Page 137 of The Holiday Hate-Off
Amanda slips through the crowd to join us, plenty of people watching her.
“It’s Defiantly Herself,” she says, surprising me by giving Lucy a hug. There’s a story there, obviously, and I’d like to hear it. But I’m not surprised she managed to befriend a famous actress. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d charmed a dictator, won over a warlord, got offered a crown.
“We’re up next,” Amanda continues, “but good luck, you guys. We’re going to stick around for a while to listen.”
I’m feeling a little choked up by the time Lucy and I read our story, each doing a page at a time. It’s a little existential book about a man who looks like a stick and almost gets burned alive, but I like it. It has a dark edge most Christmas books lack. An acknowledgement of the other side of life—the dark that makes the light glow brighter.
I’m in a strange mood by the time we step out into the sunlight, ready for the woolen sock race. And it’s flurrying. Justa few flakes coming down, but the clouds look like they’ll bring a white afternoon for us.
“It’s beautiful,” Lucy breathes out, stretching her hand to catch a snowflake.
“Can you catch one on your tongue?” I ask. Mostly because I want to see her with her head tipped back, tongue extended.
“You want me to look like an idiot,” she accuses, but not hotly.
“You could never. Except maybe for that time you got caught in that Porta Potty.”
I get the playful arm shove I was hoping for, and I wrap my arm around her. We’ve only taken a couple of steps toward the Locke Reserve, where the woolen sock race is being held, when I feel my cell phone vibrate in my pocket.
Thinking it might be my sister again, I slide it out.
There’s a voice message, which is apparently only coming through now after having been left yesterday.
“There’s a message,” I say.
A dark look crosses her face, but she juts out her lower lip stubbornly. “Check it, Enzo.”
So I do…
“Enzo, this is Martin Murphy. You’re a hard man to reach. We got your brief the other day, and holy shit, man, it blew me away. Tom’s gone. We don’t need that kind of unilateral thinking in our company. We need innovation. We needyou. I want to interview you for his job. Now, look, I know Christmas is coming up, but as you know, we’re slammed, so we need you on board, like, yesterday. When can you be in New York for the interview?”
My heart rate picks up. My palms sweat.
Fuck. My boss’s job. This is…
This is huge. Everything I thought I wanted, the life I’ve been working for since I left home.
“Enzo?” Lucy says, her voice fainter than usual. Full of trepidation. “Who was it?”
I can tell from the look on her face that she already knows.
“It was my ex-boss’s boss,” I say carefully. “They let him go. They want to interview me for his position.”
“Of course they do,” she says with a gratifying lack of surprise. “And you’ll go.”
“We can talk about that later. I believe we’re supposed to do the woolen sock race. There’s no way I’m missing that. What the fuck is a woolen sock race, anyway? Are we seriously going to be running in our socks in the snow? We may want to be bystanders for this one, Lucy. We can cheer on everyone else.”
“We’re racing,” she says. “Because I also want to find out what the fuck a woolen sock race is, and I intend to win it.”
I smile at her, but I feel an unfamiliar, uncomfortable tension between us that I’m not sure how to navigate. “You’re not going to throw this one, Lucy?”
“No,” she says. “I’ve already lost the element of surprise.” She takes a brief pause, then says, “You have to take the interview, Enzo. Youhaveto.”
CHAPTER 32
LUCY
“You have to take the interview,” I tell Enzo for the fiftieth time. “This is a really big deal. Huge.”
