“Plus, I’m sure we’ll have way cooler plans next year,” Finn says. “Next year, we’ll live here.”
That’s the plan. After we graduate in May we’ll move to New York. Finn will become a big Broadway star. He has a plan to work his way up through the ensemble into feature roles within two years, and win a Tony by twenty-five. I, on the other hand, am less certain about the future. The career counselor at the campus career center gave me a worn copy of What Color Is Your Parachute? to read over the break.
This morning, before going to Brooke’s, we walked around Tompkins Square Park pointing out which buildings we’d live in when we moved to the city.
“These are definitely the best part of Christmas,” I tell Finn as I drag a fry through the pool of cheese sauce on the plate.
“Here’s a burnt one,” Finn points to a dark brown fry. Our complementary fry preferences—the well-done fries for me, the undercooked ones for him—seems to validate the perfection of our pairing. I look at Martha, standing behind the counter marrying the ketchups, and I feel bad for her. Alone, on Christmas. She doesn’t have a Finn.
“Okay, enough about Brooke,” Finn says. “What I really want to talk about is Spencer’s shirt. The white cuffs with the blue shirt, who does he think he is, Gordon Gekko?”
His comment catches me so off guard that I shoot milkshake out my nose laughing. No one can snap me out of a bad mood like Finn.
twenty-three
Hannah
This year, December 25
I’ve been sitting outside the rec room of the children’s wing for twenty minutes and I already have a nemesis. A teenage boy, jaw speckled with acne, stole a Christmas cracker from one of the younger kids. He’s a bully. Sure, he probably has cancer, but he’s still a dick. Plus, hating him is better than hating myself. What if Priya is right and I am a bad friend?
After I left, it felt good to slam the crash bar of the stairwell door and climb until I was out of breath. When I was panting, I stepped out on the ninth floor, aimlessly roaming the halls. But even after I recovered from the climb, my heart banged in my chest, and I could feel tears prickling behind my eyes.
On the verge of a panic attack, I wandered onto the children’s ward. The unit is oddly cheerful, the hallways painted with murals of Candy Land. I’m watching the theater troupe, which is really more of a folk band, sing Christmas songs to a circle of children through the rec room’s plate glass window.
I startle when someone appears at my side. I look over, expecting a nurse telling me I’m not allowed to be here, but it’s Finn.
“How’d you find me?” I ask.
“Are you kidding? You’re wearing a bright red ball gown and a feathered headpiece. Everyone in this hospital has heard about us and thinks we’re total freaks. I overheard two of the nurses speculating that we’re in some kind of cult. One of them told me you were up here. I think she was worried you were recruiting the children.”
I laugh in spite of myself, but I’m secretly disappointed that he wasn’t frantically searching for me. Ideally, because he needed to tell me how wrong Priya was. How unfair her words were.
But instead he says, “Our costumes are better.” He nods at the music group in the rec room. “I’m also a better singer than him.” The lone man in the group is butchering “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” an ambitious song choice for his limited vocal range. His attempted falsetto comes out crackly and sharp, but no one else notices. The kids are too hyped up on sugar and their parents are nearly catatonic, grateful for any distraction.
“We could challenge them to a duel?” I offer.
“I’m gonna guess dueling is frowned upon here. Also, what are you even doing up here? Isn’t it kind of messed up to gawk at all these sick kids like it’s some kind of sadness zoo?” He scrunches his nose in distaste.
“Shit, is that what I’m doing? I just wanted somewhere to think.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“Do you remember that Christmas we went to my sister’s? Our senior year of college?”
“I remember,” he says. “But why were you thinking about that?”
I shrug. The honest answer is that I’ve been trying to shove thoughts of what Priya said out of my brain. If I don’t think about it, I don’t have to deal with it. At least for a little while longer.
“Do you remember how awful that night was?” I ask.
“Oh god, yeah, your sister is a terrible cook. Not that you’re much better. Glass houses and all that.” He raises his eyebrows at me. “That ham she made was, like, black on the outside, but somehow still raw in the middle. And those rolls! We could have played hockey with them. You know, if one of us knew how to play hockey.”
“Sure. But do you remember how insufferable she was?”
“What do you mean?” He gives me a blank look.
“How she completely erased every single trace of our parents and moved on like: Poof! Brand new life!”
He’s silent for a minute while he mulls this over. “That’s not what I remember. I mostly remember how bad the ham was and how the whole apartment smelled like burnt meat. Although, in hindsight, who were we to complain? I’m pretty sure we showed up empty-handed.”
“No, you must remember. She was sucking up to Spencer’s mother and we had that stupid white elephant with all that taffy because that’s what Spencer’s family does every year? We didn’t even watch The Grinch. We used to watch it every year when I was a kid, it was our favorite part of Christmas.”
“Hannah, she probably didn’t want to watch The Grinch because you were twenty-one, not twelve.”
I puff out a breath. How could he have forgotten how bad that Christmas was? Time must have dulled his memory. In mine, that Christmas was painful. I wouldn’t have survived it without him.
“I remember one other thing,” he says with a finger poised in the air. “I remember her telling the story about her trip and how she went to all the places in your mom’s journal. I thought that was really nice.”
“What?” I would have known if that’s what Brooke was doing on her gap year. “No. Trust me, she was just gallivanting from one hostel to another following Spencer around like a little duckling.”
“I swear I remember her telling a sweet story about how much that trip meant to her and how she used your mom’s list as a guide. Maybe you were in the bathroom or something? Or you were talking to someone else?”
A seed of doubt plants itself in my gut. If she did say that, I definitely wasn’t there to hear it.
“Well, even if that’s true about her trip, it doesn’t counterbalance her abandoning our family.”
“I don’t know if I’d put it that way. Maybe she . . .” He hesitates. “. . . Moved on?”
“Exactly! She moved on! From me, from her only family. Who does that?”
“She invites you to every Christmas and Thanksgiving. Weren’t you complaining that she invited you to a Fourth of July barbecue last year?”