In every room, save Radar’s, their home was awash in black Santadom — plaster and plastic and marble and clay and wood and resin and cloth. In total, Radar’s parents owned more than twelve hundred black Santas of various sorts. As a plaque beside their front door proclaimed, Radar’s house was an officially registered Santa Landmark according to the Society for Christmas.
“You just gotta tell her, man,” I said. “You just gotta say, ‘Angela, I really like you, but there’s something you need to know: when we go to my house and hook up, we’ll be watched by the twenty-four hundred eyes of twelve hundred black Santas.”
Radar ran a hand through his buzz cut and shook his head. “Yeah, I don’t think I’ll put it exactly like that, but I’ll deal with it.”
I headed off to government, Ben to an elective about video game design. I watched clocks through two more classes, and then finally the relief radiated out of my chest when I was finished— the end of each day like a dry run for our graduation less than a month away.
I went home. I ate two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as an early dinner. I watched poker on TV. My parents came home at six, hugged each other, and hugged me. We ate a macaroni casserole as a proper dinner. They asked me about school. They asked me about prom. They marveled at what a wonderful job they’d done raising me. They told me about their days dealing with people who had been raised less brilliantly. They went to watch TV. I went to my room to check my email. I wrote a little bit about
2
I swiveled around when I heard the window open, and Margo’s blue eyes were staring back at me. Her eyes were all I could see at first, but as my vision adjusted, I realized she was wearing black face paint and a black hoodie. “Are you having cybersex?” she asked.
“I’m IM’ing with Ben Starling.”
“That doesn’t answer my question, perv.”
I laughed awkwardly, then walked over and knelt by the window, my face inches from hers. I couldn’t imagine why she was here, in my window, like this. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” I asked. Margo and I were still friendly, I guess, but we weren’t meet-in-the-dead-of-night-wearing-black-face-paint friendly. She had friends for that, I’m sure. I just wasn’t among them.
“I need your car,” she explained.
“I don’t have a car,” I said, which was something of a sore point for me.
“Well, I need your mom’s car.”
“You have your own car,” I pointed out.
Margo puffed out her cheeks and sighed. “Right, but the thing is that my parents have taken the keys to my car and locked them inside a safe, which they put under their bed, and Myrna Mount-weazel”— who was her dog —“is sleeping inside their room. And Myrna Mountweazel has a freaking aneurysm whenever she catches sight of me. I mean, I could totally sneak in there and steal the safe and crack it and get my keys out and drive away, but the thing is that it’s not even worth trying because Myrna Mountweazel is just going to bark like crazy if I so much as crack open the door. So like I said, I need a car. Also, I need you to drive it, because I have to do eleven things tonight, and at least five of them involve a getaway man.”
When I let my sight unfocus, she became nothing but eyes, floating in the ether. And then I locked back on her, and I could see the outline of her face, the paint still wet against her skin. Her cheekbones triangulating into her chin, her pitch-black lips barely turned to a smile. “Any felonies?” I asked.
“Hmm,” said Margo. “Remind me if breaking and entering is a felony.”
“No,” I answered firmly.
“No it’s not a felony or no you won’t help?”
“No I won’t help. Can’t you enlist some of your underlings to drive you around?” Lacey and/or Becca were always doing her bidding.
“They’re part of the problem, actually,” Margo said.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“There are eleven problems,” she said somewhat impatiently.
“No felonies,” I said.
“I swear to God that you will not be asked to commit a felony.”
And right then, the floodlights came on all around Margo’s house. In one swift motion, she somersaulted through my window, into my room, and then rolled beneath my bed. Within seconds, her dad was standing on the patio outside. “Margo!” he shouted. “I saw you!”
From beneath my bed, I heard a muffled, “Oh, Christ.” Margo scooted out from under the bed, stood up, walked to the window, and said, “Come on, Dad. I’m just trying to have a chat with Quentin. You’re always telling me what a fantastic influence he could be on me and everything.”
“Just chatting with Quentin?”
“Yes.”
“Then why are you wearing black face paint?”
Margo faltered for only the briefest moment. “Dad, to answer that question would take hours of backstory, and I know that you’re probably very tired, so just go back t—”
“In the house,” he thundered. “This minute!”
Margo grabbed hold of my shirt, whispered, “Back in a minute,” in my ear, and then climbed out the window.
As soon as she left, I grabbed my car keys from my desk. The
Upon close inspection, it contained a Chrysler key. A key for a Chrysler minivan. The one and the same Chrysler minivan owned by my mother.
“My present is a key to your car?” I asked my mom.
“Tom,” she said to my dad, “I told you he would get his hopes up.”
“Oh, don’t blame me,” my dad said. “You’re just sublimating your own frustration with my income.”
“Isn’t that snap analysis a tad passive-aggressive?” my mother asked.
“Aren’t rhetorical accusations of passive aggression inherently passive-aggressive?” my dad responded, and they went on like that for a while.
The long and short of it was this: I had access to the vehicular awesomeness that is a late-model Chrysler minivan, except for when my mom was driving it. And since she drove to work every morning, I could only use the car on weekends. Well, weekends and the middle of the goddamned night.
It took Margo more than the promised minute to return to my window, but not much more. But in the time she was gone, I’d started to waffle again. “I’ve got school tomorrow,” I told her.
“Yeah, I know,” Margo answered. “There’s school tomorrow and the day after that, and thinking about that too long could make a girl bonkers. So, yeah. It’s a school night. That’s why we’ve got to get going, because we’ve