* * *
It turned out Roth’s girlfriend’s name was Silke, which seemed completely improbable, but apparently was the kind of Nordic name that went with naturally ice-blond hair and swimming-pool blue eyes.
Wren plugged her number into my cell. Roth watched Penny like she was a dangerous animal who might suddenly bite him. I wished she would. Behind her mask, Penny was probably red-nosed and blotchy from crying, but from the outside at least, she looked like an avenging devil. Roth was right to be afraid.
Then Wren gave an address for this New Year’s party. My dead grandmother’s not-as-yet-sold trailer.
“Wren—” I said, trying to inject myself into the process. But Wren kept talking until it became too late to stop her. Which was, I reminded myself, the problem with Wren’s brand of chaos. She was always making the trouble the rest of us had to wriggle out of.
I had no idea what she was thinking. How would this help Penny?
I couldn’t picture anyone from Mossley at a trailer park, no less Roth and his friends. I was sure that was part of what Wren thought would be awesome about it, imagining Silke’s distress as she wobbled around the pickup trucks and plastic reindeer in her high heels, Roth on her arm. And Grandma’s trailer wasn’t a bad spot for a party, per se. I could volunteer to clear it out, a job that my dad had been avoiding. It might be fun to have a party.
But not a party with Roth and the kids from Mossley. Not a party that we couldn’t even pretend was cool, because they’d be there reminding us that it sucked.
I glared at her.
Wren’s grin only got wider.
“You can invite him, too,” she turned and pointed. When I pivoted, I realized she was talking about the hot Krampus boy I’d called to earlier, who was behind us in line, close enough to have heard her. My cheeks scorched, and I probably looked as ridiculous and sputtering as Roth had. The bare-chested, gold-streaked Krampus tipped his head toward us, in acknowledgment of being noticed.
“Want to come to a New Year’s party?” I called to him, in an act of uncharacteristic daring. It was only November fifth—officially Krampusnacht—so it was remotely possible he hadn’t firmed up plans.
“It would be my pleasure,” he said in a voice that shivered down my spine, a voice that seemed to come from a reality that had gotten a little bent.
“Bring all your friends,” Penny said with a vengeful smile in my direction, as though messing with Roth at the Krampuslauf was our fault and not her idea. As though maybe there was something wrong with the hot Krampus boy bringing his friends to a party in a trailer park. As though I had something to be ashamed of.
A few minutes later, we got our steaming Styrofoam cups of marshmallow-strewn chocolate and started the Krampuslauf, loping along for a half mile as Penny cursed out us, cursed out Roth, and cursed out love. Then we ditched and headed for the good mall.
* * *
It wasn’t like I didn’t understand about crappy boyfriends. I’d had one too. His name was Nicandro, and he’d been way too old for me. After we broke up, I was so messed up that instead of dating anyone else, I made up a boyfriend with an equally extravagant name.
Joachim.
I wrote his name on my notebooks in Sharpie, like he was a real person. So yeah, I understood how Penny could pretend that Roth loved her. After all, I’d pretended a whole person into being.
* * *
I figured the New Year’s party wouldn’t turn into a real thing, but I was wrong. The more time passed, the more the idea came alive in my mind. Even though it had started to goad Roth, and maybe even get Silke and him to come, it became more than that.
Although it was definitely still that, too.
“No, they’re coming,” Pen said, lying on my floor, scrolling through the messages on her phone. “Roth swears. And he said that he was sorry about not introducing me to Silke, but he’d just been so surprised to see us. We probably should have told him we were going.”
“So she’s not his girlfriend?” Somehow the toad had convinced her not to dump him yet again.
Penny sighed, long-sufferingly. “Kind of. I mean, I guess he never said we were exclusive.”
“He said you were his girlfriend,” Wren said. She sat in front of the pieces of cracked mirror I’d glued to the wall and ran her fingers over her half-shaved head, checking for too-long pieces.
“Not his only girlfriend.” She answered this too quickly, like maybe she was parroting back excuses Roth had given her. “Anyway, he promises that he’s going to drop her after the holidays. Before New Year’s Eve. He just doesn’t want her to be sad when they go home. Their parents know one another.”
Wren snorted. “Whatever. He’s a liar. So about the party…”
No one we knew had the kind of fancy New Year’s parties I was imagining. Not like the kind in black-and-white movies. The kind where people wore long, glittering silver gowns and drank champagne out of coupe glasses and kissed one another at midnight. The kind I was determined to somehow throw, despite our limited resources and even more limited experience.
“Probably someone has those,” Penelope said when I explained my vision.
“Roth’s parents,” Wren said. “State senators. Movie stars. People who get cars for Christmas. People who spend Christmas at ski chalets. Not us. You can’t have one of those parties in a trailer.”
“Sure I can,” I said, gripped by compulsion. Sometimes I felt like I was waiting for my life to begin and more than anything, in that moment, I wanted to force some kind of beginning. I wanted things to be different than usual. I wanted to bend reality. “Sort of. We all dress up. And we make, like, canapés instead of onion dip.”
Wren started to laugh. “Canapés? What the hell are those?”
“Finger food,” I said. “Crackers with stuff on them. If you want us to use my dead grandmother’s place to throw a party, it has to be the kind where we wear a gown and drink out of real glasses. No plastic cups or bags of chips or ripped T-shirts. It has to be nice. Otherwise, I’m out.”
They agreed, which I later realized meant that I not only needed to finagle the keys to the trailer, but that I had to actually throw a party worthy of all my big talking. When I volunteered to clean out Grandma’s trailer, Dad looked at me like he could see exactly what I was planning, but he gave me permission all the same.