Page 32 of A Very Snowed In New Year
From: [email protected]
This is amazing, Piper. Thank you. I really appreciate it.
You’re right—she’ll love these.
My sister has a theory that you stopped writing fanfic because you have a boyfriend.
Accurate?
From: [email protected]
I love that there are theories circulating about me!
I’ve just been busy with school, that’s all.
I don’t have a boyfriend.
I have, however, been creating many, many swoony male humans on the page. I just haven’t shared them with the internet. And they have not yet materialized as actual humans. Not for me anyway. Not yet.
TEN
Piper
ONE PIPER PINING
Christmas
“Pipah!Quit starin’ at yer phone and take a picture of me andWaltahby the mantle. With mynutcrackahdolls! Chop-chop, so we can watch the movie!” My great-aunt Mel gives me her point-and-shoot camera and shuffles over to her gas fireplace, fluffing up her hair and stepping carefully over the train set that’s chugging around the tree. She’s wearing a red-and-green crushed velvet tracksuit with her Rudolph slippers and dangly elf earrings that are the size of actual elves. “Waltah.Waltah.WALTAH!”
Walter is my great-aunt Mel’s new boyfriend. He lives two blocks away, but they met on a cruise. “For cryin’ out loud. Where’s the fire, woman? I’m talkin’ to your brother-in-law over here about snowblowers.”
“Well, excuse me,mistah, but I happen to think that conversation could be an email. Come over here by the mantle for a picture,arright?”
“Good thing I love it when she bosses me around,” he mutters, grinning as he winks at me. Walter looks like a cross between Channing Tatum and Larry David, which shouldn’t be a thing, but it’s a thing.
“Oh, you think I don’t know what you like,mistah? Get over here and spoon me for the camera.” It is alarming how much energy she has after all the roast chicken, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, and frozen chocolate pie with Cool Whip she’s eaten. But she’s so excited to host the whole family and her boyfriend for Christmas this year—it’s sweet.
It’s getting pretty crowded in her little house on Staten Island. My grandparents, my parents, me and my brother, Aunt Maddie and Uncle Declan, their kids—Ciara and Kieran. Walter. And all twelve thousand of Mel’s bargain-priced Christmas decorations.
Walter stands behind Mel with his arms around her waist, and they pose like for a prom photo. I don’t think they’re even doing it ironically. It’s very cute. I get a landscape shot of Mel’s and Walter’s smiling faces, most of Mel’s hair, some of the pre-lit frosted faux-spruce garland, a pair of craft store angels, and three out of nine of her nutcracker dolls.
My collection of Christmas pipers has grown again, thanks to her. This year she got me a mouse standing in front of eleven organ pipes. Honestly? The hand-painted face on that mouse will give me nightmares for the rest of my life. But it’s from a limited-edition Twelve Days of Christmas collection that Mel is very proud of, so I will treasure it while keeping it face down in a box at the back of a closet forever.
“Hey,mistah!” she calls out to Declan. “Remembahthe first time you came to my house and brought me this doll? I knewright then. I said to mysistah—that man is gonna be one of us. I knew the way you know a good bagel just from lookin’ at the crust. And now look at us. We got three more beautiful people in our family, and I got ninenutcrackahdolls. Nine. A fancy collection that a fancy lawyer started for me, la-di-da! ThirtydollahsI paid for that green-and-gold one, would you believe? I must think I’m a Kardashian, but I tell you, I just had to have him.”
Declan and my dad are moving the extra folding chairs from around the dinner table to the living room area for the TV-watching portion of tonight’s festivities. “I think about that night very often, Mel,” he says, grinning. “Fondly.” He shares a look with Maddie, and I know he’s talking about their infamous ferry ride home that evening more than the time he spent here with the family.
But I remember that Christmas dinner like it was yesterday—when I encouraged Declan to join us so he could be with Maddie. I was so good at texting him from Maddie’s phone that they are now a family of four, and this year I’m helping someone I don’t even like get together with my celebrity crush. And she doesn’t even like him. Why can’t I do this for myself?!
Looking around, I realize that I am the only person here over the age of ten who is single. And Ben even has a girl that he likes to spar with in karate class. How is it possible that I, the greatest champion of Love and Romance, am still boyfriendless? ShouldIgo on a cruise?
I haven’t heard from Journal Guy since I told him I don’t have a boyfriend two nights ago. Maybe I seemed too eager—who knows. I hope I have time to get back to the Wishing Wall before I leave town. In addition to selling a script, meeting Holden face-to-face, and having my First Time within the next year with someone who really cares about me, I want to add a new wish: Meet Journal Guy face-to-face.
I think.
I don’t even know which one I’d choose if I found myself in the amazing predicament of having to choose between two guys: one guy whose identity I know; one who could be anyone, really. But then again, this not-knowing has its charms, as Tom Hanks said inYou’ve Got Mail.
