kept almost walking right out of them. (These boots were made for … slipping out of … la la la … ha ha ha.)
I had to acknowledge that despite my excitement to follow the trail of mystery snarl, any boy who left me a ticket to see Gramma Got Run Over by a Reindeer would unlikely turn out to be a keeper. The title, quite simply, offended me. Langston says I should have a better sense of humor about these things, but I don’t see what’s so funny about the idea of a reindeer going after one of our senior friends. It is a known fact that reindeers are herbivores who subsist on plant life and shun meat, so I hardly think they’d be gunning for someone’s gramma. It upset me to think about a reindeer harming Gramma, because we all know that if that happened in the real world and not in the movies, then the Wildlife Service would go hunting for that reindeer and do away with the poor antlered guy when it was probably Gramma’s fault getting in his way like that! She always forgets to wear her glasses and osteoporosis hunches her walk and slows her down. She’s like a walking bull’s-eye for dear ol’ Bambi!
I figured the whole point of bothering going to the movie at all would be to possibly get a look at mystery boy. But the dares he’d left inside my stocking with the Moleskine notebook, on a Post-it note placed onto the movie ticket, had said:
DON’T read what I wrote in the notebook until you’re at the theater.
DO write down your worst Christmas memory in the notebook.
DON’T leave out the most horrific details.
DO leave the notebook behind for me, behind Mama’s behind.
Thank you.
I believe in honor. I didn’t read the notebook ahead of time, which would be like peeking in your parents’ closet to see your Christmas present stash, and I vowed to hold off reading it until after the movie.
As prepared as I’d been to dislike Gramma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, I was completely unprepared for what I’d find at the cinema. Outside the theater showing this particular movie, there were rows of strollers in uniform formation against the wall. Inside was complete pandemonium. The 10 a.m. show, apparently, was the Mommy and Me viewing, where moms could bring their babies and toddlers to watch really inappropriate movies while the little ones babbled and burped and cried to their hearts’ content. The theater was a cacophony of “Wah wah” and “Mommy, I want …” and “No!” and “Mine!” I barely had a chance to pay attention to the movie, what with having Goldfish crackers and Cheerios thrown in my hair from the aisles behind me, watching Legos hurl through the air, and unsticking Great-aunt Ida’s taps from the sippy cup liquid spillage on the floor.
Children frighten me. I mean, I appreciate them on a cute aesthetic level, but they’re very demanding and unreasonable creatures and often smell funny. I can’t believe I ever was one. Hard to believe, but I was more put off by the movie theater than the movie. I only made it through twenty minutes of watching the black comedian man playing a fat mama on the screen while rows of mommies tried to negotiate with their toddlers in the seats before I couldn’t take it any longer.
I got up from my seat and went outside the movie theater to get some peace and quiet in the lobby so I could finally read the notebook. But two mommies returning from taking their toddlers to the potty accosted me before I could dig in.
“I just love your boots. They’re adorable!”
“Where did you get that hat? Adorable!”
“I AM NOT ADORABLE!” I shrieked. “I’M JUST A LILY!”
The mommies stepped back. One of them said, “Lily, please tell your mommy to get you an Adderall prescription,” as the other tsk-tsk’d. They quickly hustled their tykes back into the cinema and away from the Shrieking Lily.
I found a hiding place behind a huge, standing cardboard cutout advertisement for Gramma Got Run Over by a Reindeer. I sat down cross-legged behind the cutout and opened the notebook. Finally.
His words made me so sad.
But they made me especially glad I’d gotten up at four that morning to make him cookies. Mom and I had been making the dough all month and storing it in the freezer, so all I’d had to do was thaw out the various flavors, place them in the cookie press, and bake. Voilà! I made a cornucopia tin of spritz cookies in all the available flavors (a strong affirmation of faith that Snarl would be worthy of such efforts): chocolate snowflake, eggnog, gingerbread, lebkuchen spice, mint kiss, and pumpkin. I’d decorated the spritz cookies with appropriate sprinkles and candies according to each one’s flavor and wrapped a bow around the cookie tin.
I took out my headphones and tuned my iPod to Handel’s Messiah so I could concentrate on writing. I resisted the urge to mock-conduct with the pen in my hand. Instead, I answered Mystery Boy’s question.
My only bad Christmas was the year I was six.
That was the year that my pet gerbil died in a horrible incident at show-and-tell at school about a week before Christmas break.
I know, I know, it sounds funny. It wasn’t. It was actually a gruesome massacre.
I’m sorry, but despite your DON’T request, I must leave out the horrific details. The memory is still that vivid and upsetting to me.
The part that really scarred me—separate from the guilt and loss of my pet, of course—was that I earned a nickname after the incident. I had screamed like heck when it happened, but my rage, and grief, were so big, and real, even to such a little person, that I couldn’t make myself STOP screaming. Anyone at school who tried to touch or talk to me, I just screamed. It was like basic instinct. I couldn’t help myself.
That was the week I became known at school as Shrilly. That name would stay with me through elementary and middle school, until my parents finally moved me to a private school for high school.
But that particular Christmas was my first week as Shrilly. That holiday, I mourned not only the loss of my gerbil but also that bizarre kind of innocence that kids have, believing they can always fit in.
That was the Christmas I finally understood what I’d heard family members whisper in worry about me: that I was too sensitive, too delicate. Different.
It was the Christmas I realized Shrilly was the reason I didn’t get invited to birthday parties, or why I always got picked last for teams.
It was the Christmas I realized I was the weird girl.
When I finished writing my answer, I stood up. I realized I had no idea what Mystery Boy had meant by telling me to leave the notebook behind Mama’s behind. Was I supposed to leave it on the stage in front of the screen showing the movie?
I looked over to the concession stand, wondering if I should ask for help. The popcorn looked especially yummy, so I went to get some, nearly knocking over the cardboard cutout in my hungry stomach’s sudden urgency. That’s when I saw it: Mama’s behind. I was already behind it. The cardboard cutout was a picture of the black man playing fat Mama, whose rear end was particularly huge.
I wrote new instructions into the notebook and placed it behind Mama’s behind, where no one would likely see it except for the one who came looking for it. I left the red Moleskine along with the box of cookies and a tourist postcard that had been stuck to a piece of gum on the floor in the movie theater. The postcard was from Madame Tussauds, my favorite Times Square tourist trap.
I wrote on the postcard:
What do you want for Christmas?
No, really, don’t be a smart aleck. What do you really really really supercalifragiwant?
Please leave information about that, along with the notebook, with the security lady watching over Honest Abe.*
Thank you.
Yours sincerely,
Lily
*PS Don’t worry, I promise the security guard won’t try to feel yo
u up like Uncle Sal at Macy’s might have. I assure you that wasn’t sexual so much as he’s genuinely just a huggy kind of person.
PPS What is your name?
five
–Dash–
December 23rd
The doorbell rang at around noon, just when Gramma Got Run Over should have been getting out. So my first (admittedly irrational) thought was that somehow Lily had tracked me down. Her uncle in the CIA had run my fingerprints, and they were here to arrest me for impersonating someone worthy of Lily’s interest. I took a practice run for the perp walk as I headed over to the peephole. Then I peeped, and instead of finding a girl or the CIA, I saw Boomer shifting from side to side.
“Boomer,” I said.
“I’m out here!” he called back.
Boomer. Short for Boomerang. A nickname given to him not for his propensity to rebound after being thrown, but for his temperamental resemblance to the kind of dog who chases after said boomerang, time after time after time. He also happened to be my oldest friend—old in terms of how long we’d known each other, certainly not in maturity. We had a pre-Christmas ritual dating back to when we were seven of going to the movies together on the twenty-third. Boomer’s tastes hadn’t changed much since then, so I was pretty sure which movie he was going to choose.
Sure enough, as soon as he bounded through the door, he cried, “Hey! You ready to go see Collation?”
Collation was, of course, the new Pixar animated movie about a stapler who falls helplessly in love with a piece of paper, causing all of his other office-supply friends to band together to win her over. Oprah Winfrey was the voice of the tape dispenser, and an animated version of Will Ferrell was the janitor who kept getting in the young lovers’ way.
“Look,” Boomer said, emptying his pockets, “I’ve been getting Happy Meals for weeks. I have all of them except Lorna the lovable three-hole punch!”