My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories (14 page)

A few years from now, I can see it. Her in a silvery wedding gown made to match her hair, a wreath of ivy at the crown of her head, him, tall and slim, together in front of the marriage tree every North Pole elf has ever married in front of. Of course he will love her. Of course he will marry her. Who else would he love? Not me, obviously. I’m not an elf. I’m not like them.

*   *   *

I stepped outside of the Great Hall for a breath of fresh air, but then I just kept walking.

The air smells like peppermint all the time now. The candy-cane factory is just next door, and the confectionery elves are working round the clock.

It’s snowing, of course. There’s always snow on the ground here. It makes everything look diamond dusted. The thing about snow is, it’s very quiet. The air is hushed. It’s like church.

It’s reverential.

It’s dark, but it’s always dark this time of year. We won’t have sunshine for weeks. The elves don’t mind it, because it’s their natural habitat, but my papa worries I’ll get seasonal affective disorder, so in our house there are light-therapy boxes everywhere.

The sound of my boots crunching along the ground is the only sound I hear besides the sound of my heartbeat as I walk along the path from the Great Hall to our house. And then through the silence I hear Flynn call my name. “Natty, wait!”

I freeze. When I turn around he’s already caught up with me, and he’s just standing there, not wearing a coat. The cold doesn’t really bother the elves. I eye him warily. “Are you here to give me a lecture on holiday cheer and a joyful spirit?”

“No. I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

“Oh.” And then I draw up all my courage, and I just ask, because I have to know. “Why does it have to be her?”

“It’s only a Snow Ball, Natty.” But it isn’t. He knows it, and I know it.

Flynn looks up at the sky, at the North Star above us. Polaris, it’s called. A fixed point, more accurate than any compass. You always know where you are when you look up at it. Home. “The north celestial pole is shifting, did you know that? It’s because of the gravitational forces of the sun and moon. Polaris won’t always be what it is now.” I’m about to reply when he asks me, “Do you ever think about the future, Natalie?”

It thrills me to hear him say my name. So much so that I don’t answer so he’ll say it again.

“Natalie?”

“I’ve only ever thought about the future in days till Christmas,” I tell him. No more than three hundred sixty-four days ahead. It never occurred to me that anybody thought differently. Especially not elves. But I guess Flynn
is
different, and I guess I’ve always known that. It’s why we are friends. It’s why he knew I wasn’t okay, why he followed me out here to check. Whatever we are, we’ll always be friends.

I’m thinking maybe now is the right time to give him the robin. I feel around for it in my pocket. And then he says, “You don’t really belong here.”

His words hit me like a snowball to the face. They sting, but they land true. The robin slips through my fingers and deep into my pocket.

Flynn is still talking. “Sometimes I wonder how different things would be if you weren’t here. Sometimes I think maybe
I’d
be different.”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Like … maybe if you weren’t here, maybe I wouldn’t wonder about what the world is like beyond the North Pole.”

I wave him off. “Flynn, it’s not that great. I saw the world two Christmas Eves ago and I’m telling you, what we have here is better than anything out there. There’s eggnog every day! And candy cane hot chocolate, and those marshmallow cakes with the little red dots.”

“I’m pretty sure they have all that stuff, too. You’ll see. You’re going to go away someday,” he says, and it sounds like a premonition. “You’ll stop believing.”

Tears spring to my eyes. “Not me. I’ll never stop. Never ever ever.”

Stubbornly, he shakes his head. “One day you will, and you’ll forget all about us.”

“Stop saying that!”

“It’s all right. It’s what you’re supposed to do.”

I don’t like the sad look on his face; it weighs on me in a way that is unfamiliar and strange. We’ve never talked like this before. I don’t like the way it makes me feel—too real. Lightning quick, I pull the robin out of my pocket and hand it to him. “Here,” I say. “Merry Christmas.”

He holds the bird up to the moonlight and examines it. “It’s your best work,” he says, and from an elf, there’s no higher compliment. “It’s beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

Faster than I can blink, as fast as only an elf can be, he touches my cheek with his fingertips, whisper soft and cool. He tucks my hair behind my ear. And then, a sharp intake of breath, my own. Is this really happening?

I lean in closer, I close my eyes, and I purse my lips. And nothing.

I open my eyes. “Um … were you going to kiss me?”

“I—I can’t.”

“Why not?”

He hesitates and then he says, “I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

“You won’t hurt me,” I quickly say.

Flynn shakes his head.

I can see that he means to stand firm. The answer is no. So I say it, my whammy, my ace in the hole, the one thing an elf cannot refuse. “It’s my Christmas wish, Flynn.”

He opens and closes his mouth. He tries not to smile. “How is it that you always find a way to get what you want?” Before I can reply he says, “Don’t answer that. Just—close your eyes.”

Dutifully, I do.

“And Natalie?”

“Yes?”

“You aren’t the one I’m worried about getting hurt.”

Before I even have time to think, he tips my chin up, and he brushes his lips against mine. Flynn’s lips aren’t cool the way I imagined; they are warm. He is warm. He’s warm but why is he shivering? When I open my eyes again to ask him, he’s already backed away from me. “I have something for you, too,” he says.

I hold out my gloved hand, and he drops a piece of paper inside, and then he’s gone. Leaving me to wonder if I imagined the whole thing. Living where I live, it can sometimes be hard to tell the difference between magic and make believe.

I open the piece of paper.

Lars Lindstrom

10 Osby

Marigold loved this Christmas tree lot. It was brighter—and maybe even
warmer
—than her mother’s apartment, for one thing. Fires crackled inside metal drums. Strings of bare bulbs crisscrossed overhead. And, beside the entrance, there was a giant plastic snowman that glowed electric orange. Its pipe gave off real puffs of smoke.

She loved the husky green scent of the Fraser firs and the
crinkle crunch
of their shavings underfoot. She loved the flannel-shirted men, hefting the trees on top of station wagons and sedans, tying them down with twine pulled straight from their pockets. She loved the makeshift wooden shack with its noisy old cash register. The shack’s walls were bedecked with swags and wreaths, and its rooftop dripped with clear-berried mistletoe like icicles. And she especially loved the search for the perfect tree.

Too tall, too short, too fat, too skinny. Just right.

Marigold Moon Ling’s family had been coming here for years, for as long as she could remember. But this year, Marigold had been coming here alone. Frequently. For an entire month. Because how do you ask a complete stranger for a completely strange favor? She’d been wrestling this question since Black Friday, and she had yet to discover a suitable answer. Now she was out of time. The solstice was tomorrow, so Marigold had to act tonight.

Marigold was here … for a boy.

God. That sounded bad, even in her head.

But she wasn’t here because she
liked
him, this boy who sold Christmas trees, she was here because she
needed
something from him.

Yes, he was cute. That had to be acknowledged. There was no getting around it, the boy was an attractive male specimen. He simply wasn’t her usual type. He was …
brawny.
Lugging around trees all day gave one a certain amount of defined musculature. Marigold liked guys who were interested in artsier, more
indoor
activities. Reading the complete works of Kurt Vonnegut. Maintaining a respected webcomic. Playing the stand-up bass. Hell, even playing video games. These were activities that tended to lead to bodies that were pudgy or scrawny, so these were the bodies that Marigold tended to like.

However, this Christmas Tree Lot Boy possessed something that the other boys all lacked. Something she needed that only he could provide.

She needed his voice.

The first time she heard it, she was cutting through the parking lot that lay between her apartment and the bus stop. Every holiday season, Drummond Family Trees (“Family Owned and Operated Since 1964”) took up residence in the northeastern corner of the lot, which belonged to an Ingles grocery store. It was the most popular tree-buying destination in Asheville. Lots were everywhere in the mountains of North Carolina—this was Christmas-tree-farm country, after all—so to distinguish themselves, the Drummonds offered friendliness and tradition and atmosphere. And free organic hot apple cider.

Asheville loved anything organic. It was that type of town.

The boy’s voice had stopped Marigold cold. He was unloading slim, straitjacketed trees from the back of a truck and shouting instructions at another employee. Marigold crouched behind a parked minivan and peered over its hood like a bad spy. She was shocked at his youth. He looked to be about her age, but the voice issuing from him was spectacularly age-inappropriate. Deep, confident, and sardonic. It seemed far too powerful for his body. Its cadence was weary and dismissive, yet somehow a remarkable amount of warmth and humor underlay the whole thing.

It was a good voice. A
cool
voice.

And it was the exact missing piece to her current project.

Marigold made comedic animated short films. She’d been making them for herself, for fun, since middle school, so by the time she launched an official YouTube channel last year—her senior year of high school—she had the practice and talent to catch the attention of thousands of subscribers. She was currently trying to catch the attention of one of the many animation studios down in Atlanta.

She did most of the voices herself, getting additional help from her friends (last year) or her coworkers at her mother’s restaurant (this year). But this film … it was important. It would be her mother’s winter solstice present,
and
her ride out of town. Marigold was cracking. She didn’t know how much longer she could live here.

She needed this boy’s help, and she needed it now.

It was an unusually blustery night. Marigold searched between the trees—free organic hot apple cider clutched between her hands, she was not immune to its lure—and strained her ears over the sounds of laughing children and roaring chain saws. Under any other context, this combination would be alarming. Here, it was positively merry. Or it would’ve been, had her stomach not already been churning with horror-movie-like dread.

“Can I help you with anything?”

There.
In the far corner. Marigold couldn’t hear the customer’s reply, but the boy’s follow-up said enough. “No problem. Just flag any of us down when you’re ready.”

She barreled toward his voice, knowing that the only way this would happen would be to place herself before him with as much speed as possible, so they’d be forced to interact. Cowardly, yes. But it was the truth. She hurried through a row of seven-footers, recently cut and plump with healthy needles. The boy rounded the corner first.

She almost smacked into his chest.

The boy startled. And then he saw her face, and he startled again. “You’ve been here before.”

Now it was Marigold’s turn to be surprised.

“That hair.” He nodded at the thick, stylish braid that she wore like a headband. The rest of her coal-black hair was pinned up, too. “I’d recognize it anywhere.”

It was true that it was her signature look. A sexy twenty-something with an eyebrow scar had once told her it looked cute. She
felt
cute in it. She did not feel so cute in this moment. She felt like someone who was about to upchuck.

“You know,” he said over her silence, “most people only have to buy a tree once.”

“I live over there.” Marigold pointed at the apartment complex next door. “And I catch the bus over there.” She pointed at the street beside the grocery store.

“Ah. Then I won’t stand in your way.” Though he didn’t move.

“I’m not going to the bus stop.”

“So … you
are
buying a tree?” He looked at her as if she were somehow askew. But at least he didn’t seem frustrated. His brown eyes and brown hair were as warm as chestnuts. He was even larger up close, his arms and chest even broader. He was wearing a red plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the uniform of Drummond Family Trees. Was he a Drummond or a seasonal hire?

It wasn’t that Marigold didn’t want a tree. She did. She really, really did. But her mother was saving for a new house, and she was saving for an apartment of her own in Atlanta. Her brain scanned for another way around this situation. She needed time to suss him out—and time to show him that she was a totally normal human being—before asking him the scary question. Unfortunately, a tree seemed to be her only option.