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Lady blinked, roused from her nap. She let out a gentle wuff of concern.
“We could get the good stuff appraised,” A
“Oh, yeah, and who is going to pack up those boxes?” He threw up his hands, making the tea slosh in his cup. “Who is going to take them to the post office? It won’t be you!”
And just like that, my party was forgotten. I escaped with the keys and no particular instructions. I went over to the trailer, sat on Grandma’s worn velveteen sofa, and schemed. My grandmother had been the kind of lady who loved to drink and smoke and tell stories about being a nurse and the wild times she got up to before she married my grandfather. I hoped that if her spirit watched over the place, she’d be glad to be watching over a party.
* * *
My dad always said that I was a good kid with a great imagination, but also that I was a little bit of a space cadet. A
When he first married her, I wasn’t sure how things would be, but she was sweet and normal and not at all like my real mom, who’d been fond of flying into rages and throwing things and who was off somewhere in New Mexico, committing credit card fraud. Our first Christmas together, A
I didn’t let her know, but I’d teared up when I saw the doll. I was too old for it, but I didn’t care. I carried her around in my purse, until she got so sticky with Jolly Ranchers and marked up by pens that I had to retire her to a bookshelf in my room. For a few months after that Christmas, I pretended A
I guess that’s what gave me the idea of pretending about Joachim.
* * *
No matter where I looked, there were things piled neatly upon piles of other things, deceptively tidy until I started dismantling them. Shoeboxes stacked under the bed. A closet crammed full of clothes. A dresser so full the drawers didn’t open. A glass-fronted cabinet piled with two sets of dishes and seemingly endless glassware. The ironware bowl she would let me put milk in for the faeries, which she called by the Sicilian name, donas de fuera. The glass terrarium arranged with succulents, marbles, and a few of my old Star Wars figures. The Santa Claus plate for cookies. Dozens of hand towels and napkins and bath towels. Boxes of jewelry, boxes of holiday decorations, unlit themed candles from decades back, and dozens upon dozens of ceramic figurines.
It was a treasure trove.
I found cookbooks from the sixties and seventies with pictures of people in front of trays of crackers or pots of fondue. I found champagne coupes, shot glasses, aperitif glasses, and highballs. I found long sparkly dresses in silver and pink and gold, with shoes to match. I found rhinestone necklaces and even a half-full bottle of Scotch.
Wren came over with her friend Ahmet, and we worked on hauling out stuff we didn’t need for the party. I kept all the old photos for Dad, the sets of china and some of the jewelry for A
Then I started to really plan.
We needed food.
We needed booze.
We needed music.
We needed décor.
And we needed guests.
We pooled our Christmas cash, and I borrowed Dad’s Costco card. We bought a whole wheel of Brie, a block of cheddar, a bunch of grapes, and tiny, individual quiches that cooked in the oven. We also got chips, crackers, hummus, and salsa, and fancy glass bottles of Coke. It wasn’t exactly my dream of canapés, but I figured that once it was all arranged on trays surrounded by grapes, it would look pretty nice.
Then we arranged for the drinks. Penelope had a cousin we could pay extra to get booze for us. I would make a big vodka punch in Grandma’s punchbowl, and then hopefully we could pool our funds and get some bottles of Korbel, a few more of André, and a case of supercheap beer. I know that over at Mossley, they probably guzzled capital-C champagne, the kind that comes from the Champagne region of France. But no matter how classy I wanted our party to be or how much I read about fancy things, I knew Korbel was stretching the limits of my budget.
It would have to do.
Ahmet agreed to make a playlist on his phone and had the stuff to run it through Grandma’s ancient sound system. We texted our crew from school. Wren even asked a guy she liked from the local coffee shop if he’d come. He said he had another party to go to, but he’d try to stop by, and ever since she’d been trying to play like the possibility wasn’t on her mind a lot.
For décor, I fished through all the Christmas decorations and picked out the strings of fairy lights. Wren, Pe
It took a week and a half of work to get the place shipshape. Some nights I would stay overnight at the trailer, stretched out on the scratchy sheets of Grandma’s bed, a brightly woven afghan over my feet. I thought that maybe I’d dream of her, but instead I dreamed of the gold-smeared Krampus. In my dreams, he flayed off all my skin with his whips, and underneath I was made from pressed glass, like one of Grandma’s pretty trays. Then the glass cracked and fell, sharp shards of ice melting in the torch fire, and my real self was underneath, a self no one had ever seen before.
You created me, he said, eyes bright and hot as coals. But once you create a thing, you can’t always control it.
I was raw and trembling in front of him. I opened my mouth to speak, to beg for him not to hurt me or maybe to hurt me more, I wasn’t sure which—and then woke, sweat cooling on my skin.
After that, I tried not to sleep so much. After all, there was lots of work to do.
The night before New Year’s Eve, I moved on to fixing up the outside of the trailer. I arranged some lawn chairs around an outdoor table and lit some more candles to make a smoking parlor. I hung silver Christmas-tree ball ornaments from the trees with fishing wire. Then, finally, I took a step back and looked around. It was beautiful. Glimmering. Magical.
One of the other things my dad had brought back from dumpster-diving was occultist Aleister Crowley’s book, Magick. I remember his definition of magic vividly: “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with will.”
I’d willed this into being. For a moment, I felt like a magician.
Then my vision shifted, and I saw the place as Roth and Silke were going to see it, as the boy in gold with the beautiful, no-doubt-expensive costume would see it. A sad, ramshackle trailer hung with a bunch of cheap lights.
“They’re not really coming,” I said. “You know that, right?”
“What?” Wren sat in the open doorway, trying to fit into a pair of narrow silver shoes that she’d borrowed from Penelope. She never wore heels.
“The Mossley kids. Roth. Silke. Why would he let his friends come when he knows having two girlfriends at the same party is a recipe for disaster? He wouldn’t. And why would Silke come to a trailer park? What if no one else comes, either? What if it’s just us at this party?”
“Then we get loaded,” Wren said. “Really, really, really loaded.”
I sighed, slumping in a lawn chair. “And eat all those little quiches by ourselves. And cry.”
Wren and I had been friends for years, since we’d met at the muddy pond the town called a swimming hole. She was trying to drown a boy she liked and got in trouble with his mother. Pe