What She Wants for Christmas

Like Joe was his dad or something. Didn’t Mark have any discrimination?

What made her maddest was that she was jealous. He never offered to do stuff with her. Actually, she thought she made him uncomfortable. Well, that was how he made her feel. Like neither of them belonged when the other one was around.

But watching her brother and him through the window, Mark chattering, Joe not saying much but making every catch look easy, as though her little brother had a great arm, she had this flash of dеj? vu. Their yard in Bellevue hadn’t been very big, but she remembered looking out from her bedroom window seat because she heard her father’s voice out there and seeing him and Mark throwing a football. In her memory, it was bright blue—probably a Nerf ball. But there’d been some connection between them, a closeness that had made her feel jealous for a moment, before she’d heard footsteps on the stairs and her mother’s voice calling her. She’d jumped off the window seat and run to her bedroom door—

She shook her head, jolted out of the dream remembrance. Had she heard her mother calling? But the house was silent. And when she looked out again, standing to one side of her window, she saw that her mother sat on the back porch steps, arms wrapped around her knees, watching Mark and that guy. Why would she bother calling her, Nicole?

Nicole yanked the ugly curtains closed and threw herself facedown on her bed. She told herself she was crying because she missed her father. Sometimes it was hard even to picture him. But she’d just now seen him so vividly, as though it was Dad down there right now, not that redneck logger. She remembered stuff they’d done together, like the time he’d taught her ballroom dancing. Sometimes while Mom was cooking dinner, her father would put on a CD, a waltz, maybe, and bow to her. He was a really good dancer. She could almost forget he was her father. They’d twirl and twirl and twirl, perfectly in time. She guessed that was his way of throwing a ball with her. Maybe that was why she loved to dance so much.