Christmas Criminal

13. Noelle

13

NOELLE

Sunday, December 15th

I stomp back to the high school parking lot with my bag slung over my shoulder. I don't know what's going on, but the fact that people are hiding things from me makes me very uncomfortable. Especially Christina. She tells me everything.

Since high school, she's been the only person I could truly trust. The only person who saw what high school did to me and loved me regardless. She's never asked me to be anyone but my authentic self, but she also won't hesitate to snap at me and tell me I'm being a growly bitch when I've had enough Christmas and she's just getting started.

She was my best friend when I had friends, and it bothers me to think that she's been scared to tell me about some big development in her life. One that she's obviously excited about, if she's telling our mom about it.

A deep sense of guilt hits me in the gut as it dawns on me that she's probably keeping this a secret because she doesn't want to hurt me. I've been moody about community service, and over the past few weeks I've probably impressed upon her a little too strongly how angry I am about being forced back into this town.

Right when she's gearing up to make a big, exciting change in her life. One that unfortunately will result in me being stuck in this town more frequently. Because as much as I love our apartment in the city, with the sunset view over the river and proximity to all the bars and fun things to do, I think we both know my favorite thing about our apartment is her.

And she's leaving.

By the time I get back to my mom's house, I've worked myself into a frenzy. I'm upset that our sister powwow is ending. That she'll be gone and I won't be able to see her as often as I want to.

But most of all, I'm upset that she didn't feel like she could tell me this. I'm upset that that's who I've become in our relationship.

She has her leg up on a pillow on the couch when I get there, a plate of eggs and bacon in front of her. My mom is in the kitchen, Christmas music playing as she flips a pancake on the stove.

"Noelle!" she says, stepping around the counter to give me a quick hug when I pass by. "Honey, we thought you'd be gone all day!"

I nod, returning her hug quickly but keeping my focus on Christina. She's been eyeing me since I walked in, her plate of food untouched in front of her.

I leave my bag on the barstool next to the counter and head straight for her, dropping into the armchair covered in a fuzzy red and white blanket.

She purses her lips, her eyes dipping before landing on mine again. "So, I take it you know."

I huff, leaning forward in my chair and grabbing her hand from where it rests on the edge of the couch. "I'm sad that you felt like you couldn’t just tell me."

She lets out a long breath as my mom sets a pile of pancakes and a smattering of breakfast foods on the coffee table in front of me. "I didn't want to tell you until it was a sure thing, but I never really believed it was a sure thing until it was happening and then it felt too late."

"But you're excited about it, aren't you?"

She nods. "Yeah, really excited. I just... I know this is going to really interrupt your life. And I wasn't sure how to tell you."

I throw my hands in the air as I let out a long breath, leaning back in my chair.

The news winded me, sure. My chest is still tight half an hour after leaving Nick and Hank at the fair.

But I am excited for my sister. She doesn’t make decisions flippantly, so I can only assume she’s analyzed this from every angle already and knows this is the right choice. Not just for her but for all of us.

My chest squeezes when I think about Nick. What it might mean for us, if the distance between us wasn’t so great.

I shrug, pressing my lips together as I catch Christina’s eye. "I'll deal with it. And I guess I should say I'm sorry, because if you felt like you couldn't tell me, it's probably because I've historically made things difficult when it comes to this town."

She shrugs noncommittally. "You don't always make it easy."

"I know I don't." I sigh, thinking about it for a moment. "I think I have to find a way to get over it."

Christina snorts. "How so?"

"I don't know. I feel like I grabbed onto you after high school because you were my only friend. And it's unfair to you, to be in that position. I'm older and wiser now, and if I'm being totally honest, it has felt really good recently to tell the people who deserve it to shove their assholery right up their butts."

Christina's brow furrows as my mom takes the place of the pillow underneath her leg, patting it as she settles her cast on my mom’s lap.

She turns back to me. "This sounds like dangerous territory. Maybe we should keep you out. You can visit for Christmas and birthdays, but otherwise you stay in the city."

"Oh," my mom says, whacking her lightly on the arm before turning to me. "You come visit anytime you want. If you could just refrain from throwing eggs, we can deal with anything else."

"Don't tell her that," Christina says.

"I'm not throwing any more eggs!" I give them both a look. "No, I think I feel begrudgingly better being in this town after having stuck up for myself. Do you remember Louis Prince, who sent that fucking picture asking if I had an STD?"

My mom's jaw clenches. If someone had handed her an egg back then, I'm sure she would have thrown it in his face and taken the community service as happily as I did. "I remember."

"I told him off yesterday. He came up to me all nice, like, asking how I've been, and I told him I was happy I learned who he was before I got stuck. And he got all sputtery and I walked away. I mean, sure, you could argue it was almost ten years ago, but it significantly changed the trajectory of my life, and he doesn't get to wander through life thinking he's hot shit when he did that to someone."

Christina nods. "Good for you, Noelle."

"I also might have given Dad a piece of my mind yesterday, too."

Christina's head tips back. "Noelle," she groans.

"I feel justified. He came up to apologize and said that he didn't realize you were hurt when you broke your leg–he thought you were just upset –and I'm sorry, but I don't think that's good enough. So I told his daughters that they deserve someone who shows up whether they're hurting on the outside or the inside."

"You're his daughter too, you know," she reminds me.

"And I think all six of us deserve better than what we got."

"Six?"

My mom shakes her head. "Do not tell me that man has another family."

I laugh. "No. I'm including you and the harlot, too."

She holds a hand over her face. "Oh, Noelle."

"What? Can we all say it? Agree that we deserved better?" I turn to Christina. "If you want a relationship regardless, I will support you. But that doesn't change the fact that we deserved better."

My mom pats Christina's cast. "We did deserve better than that."

"He can't change the past," Christina insists.

"No, he can't. And if you're willing to forgive him for that, I promise I will not stand in your way. But I will not stop standing up for you when he should be showing up and he doesn't."

Christina nods. "I suppose that's fair." She shakes her head, laughing. "You know, I feel like we've traded places since high school. I used to be the first person screaming and throwing a tantrum the second anyone said a word about you. Now you're the one rushing to my defense when Dad continues to be the same person he's always been."

I shrug. "I've spent a lot of my life accepting what others are willing to give me rather than demanding they treat me well." I swallow. "It's weird and uncomfortable but I think I'd rather that be the case than just swallowing down how I feel." I shake my head. "When I'm in this town, I feel like I have to scream at the world that I'm a different person now. That I'm not the Noelle who deals with bullshit anymore, but the one who's made something of herself."

"You don't have to scream it, you know," Christina tells me, squeezing my hand.

"I feel like I do. Like if I don't scream it, old Noelle is going to kick in again and I can't go back. I can't shrink into the shell of a human I once was." My mom and sister look at me with sad smiles on their faces. "I'm happy now. And sometimes being in this place makes me feel like I used to. Like everything I've worked for is so close to crumbling."

"So, I take it you will not be moving here with your sister," my mom says.

I shake my head. "I don't think it's good for me to be here too long. Before we know it, I'll be overcorrecting and shouting profanities at people from the town square."

"That guy did get arrested," my mom tells me.

"Oh great, so the position is open."

My mom reaches over Christina and rests her hand on top of ours. "I hope you know that you don't have to scream, honey. You don't have to hide out in the city to feel like you'll go unnoticed. This town loves you, whether you love them back or not, and whenever you're here, you can bet your sister and me, and Hank, and maybe even that nice math teacher you've befriended? We'll all come running the second you need us."

I do my best to ignore the math teacher comment. If I think about him a second longer, I'm sure the color will rise in my cheeks. "Thanks, Mom. I'm not sure this is a good place for me. Regardless of all the good people here."

She nods. "Well, I tried my hardest. But my Noelle always does what she has to, to take care of herself."

I sigh. "I have a life that I really like now."

My mom pats my hand. "And I'm happy for you, honey. Truly. As much as I would love to have both my girls close by, the only thing I care about is that you're happy."

"Thanks, Mom."

I lean back in my chair, grabbing a piece of bacon off Christina's plate because she's my big sister and I can. She slaps at my hand.

"Hey, Chris?"

"What?" she asks, reaching forward and taking a piece of bacon off my plate.

"You wanna tell me about your fancy new job?"

"Don't you have community service to do?" she asks.

I shrug. "I decided to play hooky today. So you might as well tell me." I take a pancake from the plate my mom left on the coffee table and hand it to her. "Come on, I want to hear."

Her eyes flash as she smiles. "Fine. But if I'm telling you about my fancy new job, I want to hear about the math teacher."

"Oh, I knew there was something going on there!" my mom says, settling into the couch. "Christina, you go first. Then we get math teacher details."

I roll my eyes as Christina grins.

"Well, I'm still doing data science, but this new company is actually a non-profit that does research into childhood cancer. They've made a ton of progress over the past ten or so years, and they're on track to improve survival rates for childhood leukemia by twenty percent by the end of the year. Twenty percent!"

Christina has always had a passion for kids, but she never found the right way to use it. She's super smart–probably too smart for her own good–and a lot of the jobs she's had haven't let her stretch her brain in the way she wants to.

I squeeze her hand. "If a perfect job does exist, that's the one for you."

She smiles, nodding. "I'm really excited about it. And honestly, I've been missing home." My mom squeezes her shoulder. "I know how much you hate it here, but every time I come back, it's like a breath of fresh air."

"As it should be. If that's what Snow Falls is to you, I will not get in the way of that. I'm really, truly happy for you, Chris."

"Thanks, Noelle." She squeezes my hand back, and we have one of those quiet sister moments where I can only hope she's waxing poetic in her head about her love for me like I'm doing in mine for her.

My mom purses her lips, her eyes darting between the two of us. "Okay, now I want to hear about the spicy math teacher!"

"Ew, Mom!" I shout. "He's not spicy!"

She raises her eyebrows. "Honey, I've been on this Earth long enough to know a spicy man when I see one, and he looks at you like you hung the moon and he's ready to feast on it."

My mouth drops open at the same time Christina's does, and we can only look at each other in shock before my mom starts squirming under my sister's cast.

"Come on, tell me!" my mom says.

"Why don't you go ahead and tell us about Hanky Panky?" I ask her.

Her cheeks go pink, and I bite my lip to soften my grin.

"Yeah, that's what I thought," I say.

"Hanky Panky?" Christina asks, her eyes wide as she turns her attention to my mom.

"We dated briefly in high school," my mom says.

"Long enough that he signed your yearbook Hanky Panky .”

She shakes her head. "Well, I don't know what to tell you. He was a very nice young man."

"Are you seeing him again?" I ask.

"We're friends."

I raise an eyebrow. "He got awfully defensive of you yesterday when Dad showed up. Certainly seems like there are still some feelings there."

She gives me a look. "We're friends," she repeats.

A beat of silence passes between us. "Well, I am just friends with the math teacher."

Christina snorts.

"You shush."

Rather than returning to Hank's booth, I spend the day with my mom and Christina. The two of them overpower me and decide on a number of Christmas movies to watch in turn, my mom squished under Christina's cast and me curled up in the armchair. We order lunch to the house and eventually, my mom moves to the floor where she starts surreptitiously wrapping Christmas presents while barking at us, every single time we stand, to keep our eyes on the ceiling.

When I clean up our empty lunch containers from the coffee table and dump them in the trash, I take a moment to grab my jacket and slip out the door to the front stoop. My mom has a gigantic Merry Christmas sign along one side of her door and an array of snowmen in the front garden dressed up in the winter clothes.

I tug my jacket around me and sit on the stoop next to a snowflake with a too-wide smile wrapped in a winter scarf.

It dawned on me, sometime today, what Nick had said when he told me about Christina's job.

That his loyalty lies with me.

I'm not sure he meant it in the way it came off, but there was something so comforting in his words. Like aside from my mom and sister, who have always been my fiercest supporters, there's one other person in this town who truly has my back.

Like it doesn't matter that he and Hank are buddy-buddy, or that he might get in trouble for crushing on the criminal.

All that matters is... me.

And whether he meant it that way or not, it inspired a calmness in me that I don't usually feel when I'm here. Like I can trust him to have my back when I'm not around.

So, I take a deep breath and call him.

He answers in two seconds, almost as if he had been sitting there, waiting for me to call.

"Noelle," he says. I hear the sounds of the fair going on in the background. Christmas music and kids shouting.

"Hey," I say, picking at the hem of my coat. "I wanted to call and say thank you for telling me about my sister's new job today. I really appreciate that you were in my corner."

He lets out a breath, and I hear the clanging of the folding chair against the table. "Did everything go okay? When you rushed off like that, I worried that maybe I hadn't done the right thing."

"No, you did. I'm sorry. All I knew was that my sister had some big thing going on in her life and I was missing out on it." I shake my head. "I panicked, a little bit."

"Are you okay now?" he asks.

And I can't help but think of my dad, hearing his daughter on the phone asking for his help because yes, she had broken her leg, but she mostly needed the comfort of someone who shows up when they're needed.

And Nick, hours after the fact, doesn't hesitate to ask how I am.

Because his loyalty lies with me.

"Yeah, I'm okay. Thank you for checking in with me."

"Of course. I mean, I feel so terrible that I blurted it out like that, but you and Hank were all jokey with each other and I worried that if I kept it in any longer, it might screw up your relationship with him. Or me, you know?" He pauses, and I wonder if he meant to refer to us as a relationship. "Because you're my criminal."

I laugh. "Yes, god forbid you're on bad terms with your criminal."

He lets out another long breath into the microphone. "So you talked to your sister?"

“Yeah. We’re fine. She’s excited, and I’m excited for her. Bummed that our little powwow is ending, but happy that we had so many years together.”

He’s quiet for a moment. “Do you ever think of moving back here? Maybe not with her, but just–I don’t know–coming home one day?”

I lick my lips, trying to figure out the right thing to say. I don’t want to give him false hope–if we’re even at that point yet–but I also don’t want to blatantly reject something that… I don’t know, might change my mind one day.

“Not really. I’m so uncomfortable here it’s really hard to imagine calling this home again.”

He hums. "Don't you think if you gave it some time, you'd get used to it here? If you don't come back very often, don't you think you're almost precluding yourself from ever getting comfortable?"

I sigh. "I don't know. Every time I'm here I feel like I'm constantly thinking twenty steps ahead in an effort to thwart whoever's going to pop up and try to take me down next."

He's quiet for a second. "I know that that's been your experience, but if you took yourself out of your old bedroom, out of the high school and away from town events where asshole ex-boyfriends crawl out of hiding, don't you think maybe you could breathe easier?"

"What's the point of being here if I have to shun most of the town to feel like I can breathe?"

The silence is deafening.

"I guess you're right," he says, and I realize with that one sentence that I was hoping he might try to convince me.

Like maybe he might be a reason to try.

A few more beats of silence pass between us.

"Hey, Noelle?"

"Yeah?"

He lets out a quick breath that makes a whooshing sound in the phone.

"Will you help me put up my Christmas tree?"

I blink, wondering where this development came from. I'm sure he doesn't actually need help .

And that means he wants to spend time with me.

My chest swells, images of red wine and candy canes floating through my mind.

"Yeah. That would be nice."