“You can invite him, too,” she turned and pointed. When I pivoted, I realized she was talking about the hot Krampus boy I’d called to earlier, who was behind us in line, close enough to have heard her. My cheeks scorched, and I probably looked as ridiculous and sputtering as Roth had. The bare-chested, gold-streaked Krampus tipped his head toward us, in acknowledgment of being noticed.
“Want to come to a New Year’s party?” I called to him, in an act of uncharacteristic daring. It was only November fifth—officially Krampusnacht—so it was remotely possible he hadn’t firmed up plans.
“It would be my pleasure,” he said in a voice that shivered down my spine, a voice that seemed to come from a reality that had gotten a little bent.
“Bring all your friends,” Penny said with a vengeful smile in my direction, as though messing with Roth at the Krampuslauf was our fault and not her idea. As though maybe there was something wrong with the hot Krampus boy bringing his friends to a party in a trailer park. As though I had something to be ashamed of.
A few minutes later, we got our steaming Styrofoam cups of marshmallow-strewn chocolate and started the Krampuslauf, loping along for a half mile as Penny cursed out us, cursed out Roth, and cursed out love. Then we ditched and headed for the good mall.
*
It wasn’t like I didn’t understand about crappy boyfriends. I’d had one too. His name was Nicandro, and he’d been way too old for me. After we broke up, I was so messed up that instead of dating anyone else, I made up a boyfriend with an equally extravagant name.
Joachim.
I wrote his name on my notebooks in Sharpie, like he was a real person. So yeah, I understood how Penny could pretend that Roth loved her. After all, I’d pretended a whole person into being.
*
I figured the New Year’s party wouldn’t turn into a real thing, but I was wrong. The more time passed, the more the idea came alive in my mind. Even though it had started to goad Roth, and maybe even get Silke and him to come, it became more than that.
Although it was definitely still that, too.
“No, they’re coming,” Pen said, lying on my floor, scrolling through the messages on her phone. “Roth swears. And he said that he was sorry about not introducing me to Silke, but he’d just been so surprised to see us. We probably should have told him we were going.”
“So she’s not his girlfriend?” Somehow the toad had convinced her not to dump him yet again.
Penny sighed, long-sufferingly. “Kind of. I mean, I guess he never said we were exclusive.”
“He said you were his girlfriend,” Wren said. She sat in front of the pieces of cracked mirror I’d glued to the wall and ran her fingers over her half-shaved head, checking for too-long pieces.
“Not his only girlfriend.” She answered this too quickly, like maybe she was parroting back excuses Roth had given her. “Anyway, he promises that he’s going to drop her after the holidays. Before New Year’s Eve. He just doesn’t want her to be sad when they go home. Their parents know one another.”
Wren snorted. “Whatever. He’s a liar. So about the party…”
No one we knew had the kind of fancy New Year’s parties I was imagining. Not like the kind in black-and-white movies. The kind where people wore long, glittering silver gowns and drank champagne out of coupe glasses and kissed one another at midnight. The kind I was determined to somehow throw, despite our limited resources and even more limited experience.
“Probably someone has those,” Penelope said when I explained my vision.
“Roth’s parents,” Wren said. “State senators. Movie stars. People who get cars for Christmas. People who spend Christmas at ski chalets. Not us. You can’t have one of those parties in a trailer.”
“Sure I can,” I said, gripped by compulsion. Sometimes I felt like I was waiting for my life to begin and more than anything, in that moment, I wanted to force some kind of beginning. I wanted things to be different than usual. I wanted to bend reality. “Sort of. We all dress up. And we make, like, canapés instead of onion dip.”
Wren started to laugh. “Canapés? What the hell are those?”
“Finger food,” I said. “Crackers with stuff on them. If you want us to use my dead grandmother’s place to throw a party, it has to be the kind where we wear a gown and drink out of real glasses. No plastic cups or bags of chips or ripped T-shirts. It has to be nice. Otherwise, I’m out.”
They agreed, which I later realized meant that I not only needed to finagle the keys to the trailer, but that I had to actually throw a party worthy of all my big talking. When I volunteered to clean out Grandma’s trailer, Dad looked at me like he could see exactly what I was planning, but he gave me permission all the same.
“She had a lot of junk,” he said, from his chair in front of the television. A crime show was playing, and he had a big cup of tea balanced on his stomach.
“Some of it was nice,” said my stepmother, Anne. She was sitting on the couch, our pit bull, Lady, resting her box of a head on Anne’s lap. “Don’t throw out anything nice, okay? We could have a garage sale.”
“You’re not going to have a garage sale,” Dad snapped at her. “It’s all just going to rot in our basement.”
Lady blinked, roused from her nap. She let out a gentle wuff of concern.
“We could get the good stuff appraised,” Anne said. She and Dad had been together too long for her to pay attention to his moods. “Sell it online.”
“Oh, yeah, and who is going to pack up those boxes?” He threw up his hands, making the tea slosh in his cup. “Who is going to take them to the post office? It won’t be you!”
And just like that, my party was forgotten. I escaped with the keys and no particular instructions. I went over to the trailer, sat on Grandma’s worn velveteen sofa, and schemed. My grandmother had been the kind of lady who loved to drink and smoke and tell stories about being a nurse and the wild times she got up to before she married my grandfather. I hoped that if her spirit watched over the place, she’d be glad to be watching over a party.
*
My dad always said that I was a good kid with a great imagination, but also that I was a little bit of a space cadet. Anne told him he couldn’t say stuff like that to me. That it wasn’t good for my self-esteem.
When he first married her, I wasn’t sure how things would be, but she was sweet and normal and not at all like my real mom, who’d been fond of flying into rages and throwing things and who was off somewhere in New Mexico, committing credit card fraud. Our first Christmas together, Anne sewed me a tiny doll with jointed cloth limbs and thin embroidery floss for hair. I guess Dad had told her about my old Christmas lists.
I didn’t let her know, but I’d teared up when I saw the doll. I was too old for it, but I didn’t care. I carried her around in my purse, until she got so sticky with Jolly Ranchers and marked up by pens that I had to retire her to a bookshelf in my room. For a few months after that Christmas, I pretended Anne was my real mother.
I guess that’s what gave me the idea of pretending about Joachim.