My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories(31)

*

I’m standing with my back pushed up against the wall, and my tights itch, and I’m wishing someone, anyone, would ask me to dance. Even out of pity. That would be fine. I catch Flynn’s eye while he’s spinning Elinor around. She looks good in his arms. She looks right. If it were me dancing with him, I would only come up to his chest. I wouldn’t be able to dance cheek to cheek.

I hang by the refreshment tables. They are my safe zone. For the first twelve days of December, dessert is themed. It’s a tradition, one of many. On the first day of Christmas, a partridge in a pear tree. This year, they did chocolate partridges stuffed with chestnut cream and drizzled with a tart pear syrup.

The chocolate partridge reminds me of the wooden bird in my coat pocket.

When I was eight, a robin got stuck in the Great Hall. It flew in an open window, and it couldn’t figure out how to fly back out. It kept flying up to the ceiling. I tried to shepherd the bird out the door with a Quidditch broom—the number-one requested present with six-to-eight-year-olds that year, though I think kids were hoping it would actually fly. None of us could figure out how to help the bird. But then Flynn climbed up on the banister, and the robin flew right up to him. He caught the bird and carried it outside, cradled in the palms of his hands, and the robin flew away. For days it was all anyone could talk about.

So for Christmas that year, I gave Flynn a bird I carved out of wood. I tried to do a robin, but I just couldn’t capture its likeness. So instead I did a chickadee with a glass eye, carved out of pine. I was nervous to give it to him.

Because the thing to understand about elves is that they aren’t usually into presents. They make things, they create, they labor, but they don’t like to receive. It’s not in their nature.

There was a good chance he wouldn’t accept it, but when he opened up the box, he stared at the chickadee for a long time. I watched as he held it in his hand, turning it over, feeling its weight. Was it good enough? I’d practiced other birds as well, but this was the only one I thought worthy enough of my friend. And then he said, “No one ever gave me a gift before.”

I let out the breath I was holding. “So you’ll keep it?”

“I’ll keep it.”

I’ve given him a bird every Christmas ever since. This year, I finally got the robin right. Black walnut, painted holly-berry red.

*

I’m pouring myself another cup of raspberry-ginger punch when I hear Elinor say, “It’s sad that Natty didn’t have anyone to come to the ball with. I doubt she’s ever even met a human boy before.”

“Yes, she has,” Flynn says. “That guy Lars, remember?”

Their backs are to me. They don’t know I’m standing in earshot. I could still slip away without them knowing.

Then Elinor says, “Oh, Flynn. It’s so obvious she made that up to make you jealous. She’s always had a crush on you.”

My vision goes blurry, and I drop my cup of punch. Red liquid streams all over the refreshments table and some splashes on my dress. How could she say that? Never mind the fact that she’s right, I do have a crush on Flynn. Always have.

“She didn’t make it up,” he says, and his voice rings out loud and clear like a bell. “I checked it out. The databases haven’t been completely updated so I looked in Santa’s actual logs. There really was a boy named Lars.”

“You’re just saying that to be kind,” Elinor says. “We all know Natty tells stories.”

My cheeks burn hot. I used to tell stories. For attention. Like the time I told everyone I got lost in a blizzard and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer came and rescued me. But I don’t tell stories anymore. Aren’t people allowed to change?

I clear my throat before I can stop myself. They whirl around in one motion, as if it were choreographed. Elinor has the grace to look ashamed. She’s worried I’ll tell Santa. I won’t. I’m not a little baby tattletale anymore. I can handle myself. My heart pumps so hard in my chest, I worry that everyone can hear it. So I speak loudly. “I don’t ‘tell stories,’ Elinor. And I wasn’t lying about Lars.”

*

Two years ago, because I begged and pleaded, because it was my Christmas wish, Santa took me out with him on Christmas Eve.

Most things about the night are a blur, as most magical things are. But when I close my eyes and try hard to remember, I remember dogs that yapped and dogs that barked, the smells of other people’s houses, the thrill of being somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. Christmas trees and Christmas cookies and Christmas stockings. Christmas everything. Mostly I took pleasure in watching Papa work, because he took so much pleasure in it. The way he arranged the presents just so. He really does know the name of every girl and boy. He’d adopt all the lost little girls and boys if he could. I just got lucky. Sometimes I think about my mother, my real mother, and I wonder if she knew whom she was giving me to. I like to think so.

Papa and I visited a house—it was small and blue with white shutters—by the sea. I remember the smell of salt and the sound of the water. While Papa got to work, I set off looking for the cookies. So far my favorites were peanut M&M’s ones at an apartment in Charleston, South Carolina, and a close second were fancy raspberry macarons in Paris.

I found a blue-and-white china plate with cookies dusted in powdered sugar. I bit into one. It was hard nougaty pecan. I was licking sugar dust off my fingers when I heard him. It was a teenaged boy, thirteen or fourteen, standing at the foot of the stairs, staring right at me. He had hair the color of lemon candy, a translucent yellow. “J?vlar!” he whisper-shouted.