My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories (24 page)

No one else so much as cracked a smile. Oscar cracked his knuckles instead.

Silke looked uncomfortable.

I took my phone out of my pocket. I wasn’t as good at this as Wren would have been, but with the liquor singing through my veins, I knew I had to do something. “I have a picture of Roth here—”

“No you don’t.” Roth grabbed for the phone. “Give me that.”

I didn’t actually have a picture of him and Penny together, but Roth didn’t know that. He lunged. I turned away from him, tossing my phone toward the couch as Roth twisted my wrist hard enough to make me yell.

And then everything happened at once. Wren burst out of the back in her underwear. Marc tried to get between me and Roth. One of Roth’s friends tried to get in Marc’s way. Oscar hit somebody. I was on the floor and guys were punching one another and Wren was smashing a lamp over someone’s head and everyone was screaming.

That’s when Roth kicked the table with the punch bowl on it. The leg cracked, and the punch bowl went over, spilling a fizzing frozen strawberry and booze tide onto all the food, soaking the cheese and crackers, splashing into the hummus and onion dip, ruining the quiches. Ruining everything.

I full-on screamed. Way louder than when he bent my arm. I screamed so loud that Marc let Roth go. Bloody-nosed, Roth turned and saw my horrified face. I don’t think it was until that moment that he realized how much destroying the party would hurt me. His smile was smug and hideous.

I wanted to claw his eyes out. I wanted to hide in the back room. I wanted to go outside and sit in the cold until I was frozen all the way through. I wanted to do all those contradictory things so intensely that I did absolutely nothing at all. I just stood there, my eyes filling with tears as Roth’s smile grew into a laugh.

Then the door opened again, letting in a cold breeze that guttered the candles.

It was the beautiful Krampus boy with the goat legs and the gold paint. He must have misunderstood about dressing up for the party, because he was in a variation on his costume at the
Krampuslauf.
He’d paired his goat legs with a green brocade jacket stitched with silver thread and matching knee breeches with tiny silver buttons along the cuffs. Two friends were with him, both in costume. One, a girl in a white dress with a single sleeve stitched with glittering crystals. The other, a boy with waist-length blond hair. He wore pointed-eared prosthetics and a black wool Edwardian suit.

Roth and his friends looked thrown by their arrival, but they weren’t standing there with tears in their eyes and a wrecked table of food.

“We brought gifts,” the boy with the hooves said, and the blond reached into his coat and brought out a bottle of clear liquor. He removed the cork with his teeth. “Mine is holiday cheer.”

“Are you guys for real?” one of the Mossley kids said.

Roth snorted, still spoiling for a fight. Silke stepped back, into the kitchen of the trailer. A few of our friends were rearranging themselves in case Roth and the Mossley boys wanted to throw a few more punches. I was trying to edge my way to where I’d left my grandmother’s broom. If Roth tried anything else, I’d crack it over his skull.

“I brought a gift, too,” said the girl, and drew a curved knife out of her bodice. She took two steps. Before the rest of us even reacted, she had it pressed against Roth’s throat. His eyes went wide. I was pretty sure no one had ever had a knife on him before, especially not a girl. “I understand this boy was causing some trouble.”

“Are you robbing us?” the dark-haired Mossley girl asked. “Seriously? In those outfits?”

The boy with the goat legs laughed.

The blond boy with the elf ears looked from me to Penelope to Silke and then to Roth. “What ought his fate be?”

I let go of the broom and took a step toward Roth and the girl in white. “Don’t hurt him. I get the impulse, but he’ll sue.”

“Who
are
you?” Penny asked, awed.

“Joachim,” the Krampus boy said. “And my companions, Griselda and Isidore.”

Wren’s eyebrows went so high it was like they were trying to climb off her face. “I thought he was…”

Penny looked at me. “
That’s
Joachim?”

But of course, he wasn’t. He couldn’t be. Joachim wasn’t anyone. He didn’t exist.

“So what would you have me do with him?” Griselda asked. “I’d like my gift to be well received.”

Silke stepped out of the kitchen, moving as though drawn against her better judgment. “I want him punished.” At that, Silke turned to Penny. “Don’t you?”

Penelope walked up to Roth. His eyes widened the closer she got. And in that moment, I could see her dilemma. She could save him and indebt him to her. She could prove that she was better than his other girlfriend—better than
him.
But he might leave her anyway—and then she’d feel like an even bigger fool.

But she’d still be a better person.

“I don’t want him hurt,” Penny said, looking over at me. She hesitated. “But I do want him punished. You’re dressed up like a Krampus, right? So punish him like one.”

Christmas is supposed to be this time when everyone is nice to one another and forgives one another and all that, but the true meaning of Christmas is
presents.
And in the real world, Santa’s not fair. Rich kids get everything and poor kids get secondhand crap their parents bust their asses to afford. It costs money just to sit on Santa’s lap.

But Krampus, he brings justice. If you’re bad, you get served up a big plate of steaming hot coals. You get whipped with birch rods until you bleed. You get put in shackles and fished out of pools of ink with pitchforks. That’s the spirit of Krampus. It might look like it’s all hipsters and charity, but underneath it’s justice, and I get the appeal.

“Easily done,” Griselda said. “Boy, you’ve been an ass—and so, until you’re forgiven by these two ladies, that’s exactly what seeming you’ll take.”

Her lips went to his cheek, pressing a kiss to his skin as her blade kept him in place. As she withdrew, he began to change. Gray whiskers sprouted over his face. His neck elongated and nose flared. He was changing shape. His head was becoming the head of an animal.

I’d wished for magic, for reality to bend, but watching this, I wondered if it was possible for reality to bend so far it broke.

Roth’s two friends looked at one another, then at us and at Griselda, like they were trying to figure out who dosed them. We were all watching in gluttonous wonderment.

Roth brayed from his donkey head as Griselda put away her knife. He stumbled toward his friends. They screamed and ran for the door of the trailer. Silke edged closer to Penny, who looked as freaked out as I felt.

Joachim threw an arm over Roth’s neck, eyes dancing with mirth. “Oh, come now, it’s not so bad. You have very fine fur and a magnificent nose—a much better nose than your last one. And I’d wager you’ll like your fate betimes.”

Oscar reached out wonderingly to touch one of Roth’s twitching ears. Roth shied back, and Oscar snorted with amazed laughter. “That is some Harry Potter shit.”

“This cannot be happening,” Wren said, laughing, still in her bra and panties, one hand on her hip, looking like she’d stepped out of a forties pinup postcard. “It’s just too good.”

But it was happening. And we were drunk enough to go along with it. Even with the implications of Roth having an ass head buzzing in the back of my mind, like how if magic was real, then Joachim’s goat legs were probably not part of any costume, and when I’d left out milk for the faeries, I probably should have made sure to wash the bowl every time, I was focused on propping up the broken table. I couldn’t stand around freaking out forever. Some people helped me mop the spilled punch. I rinsed off the cheese and scraped off the top layer of hummus. It turned out I still had some chips left in the bags out in the kitchen, so I refilled the bowls. Most bottles of booze hadn’t gotten broken. Some of the food couldn’t be salvaged, but in the face of magic being real and magical creatures in attendance, I was ready to declare the party a success anyway.

Isidore poured shots from his bottle into aperitif glasses set up on Grandma’s kitchen counter. The liquor tasted like thyme and caraway seeds and burned all the way down my throat. Griselda taught us a drinking song. We screamed the words as we danced around the room, spinning madly and jumping on the furniture.

Someone found an apple for Roth to eat.

Near midnight, we turned the television to MTV, where they showed the ball dropping in Times Square. We counted down with everyone else.

Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

We went crazy shrieking and blowing paper horns and kissing one another. People yelled out the lyrics to “Auld Lang Syne,” Isidore singing lines I didn’t know.
We two have run about the slopes and picked the daisies fine. And we’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.
And then I found myself in the hall, kissing Joachim, a boy I barely knew, a boy with a pretend name and who might be a demon or a faerie or a disturbing hallucination.

My head was swimming. My hands were tangled in his hair, and I pushed him against the wall. His breath caught as I tugged his mouth to mine. I had no idea what I was doing.

Then Ahmet changed playlists to some louder, madder, midnight stuff, and we were dancing again. We danced and drank, drank and danced until the mix ran out and Ahmet fell asleep under the table, his arm thrown over Griselda.

At five in the morning, I found myself bundled up in a moth-eaten fur coat from Grandma’s closet, slumped in a chair at the plastic table as the sun began to burn the frozen horizon. I had a coupe glass full of cinnamon schnapps the color of Rudolf’s nose.

Joachim was smoking a cigarette of meadow grass and comfrey. He’d found a bottle of bubble solution and held up the wand, exhaling smoke into each delicate shimmering globe, grinning up at them as they got carried up into the dawn.

He was the kind of beautiful that got under your skin. Before, my crushes had been on normal-looking boys—pudgy boys and beanpole skinny ones, boys with bad haircuts and boys with shadowy mustaches they were trying to grow, boys with crooked teeth and spotty skin. No one would probably believe me, but Joachim’s ridiculous hotness made me uncomfortable. He was like a painting you wanted to burn so you could finally stop staring at it. Copper gold hair and copper gold eyes. Looping curls. He looked like something you were allowed to look at, but never touch.

I remembered the warm slide of his lips.

“Why
Joachim
?” I asked him.

He looked over at me, a little bit drunk and clearly baffled. It made me happy to know that whatever he was, however he looked, he still could get wasted on New Year’s.

“The name,” I said.

He laughed, throwing his head back and glancing up at the stars. “You bargained with the universe, remember?”

The words sent a shiver down my spine. I didn’t even remember exactly what I’d said or promised, but I knew I’d done it. “And the universe heard me?”

“Nah.” Above his head, a bubble burst, releasing a supernova of smoke before it was blown shapeless by the wind. “But I did. Lots of things hear when you make rash offers like that.”

“So you want—?” I was rigid with alarm, trying to think through the fog of alcohol.

He shook his head, throwing me an easy smile. “Not a thing. I just remembered the name when I saw you at the
Krampuslauf.
We don’t have names, not like you do. Isidore and Griselda have been called many things before and will be called many things again. Names, they just don’t stick to us. But I like Joachim, and I knew you liked it as well.”

I tried to imagine a name sliding off of me, as though not quite attached. It felt wrong, like losing one’s shadow. I’d always been Hanna, and I couldn’t imagine not being her. “Why were you even at that thing?”

“The
Krampuslauf
?” He had a rich throaty laugh. “I wanted to be among people without any disguise. It’s a great prank, don’t you think?”

“Oh, yeah. Absolutely.” I took a swig from my cup. It tasted like someone had melted those cinnamon hearts into a thick syrup. I wondered who’d brought it. I wondered why I’d decided to drink it and then took another swig.

“I owe you a gift,” he said, into the silence. “Griselda brought something and Isidore brought something. Now it’s my turn. Only name your desire, and I will do my best to give you its pale approximation.”

That made me laugh. “I’m glad you came. And turning Roth into a donkey was way more than enough.”

“My people are often beseeched for favors, but seldom invited to share in feasts,” he spoke with a sly humor, as though he was talking formally half in jest—but only half. “Let me give you a gift for being made so much welcome.”

“Okay,” I said, relenting, looking back at the trailer. Faint music had started up inside, and I could see people moving around. They’d gotten a second wind. Soon someone would come outside and drag us back into the dregs of the after-after-party. Soon after that, I’d collapse in Grandma’s bed along with as many people as would fit. Soon it would be morning and for all I knew, Joachim and Griselda and Isidore would be gone at first light, like dew burned up in the sun. “Okay. What I want is to never forget there’s magic in the world. I get to keep my memories of tonight. I get to keep them always.”

His smile went crooked. Leaning over, he mashed his cigarette in Grandma’s heavy glass ashtray and pressed his lips to my forehead. He smelled like burning grass.

“I promise,” he whispered, mouth hot against my skin.

And, although I was, admittedly, not even a little bit sober, that was the moment I decided that since magic was real, since I conjured up Joachim by the sheer power of wanting him to happen, since I’d made this party out of two hundred bucks and sheer determination, then maybe I was wrong about the things I thought I couldn’t have, that weren’t for me. Maybe it was okay to imagine greater things. Maybe it was all for me, if I wanted it.

With dawn of the new year on the horizon, I resolved to exert my will on the world.