“Oh, and one other thing,” Haley said. “I called home earlier today. And I officially stopped being a coward.”
“What do you mean?”
“I told Justin what I told you last night. That I had a ticket to come home, but I couldn’t bring myself to get on the plane.”
I decided it wasn’t my place to say anything. So I just listened. And nodded.
“And I’ll tell you something,” she said. “That wasn’t fun at all. We spent half the day crying to each other on the phone.” She stopped picking at the loose thread and stuck her hands in her coat pockets. “But breaking it off was the right thing to do.”
“It’s hard,” I said.
“Tell me about it.”
It felt wrong to be excited in the wake of some other dude’s misfortune. But excitement was exactly what I felt. Because if Haley was no longer taken …
Maybe …
We were getting up to leave when a new song started playing. “Here Comes Santa Claus.” Me and Haley looked at each other and cracked up, and we both sat back down. And through my laughter, I imagined the boy in the apartment above us, sitting near the radio with his little sis and his mom and dad. I wished I could tell him to remember every single thing about today. Not just whatever presents he got but his family, too. His mom. Because one day he’d be far away from home, sitting on a snow-covered stoop with a girl he might like, laughing, and he’d want to picture how they all used to be.
Elves. Elves in motion are otherworldly. They are long and lovely and lean; when they dance they are whirling dervishes that sparkle and gleam like sun shining on snow. I should know. I’ve been watching them my whole life.
The decorations committee has gone all out for the Snow Ball this year. Which I suppose they do every year, but this year feels especially tinseled. Twinkle lights cover every inch of the Great Hall, so many that we don’t even need overhead lighting. There’s a huge spruce in the center that goes all the way to the ceiling, and from its branches hang wooden carvings of every elf who’s ever lived at the North Pole. Just the elves, though.
Around the perimeter of the Great Hall, there are lots of smaller Christmas trees close to eight feet tall, all themed. There’s a paper-crane tree from Japan, a Dutch tree with dangling wooden shoes painted in all different kinds of colors, a Day of the Dead tree from Mexico, which is covered in tiny sugar skulls. There’s a 1950s tree, which might be my favorite. It has a purple-and-pink poodle skirt around the base.
All the teen elves have paired off for the Snow Ball. It’s the most romantic night of the season. The last hurrah before things really kick into gear with the holidays. It’s like prom for elves. Not that I myself have ever been to a prom, but I imagine this is what it must be like.
Boys and girls all dressed up, dancing.
Tonight Elinor is wearing a white dress with silver spangles. Under the lights, her hair looks white too. So does Flynn’s.
The dress I’m wearing is made of the same cranberry red fabric as Papa’s suit. We match. A pre-Christmas gift. My first year at the North Pole, my dress had puffy sleeves and a lacy white pinafore. This year my dress has a scoop neck and cap sleeves and a full skirt. It came with a white fur muff as well. It’s a doll’s dress, not a fifteen-year-old girl’s.
Oh, Papa. Can’t he see that I’m growing up?
Everyone at the North Pole knows the story of how Santa found me. Fifteen Christmases ago, he was delivering presents to an apartment complex in Seoul, South Korea. He loves the big apartment complexes because he can zip from floor to floor and be done in a jiffy. When he returned to his sleigh, there I was in a basket with a note that said, , which means, Please take care of my daughter. Santa didn’t know what to do. Every time he put me down, I cried, and he still had all of Asia to get to. So he took me along. He said I slept the whole way. Santa had every intention of bringing me back to Korea before morning, but by the end of night, he just couldn’t. I grabbed hold of his pinky and wouldn’t let go. And so here I live, at the North Pole, a place no human girl has ever lived before.
* * *
I’m standing with my back pushed up against the wall, and my tights itch, and I’m wishing someone, anyone, would ask me to dance. Even out of pity. That would be fine. I catch Flynn’s eye while he’s spinning Elinor around. She looks good in his arms. She looks right. If it were me dancing with him, I would only come up to his chest. I wouldn’t be able to dance cheek to cheek.
I hang by the refreshment tables. They are my safe zone. For the first twelve days of December, dessert is themed. It’s a tradition, one of many. On the first day of Christmas, a partridge in a pear tree. This year, they did chocolate partridges stuffed with chestnut cream and drizzled with a tart pear syrup.
The chocolate partridge reminds me of the wooden bird in my coat pocket.
When I was eight, a robin got stuck in the Great Hall. It flew in an open window, and it couldn’t figure out how to fly back out. It kept flying up to the ceiling. I tried to shepherd the bird out the door with a Quidditch broom—the number-one requested present with six-to-eight-year-olds that year, though I think kids were hoping it would actually fly. None of us could figure out how to help the bird. But then Flynn climbed up on the banister, and the robin flew right up to him. He caught the bird and carried it outside, cradled in the palms of his hands, and the robin flew away. For days it was all anyone could talk about.
So for Christmas that year, I gave Flynn a bird I carved out of wood. I tried to do a robin, but I just couldn’t capture its likeness. So instead I did a chickadee with a glass eye, carved out of pine. I was nervous to give it to him.
Because the thing to understand about elves is that they aren’t usually into presents. They make things, they create, they labor, but they don’t like to receive. It’s not in their nature.
There was a good chance he wouldn’t accept it, but when he opened up the box, he stared at the chickadee for a long time. I watched as he held it in his hand, turning it over, feeling its weight. Was it good enough? I’d practiced other birds as well, but this was the only one I thought worthy enough of my friend. And then he said, “No one ever gave me a gift before.”
I let out the breath I was holding. “So you’ll keep it?”
“I’ll keep it.”
I’ve given him a bird every Christmas ever since. This year, I finally got the robin right. Black walnut, painted holly-berry red.