Approximately Yours (North Pole, Minnesota #3)(7)
She frowned and glanced at his leg. “Danny.”
“Oh, good. You stayed with me out of pity. Super.” She didn’t care about him. Maybe she’d never cared about him. “Well, I guess this saves you from having to be the bad guy.” Danny glanced around, searching for Marcus or Kevin or anyone who might be able to help him to the door. Everyone stayed hidden, either as part of the game or to avoid blowback from the Danny/Star/Phil triangle. Danny hopped toward the exit. He had to do this on his own.
“Seriously, Danny. Let me help you.” Phil reached for Danny’s arm.
Danny yanked it away. “I’m fine, Phil.” He had to get out of here. His entire chest tightened, like it was about to burst into ugly, blubbering tears. He couldn’t cry in front of his entire team, and he definitely couldn’t break down in front of Star.
Using columns of neon padding as his lifeline, Danny bounced on one leg across the floor and out the door.
“Have fun?” asked Dinesh.
“Best time ever.” Still wobbling on his shaky leg, Danny retrieved his crutches from Dinesh and scanned the floor. Sam and Oliver were still here, but they were with their girlfriends. Everyone was with their girlfriends, something Danny no longer had, which was a completely foreign concept to him. He could barely remember not having a girlfriend. He’d taken Star being his girlfriend for granted, like he’d taken having two unbroken legs for granted. Eyes stinging, he limped to the door and out onto Main Street, which, at least, was snow free. He felt like a spectacle, a sad, girlfriend-less sack with a broken leg.
And, ha-ha, it wasn’t like getting a new girlfriend would be an easy task for him. He couldn’t even have a normal conversation with two strangers in a coffee shop. This was the first day of his new life as a loner.
Tourists pranced down the sidewalk, peering into shop windows, carrying armloads of green, red, and gold shopping bags. Danny lowered his eyes and booked it to the end of the street.
Single. He was single now, something he hadn’t been in, like, forever. For as long as he or the collective consciousness of North Pole could remember, they’d always been “Danny and Star” or “Star and Danny.” Wherever one went, the other followed. Her friends were his friends and his friends were her friends. Their lives were intertwined to the point where untangling them would be impossible.
Danny bit his lip. He would not cry. Not here. But then the tears started rolling down his cheeks. Danny punched himself in the thigh, but the tears kept coming.
He stopped at the corner of his street and leaned hard on his crutches. Despite the colorful holiday decorations bedecking every house and the perpetual Christmas carols on the wind, the world felt gray and drab. He’d lost everything, everything that had meant something to him since he was ten years old.
Yeah, things had been off between him and Star for a little while, but Danny would 100 percent rewind the night if he could. He’d go back to before the arcade, when he was just an ignorant guy who had no idea Star was kissing Phil Waterston on the side. He could live with that, if it meant he still had some semblance of normalcy. He’d already lost basketball; he couldn’t stand losing Star right now, too. This whole thing was a nightmare, and it was time to wake up.
Squeezing his eyes tight, he lifted his face to the sky and made a wish—a Christmas wish. Something he never did, but these were desperate times. He counted to three, slowly opened his eyes, and glanced down. His leg was still in a cast, his open toe protected by a red and green striped stocking.
This town was good for nothing.
…
With the entire Page clan currently living under one roof, it wasn’t hard to see why Holly’s parents had stopped coming here for Christmas years ago.
Grandma’s house was like a sardine tin. Holly had nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.
Holly’s Vermont aunt and uncle (Vixi and Bob) spent most of their time lying on the couch watching Fox News, dressed in baggy blue jeans and matching plaid flannels, while their gaggle of young kids ran wild through Grandma’s living and dining rooms. Holly’s eyes were stuck in a permanent eye-roll every time she encountered them. Elda’s parents, Donder and Pilar Page, had snapped up Grandma’s bedroom off the back of the house and held court in the kitchen most of the time. Holly’s own parents, Rudolph (Dolph) and Linda, had commandeered the second floor with R.J., Holly’s little brother. Holly and Elda were sharing the attic, which was awesome, because Elda was awesome, except for the part where she kept chatting on the phone with people from home.
This afternoon she was FaceTiming with some guy she’d met in college. Holly adored her cousin, but this dude was well below her station, and Elda totally didn’t see it. Teddy was a short, stocky dude who rocked a limp, scraggly comb-over at age twenty-one, and he was playing Elda like a fiddle.
Today Teddy was full-on trying to break up with Elda. He kept mentioning how busy he was and how he was going into his final semester of college and needed to focus. He even managed to mention some girl named “Kara” at three different points during the conversation.
Holly didn’t have a ton of dating experience, but she was well-versed in the art of rejection, having been on the receiving end more than a few times. Elda needed to save face here. She couldn’t cede the upper hand to this classless jerk-store who treated Elda like garbage. Holly wrote a note on a blank page in her sketch pad and ripped it out.