“Jamison, it pains me to say this, but Brian’s actually right on this one. Sort of,” Danny said. “Both Page girls are cool, but Elda’s the ‘nice’ one. Holly—” Is hot and sexy and frustrating and doesn’t like me and would probably end up hurting me like Star did. “Holly wants absolutely nothing to do with me.”
Jamison shook her head. “I don’t buy it. I saw you interacting with both of them, and I definitely saw sparks between you and the one with the glasses.”
Any sparks, if they existed at all, had come from him. Holly had made her position extremely clear. “I don’t know.” Danny shrugged. “I’ve talked to both of them, and Holly looks at me like I’m only slightly less disgusting than gum on the bottom of her shoe. I just got out of a relationship like that, and, frankly, I don’t want to do that again.”
“Fair enough,” Jamison said.
Brian put an arm around his brother. “And you know what? Since you called dibs on the hotter Page, I’ll go after the other one.”
“You’re disgusting,” Jamison said.
“You actually are.” Danny nudged his brother’s arm off his shoulders. Brian was not going to make Holly Page one of his Christmas break conquests.
“I’ve never claimed otherwise,” Brian said.
Danny rolled his eyes hard at Jamison.
“I hope you strike out spectacularly,” she said.
“I’m with Jamison,” Maggie added.
“I bet she laughs in your face,” Danny said. If Danny underwhelmed Holly, Brian Garland was going to physically repulse her. At least that’s what Danny was counting on.
Brian held out a hand. “I’ll take that bet.”
Danny shook his brother’s hand, making sure to add an extra-firm squeeze at the end. Holly Page had to say no to his brother. She simply had to.
…
Monday, December 18
“This is all new to me,” Elda said, rubbing her hands together. “What do we do first?”
Holly sipped her coffee and glanced down Main Street, which buzzed with tourists. Grandma’s house was a zoo, but it was nothing compared to downtown North Pole at ten o’clock on a Monday morning the week before Christmas. The girls had stopped in for caffeine at Santabucks, but Danny hadn’t been working. His brother, Brian, was there, and he’d written his number on the side of Holly’s cup.
“Maybe we can double date,” he’d said with a nod toward Elda.
Holly had rolled her eyes so hard she nearly strained a muscle.
That’s why the two of them were standing outside on this cold, gray morning, instead of sitting on warm, padded chairs listening to Christmas carols in the coffee shop.
“First we’ve got to buy the candy.” Holly took the tiniest sip of her blazing hot mocha. “Since it’s the morning after the gingerbread kickoff party, people are going to be storming the candy shop and grocery store today, grabbing everything they can. We need to fight like hell to get what we need. No mercy.” She nodded toward her cousin’s hands. “Good thing you’ve got those nails. We’ll need them.”
Holly headed down the street toward the candy store. The showstopper was taking shape in her head already. They were going to build a gingerbread model of their grandma’s house. It was something she and her grandma had discussed doing once, the year before the Pages stopped coming back to North Pole for Christmas. Since she and Elda were already using Grandma’s day planner as a guide for their time in town, they’d channel her brain for the contest. They were going to need gumdrops and licorice whips and some kind of fruit leather for the wooden slats on the outside of the house. Holly hadn’t gotten that far yet in her plans, so their best course of action was to simply buy everything they could get their hands on and sort it out later.
“Maybe we should double date,” Elda said.
“Well, that’s a non-sequitur.” Holly glanced inside the bakery as they passed the window. She noticed some giant lollipops and fancy cookies on the shelves, plus who knew what else. Holly was open to inspiration. She had some really cool, unorthodox ideas for decorations—like making wrought iron fencing out of dried spaghetti and royal icing, which was something she’d seen on a website and was desperate to try.
“It’s not, really,” Elda said. “We should all go out—me and Danny and you and his brother.”
“Oh. That…no. That’s not going to happen.” Brian came off as smarmy and kind of dumb. He reminded her of the guys from her neighborhood at home who seemed to believe that knowing their way around a hockey rink counted as enough personality to get them through life. Plus, did Elda really think Holly would go on a date with her and Danny? That hadn’t been part of the plan, had it?
“I just thought…I mean, I’ll totally blow it if it’s just the two of us.” Elda held up her phone. “I can’t even handle texting.”
Holly rubbed her left temple. Elda was dead right. She’d tried texting Danny last night after the gingerbread kickoff thing, and it had been a near catastrophe. Holly had been down in the kitchen helping her mom pack up Grandma’s china, and she’d left Elda alone upstairs with her phone. Danny had texted her: “What’s your recipe for royal icing?” and Elda had totally flubbed it, sending Danny a dictionary-sized pile of babble—going from her favorite kind of frosting to the time her brother Sal had tried to hide the evidence that he’d eaten part of their dad’s birthday cake by shoving it down the garbage disposal, fork and all, and Elda had to take the whole sink apart. She’d even managed to sneak something in there about Sal’s issues with clogging up the plumbing. The whole conversation was a disaster. It was like The Coffee Shop Incident on steroids.
Holly had to perform triage. She took the phone from Elda and wrote, “OMG! Sorry. My little cousin got a hold of my phone and was being a jerk.” Holly shot Elda an accusing eye.
“You had me wondering…” Danny wrote back.
“So embarrassing! And shame on you for trying to steal my royal icing recipe!” She sent him a gif of Veronica Mars wagging a finger. Then he sent her a gif of some basketball player doing it, too, and then the whole thing devolved into a thirty-minute gif off.
The time flew by. Holly’d planned on ending the conversation right away, just kind of shooting him a quick “good night” or something, but then he sent her a gif of a little girl crying while her gingerbread house crumbled with the caption “you,” and Holly couldn’t back down from that challenge. She summoned everything she ever knew about Danny Garland, remembering that he was a big LEGO dork as a kid, so she sent him the same caption attached to a gif from The LEGO Movie of a guy running around with no pants.