Mine.
“Hey what?” He’s still pissed. Doing the Santa bit, but pissed.
“How about you bring the suit home, too? We can play Santa Disciplines the Naughty Elf,” I whisper in his ear as he dons the fake beard.
“That’s one of your father’s favorite games,” Satan says from behind a fake ficus across the way.Chapter 4“MOM?”
“Just look at you two! I knew Shannon was here as a beautiful little perky elf, but Declan as Santa! You two were meant to be together,” Satan, a.k.a. my mother, says, reaching in to give Declan a kiss, ignoring my protests.
My sister Amy is with her. “Perky is right. Shannon, your, um, headlight is…” I look down. One is pointed toward New Hampshire and the other toward Antarctica.
I turn around and readjust. “What are you two doing here?”
“Amanda texted to let us know.”
“I hate her.”
“She’s your best friend. You can’t hate her.”
“Why isn’t she here doing the elf impression?”
“She’s delivering toys to needy kids.”
“Flimsy excuse.” I look around the wall and see that Mommy Masochist is back in line, dragging a very chocolate-y Tycho. The line’s gotten a lot longer suddenly. Doubled, even.
“Wow,” I say. “The line’s really getting long.”
“Blame it on Hot Santa,” Amy says, pointing to Declan, who scowls.
“You look just like Chuckles!” Mom gasps.
It makes Declan’s frown darken. Even Mom backs off.
“Please don’t call my boyfriend ‘hot,’” I chide Amy. “It’s gross.”
“No,” she explains, pulling out her phone. “#HOTSANTA. Some mommy blogger who’s here at the mall started it on Twitter with pics of Declan getting dressed, and now Jessica Coffin’s made it go viral.”
“What?”
She’s holding up a picture of Declan in all his broad-chested, thick-pec glory, adjusting one red suspender and looking good enough to ride.
Like Santa’s sleigh.
“But, but—” he protests. “That was five minutes ago!” He’s rattled, and Declan doesn’t do rattled.
“Five minutes is like a day on Twitter. You could end up with a flashmob,” Amy says.
“Hot Santa, huh?” I smack his ass and send him on his way. “Time to go make some good little girls and boys very happy.”
“I think he’s got mostly naughty girls out there,” Mom says.
“Humph,” is all I can reply. I see the photographer out there, working the longer line, more cash changing hands. Greg trusted me to get this right, and I will. I march out there, ignoring my mom and sister, wondering if the day can get any weirder. By the time I get to the guy, he’s worked his way to the front of the line.
The new photographer ignores my outstretched hand as I try to introduce myself and says something in a clipped, accented voice to the mom standing with her little boy. She smiles nervously at him, clearly not understanding a word he says. He sounds like a mix of a Russian hit man and the Swedish chef from the Muppets.
Which means he’ll probably shoot me dead with a silenced gun and have my body made into something they serve at the shady burger joint in the mall food court before he finishes a cigarette.
“Come here! Look here!” he says in that severe accent, his eyes dead. The guy could be anywhere from twenty to fifty, with a face so angular you could use it to dig a hole under the Berlin Wall (circa 1988).
The little boy who is about to perch himself on Declan’s lap begins to cry as the photographer sighs, throws his hands up, and spews a stream of foreign-language invective that might well be the words to Goodnight Moon but sounds like a laundry list of all the ways he’s going to cook this boy’s pancreas for dinner.
“We have our own photographer, actually,” the mother says nervously as she comforts the sweet boy, whose eyes are teary. He has bright blonde hair and a giant cowlick on his forehead hairline. The green eyes make me think of Declan.
The photographer starts screaming in what I now realize really is Russian, making a handful of kids in line start crying, parents on smartphones texting and calling and trying to look like they’re doing something.
And then: Santa starts shouting back at the photographer. In Russian. Declan speaks Russian?
The Russian man spits on the ground. Santa hands the kid off to his mom and stands, grabbing the photographer’s arm and pulling him behind the wall on the other side of Santa’s chair.
A massive wave of anxiety and fear spills through me as Amy and Mom hide behind a planter and my nipples decide to try to run away, too. I can’t catch my breath and everything happens so fast I feel the room spin.
There is this 1980s movie that Mom and Dad loved to watch over and over when we were teens. It’s A Fish Called Wanda, and there’s this scene where John Cleese speaks Russian to Jamie Lee Curtis and it makes her so hot and horny she turns into a sex machine. I always giggled with embarrassment, and later lots of eye rolls, at the idea when we watched the film.