The Kind of Friends We Used to Be (17 page)

It is Christmas Eve, and Flannery sits on the couch in the living room, listening to her stepbrother Ellis go on and on about college and all the wild, out-of-control things he’s been doing this semester. Flannery’s stepdad, Stan, nods his head like crazy, as though he doesn’t mind that instead of attending classes and studying, Ellis seems to be spending his college years taking spur-of-the-moment crosscountry rides to see bands no one has ever heard of and running around the campus’s main quad at three a.m. wrapping the lampposts with toilet paper. Stan seems to find it all too hilarious for words.

Flannery’s mom walks into the room with the phone in her hand. “They can’t find his luggage anywhere,” she says to Stan. She turns to
Ellis. “They’re doing everything to track it, honey. They think it probably flew on to Atlanta after you made your connection in Chicago.”

Ellis shakes his head, like he can’t believe how cruel the world is to him. “I don’t care about the clothes,” he says. “I can borrow some of Dad’s clothes. But I need my guitar. If I go more than twenty-four hours without playing, it’s like my hands get arthritis or something. All the tendons and stuff start tightening up.”

Flannery’s mom’s face lights up with a smile. “Flannery has a guitar,” she chirps. “You can play hers while we’re waiting for yours to show up.”

Ellis looks at Flannery. His expression is doubtful. “What kind of guitar do you have?”

“Electric,” Flannery says. “Fender.”

“More specific, please,” Ellis says in a snotty tone of voice, like he is Mr. Guitar Expert of the Universe.

“Stratocaster, blue finish, medium-heavy strings.”

“Yeah, whatever, okay,” Ellis says, shrugging.
“I’ll make do. The only Fender worth playing is a Telecaster, and Fenders suck in general. You want to play guitar? Get a Gibson, man. A Gibson Les Paul.”

“Is that what you play, honey?” Flannery’s mom asks, sitting down next to Stan on the couch and smiling brightly at her stepson.

Ellis turns away and mumbles, “I wish.”

Flannery’s mom turns to Flannery. “Go get Ellis your guitar, sweetie. I’d really love to hear him play.”

“I can’t,” Flannery says. “Kate Faber has it.”

“Then go get it from Kate,” her mom says, the bright and shiny smile still pasted on her face. “I’m sure she’s not using it.”

Shrugging into her jacket, Flannery wonders how her mom can be sure Kate’s not playing her guitar at this very moment. It’s the sort of thing her mom says all the time, as though you can wipe away problems or stress or difficult situations by denying the very possibility they exist in the first place. It can be pouring rain outside, but in her mom’s mind all you have to do is say,
Rain, what rain?
and,
poof,
the rain is gone. The fact is, Kate may be jamming out right now in front of the mirror, pretending she’s the greatest rock star who ever lived, and by asking for the guitar back, Flannery’s going to ruin her whole Christmas Eve.

Outside, the light is already dimming, even though it’s only a little after four. The sky is a pinkish gray, and it won’t be long before the first star of the evening shows itself, a little silver dot that winks and blinks over the world. Flannery thinks she should go back into the house and get Rocko, so she can have a little company on her walk down the street, but then she pictures Rocko snoozing by the fireplace and figures it wouldn’t be fair to wake him just so she won’t feel lonely. Lately, the fur around his eyes has gotten whiter, and he’s stopped chasing squirrels. Flannery has had Rocko since she was three, and it is hard to believe she won’t always have him, but she knows he’s getting old. He’s already lived past the age the books say a bulldog will live. Maybe there’s some sort of operation Rocko
could have, Flannery thinks vaguely, not exactly able to say what the operation would be for. Immortality?

She looks back at her house, to see if Stan has turned the lights on yet. Flannery is not Stan the Man’s biggest fan, but she has to admit he puts on an impressive Christmas light show. It is probably the best one in the neighborhood, but that might be because there are two families on their street where the parents always travel for work and never decorate anything, which cuts down the competition, and then there’s that old lady with all the rosebushes, whose house is always dark at night, like maybe she goes to bed at five or something. She is definitely not the type to put up Christmas lights.

Stan puts up his lights the day after Thanksgiving. Flannery knows her mom wishes that he would wait. Her mom is the sort of person who thinks you shouldn’t get your Christmas tree until the week before Christmas. But Stan is not the sort of person who takes other people’s opinions into consideration. He
does things his way, because in his opinion, his way is the best and only way.

Flannery stoops to scoop up a handful of small white stones from somebody’s rock garden. She wonders if you could get arrested for stealing rocks. It might make Christmas more interesting if she spent it in jail.

The problem with being thirteen, Flannery thinks, is that Christmas isn’t that fun anymore. “Santa Claus” still visits her house, but what he brings is clothes Flannery’s mom hopes like anything she’ll wear (she won’t) and a few books that a bookstore salesclerk has recommended for girls Flannery’s age, and gloves and a new wallet, stuff like that. Flannery doesn’t care. She doesn’t even bother making a Christmas list anymore. She can get all the music she wants off the Internet, and music is pretty much all she cares about anyway.

There are a few lights on at the Fabers’, so Flannery figures somebody is probably home. She gets a little excited thinking about her guitar and wonders why she’s waited so long—since the beginning of school, she realizes—to
ask for it back. It’s not like she’s been so busy studying. Flannery doesn’t have to study very much, though her mom tells her that will change when she goes to high school. Flannery doubts it.

No, Flannery knows why she hasn’t asked. Because her dad, Hawaii Bob as she’s come to refer to him, promised her a new guitar last summer, when she’d had lunch with him at the airport. He had a layover of two hours, and he and Flannery had spent it at a crowded hamburger place, the floor littered with scrunched-up napkins and decimated French fries. That was the only time she’d seen him all year, but she figured the guitar would make up for the lack of real face time.

If she’d asked Kate for her old guitar back, it would be like admitting she didn’t think the new guitar was coming. And Flannery believed it was. In fact, she could hear the rumbling of a
UPS
truck on the next block. Her guitar might be on it, sitting on the seat next to the driver,
HANDLE WITH CARE
scrawled across the box.

Flannery realizes as she rings the Fabers’ doorbell that she is no longer holding the little white stones she’s stolen. Turning around, she can barely make out a trail of them behind her, where she has dropped them one by one. Like she would need a trail to follow to get home, she thinks. Like getting back home is so important.

It is Christmas Eve, and Matthew Holler is sitting on the living-room couch watching
Frosty the Snowman
with his little sister. Sarah is addicted to Christmas specials, and she refuses to watch them by herself. His older sister, Carrie, took the early afternoon shift—
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Rudolph’s Shiny New Year, The Little Drummer Boy
—and now it is Matthew’s turn. He doesn’t mind
Frosty the Snowman
so much, but he hates the other one that’s on the same
DVD
,
Frosty and the Environmental Disaster,
something like that. It’s a bunch of bull, in Matthew’s opinion, just something they did so somebody could make a bunch of money.

People ruin everything, he thinks, at least the greed-heads do. They make sequels to shows that don’t need sequels. There should only be one Rudolph story and one Frosty the Snowman story and one Charlie Brown Christmas story.

It occurs to Matthew that this is a pretty stupid conversation to be having with himself, but he can’t help what he thinks about. The thoughts pretty much show up whether Matthew wants them to or not. Besides, he is bored with
Frosty the Snowman,
bored with sitting around the house, bored with Christmas. His parents are out making the rounds of Christmas open houses and won’t be back until nine. Matthew, Carrie, and Sarah could have gone with them, but Matthew and Carrie didn’t want to, and so Sarah didn’t want to either. She is nine but considers herself to be Matthew and Carrie’s equal, both socially and intellectually.

When the phone rings, Matthew jumps up to get it. He is not usually a phone guy, but suddenly he’s hoping it’s one of his friends, Sam, maybe, or Evan or Kate, anyone to talk to.
Maybe it’s Kate, and she wants to play guitar over the phone. They do that now a few times a week, mostly just one playing, and then the other, but the other night they played a song together, a Pink Floyd song he’d learned from Sam called “Wish You Were Here.” He even sang, which was not something he did a lot, not with other people, at least.

It’s not Kate, however, or Sam or Evan. It’s Emily. A thought darts through his mind that he’s not quick enough to grab hold of, but it comes back a few seconds later, and this time he catches it: He is sorry it’s Emily, not Kate, who has called him. Emily talks too much, for one thing, and what she has to say isn’t all that interesting. Sure, she’s hot, and no one’s ever said Matthew Holler didn’t have a thing for hot girls. But after a few weeks of hanging out, sometimes Matthew is filled with the desire to smash something when he hears Emily’s voice, not because she makes him angry, but because he feels like it’s a waste of time. Maybe hotness isn’t everything, he thinks as Emily recites a list of what she wants for
Christmas. It’s a high percentage of everything, just not 100 percent.

“Oh, yeah, hey, listen—there’s my mom. I’ve gotta go.” Matthew hangs up the phone before Emily even has a chance to say good-bye, which he realizes is a pretty harsh thing to do, especially on Christmas Eve, but if he stayed on the phone one more second, he is pretty sure his brain would have exploded.

Looking into the family room, he sees that Sarah is totally absorbed in the second
Frosty,
the one Matthew can’t stand, so he sneaks upstairs to his room. It’s a complete and impressive wreck, and he’s supposed to have it cleaned up before his parents get back. Like what, they’re going to cancel Christmas if his bed isn’t made? He closes his door, grabs his guitar, and sits on the edge of his bed, working out the solo that comes in the middle of “Wish You Were Here.” He could go online and print out a chart—there are only two hundred thousand Pink Floyd fan sites where you can find tabs and barre chords—but he’d rather do it himself.

He’s almost got it worked out when his brain flips from “Wish You Were Here” to “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” which has always been Matthew’s favorite Christmas carol. Can you even play that on guitar? he wonders. He listens to it in his mind and then slowly starts translating the notes in his head to his guitar. E minor, he’s pretty sure, then C, then B—no, B-7.

He gets it worked out, then plays through it a couple of times until he’s happy with his strumming. It sounds good, he thinks, then looks around his room and thinks that playing Christmas carols by yourself is beside the point somehow. He suddenly imagines himself walking down the middle of his street, his guitar strapped on over his winter jacket, singing all the Christmas songs he knows. He can’t help himself—he starts working out the chords to “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

You’re not really going to do this, he tells himself as he’s figuring whether “Frosty the
Snowman” starts out with a G or a C. There’s no way.

Definitely no way would I ever do that, he thinks, standing up and looking around his room for his coat and the scarf his mom knitted him last Christmas. That is so completely not what I’m about.

He is careful to not let the screen door slam behind him as he sneaks out of the house and heads toward the road.