*
No matter where I looked, there were things piled neatly upon piles of other things, deceptively tidy until I started dismantling them. Shoeboxes stacked under the bed. A closet crammed full of clothes. A dresser so full the drawers didn’t open. A glass-fronted cabinet piled with two sets of dishes and seemingly endless glassware. The ironware bowl she would let me put milk in for the faeries, which she called by the Sicilian name, donas de fuera. The glass terrarium arranged with succulents, marbles, and a few of my old Star Wars figures. The Santa Claus plate for cookies. Dozens of hand towels and napkins and bath towels. Boxes of jewelry, boxes of holiday decorations, unlit themed candles from decades back, and dozens upon dozens of ceramic figurines.
It was a treasure trove.
I found cookbooks from the sixties and seventies with pictures of people in front of trays of crackers or pots of fondue. I found champagne coupes, shot glasses, aperitif glasses, and highballs. I found long sparkly dresses in silver and pink and gold, with shoes to match. I found rhinestone necklaces and even a half-full bottle of Scotch.
Wren came over with her friend Ahmet, and we worked on hauling out stuff we didn’t need for the party. I kept all the old photos for Dad, the sets of china and some of the jewelry for Anne, and some of the clothes for me. We took the big wooden cabinet down to a consignment shop and managed to trade it for more glassware, including a little ice bucket. We threw out loads of slips, towels, and greeting cards.
Then I started to really plan.
We needed food.
We needed booze.
We needed music.
We needed décor.
And we needed guests.
We pooled our Christmas cash, and I borrowed Dad’s Costco card. We bought a whole wheel of Brie, a block of cheddar, a bunch of grapes, and tiny, individual quiches that cooked in the oven. We also got chips, crackers, hummus, and salsa, and fancy glass bottles of Coke. It wasn’t exactly my dream of canapés, but I figured that once it was all arranged on trays surrounded by grapes, it would look pretty nice.
Then we arranged for the drinks. Penelope had a cousin we could pay extra to get booze for us. I would make a big vodka punch in Grandma’s punchbowl, and then hopefully we could pool our funds and get some bottles of Korbel, a few more of André, and a case of supercheap beer. I know that over at Mossley, they probably guzzled capital-C champagne, the kind that comes from the Champagne region of France. But no matter how classy I wanted our party to be or how much I read about fancy things, I knew Korbel was stretching the limits of my budget.
It would have to do.
Ahmet agreed to make a playlist on his phone and had the stuff to run it through Grandma’s ancient sound system. We texted our crew from school. Wren even asked a guy she liked from the local coffee shop if he’d come. He said he had another party to go to, but he’d try to stop by, and ever since she’d been trying to play like the possibility wasn’t on her mind a lot.
For décor, I fished through all the Christmas decorations and picked out the strings of fairy lights. Wren, Penny, and I hung them from the ceiling of the trailer and from the trees outside. We stuck candles in silver snowflake candleholders, covered the furniture in white sheets, and polished trays until they gleamed.
It took a week and a half of work to get the place shipshape. Some nights I would stay overnight at the trailer, stretched out on the scratchy sheets of Grandma’s bed, a brightly woven afghan over my feet. I thought that maybe I’d dream of her, but instead I dreamed of the gold-smeared Krampus. In my dreams, he flayed off all my skin with his whips, and underneath I was made from pressed glass, like one of Grandma’s pretty trays. Then the glass cracked and fell, sharp shards of ice melting in the torch fire, and my real self was underneath, a self no one had ever seen before.
You created me, he said, eyes bright and hot as coals. But once you create a thing, you can’t always control it.
I was raw and trembling in front of him. I opened my mouth to speak, to beg for him not to hurt me or maybe to hurt me more, I wasn’t sure which—and then woke, sweat cooling on my skin.
After that, I tried not to sleep so much. After all, there was lots of work to do.
The night before New Year’s Eve, I moved on to fixing up the outside of the trailer. I arranged some lawn chairs around an outdoor table and lit some more candles to make a smoking parlor. I hung silver Christmas-tree ball ornaments from the trees with fishing wire. Then, finally, I took a step back and looked around. It was beautiful. Glimmering. Magical.
One of the other things my dad had brought back from dumpster-diving was occultist Aleister Crowley’s book, Magick. I remember his definition of magic vividly: “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with will.”
I’d willed this into being. For a moment, I felt like a magician.
Then my vision shifted, and I saw the place as Roth and Silke were going to see it, as the boy in gold with the beautiful, no-doubt-expensive costume would see it. A sad, ramshackle trailer hung with a bunch of cheap lights.
“They’re not really coming,” I said. “You know that, right?”
“What?” Wren sat in the open doorway, trying to fit into a pair of narrow silver shoes that she’d borrowed from Penelope. She never wore heels.
“The Mossley kids. Roth. Silke. Why would he let his friends come when he knows having two girlfriends at the same party is a recipe for disaster? He wouldn’t. And why would Silke come to a trailer park? What if no one else comes, either? What if it’s just us at this party?”
“Then we get loaded,” Wren said. “Really, really, really loaded.”
I sighed, slumping in a lawn chair. “And eat all those little quiches by ourselves. And cry.”
Wren and I had been friends for years, since we’d met at the muddy pond the town called a swimming hole. She was trying to drown a boy she liked and got in trouble with his mother. Penny and I rescued her by lying and saying the boy had started it. Which pretty much set a precedent. One of us would get in boy trouble, and the other two had to bail her out.
Even though Penny and I had known each other longer, Wren was the one who knew my dumbest secret. After Wren found out about my fake boyfriend, I’d had to have a fake breakup with fake texts and everything so Penny didn’t guess. If they’d both known, we would all have had to talk about it.
It was too bad. My fake boyfriend was the best boyfriend I’d never had.
*
Joachim was a name I’d found on a website that I’d stumbled across when I was looking up the meaning of my own name. It stuck in my head until it came blurting out of my mouth as a boy I really liked, a boy who never existed. After that, I just embroidered the lie. I made up details about his life, about how we met online and how we had plans for him to come up that summer. I sent myself long e-mails full of things we would do in the future, nicknames for one another and lines copied from favorite movies and books and then showed off those e-mails like they were real. I made him into the one person who truly understood me—and weirdly, sometimes he seemed to understand me better than I understood myself.
With my fingers, he wrote that all I needed was to believe that the world wasn’t one way. That it was big enough to contain a lot of different stories in it, big enough to be unpredictable. But I wasn’t sure how to believe him. I knew it was only me talking.
After I’d been found out and “broke up” with Joachim, I cried into my pillow for so long that my face was swollen and puffy at school the next day. Penny snuck out during lunch and came back with a mocha Frappuccino of sympathy. Wren, knowing that both the breakup and the boyfriend were fake, spent the day marveling and being creeped out by my acting prowess.
A couple of nights later, when I couldn’t sleep, I went outside and sat on the stairs in front of my house. Looking up at the glow of streetlights buzzing with moths and feeling the shiver of the wind, I wished that the stars or Santa’s elves or Satan himself would bring me someone like Joachim—or at least give me some kind of sign that the world was big enough and unpredictable enough to contain someone like him—then I’d be as good or bad as I needed to be to deserve it.
*