My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

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. Penny and I rescued her by lying and saying the boy had started it. Which pretty much set a precedent. One of us would get in boy trouble, and the other two had to bail her out.

Even though Penny and I had known each other longer, Wren was the one who knew my dumbest secret. After Wren found out about my fake boyfriend, I’d had to have a fake breakup with fake texts and everything so Penny didn’t guess. If they’d both known, we would all have had to talk about it.

It was too bad. My fake boyfriend was the best boyfriend I’d never had.

*   *   *

Joachim was a name I’d found on a website that I’d stumbled across when I was looking up the meaning of my own name. It stuck in my head until it came blurting out of my mouth as a boy I really liked, a boy who never existed. After that, I just embroidered the lie. I made up details about his life, about how we met online and how we had plans for him to come up that summer. I sent myself long e-mails full of things we would do in the future, nicknames for one another and lines copied from favorite movies and books and then showed off those e-mails like they were real. I made him into the one person who truly understood me—and weirdly, sometimes he seemed to understand me better than I understood myself.

With my fingers, he wrote that all I needed was to believe that the world wasn’t one way. That it was big enough to contain a lot of different stories in it, big enough to be unpredictable. But I wasn’t sure how to believe him. I knew it was only me talking.

After I’d been found out and “broke up” with Joachim, I cried into my pillow for so long that my face was swollen and puffy at school the next day. Penny snuck out during lunch and came back with a mocha Frappuccino of sympathy. Wren, knowing that both the breakup and the boyfriend were fake, spent the day marveling and being creeped out by my acting prowess.

A couple of nights later, when I couldn’t sleep, I went outside and sat on the stairs in front of my house. Looking up at the glow of streetlights buzzing with moths and feeling the shiver of the wind, I wished that the stars or Santa’s elves or Satan himself would bring me someone like Joachim—or at least give me some kind of sign that the world was big enough and unpredictable enough to contain someone like him—then I’d be as good or bad as I needed to be to deserve it.

*   *   *

“Let’s text Silke,” Wren said, pulling out her phone. A few minutes later she was grinning.

“What?”

“You were totally right. He told his friends the party was off. But I told her that Roth was a piece of shit who was cheating on her and that she should come anyway. I told her we could prove it.”

“You didn’t,” I said.

“She cursed me out, too.” She raised both her eyebrows. “But if she comes, we give her details.”

I groaned. “Penny will never forgive us—”

Wren cut me off. “If we want Pen to dump Roth, we’re going to have to prove to Pen that he’s a rat. Now we just have to prove it to Silke, too.”

“There’s nothing we can do about the way she feels. We’re her friends. Our job is to roll our eyes and stand by her, right?”

“Well, I have a plan,” Wren said, looking at me like I was a little slow. “I figured we’d get Roth really drunk and confess to being a douchenozzle, and if that didn’t work, I thought we’d trap him in the bathroom until he told the truth.”

I wanted to take the phone out of her hand and see what she’d told Silke and what she’d said back. “That’s a terrible plan. That may be literally the worst plan you’ve ever had.”

Wren shrugged. “I just think he would admit stuff eventually, that’s all. Although I guess eventually someone else would want to pee.”

Wren seemed to just know things about people. Often those things turned out to be true. But I wasn’t so sure about her intuition this time.

“Anyway,” she said, standing up and wobbling in the borrowed heels. “It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t come. We need a new plan and that plan should be to get Silke and Pen to compare notes so they see he’s been running a game on them.”

In that moment, I wished I could take back the whole party. It had been a ton of work, I was broke, and now I was pretty sure it would be a catastrophe. But all I could do was go home, collapse on my bed, and promise myself that I was never, ever, ever volunteering to throw a party ever again, no matter how much I wished I was the kind of person who ate crudités and canapés.

Dad was right. I needed less imagination.

*   *   *

The next day, I crawled out, took a super-hot shower, and got ready for the party. I had borrowed a dress out of Grandma’s closet—a floor-length cocktail number in a shimmery silver-black semi-sheer fabric with billowy sleeves, heavy cuffs, and a peekaboo front.