“You got fired?” I’m shocked. Priya has talked about her job at Glossier nonstop since starting in April. Who wouldn’t want someone as passionate and experienced as Priya on their team? I feel a surge of rage on her behalf.
“Yep. A pretty shitty month on all fronts.” She flops her head back against the pillow and stares at the ceiling. The fire’s gone out of her after her tirade. She looks exhausted and resigned, and completely at odds with her surroundings because she’s still wearing an intricately beaded flapper costume.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” I ask.
“Because you didn’t ask. And it’s embarrassing. How do I bring that up? ‘Oh hey, guys, you know the job that I keep bragging about? The one that I love? Yeah, turns out they didn’t feel the same way.”
Theo perches on the bed beside Priya and clasps his hand with hers.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her from where I’m standing frozen beside her bed. “Finn’s right, you’re always so happy. I guess sometimes we forget to ask about you.”
“Well, it’s bullshit,” she snaps with a second wind of rage. “I’m ‘happy.’ You say that like it’s a mythical island you’re not invited to. You don’t want to be happy. It’s like you’re allergic to happiness. Why aren’t you with David right now? Or why isn’t he here? I mean, how dare he have a family who loves him! Who loves you, too!”
My hackles rise at her accusation. “I’m not with David because this is our tradition and it’s important to me. You’re my chosen family. That means something to me. But apparently it doesn’t mean anything to you.”
“Hannah, we’re together all year long. This one-day-a-year tradition isn’t what makes us a family,” she scoffs. “This is just a way to pass the time on a day that would otherwise be a real bummer for the three of you.” She pauses. “I’m sorry, I know that was harsh, but—”
“She’s kind of right,” Finn says.
I stare daggers in his direction. They don’t understand. None of them do.
“I’m going for a walk. I need a minute.” I tear aside the curtain and storm off.
twenty-two
Hannah
Christmas #3, 2010
“Fries?” Finn asks as we pass a glowing orange open sign in the grease-stained front window of a diner.
“Fries,” I confirm.
Everything in Boston closes early. It feels miraculous to stumble on a diner open at 11:00 p.m. on Christmas, especially when we still have an hour to kill before the midnight Chinatown bus. Brooke suggested we stay the night, but nothing about sharing the pullout couch in the middle of her living room, which now smelled like charred ham, felt appealing. And if we stayed, we’d only have another awkward meal with Brooke and Spencer to look forward to in the morning, although at least his family wouldn’t join for that.
When she offered, I gave Finn the signal we devised for parties when one of us wanted to leave and dipped my right ear to my shoulder like I was stretching my neck. “You know what, I have to get back tonight. I forgot to feed my pet turtle before we left and he’s probably hungry,” he lied.
“You have a pet turtle?” Brooke asked.
“Big turtle guy,” Finn deadpanned.
I made fun of him for the turtle when we made it outside. “The first rule of improv is yes, and,” he rebutted, “If you’d yes, anded me, you could have had a fictional exotic pet of your very own.”
“Are turtles exotic? I don’t think that counts.”
“I’m just saying that you lost your opportunity to yes, and a pet parrot into existence.”
Inside the diner, I shove my backpack into the red vinyl booth before sliding in and stripping off my winter layers. A sixtysomething waitress in a pink bowling shirt embroidered with her name takes our order. Martha’s bleach-blond hair is shellacked into a beehive and the smell of hairspray radiates off her in waves.
“That sucked, right?” I ask Finn after Martha retreats to the kitchen to put in our order and tempt fate by standing anywhere near an open flame with her choice of hairstyle.
“I hope Brooke’s not holding her breath for a Michelin star.”
It wasn’t that Brooke burnt the ham, which she did, it was that she so thoroughly erased any glimmer of our family’s Christmas traditions. She was all manic smiles as she tripped over herself to suck up to Spencer’s family, who drove down from Maine for the day.
First of all, ham? We always had lasagna on Christmas. Then there was the white elephant gift exchange she insisted on where three different people brought taffy, some dumb in-joke with Spencer’s family. Grandma Betty was not thrilled to get stuck with my gift, a throw pillow screen printed with a bare-chested Nicolas Cage with his lower half encased in a banana peel for modesty. I bought it at a joke shop on Newbury Street hoping Finn would pick my gift.
The nail in the Christmas coffin was when Spencer suggested we turn off The Grinch and put on It’s a Wonderful Life and Brooke actually agreed with him.
Martha drops off a plate piled with fries doused in cheese sauce and two chocolate milkshakes.
“We should have stayed on campus.” I take a long pull of shake to drown my sorrows.
“Reginald Tiddlywinks could have joined us,” Finn laments. Reginald Tiddlywinks III—heir to the inventor of the children’s game—is the ritzy alter ego Finn invented for himself last Christmas. We scrimped and saved all of fall semester to book a room at the Copley Plaza hotel for the weekend. On Christmas, we went downstairs to the swanky wood-paneled bar and drank candy cane martinis in outfits borrowed from BC’s drama department pretending to be Reginald Tiddlywinks and his mistress, Miss Scarlett Oglethorpe.
The bar’s signature holiday cocktail was dangerous, it tasted like melted peppermint stick ice cream, and not at all like booze. The more we drank, the smoother Finn’s British accent became—he was perfecting it for an upcoming audition to play Henry Higgins in the drama department’s spring production of My Fair Lady—while the addition of alcohol sent my attempt at an accent careening back and forth on a spectrum between The Godfather and Cool Runnings. No one believed our fake backstories, but it didn’t matter, we spent the evening in a bubble of our private jokes laughing so hard Finn shed actual tears.
“Reginald has an open invitation next year, because I’m never going back there for Christmas again. Or maybe ever. I haven’t decided.”
“Fine with me.” Finn tips his milkshake toward mine to seal the promise with a cheers.
I feel lucky that Finn was there with me today, both as moral support, but also as a witness to my sister’s Olympic-level effort to replace our family with a shiny new one of her own. It’s clear now that ours was a pity invite. Not having a “real” family won’t be so bad. What Finn and I have is better than family anyway, because we chose it.