Christmas Kitsch (Hol) (MM) Read Online Free PDF Page A

had to cancel my party. “With you, dumbass.” He said it with a smile, and for a moment, I thought he was going to zing me, but he pulled back somehow. Dumbass didn’t sound like an insult when he said it. It sounded like sweetheart or baby or one of those other gross words that girls liked us to call them.
    But because it was dumbass , it didn’t make me gag.
    “Oh my God!” Nicole rolled her eyes. “That’s gross. Men should never talk to each other that way. Ever. I don’t care who they sleep with!”
    “Ni cole !” my mother snapped, and my sister turned to her chicken and asparagus with a meekness I did not believe. Sure enough, she looked up at me under her lowered brows, and I stuck my tongue out at her. Her shoulders shook and her look shifted to a glare, and then she looked next to me, to where Oliver was sitting (he got the end on account of being left-handed), and I saw him sticking out his tongue and crossing his eyes.
    Nicole burst into giggles, and Oliver and I joined her. My parents glared at the three of us, but they weren’t going to start shrieking about manners in the middle of the restaurant—that would be rude.
    So it was a good dinner. I thought I might miss Nicole when I was gone. When we were little, she used to sneak into my room at night and sing silly kids songs to me. I don’t know where she heard them—kindergarten, maybe? Preschool? Our mom wasn’t one for singing nonsense songs, but Nicole remembered every one she heard. Probably why she loved vintage vinyl records so much. Anyway, as we all walked through the balmy air to the parking lot, I remembered that.
    We’d driven in two separate cars so I could pick Oliver up, and my Prius with the moonroof had a decent backseat. I thought maybe some company would be nice.
    “Nicole, you want to ride with us?” I asked all of a sudden. “We can go for ice cream, and then get home.”
    Nicole looked up at me with a smile on her round face while she pushed brown hair out of her eyes, and for a moment, it looked like she was going to say yes. Then she grew thoughtful, and she said, “No, Rusty. You go ahead. We’ve got tomorrow before you leave, but you’ve only got Oliver for tonight.”
    I shrugged and got into the car, but, as dumb as I am, there were a few things I didn’t miss.
    I didn’t miss the way my parents glared at Nicole, and I didn’t miss the way she looked at them, innocent as pie, which is how she usually looked when she’d been robbing my drawers for those awful white T-shirts.
    And I didn’t miss the way Oliver beamed like a dark sun, either. It made me feel good, right? Because he was my friend.

    I meant to take us to ice cream, but as I neared the turnoff for the strip mall that had the Ben & Jerry’s in it, Oliver made a no sound.
    “Just keep driving,” he murmured, and so we did.
    We rolled down the windows and the wind was perfect. It smelled like cut brown grasses, because the hills were scorched, and we drove the long straight highways through Amador, listening to music and talking about what we thought college was going to be like.
    I said, “You know, it’s probably going to look like the inside of my dorm room. I’m never going to cut it.”
    Oliver sighed, and then I sighed too. It would have been nice if he could have lied to me, just once, but that wasn’t him.
    “Rusty?”
    “Yeah?”
    “You know, you can email me when you’re gone, right? Text, Skype, all of that.”
    I brightened a little. All that shit. I’d forget. Oh crap, I should tell him that. “You’re going to have to poke me a little, okay? You know, like now? I forget.”
    Oliver shook his head. “You don’t, really,” he said with an apologetic smile. “You just don’t like calling people out of the blue. Once I text you or something, you’re all okay.” His teeth glinted a little in one of the rare streetlamps, and he shook his bangs out of his eyes. “Actually, Rusty, you’re sort of a little bit