My Christmas

For a while my new friends and their exciting conversations have been distracting Juice and me from pursuing boys, but Juice has developed a crush on a guy she knows nothing about. She keeps insisting that she doesn't need to get to know him because they're soulmates. For that reason she was convinced that he would come to our church’s Christmas Eve service, so she dressed up in blue net tights with a fluffy blue sweater. She is currently having a fanny-free phase, which means she searches for alternatives to the conformative skirts and pants that so many oppressed teen girls wear.

Needless to say, Juice was freezing in church, and her crush never came. Fortunately, a little girl in the pew in front of us had been crawling under every pew in church during the sermon, picking off the old dried gum stuck to the bottom of the pews. The sight made me feel nostaligic for the good old days when Juice and I used to do that. We never made anything with the gum though; we just collected it and molded it into a ball. This little girl remoistened each piece of gum and molded the pieces into a hat, which Juice promptly stole in order to plug up the chilling holes in her net tights. She used the remaining gum to mold mittens for herself while the children’s chorus line was performing the final song of the evening, “Silent Night” to the tune of “Jingle Bell Rock,” complete with high kicks.

As we left church. I avoided commenting on Juice’s fashion choices by saying, “Golly, my hands are cold. Aren’t yours, Supergirl?”

“Yes,” Supergirl said as we walked outside into the biting cold, “but what’s worse is that my eyes froze shut as soon as I stepped outside.”

I ripped Supergirl’s eyelids open so that she could see my latest accomplishment. With my new water-resistant brown coat I have learned to mold and throw snowballs with my elbows. I threw a snowball at Juice just as she was fashioning herself a gumband for her hair.

After a few more snowballs, I said, “ I hope you learned your lesson, Juice.”

“Sure I did,” Juice smirked. “Hey Supergirl, what’s wrong? Your look like your lips fell off.”

“They did,” Supergirl said, using her index and middle fingers as makeshift lips. “I told you I was cold. Oh, here they are.”

She picked up her lips by our church’s outside nativity set, which was chained to the pavement. Juice and I walked over to her because she still seemed pretty upset.

“Why aren’t those people in the stable moving?” she asked, her eyebrows nearly vertical with worry. “Are they frozen? And they’re so small. The cold must have shrunk them!”

“They’re plastic, stupid,” I said.

“Plastic?” she echoed. “I thought we were supposed to recycle plastic. This manger scene just stays here.”

Juice’s eyes lit up at that comment and I’m sure mine did too. An excuse to go to our favorite place on earth, Sink World! (For those of you who live in caves or are Roachel, they have a plastic-melting department and are open on Christmas Eve.)

“You’re right,” I said, patting Supergirl on the shoulder. “Let’s break it up into pieces to recycle.”
“We can have it melted down at Sink World,” Juice said, jutting her thumb over her shoulder.

So we went to Sink World and practiced football huddles over melted plastic. The great thing about Sink World isn’t the sinks, in my opinion, but the store’s pet pigeon, except that on this particular occasion it pooped on both me and Juice. We stayed there until Supergirl complained that the warmth of the melted plastic was making Juice’s gum-mittens darker and stickier, and her hand was stuck to one of them.

When I got home, I let Whitey unwrap my presents. I no longer cared about them. In memory of that great evening I wanted to keep the pigeon poop on my cheek, but it got in my eye. That upset me because I never have problems with my eyes, nor does anyone else I’ve ever known, hence it's a problem inconsistent with real life.