“What kind of glitter is this?” I shouted to Kerry-cousin as she weaved between Dash and me. Glitter, glitter, glitter—everywhere there was glitter as the Rawkettes tossed handfuls on the rink like fairy dust.
“Craft store glitter!” she said. “You said to spare no expense, so I didn’t!”
I picked up a handful of glitter from the ice. It was not the cosmetic kind of glitter, like Kerry-cousin had on her face. This glitter was on a Martha Stewart level of fancy, made of finely ground glass, the size and shape of small pebbles. This craft store glitter was not fairy dust at all, but thousands of tiny, sharp, lethal weapons strewn across ice. And it was causing a free fall of skaters on the rink, taking hard knocks down onto the ice.
Boomer flew by us—“Whee!”—and then took a nasty fall on the glitter. Dash leaned over to help him up just as another librarian took a fall, and the blade of her skate made a direct slice on Dash’s face. “My eye!” Dash cried out.
“My knee!” someone else shouted.
“I think I broke my wrist,” said another voice.
It all happened so fast. One minute the Rawkettes were performing while librarians happily skated around them, and the next, there was a triage scene on the rink and emergency medics trying to maneuver stretchers across the ice, passing over streaks of blood from so many blade wounds. It was Chaos on Glitter Ice. A massacre of librarians.
As Dash was wheeled away to the ambulance, his wounded eye covered in bloody gauze, his hands already bruised and sliced from all the other skaters that had fallen on him, I told him, “I’m so sorry, Dash! I’ll call your dad and let him know you’re on the way to the hospital.”
“Don’t throw glitter in the wound, Lily,” said Dash.
Kerry-cousin handed me an invoice. “You still owe me a hundred bucks.”
I couldn’t have felt worse. I was responsible for a small army of librarians—the nicest people in the world—being taken away in ambulances from a party designed to celebrate them. I’d mortally wounded my boyfriend.
The Lily who loved Christmas had just ruined it.
Monday, December 22nd
’Twas three nights before Christmas and all through the hospital, not a creature was stirring…except for a half dozen librarians on painkillers.
Because we’d come in together from The Great Glitterskating Massacre, we were sharing a room in New York–Presbyterian. While I didn’t know any of the librarians, they all knew each other—the skate-off had been an add-on to their usual pre-holiday NYC bender. There is something a little disturbing but mostly remarkable about seeing a bunch of librarians become completely unshelved, and in the close quarters of our medical confinement, I was getting to see all this up close…albeit only through one eye. Although it hadn’t been a direct hit, the blade had gotten close enough to my cornea that they wanted me to wear a patch for protection as everything healed. Unfortunately, I’d taken a look in a mirror before they’d patched it up, and the eyeball looked like every vessel within it had burst, as if I’d stayed awake for a year straight without remembering to blink. Had I been auditioning to play a demon spawn in a Christmas pageant, I would have been a shoo-in. (Once bandaged, I was more of a shoo-in for Christmas Pirate #3.)
I’d gotten a text from my father saying he was “on his way”—but that had been two hours ago, which led me to wonder which way he was taking. In the meantime, my guardians were the Page-Turn Posse.
“?‘Santa Can’t Feel His Face’!” Kevin from Kalamazoo (injury requiring neck brace and morphine) called out. “I’ve never related to that song as much as I relate to it now!”
“Santa needs to redecorate this room!” Jack from Providence (dislocated shoulder) added. It didn’t surprise me that the drab hospital decor offended his sensibilities—he was dressed in the most elaborate Krampus sweater I’d ever seen, and bright neon blue pants that could have just as easily been leggings. “And Santa also needs a double….” He reached into his Marc Jacobs bag and pulled out a thermos, a cocktail shaker, and six cocktail glasses. “Voila!”
“Make mine a triple!” Chris, who’d arrived with Jack but was from somewhere in New York, called out. (He had only a few bruises but wanted to keep the rest of us company.)
“I’d settle for a double,” I said.
All the librarians turned their heads to me in a collective shush.
“I’m afraid you have to survive library school, put up with the general public on a daily basis, and endure several years of budget cuts in order to deserve these drinks,” Chris told me kindly. “But someday, Dash, all this will be yours! We know how to spot ’em, and you’re a young, temporarily one-eyed librarian in the rough!”
They all toasted me then. And even though I was injured and about to face my father, I felt sufficiently cheered. I knew this wasn’t the way Lily had wanted me to get it, but it was still, I was sure, what she had wanted me to get out of the evening.