A three-foot-tall fake Christmas tree sat on a rickety table in a corner window, looking as pathetic and unfestive as possible. Non-blinking, multicoloured bulbs were affixed to it. The only ornaments were a few actual candy canes, still in their cellophane wrappers and hooked over branches, a dozen shiny silver glitter-coated bells, and eight felt-enclosed school photos of me, from kindergarten through seventh grade.
There was no star. No angel. Nothing on the top at all. No gifts beneath. Just the plastic stand, sitting bare on the wood.
Our trees had always been tall and fresh, chosen at a Christmas tree farm twenty miles out of the city. Mom and Dad always let me choose the tree, and then Dad would pay the tree farmer before cutting it down and strapping it to the roof of our car, where it would hang out over the windshield in front and poke out from the back like a roof-mounted rocket. Last year, the tree I chose was so tall that Dad had to climb to the top of the ladder to circle the top branches with twinkly white lights and add the star.
The tree skirt Mom used looked like a tapestry – trimmed in gold braid and embroidered with gold-threaded words like Noel and Merry Christmas and Ho Ho Ho. There were always lots of gifts on top of it, and most of them said Landon.
I’d been spoiled, and though I’d been somewhat aware of the fact, it didn’t seem to matter, because every kid I knew was the same.
Grandpa grabbed a suitcase from my hand and turned to walk towards the kitchen. That was the moment I wondered where my room would be.
He opened the door to the pantry. Only, it wasn’t the pantry any more. The lower shelves had been removed, and a twin mattress and frame was somehow, impossibly, crammed wall-to-wall inside. From the ceiling, an overhead light hung on a chain – a three-bulb type of light usually found over a kitchen table. I recognized that it had, in fact, hung over the kitchen table the last time I’d been here, months before. The world’s most compact, narrow chest stood crammed into the entry corner. I had to shut the pantry door to open any of the drawers. There was no window.
I had become Harry Potter. Except I was thirteen and not magic, and my destiny, whatever it was, held no profound purpose.
‘Spruce it up or not – whatever you’d like. It’s just for sleepin’ and holdin’ your stuff. You aren’t obliged to stay in here.’ People as old as Grandpa forgot a lot of things, obviously. If he’d have remembered being a teenager, he’d have known we live in our rooms.
Grandpa was commonsensical, Mom always said. ‘He’s like your dad. They see the world in black and white.’
‘Why are they always mad at each other?’ I asked.
‘They aren’t really mad – just in a disagreement about what’s black and what’s white. Problem is, they’re fighting over something in between.’
Dad believed Grandpa was disappointed in him for leaving, instead of staying and working on the boat. I wasn’t so sure. Maybe Grandpa just wanted to be allowed to do what he wanted to do with his life, instead of being judged as not educated enough – not good enough.
‘So they’re fighting over the grey stuff?’
‘Yes, but more like – the colours. Grey tones in black-and-white photos are the coloured things in real life – the green grass, a pink scarf, a yellow rose. I think they sometimes don’t understand how much falls in the middle. How much will never be black or white.’ She smiled. ‘Maybe they’re artistically challenged. Like I’m math challenged. You know?’
I nodded. But I was comfortable with both, so I didn’t really understand.
Lying on my new bed, I stared up at the three faux-flame bulbs of the only light fixture in my microscopic room. The switch was on a cord that hung down the wall by the door. The fixture and arms were a sort of oxidized brass, but so corroded that I couldn’t tell what it was supposed to look like. Maybe the metal had been shiny once – like fifty years ago. Probably, brass wasn’t made to be this near the ocean and never polished.
I stretched my arms out to either side and touched the walls, then reached behind me and touched the third wall. The fourth wall was mostly the pantry door, with a tiny bit of wallboard around and above it.
Going up on my knees, I groped along one of the shallow shelves Grandpa had left attached to the wall and grabbed my iPod from its new home next to a stack of my sketchbooks. A few months ago, these shelves held canned goods and preserves and boxes of cereal and macaroni and cheese. There had been a basket of potatoes by the door that Grandpa called tubers, and a basket of onions next to it that I could still smell even though they’d been moved somewhere else – to a drawer in the kitchen, I guessed.
I shoved my earbuds in and dialled to a playlist of a new band I’d just discovered before we left Alexandria. They’d been local, getting some play on the college stations. I was thinking I might go see them, live. Now, unless they got really famous and started touring, I’d never see them. Even if they started touring, they’d never come here. No one came here.
I wasn’t sure what happened to the boxes of ornaments and decorations Mom dragged from the basement closet every year – the strands of lights, twistable green garland, velvet stockings and the advent calendar with its tiny hinged windows.
I hadn’t expected any gifts, but Grandpa gave me a pearl-handled pocketknife with a blade longer than my middle finger. It looked old, but well maintained and wicked sharp. Dad, having failed to remember to buy me a gift on a major holiday, handed me a few bills, and I stuffed them into my wallet without looking at them. ‘Thanks,’ I said to each of them, and then Grandpa pulled an ancient waffle iron from a low cabinet and a box of waffle mix and plastic jug of maple syrup from a high cabinet.
First Christmas without Mom, over.
I’d grown a bit more since summer but hadn’t been shopping for new clothes. I hadn’t had a haircut. Honestly, I sort of forgot about how I looked until the first day I had to go to a new school.
In this town, there was one elementary school, one junior high and one high school, all housed at the same address. Sort of like my private school back home – or what used to be home. Most of the kids here had known each other most if not all their lives, just like we had. Newcomers were mistrusted until they made friends or became outcasts. I knew this, but even so, I didn’t think about how it would apply to me, until it did.
My T-shirts still fitted okay, but my jeans didn’t. My shoes squeezed my toes. I’d outgrown my North Face jacket, and the sleeves of my hoodies were all too short. I tugged them down my arms until the knitted cuffs stretched out like too-wide mouths and stayed that way.