Then she said, “Well, are you going to introduce me?”
“Yeah. Just don’t, um, don’t say anything about my sister or whatever, okay?”
Janey looked back at me, her face falling into a worried frown. Before she could say anything else, I led her over to the table where Hannah was.
“Hey, Hannah,” I said, “this is my friend Janey, from—”
Janey broke in. “From forever. Only she doesn’t talk to me anymore.”
Hannah nodded, studying Janey. “You’re pretty,” she said. “You look like a Disney princess or something.”
I think Hannah meant that as a compliment, but it didn’t quite come out that way. Janey let it roll off. “Thanks,” she replied. “I like your dress.”
Then Janey looked at Kasey next to Hannah, and she looked back at Natalie dancing, and she did something pretty great. She grabbed Hannah’s hand and said, “So, do you want to go dance or what?” and she pulled her away from Kasey and onto the dance floor.
I watched them, Hannah dancing with Natalie and Kristen now, and Janey doing more conservative moves on the edge of the circle. I remembered how actually wonderful Janey is. I felt a pang, watching her bobbing her blond head and remembering how there was a time when there was no secret I couldn’t tell her.
I needed some air, so I went out to the balcony. I was standing there, looking at the tangled fingers of the tree branches reaching for the winter-clear sky, when Tristan came out and lit a cigarette with his giant kitchen lighter.
“Laurel. What are you doing alone out here? Wait, let me guess. You are ‘thinking about things,’” he teased.
“Shut up.” I smiled.
With Tristan around, the sad I felt changed from sad like watching a balloon drift out of sight to sad in an it’s-good-to-know-your-soul-works way.
“How are you doing, Buttercup?” he asked.
“All right.” I shrugged. “I guess.” And then I asked him, because for some reason it’s easy to talk to him, “When you first thought you were falling in love with Kristen, did you ever get scared? Because I get that way with Sky, and I think that I might have sort of screwed stuff up.”
Tristan looked at me, and he said something I’ll always remember. “Let me tell you something, Buttercup,” he said. “There are two most important things in the world—being in danger, and being saved.”
I thought for a moment of May. I asked him, “Do you think we go into danger on purpose, so we can get saved?”
“Yes, sometimes. But sometimes the wolf comes down out of the mountains, and you didn’t ask for it. You were just trying to take a nap in the foothills.”
Then I asked him, “But if those are the two most important things, what about being in love?”
“Why do you think that’s the most profound thing for a person? It’s both at once. When we are in love, we are both completely in danger and completely saved.”
When he said that, it made sudden sense. “Thank you,” I said.
He stomped out his cigarette and ruffled my hair before he went back inside.
I took out my phone and dialed Sky’s number. His voice was soft with the edges of sleep creeping around it.
“Sky?” I asked.
“Yeah? Where are you?”
“I’m at this party. Could you come and take me home? I really want to see you.”
He agreed, so I said bye to my friends and blew a kiss to Janey, who was sitting on Landon’s lap by then. I waited outside until Sky’s truck pulled up. When I got in, I put my hands against the heater. He took them in his and rubbed them to warm them up. I leaned over and kissed the part of his shoulder that pushed against the threads of his sweatshirt.
When we pulled up outside my house, I asked, “Do you think I’m too messed up?”
“For what?” Sky replied.
“For you.”
“No.”
He said it so plainly that a flood of relief rushed into me. All I wanted was to lose myself in his body. I crawled onto him across the seat and felt his hands on me. I don’t mean we had sex, but we got closer than we have yet. As the neighborhood Christmas lights on their timers started to shut off, one by one the houses went quiet. The windows in the truck turned foggy, with patterns like icy feathers cracking across them. I let him keep me warm, and I promised myself I would be brave this time.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Judy Garland,
Today is the second day of break, and tomorrow is Christmas Eve. Luckily I got permission from Aunt Amy to stay with Dad the whole vacation. I know how much she’ll be all about Christ’s birth and salvation and stuff this time of year, and I’m not really up for it at the moment. It’s depressing at Dad’s, but the ghosts in the house are ours, and I just want to be with them. Even though Aunt Amy and Dad are not exactly best friends, Aunt Amy will still come over on Christmas, because I don’t want her to be alone. I got her a super fancy advent calendar that you can use every year, all with Jesus-type pictures in it. Dad was harder, but I got him a basket of joke things to remind him of how he used to like that kind of stuff—whoopee cushions and plastic spiders and chewing gum that turns your mouth blue.
I watched Meet Me in St. Louis twice already this morning. I cried both times when you sang “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” with your voice full of longing. I wonder if when you had to sing the song for the movie you were remembering how Christmas was when you were little, singing “Jingle Bells” on the stage in your daddy’s theater. He died when you were only thirteen, just after you signed with MGM. He was so proud of you, driving you to the studio every morning, walking you into its one-room schoolhouse. While he was dying in the hospital, you were on the radio, singing to him. You never got to say goodbye. This will be my first Christmas without May.
After the credits rolled for the second time, I figured that at some point I should get out of my pajamas. Since Dad’s been too depressed, I think, to do anything Christmassy so far, I decided to try to cheer him up. I pulled the Christmas box out of the attic, and then I pulled Dad’s ladder out of the shed, and I was going to put the lights up outside the house so they could be glowing for Dad when he came home from work.
I was topsy-turvy on the ladder, trying to carry the bundle of lights up to the rooftop, when Mark, the neighbor boy, walked up.