Merry Random Christmas (13 page)

That was worse.

Way
worse.

“I don’t understand why you’re so upset, Darla,” Joe said, clearly perplexed.

“Because—because—because now I owe her and she went out of her way to help me but I’m not good enough to be counted as part of your family for a holiday,” I said, the words coming out with a groan at the end, as if I knew I shou
l
dn’t say them in the first place.

And from the resulting look on Joe’s face, I was right.

I shouldn’t have.

“You’re really fixated on this ski trip thing.”

“I’m really fixated on this whole being treated like your permanent soul mate thing.”

He looked like I slapped him.

“Those words really shouldn’t have come out, but there you go,” I said, a rising flush making my heart hammer against my ribs, my arms flailing wildly. “Can’t stuff ’em back in. That would be like trying to put semen back inside a spent penis. You could try, maybe, but it would take a lot of equipment, tons of pain, lack of cooperation and it would congeal and never really be the same again.”

Tortilla and Trevor stared at me, too.

I seriously got to work on my metaphors, don’t I?

“
Anyhow,” I said, waving them away, “nobody likes to be excluded. Nobody. Not me, not you, not Trevor.”
 

“Not Mavis,” he muttered under his breath.

Me and Joe shot Trevor a pretty familiar
WTF?
look.

“Sorry.”

“And we’ve all been together for two and a half years. Your mom told you the truth about her and Gene and your dad. You’d think she’d consider me part of your family by now.” I finished that statement with a combination of defeat and triumph in my voice.

“Darla,”
Joe
said slowly. “It took her more than ten years to admit to what’s going on with Gene, and
he’s
not
even
invited to the family ski trip.”

“Ten years? I have to spend eight more years being excluded? Damn. What’s she gonna do when we have a kid—let
it
go
on the trip
, and not me?”

Trevor made a low sound in the back of his throat.
Joe gaped at me.
 

Tortilla stuffed the final piece of bacon on my plate into his mouth. Popsicle walked a drunken line through the living room, weaving around an ottoman.

A kid.
I just said that, huh? More semen you couldn’t shove back in a penis even if you wanted to.
 

Joe
blinked. Over and over,
his
hand coming up from
his
waist, fingers touching
his
chest. I dimly realized
he
was touching
his
scar, the one from
his
infant heart surgery.

“I know you love me,”
I
said, the words coming between two long sighs. “I just wish I could get your mom to accept me.”

“What about Herb?” Trevor’s question surprised me.

“
What about him?” Joe asked.
 

I was grateful for the interruption, for the interlude to not be put on the spot, like being blinded by a police searchlight. That’s what Joe’s eyes felt like.

“He has a say. He hasn’t been some passenger in your mom’s car of life.”

I
was totally rubbing off on
T
revor’s speech patterns.

“My mom has his balls on a chain,”
Joe
argued.

“Then that’s his choice.” Trevor’s eyebrows shot up, the comment meant to stand.
What argument could Joe mount against that?
 

“You’re asking what my dad thinks o
f
Darla? Or whether he’s the one who doesn’t want to include you guys?”

Trevor’s hand went to his neck in a mock gesture of offense. “You mean I’m not invited, either?”

“Ha ha.”

“
What about me?” Tortilla asked, grabbing Trevor’s fork and shoveling the last of his eggs into his mouth. “Am I invited on this ski trip?”
 

“It’s not like that,” Joe snapped.

“Cool. Can I crash here while you’re on vacation?” He looked around the apartment like it was the Waldorf. For him, it probably was.

“Shut up,” Joe snapped.

T
ortilla took that in stride, walking down the hall to the bathroom. I heard the door shut, then the telltale tinkling sound of a man peeing.

Joe looked at the clock. “We need to stop fighting and—”

“We’re fighting? I thought we were just discussing,” I said, perplexed.

He sighed. “How about we do one thing that normal people do on Christmas morning and open presents by the tree?”

Our Christmas
t
ree was a little rosemary plant with red foil around the base of the pot. I had taken a few pairs of dangly earrings and hung them like miniature ornaments.

Three presents surrounded the plant.

“Shit,” I hissed. “What about Tortilla? We don’t have a present for him.”

Trevor held up on finger and sprinted into the bedroom.
A minute later, he came back with a gift bag, tissue paper poking out, a festive red bag with green, glittery accents.
 

“Random Acts of Crazy ski hat.”

“We have ski hats for swag?” Joe asked, surprised.

“It was a promotional freebie some company sent us. I threw in a ten dollar Starbucks card.”

“Perfect,” I said, settling it right in there among the other presents.
We wanted Tortilla to feel welcome.
 

“What about Popsicle?” Trevor asked.

“Huh?” me and Joe asked in unison.

“Popsicle should have a present, too,” Trevor insisted.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Joe said. “It’s a chicken.”

“Paul treats her like she’s a person.
His
person. So we should respect that,” Trevor replied.

“
See? Trevor gets it. We’re making Popsicle a part of our little family. You include the significant others in celebrations,” I said archly to Joe, my point abundantly clear.
 

“You’re comparing yourself to a chicken,”
he replied.
 

I shot Trevor a dark look. “Wouldn’t be the first time I competed with one,” I called back as I
went into the bedroom.
A minute later, I
came out with a tiny little hand-knit thing from a box of crap my mama won in sweepstakes and sent to me. I handed it to Trev.
 

“What is it?” He turned the item around and around, trying to figure it out. “And what’s the logo say?”

“Myers Farms.”

“What?”

“It’s a chicken sweater.”

Trevor went back into the bedroom
without a word
.

Joe turned to me. “Your mom enters sweepstakes
to win
chicken sweaters
?”

“No, silly. She entered to win a lifetime supply of eggs.”

“That’s so much better.”

 
Trevor
came
back
with another gift bag just as Tortilla returned.

“Gift time!” Trevor said. We gathered around the Christmas tree, Tortilla’s eyes full of glee.

“Who’s first?” I asked.

“You.” Trevor handed me a wrapped gift. “This is from me and Joe.”

Now, I’d asked for three things for Christmas. Gift cards to my favorite coffee shop, lingerie, and a
card
game called
SuperFight
.
We had agreed not to spend a bunch of money on each other, because we were going on tour soon and didn’t want a bunch of stuff.
 

This box didn’t feel like any of those
requests
, so I cocked one eyebrow and gave the guys a questioning look as I opened it.

It was a child’s bouncy ball. You know the kind. Like a big yoga ball, but with a circular handle you grabbed on to while you bounce
d
.

Joe had a grin on his face a mile wide. Trevor’s cheeks were pink.

“What is it?”

Trevor reached under a couch cushion and pulled out a hand pump. “Open it! We’ll show you!”

I tore open the packaging, wondering what on earth had them so excited. Trevor took the bright-red deflated rubber ball thingy from me and started pumping. I stood to get myself some more coffee, and by the time I came back and took one look at that...thing...I was howling with laughter.

This wasn’t some child’s toy.

It was
thoroughly
for adults.

A ten-inch protrusion stuck up off the ball’s surface, right about where my hoohaw would go. A much smaller
nub
was present, and it looked like if you positioned yourself in one direction, you’d avail yourself of a certain kind of pleasure, and in the other direction, well..

Let’s just say that ball went both ways.

Joe and Trevor were beaming.

“Wow,” I said slowly, all hope of a nice coffee gift card long gone. “That’s a really inventive gift.”

“I knew she’d like it!” Trevor crowed. “After the Sybian disaster, you said no more electronic toys, so we found this!”
He was so boyish in that moment, his red turtleneck snug in all the right places, jeans hugging his hips and his shoulders wide as his hands held the ball. I melted.
 

“It’s perfect,” I lied.

“It will be,” Joe said in a low voice. “Especially since it deflates and fits nicely in a suitcase. We know how much you hate to fly, and we’ll be flying a lot this coming year, so we wanted a toy you could throw in a suitcase without worrying about going through security and setting anything off.”

“
I’m
the thing that gets set off when I go through
airport
security.”

Trevor laughed. He and Joe shared a look
that made it clear they were thinking about our trip to the island of Eden years ago
. “Yeah. We remember.”

The moment kinda went sideways when we all noticed Tortilla was starting to climb on my bouncy dildo ball and rode it around the room, bouncing and pretending he was riding a bucking bronco.

“
Don’t see that every day,” I said as the man went
boing boing boing
around the room, the dildo part rubbing up against his crotch. A light flush turned his cheeks pink and if Joe hadn’t stopped him just then, I think he woulda jizzed in those borrowed jeans of Joe’s.
 

“We have a present for you and Popsicle!” I called out, trying to rescue the moment. While Joe surreptitiously hid my new bouncy ball
behind a chair near where we stored our shoes
, Trevor and I pulled out the two presents.

“I don’t have anything for you,” Tortilla said, looking shame-faced.

“It’s fine, Paul,” Trevor said. “
Just play us some music. That’d be great.”
 

Paul perked up, and for the next two minutes we got the harmonica version of Katy Perry’s “Roar,” which Joe sat through politely, his jaw twitching. Let’s just say Paul should stick to Mumford & Sons.

“Okay. Now I earned my present!” Paul declared. A troubled storm developed in Joe’s eyes, and he swallowed, hard.

Trevor put his hand on Paul’s wrist. “Hey, man. Don’t feel like you have to earn a gift. A gift’s a gift, you know?”

Paul looked at him, not comprehending. “What?”

We didn’t know his life story. We had no idea who he was, where he came from, what had happened to make him homeless and living on the streets of Cambridge with a chicken. But in that moment, as he looked from me to Joe to Trevor with confusion, some part of my heart went out to him.

Three years ago I thought that the world I knew was all I was gonna know.

I wondered if Tortilla felt that way.

“Why do they call you Tortilla?” I asked, breaking the weirdness. Trevor set Paul’s present in front of him.

Paul laughed, eyes tracking Popsicle as she walked over to one of Joe’s running shoes and pecked at the laces. “Because I like tortillas.”

“That simple?” Joe asked.

“Yeah. There’s a Mexican place down near MIT that puts all their unused tortillas out on the back curb every night. The owner’s cool. I go there and scarf ‘em down. Some of my friends started teasing me about it, and...” He shrugged. His stomach growled. His eyes went to the unopened donut box on the counter.

I got up and walked past the table, noticing the other box was now empty. Huh. Guy was a bottomless pit.

Bringing the fresh box back, the scent of cinnamon filled the air as I opened it. Cider donuts. Joe’s favorite. The guys all grabbed one each—my favorite were the maple, which rested in my full stomach now—and Paul shoved the entire donut in his mouth, then got down to business opening his present.

First, he pulled out the Starbucks gift card. “I can get a pumpkin spice latte!” Paul chirped, waggling his eyebrows. “Or maybe a peppermint one. Hmm. It’ll be hard to decide. Thanks, guys!” His eyes cut over to my bouncy ball with a lingering look of want.

Then he reached into the gift bag and withdrew the Random Acts of Crazy ski hat. You would have thought we’d given him a cashmere sweater.

“It’s perfect!” he shouted, pulling it over his
now-
clean, blonde hair. He looked so much like Trevor for a split second, the angle of his long, sharp nose making me blink twice, and then the resemblance was gone.

He jumped up and hugged all three of us, Joe’s embrace a bit perfunctory, then found his backpack, tucking the gift card away for safe keeping.

“Here’s Popsicle’s gift.” Joe handed him the gift bag.

“Why are you giving it to me?” Paul asked, brushing some hair off his eyebrow. His blue eyes glittered. “Popsicle should open it.”

Joe rolled his eyes, turning his face away from Paul, and picked up the bag. Trevor bit his lips, holding back a snicker.

“Here,” Joe announced, dropping the bag in front of Popsicle. She pecked at it.

“For God’s sake,” Joe muttered, pulling the sweater out. “Here.” He handed it to Paul, who started laughing.

“Is this a penis cozy?” He held it over his crotch and started unbuttoning his jeans.

“No! It’s a chicken sweater,” Joe snapped. “Put your junk away. It’s for the chicken.”