Страница 36 из 77
* * *
When I was a kid, I didn’t understand that Santa’s elves weren’t the kind from storybooks. I thought his toy shop was staffed with fauns and boggarts, sprites and trolls, goblins and pixies. Before Mom left, when I made lists to give to Santa, they were always full of magical things. I wanted a cloak that could make me fly. I wanted a tiny doll, no bigger than my finger and as perfectly jointed as a living person. After Mom left, I wanted crystal balls with which to scrye my mother and magical chalk that could draw me a doorway to her, and a magical potion I could make her drink that would make her care about us.
Finally, someone explained to me that Santa’s elves weren’t those kind of elves and the list was just so Dad and Grandma didn’t have to think too hard about what to buy for me. After that, I started putting normal stuff on it, like ski
* * *
We lined up in front of a desk where a nice lady let us write down our names. I could tell she wasn’t really impressed with our costumes.
“Season’s beatings!” yelled one guy in a green fur suit, with horns crafted out of red Solo cups and painted black. He wore colored contacts that turned his eyes yellow and saluted us with hot chocolate swishing back and forth in a massive earthenware goblet.
Maybe some of these folks knew how to scare people after all.
Wren and Penelope and I all got numbers that the registration lady called “race bibs” that we were supposed to safety pin to our clothes. Once we managed that, we waded into the fray.
“There he is,” Pe
Roth was standing in a group of prep school Krampuses. Three girls in short tight red satin skirts with plastic horns from the costume store, big glittery fake lashes, and high heels. Two boys with Krampus masks pushed up onto their heads so they could drink from the white Styrofoam cups.
They looked clean and mint-in-box, the way rich kids somehow managed. Like the blond girl Roth had his arm around. My hair is blond, too, but that’s because I bleach it with stuff from the beauty supply store. Her hair grew from her head bright as spun white gold.
“That’s his girlfriend?” Wren frowned. “You could totally take her.”
“I’m not going to fight some girl from Mossley.” Pe
She probably was his real girlfriend. The one he told his parents about. The one he took to dances and out for pizza and to places that weren’t the backseat of his car or Penelope’s bedroom. Pe
Wren shrugged. “I’m just saying.”
Wren had been more or less raised by her grandparents, on whose fold-out couch she slept. They taught her to skin squirrels, knee guys hard enough to rupture their testicles, and roll cigarettes as tight as ones in the store. She had no patience with the rest of us.
“Let’s go get hot chocolate,” I told them. My job was to be the negotiator and sometimes the tie-breaker, an ambassador to both their nations. In return, they didn’t call me crazy when I dreamed up stuff like papier-mâché horns, so even though I sometimes wanted to quit that job, I never would.
“No,” Pe
Wren grabbed her arm. “Then either he’ll introduce you to his friends or he’ll stand there awkwardly until his friends introduce themselves to us. Either way, he’s busted. This is what you came for.”
Pe
As we waded through the crowd toward Roth, a guy passed me. He was wearing an amazing outfit, the best I’d seen. He had on fur leggings, tight to his calves, tapering to the most amazing hooves, so good that they didn’t look like a costume. A black Utilikilt covered his waist, so the transition between fur and flesh was hidden, and despite the cold, his very fine chest was bare. He had big beautiful horns like those of a springbok rising up from his head. They were so real that I figured they were either resin molds or actual horns that he’d managed to attach to some kind of hidden hairband. His ta
“You look awesome,” I called to him, because he really did. If all Krampuses looked like him, naughtiness would rule.
He turned and gave me a mischievous, toe-curling smile. It was like he’d stepped out of a different, better story than the kind I knew—not the one that Roth was in, born to be a rich jerk and to reap the rewards of never rising above that. Not the kind Pe
Wren had to drag me away. I gri
“You guys are the worst,” Pe
“You mean the best,” Wren told her, and then elbowed me in the side.
“Hey,” I yelled to Roth, waving. I wasn’t sure if that was what I was supposed to do to avoid getting elbowed again, but I figured Wren would be happy with any forward momentum.
Pe
For a moment, Roth seemed confused, then he realized how he knew me and I saw the begi
“Hi,” Wren said to the blond girl, interrupting him. “You must be Roth’s girlfriend. He’s told us so much about you. So much. Don’t worry—all good stuff.”
The girl smiled, which was pretty damning. None of the other kids looked at all surprised, like of course Roth would tell a bunch of people about how cool his girl was. Roth began turning a tomato red, shut his mouth and ground his teeth.
I knew Penelope was considering escaping—we were at a run, after all, so if she just ran, it wouldn’t look crazy or anything. I hoped Wren had a good grip on her.
“We’re having an absolutely brutal New Year’s party,” Wren continued, and this was why you shouldn’t bring Wren to things if you didn’t want chaos. She loved chaos above all other things. “You should all come. Roth knows how hard we go. I guarantee you’d have a good time. Right, Roth?”
Roth stammered something affirmative. He knew he couldn’t afford to piss us off. Call us scum-sucking dirtbags now, I thought. Double-dog dare you.
There was just one problem. We hadn’t been pla
The blonde looked intrigued, though. We were townies and, to her, that meant we had drugs and booze and enough space to party without getting in trouble. The first one was silly, because, sure, we could get drugs. Anyone could, if they had the cash and the hookup. But at Mossley, dealers stopped by and delivered drugs straight to their door.
She was right about the other two, though. We had booze, because we had older siblings and cousins who would buy it for us, and liquor cabinets in our houses that our parents never bothered to lock, and because, compared to drugs, booze was dirt cheap.
And we had freedom. We could stay out all night for the price of a sloppy lie. No one was concerned about where we were for hours at a time and sometimes a lot longer than that. Theoretically, all of the Mossley students went home for winter break, but most of them drifted back the first week of January. After all, they spent most of the year here. Who did they know at home?