Fangirl

spaghetti noodles, and buying tamales instead of a turkey.
    With the movies on, it was easy for Cath not to talk to Wren about anything important—but hard not to talk about the movies themselves.
    “Baz’s hair is sick,” Wren said during Simon Snow and the Selkies Four. All the actors had longer hair in this movie. Baz’s black hair was swept up into a slick pompadour that started at his knifepoint widow’s peak.
    “I know,” Cath said, “Simon keeps trying to punch him just so he can touch it.”
    “Right? The last time Simon swung at Baz, I thought he was gonna brush away an eyelash.”
    “Make a wish,” Cath said in her best Simon voice, “you handsome bastard.”
    Their dad watched Simon Snow and the Fifth Blade with them, with a notebook on his lap. “I’ve lived with you two for too long,” he said, sketching a big bowl of Gravioli. “I went to see the new X-Men movie with Kelly, and I was convinced the whole time that Professor X and Magneto were in love.”
    “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!