My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories(55)

Wren had to drag me away. I grinned on as Penny and I were hauled to the hot-chocolate line.

“You guys are the worst,” Penny said in a muffled voice.

“You mean the best,” Wren told her, and then elbowed me in the side.

“Hey,” I yelled to Roth, waving. I wasn’t sure if that was what I was supposed to do to avoid getting elbowed again, but I figured Wren would be happy with any forward momentum.

Penny gave me an evil look, which looked extra evil from behind her mask.

For a moment, Roth seemed confused, then he realized how he knew me and I saw the beginnings of panic. After months of watching Penny suffer because of him, it was satisfying. “I don’t think I know y—” he started.

“Hi,” Wren said to the blond girl, interrupting him. “You must be Roth’s girlfriend. He’s told us so much about you. So much. Don’t worry—all good stuff.”

The girl smiled, which was pretty damning. None of the other kids looked at all surprised, like of course Roth would tell a bunch of people about how cool his girl was. Roth began turning a tomato red, shut his mouth and ground his teeth.

I knew Penelope was considering escaping—we were at a run, after all, so if she just ran, it wouldn’t look crazy or anything. I hoped Wren had a good grip on her.

“We’re having an absolutely brutal New Year’s party,” Wren continued, and this was why you shouldn’t bring Wren to things if you didn’t want chaos. She loved chaos above all other things. “You should all come. Roth knows how hard we go. I guarantee you’d have a good time. Right, Roth?”

Roth stammered something affirmative. He knew he couldn’t afford to piss us off. Call us scum-sucking dirtbags now, I thought. Double-dog dare you.

There was just one problem. We hadn’t been planning on having a New Year’s party. The last party I remember one of us having involved birthday cake, candles, and a Slip ’n Slide.

The blonde looked intrigued, though. We were townies and, to her, that meant we had drugs and booze and enough space to party without getting in trouble. The first one was silly, because, sure, we could get drugs. Anyone could, if they had the cash and the hookup. But at Mossley, dealers stopped by and delivered drugs straight to their door.

She was right about the other two, though. We had booze, because we had older siblings and cousins who would buy it for us, and liquor cabinets in our houses that our parents never bothered to lock, and because, compared to drugs, booze was dirt cheap.

And we had freedom. We could stay out all night for the price of a sloppy lie. No one was concerned about where we were for hours at a time and sometimes a lot longer than that. Theoretically, all of the Mossley students went home for winter break, but most of them drifted back the first week of January. After all, they spent most of the year here. Who did they know at home?

“Okay, yeah,” the girl said, looking from her friends to Roth, to me and Penny and Wren and smiling her oblivious smile. “That sounds like fun.”

*

My dad was fond of bringing home stuff he thought was still usable. Slightly moldering books from the local college, damaged sports equipment and used furniture he spotted leaning against dumpsters. He was responsible for the book that confused me about the faeries—and also got me to leave milk curdling in the sun outside Grandma’s trailer in the hopes of attracting a brownie to clean my room—and there was another book with devil stories.

The devil stories were a lot like the faerie stories. The devil was always a trickster, always seemed up for a good time, and was usually defeated in the end. In the stories where he prevailed and dragged a soul down to hell, the person usually deserved it.

He punished the naughty and rewarded the nice. Just like someone else who wore a lot of red. Scramble the letters in S-A-N-T-A and you get S-A-T-A-N.

*

It turned out Roth’s girlfriend’s name was Silke, which seemed completely improbable, but apparently was the kind of Nordic name that went with naturally ice-blond hair and swimming-pool blue eyes.

Wren plugged her number into my cell. Roth watched Penny like she was a dangerous animal who might suddenly bite him. I wished she would. Behind her mask, Penny was probably red-nosed and blotchy from crying, but from the outside at least, she looked like an avenging devil. Roth was right to be afraid.

Then Wren gave an address for this New Year’s party. My dead grandmother’s not-as-yet-sold trailer.

“Wren—” I said, trying to inject myself into the process. But Wren kept talking until it became too late to stop her. Which was, I reminded myself, the problem with Wren’s brand of chaos. She was always making the trouble the rest of us had to wriggle out of.

I had no idea what she was thinking. How would this help Penny?

I couldn’t picture anyone from Mossley at a trailer park, no less Roth and his friends. I was sure that was part of what Wren thought would be awesome about it, imagining Silke’s distress as she wobbled around the pickup trucks and plastic reindeer in her high heels, Roth on her arm. And Grandma’s trailer wasn’t a bad spot for a party, per se. I could volunteer to clear it out, a job that my dad had been avoiding. It might be fun to have a party.

But not a party with Roth and the kids from Mossley. Not a party that we couldn’t even pretend was cool, because they’d be there reminding us that it sucked.

I glared at her.