A Cliché Christmas(9)
“So, that’s it, then?”
I gawked at him. What else does he want from me?
“Um . . . pretty much, yeah.”
“Fine.” He stood, placing his mug on the coffee table beside me.
“Fine,” I said, standing quickly to beat him to the front door.
Swinging it wide, I felt a burst of frosty air bite my face and sting my eyes. Weston took two steps out the door, then turned to face me again. My lungs emptied of oxygen as I worked to rip my gaze from his.
“I live in the blue house on Maple and Tenth.”
He lives here . . . in Lenox?
I opened my mouth to ask—
“You can take your set demands there after rehearsal tomorrow night.”
The wind cut through me, and I shivered. “You’re not coming?”
“Are you asking me to come?” His eyes sparked with challenge, but I refused the bait. I didn’t need him. I would never rely on Weston James.
Not again.
“No.”
He chuckled before jogging down the steps toward the walkway. Just as I closed the door, I heard, “Good night, Miss Figgy Pudding.”
CHAPTER FOUR
I’d been staring up at the ceiling in my tiny bedroom for hours, thinking about Savannah’s letter—and a certain uncle of hers.
Whether it was the seventh-grade home economics bake-off when Weston put cumin in my oatmeal cookies instead of cinnamon, or when I stole his shoelaces before the timed mile run in PE our sophomore year, Weston and I had more stories than a library could contain. Our entire childhood—kindergarten through high school graduation—overflowed with our shared history. He teased me relentlessly growing up, and I had secretly relished his attention.
We ran in completely separate circles, if you could call my complete lack of social status a circle. But even though we were never officially friends, I knew Weston James had accepted me even when none of the others had.
And it was all fun and games until—
I sat up in bed, unwilling to let my mind wander any further. Instead, I fixated on something else entirely. Throwing off my covers, I made a dash for the living room, where I’d left Savannah’s letter. I pushed her grateful words aside and lifted the creative drawing of her modern-day Mary to the dying firelight.
Modern Mary.
And that’s when I struck gold. At 3:03 on Monday morning. Why does creativity flourish at the most inopportune times?
I grabbed my laptop from the sofa and clicked open a new document. Instead of the blink of the cursor taunting me, I found a friendly challenge. A new story waited to be told. Yes, I may have been so over Christmas plots in general, but there was something quite enticing about a modern-day Nativity scene. I picked up the pile of scattered papers marked with useless notes and set them aside.
I lifted up a silent prayer, hoping I could pull this off in time for the casting.
And then I typed. Furiously.
Fifteen hours and counting . . .
Sleep was overrated anyway.
With a fresh script in one hand, my fourth cup of double-shot espresso in the other, and my undereye concealer as thick as painter’s putty, I was ready to face the music—literally. I could hear the plunking of piano keys from the parking lot.
As the doors of the theater whooshed open, I found myself searching every face. True to his word, Weston wasn’t there. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
I hated the idea of him hovering around, yet driving to his house later to drop off the set plans was likely a worse fate.
Betty took the stage. “Gather around everyone. Our director is here.”
I walked toward the stage, quietly refusing to join her up there. Once had been enough. I stayed on the floor just below her. When I reached for the microphone, she looked at me with confusion in her eyes.
“I’m fine down here. Thank you, Betty.” She nodded, handing it over immediately.
“Thank you all for coming tonight,” I began. “I’ll be casting for the roles in Modern Mary in a few minutes, but if there isn’t a role for you, please know that we can still use you somewhere. This production will take a lot of work to pull off. We may have set a lofty goal, but it’s for a good cause. Let’s not forget that.”
I heard several verbal confirmations before I continued. “This play is a new one.” The I-wrote-it-this-morning kind of new. “It was actually inspired by Savannah herself, and I hope you’ll be as excited as I am about it. It’s the Christmas story we all know . . . but set in modern times. What if Mary were a freshman in high school? What if the wise men were stockbrokers from New York? What if the shepherds who were out tending their flocks were actually cowboys on a dude ranch? It’s the same story with a modern twist.”
“Don’t you think it’s sacrilegious to make the Virgin Mary a high school student?”
I stood on my tiptoes to see where the sharp voice had come from. It didn’t take long to find the source. Sydney Parker stood to the side, arms crossed over her large and perky chest.
“I mean, really? That sounds like a bad holiday TV special.”
Her well-planned dig was easy enough to avert.
“Well, good thing it’s just a pageant then, one to raise money for a sick little girl who loves to draw Mary in jeans and a T-shirt.”
The sour look on Sydney’s pouty lips intensified.