Chapter One
Summer Break After University Sophomore Year
I don’t know why I thought I could pull it off.
This salmon-colored button-down, I mean. I’m too pale; it washes me out in every shot—or, no, wait, that one’s not too bad. I’m standing on the steps of Lily and Iris’s estate, right before shit hit the fan, so I’m still giving that masking cocky smile. Throw it in black-and-white, and it’d be a respectable picture of me.
Ha. Respectable.
After tonight, I’m surprised I can think that word without part of my brain spontaneously combusting.
So I think it again. Respectable.
No flames. It’s like a magic trick.
And because I’ve had about four dirty vodka martinis where I order it by asking for “vodka that at one point in time aspired to be in a martini before striking out on a solo career,” I rock my head and go “Rrrrrespectable” to my phone, which leads to me humming, then softly singing, “R-E-S-P-E—”
“Don’t drag Aretha Franklin into your bullshit.”
The stool next to me groans as my brother heaves himself onto it. I glance around, but Iris isn’t here—yet. She can’t be far behind.
If she wants to see me anymore. How pissed will she be that I ruined her sister’s birthday? Or will she be more pissed by the way I ruined her sister’s birthday?
I lift the sweating glass of my fourth—fifth? Fourth. Fifth?—vodka martini and gulp half of my dry, bitter vice and go back to scrolling through the paparazzi site. Headlines fly past—Prince Nicholas’s Latest Disaster this and Prince Nicholas: Finally Too Far? that. The television above the bar is playing a basketball game, but there’s a scrolling news alert at the bottom with headlines like NATION GRANTED MILLIONS OF GIFTS FROM “SANTA” OVERNIGHT; SUSPECTED SHIPPING ERROR TO BLAME; STORY DEVELOPING—
“Oh, now that picture’s a winner,” I tell Kris, because he followed me here, so he knows very well that that means he’ll be the recipient of my … me-ness.
Me-ness rhymes a bit with another word.
I sit up straight on the barstool and look at the ceiling because this is where my limit is, apparently. Drunkenly laughing at self-inflicted dick jokes.
… it would not be out of line for self-inflicted dick jokes to be called masturbation jokes.
I bury my face in my hands. “Shit fucking fuck.”
“Yep,” Kris agrees. To the bartender, he says, “Two waters. He’s cut off.”
“Fuck you.”
“On second thought, give me the soda gun so I can blast him in the face.”
I drop my hands, only there’s two of him, so I squint, and ah, there he is.
Kris looks like me, but if I were sober and not a disheveled mess. Brown curls, blue eyes, pale skin that I should tell him does not mesh well with pink tones, a friendly brotherly FYI. He has his long hair thrown into a topknot and he took off his suit jacket and button-down so he’s in an undershirt—
It’s not an undershirt. It’s bright green and says Sleigh My Name, Sleigh My Name across the chest, some of his ink peeking out beneath the sleeves. He absolutely buys these shirts too tight on purpose.
“Did you have that under your suit the whole night?” I ask.
“Yeah, that’s what we should talk about right now. Fashion.”
I turn back to my phone. “That’s what I was doing before you rudely stalked me.”
“To the same bar you always run away to.”
I like this bar because it’s walkable from campus and has the benefit of never being too overcrowded. Even right now, at seven on a Friday night, it’s half full, the booths and tables clustered with chattering students in the occasional Yale T-shirt, the jukebox playing some pulsing country song low enough for audible conversation.
Kris shrugs. “New Haven has other bars, you know, if you wanted to actually hide. The fact that you came here tells me you wanted me to find you.”
“As my tiny baby brother, you are legally not allowed to psychoanalyze me.”
His nose scrunches. “I’m barely fourteen months younger than you.”
“Tiny. Baby.” I poke his bicep. Then sneer in jealousy at the size of it. The younger sibling should also not be legally allowed to get more jacked than the older sibling. But that would probably require said older sibling setting foot in a gym on more than a rare occasion, so screw that, I’ll let him have this.
When he inhales, clearly about to change the subject, I show him the first photo on the paparazzi site, of me in my salmon shirt.
“Why the fuck did you let me go out in public with—”
“Coal.”
I drop my phone and reach for my glass, but Kris puts his hand over it.
“Do you realize how much you fucked up?” His voice is low.
“Yeah.”
“All your bullshit, and I never thought you’d—wait, you do?”
I don’t look up at him. Just stare at the condensation beading down the side of my glass, still trapped under his hand. “I do. I didn’t—I just—fuck.”
“You gotta give me more than that, dude.”
My mouth hangs open like a gaping drunk fish. I have nothing, though. Nothing I can say to fix anything.
It’s why I fled the party like a coward. Because I am. A coward and a screwup and tonight I bested my records in both of those areas.
Kris yanks his hand away from my glass to scrub it across his face. This energy out of my brother, pity and exhaustion and the slightest tinge of fed up, damn near burns the alcohol right out of my veins.
I always know Kris and Iris are borderline annoyed by my antics, but they usually end up laughing with me, and that laughter is more infusing than any consequence is punishing. If I can get a smile out of them, I know I not only haven’t fucked up too badly, but I’ve hit the perfect note of endearingly goofy.
Like the time I arranged for our prep school building to go up for sale. Got a realtor involved and everything. Classes had to be canceled for a full week to hash out the confusion.
Or the time I filled a cathedral with chickens right before an Easter service.
Or the time during our annual Christmas Eve Ball where I rigged the sound system to play, on loop, “I Am Santa Claus,” a parody set to the Iron Man song, and it took seventeen rounds before the staff could figure out how to shut it off. People were crying.
But that was harmless. Everything I’ve done has been harmless. That’s what I have to offer: harmless, meaningless bullshit.
Until now.
“I didn’t mean for anything bad to happen,” I try. The air is stale and smells like something burned in the kitchen’s fryer. “It wasn’t supposed to be a prank.”
“Then what the fuck was it supposed to be?” Kris is fighting not to be overtly pissed, I can tell, but it’s warring hard with pity, and I can’t decide which is worse. But then his face goes cold. “Wait. If you weren’t doing it for shits and giggles, were you trying to make it an incident? Like sabotage to expose us to the real world?”
I blanch. “No. Kris. You really think I’d do that?”
His pause is louder than anything else he’s said. If I were more sober, I’d be able to react better. Dive in with an explanation that would make all this okay. But as it is, I’m hit with a barrage of all my fuckups, my reputation for never taking things seriously and dicking around, and I can’t get any explanation out, the words all dammed up against my tongue. I suck down the remnants of my drink but there my excuses stay, glued in my mouth.
Would anyone believe me if I said I’d been trying to make things better? Prince Nicholas, headline darling, was trying to do something good for once, and in truly poetic fashion managed to fuck up worse than usual?
The press wouldn’t believe me. Would Kris?
“So what were you trying to do, then?” Kris asks slowly. “Get back at Dad for dragging you into training?”
I watch the side of his face and take a quaking breath. I will get these words out, because if I can’t say them to my brother, explain what I’d meant to do and why I’d done it, then—
My phone buzzes next to my now empty glass.
I’m shocked it’s taken him this long to call me.
Kris grabs it and holds it up. “Answer.”
Normally, I’d argue, because he knows what he’s asking of me, and I know he knows what he’s asking of me. But his tone is still hanging in the air and all the vodka in my bloodstream is doing nothing to counteract the dread cracking apart my chest.
I answer and shove the phone between my shoulder and ear. “Hey, Dad.”
“Nicholas. You will come home and assist in correcting this situation. Now.”
I scratch at a stain on the bar top. “I’m not sure my presence would help.”
“You are in no position to decide what would or would not help,” Dad says, voice immutable. “I have the staff already at work unpicking what you did, and you will be here to show that this shipping error is of utmost concern to you, and that you understand the gravity of such a mistake. This behavior is disgraceful in any respectable circles—”
My brain starts in on R-E-S-P-E-C-T again. One glance at Kris and I refocus on the call.
“—but it is certainly disgraceful for a Prince of Christmas.”
Ah, there it is. The singular point to which every conversation with my father returns.
But the rest of what he said sinks into my brain like liquid trying to absorb into an oversaturated sponge.
He doesn’t want me to fix what I did. He doesn’t want me to take the blame. He wants me there for pictures. To pose and smile and reinforce whatever story is being spun for the Holiday press, a surface-level façade to salvage our reputation among the other Holidays and their people.
Fury sparks sudden and bright. I shouldn’t be surprised that he’s doing this again, but I am, and I’m pissed.
“Oh, yeah, I’ll get right there,” I snap. “Can’t have the paparazzi thinking I’m anything less than adequately remorseful. Just like this whole training sham—had to start convincing them I’m not a total screwup, no matter how much of a lie that is.”
“The training was not a sham,” Dad says. He breezes right past me being a total screwup, and that avoidance is a confirmation I fight, hard, not to feel in the pit of my stomach. “It was far past time for you to take on a leadership role in Christmas. That you chose to get nothing out of the opportunity I gave you only solidifies that I was right in my reservations over trusting you.”
“Again,” I add without thinking.
“What?”
“Over trusting me again.” I’m just woozy enough that I think it’s a good idea to bring this up. “This wasn’t my first training session, remember?”
He’s quiet for a beat. Does he remember? He has to. I was really young, but so was he. He’d showed me the globe where we track joy and magic and gifts and everything, and he’d waved his hand over it like he was literally giving me the world.
“These are the people who need us,” he’d told me. “And I do mean us, Nicholas—you and me. One day, it will be your job to make the world happy.”
Even years later, the memory is so fucking potent for a number of reasons I refuse to acknowledge. And thinking of it all now just makes me hate myself for holding on to it.
“I remember,” Dad says. Is that … fondness in his voice?
Oh look, I can be both annoyed and hopeful at the same time.
It crashes like a five-car pileup when he clears his throat and continues with, “You were a child. It’s in the past. The only thing that matters is now, and right now, you have disappointed me.”
It shouldn’t hurt. I’ve made being a disappointment like 80 percent of my personality.
But I can’t breathe for a second.
Dad’s held me at arm’s length for years since that childhood introduction that never went very far, because of his own shit and then later thanks to my damaging reputation. But something about me being halfway through my college career spurred him to action: it was time I begin taking things seriously this summer.
Copyright © 2024 Sara Raasch
