Page 71 of The Nightmare Before Kissmas
I sit next to him on the bed and pin my eyes to the far wall. His shoulders relax a little without my attention directly on him.
“I remember—” He stops, gripping his hands tight together.
I bump his shoulder but don’t say anything.
After a moment, he makes an aggrieved noise. “Why are you asking me about this right now? Fuck.”
I stay quiet. Just sitting next to him.
“I hate you sometimes,” he mutters.
Then, finally, “She’d been reading me a book every night before bed,” he says in a painfully delicate voice. “We’d only gotten a few chapters into it. I remember thinking,She has to come back to finish it. She wouldn’t just leave. The book isn’t finished.”
His words end in a topple. Like he’s trying to get them out before he can feel their impact.
“What was the book?” I whisper.
He chuckles and scrubs his hand across his thigh. “Bridge to Terabithia.” Any humor gets strangled. “I finished reading it a few months after she left. When she was reading it to me, I thought it was a magical fantasy book. It never occurred to me that it wouldn’t endhappily.I—” He sucks in a breath, and it takes me a beat to realizeit’s a gasp of shock. “I don’t think I knew books couldbesad until I finished that one. I assumed every story ended in happy ever after until—fuck.” Kris drops his head into his hands and hunches over. “Why are you making me drag all this up? You’re an asshole.”
I ignore that. Ignore his attempt to push the conversation back onto me because for the first time in a long, long time, maybe ever, I feel like I’m seeing my brother beyond his caretaker façade. Feel like I’m seeinghim.
“Bridge to Terabithiais fucking sad,” I agree.
He looks sidelong at me. “You read it?”
“Movie.”
“Ah. That makes more sense.”
So not only did Mom break Kris’s childhood innocence when she left, she doubled down by introducing him to what is quite possibly the saddest kids’ book ever written.
Whenever she texts us, I immediately get furious. I never respond, and I hound Kris not to respond either. All that anger feels productive, like I’m able todosomething against how fucking helpless she makes me feel.
But Kris wantsherto be the one to do something, to come back and apologize and be better. He wants those happy endings she stole from him.
Tears prick my eyes. I dig down for some of my usual anger at her, that protective shield of defense, but I find nothing, just sorrow, sorrow for how much this hurt my brother.
He’s still picking at his thumb. I put my hand over his and squeeze, hard, until he looks up at me again, pensive and brittle.
“I’m not going to leave. Not you. Not Christmas. I hate what Dad’s doing, but I’m not going to give up, becauseI am not our mother.This is my home.Youare my home, Kris.” My own words kick me mid-breath. “I don’t know what to do, but I’m gonnatry,and I’ll behere, trying,even if I fuck it all up, because I was serious earlier—one day, I’m going to be Santa, and you’re going to be right there with me, and it’ll all beours.Ours, Kris.That’syour happy ever after.”
He exhales, then he’s twisting into me and I throw my arms aroundhim. We’re a tangled mess of a pain that’s almost fourteen years old—god, has it been fourteen years since she left? Screw her—but certain pains don’t age, they don’t shrivel up, they go dormant like a volcano, never losing their ability to be apocalyptically devastating.
Dealing with that pain was part of the reason I was always so…me.But this was another way that the pain has lived on, because my irresponsibility was hurting Kris all this time.
We’ll never be fully rid of it. Not of what she did, not of our duties to Christmas, not of my dad’s manipulation and all the shit he’s putting us through.
But I’m done letting my body play host to it. I’m done letting their choices be parasites on my future. I cling to my brother and make a promise to myself, to him, that this is the start of something new.
I have no idea whatnewis.
My eyes snag on a bundle tucked up behind my headboard and my mood immediately does a one-eighty.
“You,” I start, “absolute fucker.”
Kris yanks back.
I shove away from him, leap onto my bed, and grab the cursed object from behind my headboard.“What the hell is this?”
