Kiss Her Once for Me (4)

I was nineteen. My mother had provided the fake ID. Happy fucking holidays.

Is that really my Christmas wish?

The answer is, apparently, yes. I don’t have anyone else. If last Christmas is any indication, it’s best I’m not alone for the holidays. I tend to make misguided life choices in the name of loneliness.

“Why would I leave Phoenix for somewhere wet and cold?” Linds asks, reminding me that my Christmas wishes are always irrelevant.

“Because I’m here?”

She smacks her lips into the phone. “Elena Oliver, don’t do that.”

“Don’t do what?”

“You’re so dramatic. You’ve always been like this. Don’t get all sensitive and try to make me feel guilty for not wanting to spend Christmas in the rain.”

“I wasn’t—”

A deep voice growls in the background of the call, and Linds mutters something under her breath in reply. “I gotta go.”

“I could always fly down to Phoenix,” I offer pathetically. So very pathetically. Just a twenty-five-year-old woman, begging her mother to spend Christmas with her.

“Now’s not a good time for that. Just Venmo me the money by tonight, okay?”

That’s it. No happy holidays. No I love you. The call disconnects before I can even say goodbye. The earlier shame in my stomach is eclipsed by the aching hole of loneliness in my chest. I’m going to spend Christmas by myself in my squalid studio apartment, eating a five-dollar rotisserie chicken over my kitchen sink for dinner.

Homesickness sluices through me, but there is no home to be sick for, nothing waiting for me here or anywhere.

I don’t let myself think about the brief moment last Christmas when I thought I’d found someone to ease the ache, a person to call home.

But I’m always alone, have always been alone, and just because it’s Christmas doesn’t mean there’s any reason for that to change. You can feel just as lost and aimless at Christmas as any other time of the year.

I pause as I wait for a walk sign, and around me, the snow is already turning to rain.

The thing about snow is, it never lasts, and you’re always left a slightly dingier version of the world when it starts to melt.

I stare down at my cracked phone screen. I’m already four minutes late for work.

Snow magic, my ass.





Chapter Two


“You’re late.”

These are the words that greet me when I come huffing into Roastlandia at 10:06 a.m. Through glasses obscured by the snow-rain, I catch sight of my reflection in the coffee shop front window. My brunette braid is waterlogged, my bangs are plastered to my forehead, and my pale skin is flushed from anxiety and exertion. In short, I look like someone who’s about to get fired.

My boss, Greg, stands by the front door awaiting my arrival, his ginger-bearded face scrunched up and condescending.

All I can do at this point is grovel. “I know. I’m so, so sorry. The buses were delayed because of the snow, and I had to walk here, and—”

Greg simply tsks. “I don’t need to hear excuses, Ellie. Just clock in.”

I don’t argue with the man who holds my fate in his grubby, mustache-sculpting-wax-stained fingers, but I will draw him vindictively later—exaggerate his neck beard and his skim-milk complexion and those beady little eyes. He’s wearing his threadbare “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like” T-shirt, which means he’s the only person in Portland under forty being ironic unintentionally.

As if to underscore the irony, he looks me up and down and scoffs. “You look like a basset hound who got stuck in a washing machine. What are the customers going to think when they see you?”

“Sorry, Greg,” I say again as I follow him into the back. “It won’t happen again.”

He looks skeptical at best.

I want to point out that I’ve never been late before, not once in the nine months I’ve worked at Roastlandia. That I do dishes while my coworkers take their vape breaks, that I’ve worked through numerous lunches at his behest (without pay) and never once complained. But there’s no point with Greg.

When I got fired from my last job, and my ten-year plan fell apart, I was just desperate to put some of the pieces back together. So I got a job at a coffee shop in a city full of incredible coffee, and I figured it would be a great place to work while I got back on my feet.

But it turns out I’m a failure at serving coffee, just like I was a failure of an animator.

Roastlandia is in the late-morning rush, and I quickly join my coworker Ari behind the counter. She’s at the register, humming along to a Christmas song that sounds tinny through the speaker. The same speaker I’ve already threatened to rip off the wall a half-dozen times already this holiday season if it plays Michael Bublé one more time.

“You’re like the cynical, city-dwelling, career gal at the beginning of a Hallmark movie who hates the holidays and has her heart melted by the strapping, small-town Christmas tree farm owner,” Ari said the other day as I complained under my breath about Greg’s obsession with garlands.

“Yes, except the part about being a ‘career gal,’?” I replied, gesturing around us.

The second he’d digested his Thanksgiving tofurkey, Greg decked out Roastlandia in twinkle lights and holly and started his Spotify Christmas playlist on repeat, convinced customers love the cheer as much as they love the overpriced holiday-themed lattes. As if everyone celebrates Christmas. As if it’s not the most triggering time of the year. With its steampunk-looking espresso machine and handcrafted artisan chairs and the artwork featuring overweight cats made out of recycled soda bottles for sale on the walls, Roastlandia’s usual vibe is hipster coffee shop trying too hard to seem like it’s not trying at all.