“Well, obviously,” Wren said.
“Sometimes I think you’re obsessed with Basilton,” Agatha said onscreen, her eyes wide and concerned.
“He’s up to something,” Simon said. “I know it.”
“That girl is worse than Liza Minnelli,” their dad said.
An hour into the movie, just before Simon caught Baz rendezvousing with Agatha in the Veiled Forest, Wren got a text and got up from the couch. Cath decided to use the bathroom, just in case the doorbell was about to ring. Laura wouldn’t do that, right? She wouldn’t come to the door.
Cath stood in the bathroom near the door and heard her dad telling Wren to have a good time.
“I’ll tell Mom you said hi,” Wren said to him.
“That’s probably not necessary,” he said, cheerfully enough. Go, Dad, Cath thought.
After Wren was gone, neither of them talked about her.
They watched one more Simon movie and ate giant pieces of spaghetti-sagna, and her dad realized for the first time that they didn’t have a Christmas tree.
“How did we forget the tree?” he asked, looking at the spot by the window seat where they usually put it.
“There was a lot going on,” Cath said.
“Why couldn’t Santa get out of bed on Christmas?” her dad asked, like he was setting up a joke.
“I don’t know, why?”
“Because he’s North bi-Polar.”
“No,” Cath said, “because the bipolar bears were really bringing him down.”
“Because Rudolph’s nose just seemed too bright.”
“Because the chimneys make him Claus-trophobic.”
“Because—” Her dad laughed. “—the highs and lows were too much for him? On the sled, get it?”
“That’s terrible,” Cath said, laughing. Her dad’s eyes looked bright, but not too bright. She waited for him to go to bed before she went upstairs.
Wren still wasn’t home. Cath tried to write, but closed her laptop after fifteen minutes of staring at a blank screen. She crawled under her blankets and tried not to think about Wren, tried not to picture her in Laura’s new house, with Laura’s new family.
Cath tried not to think of anything at all.
When she cleared her head, she was surprised to find Levi there underneath all the clutter. Levi in gods’ country. Probably having the merriest Christmas of them all. Merry. That was Levi 365 days a year. (On leap years, 366. Levi probably loved leap years. Another day, another girl to kiss.)
It was a little easier to think about him now that Cath knew she’d never have him, that she’d probably never see him again.
She fell asleep thinking about his dirty-blond hair and his overabundant forehead and everything else that she wasn’t quite ready to forget.
* * *
“Since there isn’t a tree,” their dad said, “I put your presents under this photo of us standing next to a Christmas tree in 2005. Do you know that we don’t even have any houseplants? There’s nothing alive in this house but us.”
Cath looked down at the small heap of gifts and laughed. They were drinking eggnog and eating two-day-old pan dulce, sweet bread with powdery pink icing. The pan dulce came from Abel’s bakery. They’d stopped there after the supermercado. Cath had stayed in the car; she figured it wasn’t worth the awkwardness. It’d been months since she stopped returning Abel’s occasional texts, and at least a month since he’d stopped sending them.
“Abel’s grandma hates my hair,” Wren said when she got back into the car. “¡Qué pena! ¡Qué lástima! ¡Niño!”
“Did you get the tres leches cake?” Cath asked.
“They were out.”
“Qué lástima.”
Normally, Cath would have a present from Abel and one from his family under the tree. The pile of presents this year was especially thin. Mostly envelopes.
Cath gave Wren a pair of Ecuadorian mittens that she’d bought outside of the Union. “It’s alpaca,” she said. “Warmer than wool. And hypoallergenic.”
“Thanks,” Wren said, smoothing out the mittens in her lap.
“So I want my gloves back,” Cath said.
Wren gave Cath two T-shirts she’d bought online. They were cute and would probably be flattering, but this was the first time in ten years that Wren hadn’t given her something to do with Simon Snow. It made Cath feel tearful suddenly, and defensive. “Thanks,” she said, folding the shirts back up. “These are really cool.”
iTunes gift certificates from their dad.
Bookstore gift certificates from their grandma.
Aunt Lynn had sent them underwear and socks, just to be funny.
After their dad opened his gifts (everybody gave him clothes), there was still a small, silver box under the Christmas tree photo. Cath reached for it. There was a fancy tag hanging by a burgundy ribbon—Cather, it said in showy, black script. For a second Cath thought it was from Levi. (“Cather,” she could hear him say, everything about his voice smiling.)
She untied the ribbon and opened the box. There was a necklace inside. An emerald, her birthstone. She looked up at Wren and saw a matching pendant hanging from her neck.
Cath dropped the box and stood up, moving quickly, clumsily toward the stairs.
“Cath,” Wren called after her, “let me explain—”
Cath shook her head and ran the rest of the way to her room.
* * *
Cath tried to picture her mom.
The person who had given her this necklace. Wren said she was remarried now and lived in a big house in the suburbs. She had stepkids, too. Grown ones.
In Cath’s head, Laura was still young.
Too young, everyone always said, to have two big girls. That always made their mom smile.
When they were little and their mom and dad would fight, Wren and Cath worried their parents were going to get divorced and split them up, just like in The Parent Trap. “I’ll go with Dad,” Wren would say. “He needs more help.”
Cath would think about living alone with her dad, spacey and wild, or alone with her mom, chilly and impatient. “No,” she said, “I’ll go with Dad. He likes me more than Mom does.”
“He likes both of us more than Mom does,” Wren argued.
“Those can’t be yours,” people would say, “you’re too young to have such grown-up girls.”
“I feel too young,” their mom would reply.
“Then we’ll both stay with Dad,” Cath said.
“That’s not how divorce works, dummy.”
When their mom left without either of them, in a way it was a relief. If Cath had to choose between everyone, she’d choose Wren.
* * *
Their bedroom door didn’t have a lock, so Cath sat against it. But nobody came up the stairs.
She sat on her hands and cried like a little kid.
Too much crying, she thought. Too many kinds. She was tired of being the one who cried.
“You’re the most powerful magician in a hundred ages.” The Humdrum’s face, Simon’s own boyhood face, looked dull and tired. Nothing glinted in its blue eyes.… “Do you think that much power comes without sacrifice? Did you think you could become you without leaving something, without leaving me, behind?”
—from chapter 23, Simon Snow and the Seventh Oak, copyright © 2010 by Gemma T. Leslie
TWENTY-ONE
Their dad got up to jog every morning. Cath woke up when she heard his coffeemaker beep. She’d get up and make him breakfast, then fall back to sleep on the couch until Wren woke up. They’d pass on the staircase without a word.
Sometimes Wren went out. Cath never went with her.
Sometimes Wren didn’t come home. Cath never waited up.
Cath had a lot of nights alone with her dad, but she kept putting off talking to him, really talking to him; she didn’t want to be the thing that made him lose his balance. But she was running out of time.… He was supposed to drive them back to school in three days. Wren was even agitating to go back a day early, on Saturday, so they could “settle in.” (Which was code for “go to lots of frat parties.”)