“Your grandma,” he said, his heart pounding in his chest, “she was always threatening to set me up with one of you, the one with the gingerbread skills.” Danny had been with the same girl for six years. This was the closest he’d come to making a move since he was eleven.
“Elda,” Holly said right away. She draped her arm across her cousin’s shoulders. “Elda’s the gingerbread queen.”
Damn. Apparently he’d already made up his mind about which Page girl he wanted to be with, and it wasn’t Elda. Danny tried hard not to let the disappointment show. He was being stupid, repeating old patterns, because he obviously had this weird need to be liked by everyone, especially girls who wanted nothing to do with him. Elda had been smiling at him throughout this entire conversation. Elda did not hate his guts. The logical move here was to pursue her, not Holly. If Elda was the one his neighbor had wanted to set him up with, she probably had a good reason for it. “Maybe the two of us should get together some time to talk strategy.”
Elda hooked her arm through Holly’s. “Only if my cousin can come, too. We’re partners.”
“Sure.” He mentally tried to murder all the butterflies that had popped up in his stomach at the thought of hanging out with Holly. “Bring your A game, though. I’m looking for a challenge this year.”
…
“God, that was so fun!” Elda dashed down Main Street, Grandma’s velvet cape fluttering behind her like a superhero costume. She spun around and waited for Holly to catch up. “I needed that, for real.” She put her hands on her hips. “But why did you say what you said?”
“What do you mean?” Holly pulled her own cape tighter around her torso. It still wasn’t normal Minnesota freezing, but it was definitely chilly. Even the sweat Holly had worked up on the dance floor had stopped warming her.
“You told Danny I was good at building gingerbread houses. You know that’s not true. You’re the gingerbread queen.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want him.” Holly’s throat had been dry the whole night. She’d written him off after The Coffee Shop Incident because he’d said he had a girlfriend. But now he didn’t. The reason for her not doing the terrifying thing and confessing how she’d felt about him for years was gone. Now her only excuse was Elda. “You like him, right?”
“He’s super cute.”
“Then we’re going to put our combined superpowers to the test.” She pointed to herself and then to Elda. “We are going to make Danny Garland fall hopelessly in love with you.”
Elda narrowed her eyes for a moment as if figuring out the logic of this, then a slow, massive smile crept across her face. “You’re gonna keep me from being a total goober!”
“Yes,” Holly said. “I’m going make sure you avoid any mention of roadkill in your effort to seduce him.”
Elda rubbed her arms for warmth. The Christmas lights bounced off the ten or so rings she was wearing on both hands. “I see one potential problem with this.”
Just one? “What’s that?”
“Danny seemed to think that Grandma wanted to set him up with the granddaughter who used to enter the gingerbread contest with her. That’d be you.” Elda pointed to her chest and shook her head. “Not me.”
“You were part of the team, too, Elda. Grandma could’ve easily meant you.” Though Danny had said “the one with the gingerbread skills.” Grandma would have definitely meant Holly, not Elda. But Grandma saw all of her grandchildren as special. Her lack of objectivity had blinded her to the fact that hot, popular guys like Danny didn’t go for girls like Holly. Hell, guys like Teddy didn’t go for girls like Holly. She was used to it, fine with it. She’d been on this roller coaster a million times.
Danny had obviously been looking at Elda during The Coffee Shop Incident. Holly had seen it firsthand, and it was how things were supposed to be. It was biology. If Holly couldn’t have Danny, then she’d help her beautiful, romantically challenged cousin get him. No big deal.
Holly lived a rich and fulfilling life inside her imagination. It was safe there. She didn’t get hurt there. She was friendly and beautiful and no one called her awful names like they did at school. In her dreams, the guys she liked always picked her over her beautiful cousin or any other gorgeous girl in the room.
But whenever she’d tried to take her fantasy into the real world, it had ended in disaster.
She and Danny had a great rapport, but Holly wasn’t a fool. She’d been here before. She’d had this friend, Charlie, back at school. The two of them started talking in the middle of freshman year and had gotten so close people assumed they were dating. They sat together in every mutual class. They ate lunch together. They hung out in the hallway before school and scribbled out math assignments together. Holly felt like maybe, maybe something was there. Charlie obviously liked her as a person. Even outside of school, he called and texted her. Romance was the next logical step in their relationship.
So, she wrote him a letter expressing her feelings and left it in his locker.
He said nothing.
For three days.
Finally, her best friend Rebel went up to him after school (after Holly’d asked her to) and was like, “Did you get the letter?”
He said yes, the two of them chatted, and Charlie told Rebel the thing he was too chicken to tell Holly to her face: “I don’t like her like that, and I never will.”
Holly stayed far away from Charlie after that. She’d ruined their friendship. She should’ve just kept quiet and let things carry on as they had been, because the hope, the dreams, the imagining what could be was always sweeter than the disappointment of reality.
And Holly would not make the same mistake with Danny Garland.
“Can we start walking?” Holly took off down Main Street, toward their grandma’s house. The air smelled like cinnamon, and every shop window glowed with lights and tinsel. North Pole at night was exquisite. Nothing else in the world could compare. Holly drew in a long, deep breath, taking in the cold air and the sooty smell of smoke from a hundred different fireplaces.
Elda ran to catch up with Holly, her platform shoes clomping against the cobblestone sidewalk. “You sure you don’t like Danny? We never discussed it. I don’t want to call dibs.”
Holly’s breath caught for a moment as she imagined what would happen if she did the unthinkable and told Elda she liked Danny. In her head, she saw herself dancing with Danny and kissing him and hoisting the gingerbread trophy over her head as he clapped with pride. But that wasn’t reality. Reality was him telling Elda that he didn’t like Holly “like that,” and he never would. “No way,” Holly said. “He’s not my type.”
“Really?” Elda said.
“Definitely. I’m a nerd girl, obviously.”
“Okay…” The two of them walked in silence for about half a block, then Elda said, “Thank you.”
“For what?”