“Mom, is it inappropriate to have stuffing and gravy for breakfast?” I say, eyeing the Christmas Day leftovers in the fridge.
“It might be more inappropriate to call it breakfast at eleven-thirty,” Mom says from the kitchen table, where she and Murray sift through pieces of his new deep-ocean puzzle. He got it for Christmas at Gramma and Grampa’s house yesterday, where I did, in fact, make Gramma cry with my mad poetry skillz. At least, I assume it was the poem that made her cry and not the movie I got for her.
Dad wanted to get them a Blu-ray player to try to force them into the twenty-first century, so I tried to do my part for the cause: I found a Blu-ray of the old original Muppet Movie that we used to watch together on VHS whenever I slept over at their house as a kid. And since that generally coincided with mass consumption of fresh-baked sugar cookies and sweet tea, I could even work a line in about it in her poem.
In all, I wrote three poems as gifts—which shall not be revealed to Trip under any circumstances—not including the dumb little rhyme I stuck in the box with Grampa’s gift. I found a pair of suspenders online lined with turkey silhouettes. No tears, but he did belly-laugh at the much-more-appropriate bulge/indulge rhyme I ripped off from Trip. And he had those bad boys hooked up to his signature sweatpants before he opened another gift.
“I’ll heat up some gravy for you,” Mom says, kissing Murray on top of the head as she gets up from the table. Murray absently rubs the top of his head without looking up from his puzzle.
“You’re rubbing it in,” I say, but he doesn’t hear me. They’ve got the border of the puzzle finished, covering nearly the entire table, and once Murray’s locked in on something, it’s hard to shake his focus. Kind of impressive, really.
When my near-mixing-bowl portion of stuffing and gravy is ready, I carry it and a glass of milk to my room. Breakfast of champions.
I set my goods on my desk and wake my laptop. Once I’ve got my music started, I settle into a busy day of gaming, YouTube, and SportsCenter. And probably more gravy. But before I finish off my first bowl of stuffing, my instant messenger dings to life on the screen.
TabithaHut: Merry Xmas, Matty.
TabithaHut: Can I come over? I have presents.
I look over at the huge gift bag on the floor at the end of my bed, white envelope sticking out of the top.
M-Dub: Me too.
M-Dub: And since when do you have to ask?
M-Dub: ;)
We both know since when, I think. But I’m still pretending nothing’s wrong. And, really, I do wish she still felt like she could show up unannounced.
A few minutes later, as I’m pacing my room, taking erratic shots at the Nerf hoop, the doorbell rings downstairs. I hear the door open and Mom’s excited greeting, followed closely by Murray tearing in from the kitchen, yelling Tabby’s name. Apparently the one thing that can break his focus.
When I come down the steps, Mom’s still got Tabby locked in a hug, despite the shopping bag of presents hanging from Tabby’s hand.
“We missed you yesterday, sweetie,” Mom says, her hands still on Tabby’s shoulders, keeping her at arm’s length, as though she’s afraid she’ll escape. I know the feeling.
Tabby’s wearing the earflap hat and an oversize Gettysburg College hoodie I’ve never seen before.
“Yeah, I missed you guys, too.”
It was maybe the first Christmas Tabby didn’t come over in the evening, though no one mentioned it last night.
“Liam wanted to take me to his grandma’s house,” Tabby explains. “He must have told her my dad was going in to work last night like he always does, and she insisted I come to her house for dessert. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it wasn’t a big deal.”
“Well, that was sweet of her,” Mom says. She pulls Tabby into the living room, Mom peppering her with small-talk questions about Liam’s grandma and what they do for Christmas and how her Christmas morning was with her dad. Murray interrupts every other word to show Tabby each one of his presents.
I sit down on the bottom step and watch as he blurs past me to the tree in the den downstairs, flying back up a second later with a new gift, which he piles next to Tabby on the couch like he’s presenting gifts to the altar.
On about his fifth trip, Mom stops him and says, “Murray, bring up the gifts for Tabby, okay? There should be three with her name on them behind the tree. Can you do that?”
His eyes light up, and he takes off again. He returns a moment later, his arms full of wrapped boxes, this time with Dad in tow.
“Hey, Tabby’s here!” he says, the same way he says it every time she’s here, and sits down in his easy chair next to the couch. Murray drops the presents on Tabby’s lap and sits down on the floor directly in front of her.
“Thank you, Murray! Are these all from you?”
“Mm-hmm,” he replies, nodding his head and smiling at her. She looks over at me for the first time, sitting on the bottom step, and smiles.
“You guys didn’t have to do this,” she says.
“Oh, stop it, Tabby,” Mom says. “Just open them.”
Tabby opens the first two boxes and gushes over the sweaters Mom picked out for her. In the third box is an extra-long scarf that Mom must have crocheted to go with the earflap hat, and a pair of socks with chili peppers on them.
“Those are from me!” Murray says, pointing when Tabby holds the socks in front of her.
“These are perfect, Murray! Thank you!”
Murray beams, bouncing in his seat on the floor.
“I brought presents for you guys, too,” Tabby says, reaching for the bag by her feet.
Both of my parents hug her after opening their gift—a pound of coffee from my dad’s favorite coffee shop and two oversize mugs. She smiles at me again as Murray reaches into his small gift bag, squealing as he pulls out a bald eagle Webkinz. Murray jumps up and flies his eagle to each one of us for a closer look, then, when he lands back in his spot on the floor, points to the one present left next to Tabby.
“Whose is that?”
Tabby pauses, and before she answers, Dad scoops Murray up off the ground.
“C’mon, bud, let’s go make some coffee,” he says, Murray hanging over his shoulder laughing. Mom busies herself with the wrapping paper on the floor.
Tabby looks over at me, and I nod for her to follow me up the steps. We’ve never really gotten gifts for each other before, but I guess we both felt it was warranted this year.
My heart starts pounding as Tabby sits down on my bed. I swing my door partway closed behind her and pick up the Nerf ball from the floor.
“I just got you something small,” Tabby says, holding an oddly shaped present.
“I like the sweatshirt,” I say, indicating her Gettysburg College hoodie. She looks down at it and beams, putting my present back on the bed next to her.
“Liam got it for me,” she says. She looks up, and the happiness on her face kills me. “He just got accepted. He was so excited to tell me!”
“Liam’s going to Gettysburg?” I say. That doesn’t sound right. I know I’ve heard him in the locker room, talking about this small school in North Carolina he got into. He’s even talked about playing basketball for them. Division III. He’s met the coach.
I don’t say any of this to Tabby. But I must look confused, because she says, “What?” and I can’t read her expression, but it’s not the same happy face she had a moment ago.
“N-nothing,” I stammer. “No, that’s awesome. Gettysburg’s a great school. And it’s, like, less than a half hour from here.”
Tabby stares down at the front of the sweatshirt again. Her smile has returned.
Just like that, I feel like I’m losing my shit all over again. I look up at the door, at the divot left by my notebook a month ago, and for once, I decide to get off this fucking roller coaster before it starts. Just be normal for once.
“So what’d you get me?” I say, lobbing my Nerf ball at the hoop on my door and forcing a smile. “A Webkinz?”
“Here,” she says, coming back from the little world she was lost in, and hands me the present. “It’s nothing, really. It’s kind of stupid.”
I take the oddly shaped package, wrapped in Sunday comics. It’s light, kind of soft. I put it up to my ear and shake it.
“Underwear?”
“Open it already.”
Faking happy feels better than stewing angry. Joking with Tabby, it actually just feels like happy.
I tear open the paper and pull out a pair of black gloves.
“Batting gloves?”
“They’re receiving gloves,” she says, grinning. “Grippy.” She’s enjoying the look on my face. “Now when you’re shooting baskets in your driveway in the middle of winter, I don’t have to watch you stick your hands in your armpits.”
I laugh—for real—and shake my head, feeling my face grow hot.
“Kind of a selfish gift, really,” she says.
I pull them on, reach under my bed for my basketball, and sit down beside her on the bed.
“You’re right. Grippy,” I say. I shoot the ball into the air a few times to test them out for her. “Thank you.”
“All right, now where’s my present?” she says. “What’d you get me?”
“Underwear.”
At which, of course, she punches me in the arm. I put my basketball on the bed next to me and reach around the end of my bed for Tabby’s gift.
The bag is pretty big, and there’s some definite heft to it when I slide it along the floor in front of her.
“A lot of underwear,” I say when I see her eyes widen. But as soon as she picks up the bag, she breaks into a huge smile. The sound is unmistakable—especially to Tabby.
“Oh my god, this is all Nerds?” she says, gaping at the strain on the handles of the bag as she lifts it up to her lap.
“Yup. Merry Christmas.”
There are two cases in that bag. Twelve large boxes of Rainbow Nerds per case. A shit-ton of Nerds. So no matter what happens, every time she reaches for another handful, every time she gets another hankering, she’ll think of me.
Either that, or she gets diabetes, and she’ll end up thinking of me every time she pricks her finger to check her blood sugar. But that’s the risk you take when you try to harness the power of the Nerds.
For Tabby, I’m rolling the dice.
She pulls one case from the bag, turns it over and over in her hands in reverence. She pulls back the perforated cardboard, revealing twelve brightly colored boxes. She runs her fingers along the perfect row of boxes, an odd grin glued to her face.
“Whoa.”
“Yeah.”
“I almost don’t want to eat them, it’s so beautiful,” she says, after which she pulls out the first in the row and tears it open.
“Oh, I forgot the card!” she says after crunching her first mouthful.
“Don’t worry about that,” I say. “It’s just a card.” I had resisted the urge to swipe the envelope right before I slid the bag over to her, but now I really wish I hadn’t. I stand up as she opens the envelope and busy myself with taking off my gloves, straightening my empty stuffing bowl on my desk, picking up my Nerf ball from the floor.
I turn and see Tabby smiling at the picture she’s pulled from the envelope. It’s of the two of us sitting on the couch in the den, popcorn bag between us, flashing our biggest, cheesiest smiles for the camera. We’re probably about ten in the picture, somewhere around the start of fifth grade. The year of Rebecca Gaskins.
“Where did you get this?”
“It was in a photo album Mom made for me a couple of years ago. Thought you’d like it.”
She laughs and puts her hand to her mouth. She flips it over and looks at the back, and I take a shot at the Nerf rim across the room. It’s only a couple of lines, but I can’t watch her read what I wrote:
You helped me get
my first girlfriend.
I hope you’ll be
there for the last.
I left out the lines that continued in my head, about how I hope she’ll be the last. I’m sure she knows by this point, anyway, but is it really fair to profess my undying love—now that she’s clearly fallen for someone who seems just as crazy about her? I’ve ruined enough already.
I go to pick up the Nerf ball again without looking at her. But before I step across the room in front of her, Tabby stands and wraps her arms around me. I tense for a moment, but then relent and wrap my arms around her, resting my chin on top of her head.
“I love you, Matty.”
I close my eyes and squeeze her tighter.
“I love you, too.”
I know we’re saying two different things, that her words don’t mean the same as mine. But it feels good to hear it. I thought I’d fucked things up too much to ever hear them in any context.
“We are okay, right?”
I nod, my chin still on her head, and as much as I want to stand here and keep holding on, I let her go. And for the first time in forever, we just sit and talk about our year.
“I missed this,” Tabby says after a while. “I don’t know what happened.”
“Yeah. Sorry for being such a douche.”
She shakes her head and holds up a finger, the universal sign for Tabby-lecture. “Listen,” she says through another mouthful of Nerds, “that’s bullshit. If you’re gonna say something derogatory, it had better not involve the female anatomy in any way. You’re the idiot—use your own body parts.”
I shake my head and smile. “Noted. Sorry for being a dick.”
“More of an asshole, actually.”
“Got it.”
“Wait, I forgot that I’m the asshole,” she says, and hands me her box of Nerds. “You’re my dingleberry.”
Tabby stays for dinner, which, to her delight, is leftovers from yesterday. She hadn’t gotten her holiday stuffing fix yet, so she was thrilled when she saw Mom in the kitchen, heating up yet another batch of gravy. If there’s a gravy-consumption threshold for when your blood actually congeals, we haven’t reached it. But we have to be getting damn close.
Mom and Dad are thrilled to have her. Mom can actually talk casually with Tabby about Branson over dinner, and I learn more about them than I ever expected or cared to. Their increasingly regular trips through the McDonald’s drive-through after school for milk shakes. Branson’s plans to major in communications next year (my specialty). Tabby’s misadventures attempting to make whoopie pies with Branson’s grandmother. It’s hard to listen to, but it puts Tabby at ease and lets me shut up for a while.
Murray is beside himself. Candy Land is brought out before the dishes are cleared from the table, and on my second consecutive game of pulling Plumpy down the homestretch, Tabby is introduced to the inner dark of Mr. Mint, candy cane lumberjack, much to Murray’s—and Tabby’s—delight.
Despite her getting regular texts from Branson, it’s everything I’ve been missing since October.
It makes it almost bearable when, after a final round of thanks and hugs, his black Accord is outside to pick her up.
“That was nice,” Mom says, sitting down across from me at the table, where I’m staring at Candy Land, mindlessly reading the character stories on the inside of the box. She sips reheated coffee from her new mug and continues. “Tabby and this Liam boy seem to be pretty serious.”
I nod. They do indeed seem pretty serious.
“This hasn’t been easy for you.” It’s not a question. If she knows the full extent, she doesn’t say. Thank God. “At least he sounds like a nice guy.”
“Yeah. He’s a great guy,” I say, without any expression, turning the blue Candy Land kid over and over in my hand. “Top athlete. Top student. Senior. He’s the best.”
“Would you rather her first serious boyfriend be someone who isn’t nice?”
I look up at her finally. “Of course not, Mom. What kind of friend do you think I am?”
Images flash in my brain—of Lighty following Tabby in the hall. Or Corey Sheridan. Branson is different—that’s what makes this so hard.
“Matthew, sweetie, I think you’re a wonderful friend. The kind of friend Tabby would clearly hate to lose.”
“Clearly,” I say, though I know she’s right. But I just want to whine about it—for lack of any other reasonable solution—and if you can’t be whiny to your mother, who can you be whiny to?
Mom sets her mug down and sighs.
“So maybe you don’t want to hear my advice, but listen for a minute anyway.”
I go back to fiddling with the Candy Land tokens, pretending to be disinterested. But honestly, at this point, I’d love some advice. Mom’s always had the same scary inside-my-brain thing that Tabby has—or maybe I’m not the deep, unsolvable mystery I seem to think I am.
“If Tabby’s important to you—really important to you—be her friend. You two have a history together, stories together, that you’re going to remember and talk about and tell others for the rest of your lives. Those stories don’t have to end because she has a boyfriend. It doesn’t take them away.”
The air feels sharp in my nose. My eyes squeeze closed to keep the tears from spilling over. I can’t look up at Mom.
“Listen, Matthew. Tabby’s fifteen, just like you, and this is her first real boyfriend. Do you know how many people end up with their first boyfriend or girlfriend? Almost zero. And the ones who do are kind of weird anyway.”
She pauses. I know she’s smiling at me, but I still can’t look up.
“I know it’s harder because it’s Tabby, and she’s a girl. But, you know—mistahs before sistahs. Bros before hoes.”
“Wow, Mom,” I say, shaking my head. “Please never say bros before hoes to me ever again.”
She laughs.
“Just be her friend, Matty. Don’t stop being her friend.”
“I know, Mom. I won’t.”
“And, you know, I can’t say what’s going to happen down the road, or what either of you are going to want in your lives. But remember, the best relationships are based on friendship. Your father? That grown man who is right now probably playing with Admiral Ackbar in the den? He’s my best friend.”
“God, that’s kinda sad.”
Mom laughs again. “Just be her friend.”