Us.

It ought to feel good, and it does.

And that is maybe the biggest problem in front of me right now, even bigger than inviting Holly Gale to the party.

But still, it has to move over for a minute. That Holly Gale thing needs some room.

She is sitting close enough to answer that question, and we are close enough to the end of the day to make a rejection safer, which of course makes it all the more impossible to mouth the words.

Then she asks a question of her own, to someone else not me.

“Did you ever go see Home Alone?” she asks Benny.

For half a second I wonder whether she has somehow heard me practicing the answer to that exact question aloud in my bedroom. Then I have to remind myself she didn’t ask me.

“No,” Benny says. “You?”

“Yeah. Funny.”

It is amazing how easily other people do this.

Still, I can’t decide whether Benny has helped me or hurt me. Holly Gale choosing another boy to ask such a question troubles me kind of. But this particular boy has spent the entire morning making a legal case for my baseball services, too.

So I imagine an order of things. If she can ask Benny a question that easily, surely she can one day ask the man Benny wants to play ball with this spring a similar one.

The man is me, in this calculation.

“With who?” I want to ask.

And then don’t dare ask it.

The question rises all the way up and stops, just behind my crooked front teeth. There are family answers and friend answers and answers involving boys whose faces I may need to study for future reference. None of them would change anything anyway, since the movie has already happened and I was not there.

“Have you seen it, Andre,” she doesn’t ask.

“No, but everybody says it’s funny,” I answer inside my own head, behind the teeth, which is where most of my conversations with Holly Gale have taken place.

Great chat, Andre. Real smooth.

Duncan says I don’t think before I say certain things. Holly Gale always seems to solve that problem.

January has begun with a classic. The ball’s been bouncing up all morning and of course is doing its customary nose-dive now.

A few minutes later, the party comes up before I can decide whether today is finally the day to invite her. It’s not even me who brings it up.

“You still having that basketball tournament?” Dillon asks.

“Yes.”

“I’m on Pastor’s team.”

“No, you’re not. I’m making the teams.”

“You puttin’ Holly on yours?”

I feel the entire side of the classroom turn toward me, and suddenly I’m not so joyful that Ms. Jones hasn’t bothered to start class yet. They let students talk a lot here, although she is usually more on top of things, in both Religion and Reading. Holly Gale is sitting close enough to hear everything, of course, which is probably Dillon’s entire reason for asking.

The baby hippo always seems to have something up his sleeve.

“I don’t know yet.”

“You know he is,” Didi says, teasing but not in a mean way. I like Didi.

Everyone except and including Holly Gale seems to be awaiting my response.

There are moments in life when that proper response probably exists, but God keeps it hidden to strengthen us. And that’s what I’m telling myself at the current moment, while my head and stomach burn with nerves and I feel the bottom part of my back starting to sweat.

“Nobody invited me,” Holly says to Didi.

Everything inside me is on fire. But somehow, without even my conscious effort, it spews forward….

“You’re invited you coming?”

Frank once told me that sometimes you just got to go for something without thinking about it. I don’t think he meant all in one breath. It would be a run-on sentence in Ms. Green’s class. Ms. Jones too. She grades our grammar when we write.

Everybody laughs except me because I am busy swallowing down the dangling participles and wayward fragments that also want to come out.

She doesn’t say anything, though. Just smiles. And that is when Ms. Jones decides to start class.

Somehow that is enough to feel like an answer. And somehow it is enough not to at all.

Problem solved.

Except not at all.

Square one, like a half-court joint practice with the girls team.

BOOKS 1 AND 2 AVAILABLE ON AMAZON!

'51' Novel Series | 'Play on Andre' Video Series

“You had to be there before you could win it, and you have to believe you belong.”

- Skip Bertman, as recalled by LSU legendary pitcher Ben McDonald. Skip passed away early Friday morning.

“You playing baseball in Franklin this year?”

I haven’t even gotten to the question of inviting Holly Gale to my party yet and I already have another stressor coming back around.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I already signed up in Jeanerette.”

This disappoints him more than it should disappoint someone who will probably spend half the season complaining about practice anyway.

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I live there.”

Before Benny can respond, Bubba Gentry turns around from the desk in front of us.

Bubba Gentry.

The boy who, for reasons I have never completely understood, seems to either dislike me or enjoy making me think he dislikes me. Maybe it’s both.

“You go to school here,” he says.

“I know, but...”

“So play here.”

He turns back around like the case has been decided.

I feel I’ve angered him yet again. But then why would he make a point to back Benny on the matter in the first place if he didn’t like me?

He seemed upset.

I want to know who my enemies are and who my friends are so I can stop feeling like I’m always looking over my shoulder, but nothing ever seems to come clear. It’s just more and more thoughts that further muddy the rest.

I want to be back on Christmas break.

The mornings are cold and dark right now, and this morning Pop drove me to Robie’s like always to catch the Hanson bus. We sat inside the truck waiting, and I had two things filling my mind: seeing Holly Gale again and figuring out when the right time would be to finally settle this birthday-party business with her.

Pop lit up a cigarette with only a slight crack in the window.

“Got kids goin’ to school in the dark,” he muttered.

He always says that, like it’s some crime. Even though he’s on my side technically, I don’t get the point. How else is this supposed to work? I’ve run the math: bus times, school times, sports practice schedules. It’s not ideal, but it’s necessary if you’re going to get everything in.

A little while after he put the cigarette out, he coughed so hard the truck shook. He pressed the side of his fist to his chest and looked straight ahead, blowing air once with force, as if to say, “I’ve got this.”

“You okay?”

“Swallowed wrong,” he said.

He’d been smoking. I didn’t know what he could have swallowed.

Still, I assumed he was right. He’s older. Maybe I’ll get it one day.

I didn’t think about it much once the bus came. Or I tried not to.

Now I’m at Hanson and everybody has apparently spent Christmas vacation deciding where I should play baseball.

All this is presented as simple addition. Hanson plus Franklin equals Andre. Jeanerette has been subtracted from the problem entirely. The cold calculation in that soothes me more than anything emotional could. It just is, like boys have them and girls don’t.

Pastor joins us. Then Gus. Then Dillon, even though Dillon doesn’t even play baseball. Within five minutes, I have been recruited to play shortstop, pitcher, catcher, and centerfield, depending on which one of them is talking, which position they believe Franklin needs most, and which position Dillon has no idea I’ve never played.

“I’m not catching,” I say.

“You can play anywhere, Samson.” Of course it’s Dillon.

I enjoy hearing it all more than I let show.

“We need pitching,” Gus says. “You threw that no-hitter against us last summer with a dang broken nose.”

“It was the night before surgery.”

“That makes it worse.”

“Better,” Pastor corrects. “It makes it better.”

The third bell rings for class.

I don’t remember ever imagining such glory exactly like this, with boys around me making a legitimate legal case for my baseball services and me and my desk at the center of it, but I recognize the feeling. It is the same one I got when people started telling me I belonged at Hanson before I entirely believed it myself, or when a baseball coach here and there gushed over how good of a ballplayer I was.

There was some of that too from friends along the way—I’m having to admit that to myself. St. Jude kids. Non-St. Jude Jeanerette kids.

They weren’t all Peter Reinharts.

But it’s all different now that it’s all happening at Hanson. I think of Tigers being better than Pirates and St. Jude and have to flinch it away. Pop’s lesson has stuck.

Still, none of this should be enough to change a commitment I made in the fall, nor should it make me not pay attention in class like I know I should be doing right now. I know that. But it is enough to make the commitment feel older than it is, as though those I’ve committed to have somehow forgotten or lost the papers.

I can be so sharp with English and math and science and social studies when it comes time to get A’s on a report card, and yet the ability to discern these real-life things continues to prove how very blind and stupid I am.

Ms. Green is talking at the front of the room and I am conducting baseball contract negotiations inside my head.

I signed up for Jeanerette before 42–40, the night that seems like a door hinge now. And it wasn’t that long ago. Before that night, and that pass to Pastor, and that high-five with Her, Hanson felt like something I was still wearing in the white shirt and gray pants. Now it seems etched into my skin, branded like stripes.

That night was also when St. Jude became something other than a place I wanted to beat. Then there was the conversation with Boone an hour later. But then again, there’s what Paw Joe told me over Thanksgiving about seeing Boone and Reinhart around town, and his warning that Boone might still be angry about the fight.

But he was so cool to me on the phone after the game.

“Human emotions are a funny thing,” Paw’s said to me more than once.

The signature on the Jeanerette form belongs to a version of me who seems long gone now.

It’s still me, though. And nothing happened to those papers. Some dads I respect a whole lot are still expecting me to play—needing me to play.

Nothing I think ever makes sense. Am I trying to keep the future stable, or am I not?

Jesus, Andre.

Maybe that’s what I needed the telescope for – not just to see, but to focus. To pick one thing and stick with it. To figure out what I’m actually looking at instead of letting my head move in six directions at once.

Except the telescope can only focus on one thing because nobody asks it where it wants to play baseball.

And then you have Grant, of course.

He’ll be playing.

I can’t abandon him.

“You can switch,” Benny says, picking right back up with his recruitment as soon as Ms. Green starts passing out papers.

“My dad already paid.”

“They can give it back.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Ask.”

“You ask him.”

“He’s not my dad.”

They laugh. Apparently Pop’s reputation now extends into the young seventh-grade men at Hanson.

“I’ll think about it,” I say.

“No you won’t,” Dillon says.

Franklin has my classmates. Franklin has Hanson. Franklin has a high school football team with players who vomit trying to win a ballgame. Franklin has the classrooms where people notice when I am absent, and the hallways where Holly Gale might appear at any moment. Franklin has most of my waking hours now. It has my thoughts even when I am home.

Jeanerette has the house, Mom and Pop, Maw Blue next door, Paw Joe and Maw Gladys across the street, Teche Farm, the sugar mill, the basketball court, Burleigh Park, City Park, and all the gas stations where we find new bottle caps for our collection.

For most of my life I’ve been trying to keep old things alive in my head even after I don’t really do them anymore. I don’t play football in my Cowboys jersey and Browns helmet in the rye grass like I used to, and yet I still could if I wanted to, so sometimes I do it in my mind. The ongoing present tense with things like that helps me keep everything at least somewhat straight. It keeps some of the anxiety about the future at bay.

Maybe that’s part of what Jeanerette is too.

Not something I want to leave.

Something I’m afraid of discovering I already have.

Which always leads me to Grant.

Grant ruins any attempt to make things easy.

If Jeanerette contained only Peter Reinhart, Thomas Boone, and all the places where old things happened, I could dismiss it as the past and feel intelligent doing it. Grant is different. Grant is the person who tosses rocks at my window when he wants me to come outside. He’s the person who threw a boomerang through our window and felt terrible for it. He’s the person who wouldn’t trade back the baseball cards I practically handed to him. He’s the person who has been there so long that I sometimes forget to count him when I am counting friends.

Franklin is where I keep discovering people.

Grant is the person I never had to discover.

That feels important.

Maybe more important than I want it to.

“You thinking about it, I can tell,” Benny adds.

“No.”

“You got that face,” Pastor says.

“What face?”

“Your court face. Like you calculating something.”

“I’m calculating how much trouble all of you are going to get me in.”

“Just play with us,” Gus says.

There it is again.

Us.

I’m included in that word.

Across the lawn and a network of other natural markings, Mr. Borel’s robot Santa continues walking sideways on the porch. With his new Christmas present now in hand, Andre could examine it closely enough to confirm what he already suspects about Santa—or destroy one of the last imaginings of childhood.

When the opportunity comes, he turns the telescope away and toward the moon.

Andre’s choice opens a larger question about what we do with the moments we don’t want to lose. Like St. Peter on Mount Tabor in the Bible, Andre keeps trying to build tabernacles to pin down victories, friendships, family happiness, and other experiences that God and life simply won’t allow to remain as they are.

This video considers why God gives us those moments, why ordinary difficulty eventually returns, and why the valley doesn’t make the grace received on the mountain any less real.

-

Written and produced by Jeff LeJeune
Narration generated with Descript editing program
Illustrations by Jeff LeJeune, executed with ChatGPT

It’s hard, and I get a bit of a lump in my stomach when I look at the spot where we used to leave him cookies, but I gather myself. I practically force the prayer to work.

I open up the few surprises Mom got for me, little things I either need or have mentioned along the way, like socks, a new tie for Friday Mass, and a Magic Johnson poster.

“I don’t know if I like the Lakers or the Bulls more now,” I say, and Duncan slaps me in the head.

“You ain’t learned your lesson from Jane and the truck model, dummy?”

“Oh yeah,” I say. “I love it, Mom.”

“Open your last one,” she says.

I know what it is. Everyone knows what it is.

I knew I was getting it without finding out in the sinful way. The box was the exact shape of a telescope box, and the Sears Wish Book still had the crease where Mom dog-eared the page. The box is practically an announcement to anybody with eyes.

I feel bad I notice stuff like that behind my mom’s back. I hope she doesn’t notice.

Pop and Duncan take over the assembly before I can finish reading the first direction.

“You got to know how to look at these things,” Pop says, turning the tube this way and that.

After all the thinking I’ve done about seeing lately, I almost laugh. I don’t laugh because I know he wouldn’t understand.

Pop moves through the process easily. Duncan has backed off, sitting on the sofa without a towel over his eyes, which is maybe already the best Christmas present. He picks up the box and studies the photographs.

“You can see Mr. Borel’s Santa’s face with this thing,” he says. “Probably see right into people’s windows.”

“Nobody’s looking in anybody’s windows, Duncan, now come on,” Mom says. I feel bad that for a split second I imagine somehow seeing Holly Gale opening her own Christmas presents without her seeing me.

“I didn’t say he should,” Duncan says. “I said you can.”

“Can never tell with you.”

Duncan laughs so I laugh. “True,” he says.

I want to take the telescope outside right away, but it is broad daylight, obviously, and really cold, and Mom is already wanting help cleaning up the mess. I point it toward random things around the living room and the kitchen and into the den.

“Christmas just ain’t Christmas anymore,” she says. And just as she does, my eyes meet Jesus’ body on the Cross, and I feel bad that he had to hear that.

“Best Christmas I ever had, Mom,” I say, and I go give her a quick peck on the cheek.

The Bulls-Pistons game is the Christmas showcase. It’s nice and peaceful around the house. We’ve already eaten twice on Mom’s pork roast and turkey, with two separate gravies, rice, potato salad, and garlic bread. I skipped the string beans, and of course, as always, my potato salad was separated before the celery went in. Pop took care of that one for me, and with such joy in his face. I wonder, when he gets like that, why he gets so mad at me the other times I don’t eat the celery or onions.

Chicago wins 98-86, just six days after losing to the same team by 21.

“One game don’t mean Jordan passed up Bird and Magic,” Pop says.

“He had 37 today. He had 33 the other night when they lost to the Pistons and 33 points, 15 rebounds, and nine assists two days later when they came back and beat the Lakers. I can’t even imagine scoring 37 points.”

“You’ll pass that up when you break my record,” Duncan says.

I feel myself beam, kind of like Pop when he’s making me my potato salad, sometimes.

Duncan drops his head into his fingers and presses it. “Got too excited for you there,” he says.

I want the score, I want Jordan himself, to prove something. I am not sure what I want them to prove, especially since I’ve been a Laker fan my whole life. I mean, I wore a Lakers hat and Jordan shirt to tour Hanson the first time.

But I pull for him to show them, to show them all. Like I do Agassi.

“Hate to say it, fellas,’ Mom says, looking at her magazine, “but I think Michael’s passed ‘em all up.”

Coach Mom is a believer. I love Coach Mom.

Maybe losing by 21 to somebody you’ve lost to so often in the playoffs doesn’t mean you stay behind them forever. Maybe old champions can still stick around while something new begins right in front of them. Hard to say, since the Celtics and Lakers went back and forth for a while when the Pistons were still lingering.

Yeah, the Bulls are still lingering. Just waiting to hit that big shot. Just waiting to take that next step.

Pop only says, “They gotta beat ‘em when it counts. Then maybe I’ll be a believer.”

Just like Agassi. It doesn’t matter how great you are. You have to take the shot and make the shot and win—and you have to do it when it matters.

Through it all, my eyes keep drifting across the room to the telescope. It’s getting dark outside now. I could probably use it, if Duncan will help me.

The telephone rings.

Mom answers in the kitchen. Her voice changes after the first few words. It’s not louder or softer exactly, just—careful. She turns away from us, and is there, just standing and staring at something we can’t see.

“She ate anything?” Mom asks. “What did the doctor say?”

Everybody has shut down the basketball conversation wars and are just waiting. Pop is staring at the TV, some commercial on. Duncan is folding one piece of wrapping paper again and again until it’s a tiny square.

Mom says she will call back. She hangs up and simply turns around to join us in the den. Her voice seems fine, but the wear is in her face. She doesn’t hide things too good.

My copy of Flowers for Algernon is sitting on the end table. I see the title, then I picture my small writing in the margin. I had intended to do something, and the whole plan went away as soon as the bell rang for Christmas break.

Roses for Rosalie.

Charlie waited too long for almost everything. At the end, all he could do was ask somebody else to put flowers on Algernon’s grave.

I refuse to be like Charlie. I refuse not to learn the lesson and actually move on it.

I wait till Mom leaves the room again. I know it won’t be long, because after putting up that brave front she’ll need to step away. She’s done it before, with dead pets and things.

Sure enough, after about five minutes, she steps out and walks down the hall.

“Pop, can you take me somewhere?”

“Not right now.”

“Somewhere that sells roses.”

He looks at me, then back at the TV. “Nothing is open on Christmas, son.”

“What about Paw’s garden?” I say it before I have time to wonder why I never thought of it before.

He isn’t as happy as he was with the potato salad, but I think he understands, because he’s getting out of the recliner.

“Let’s us three go, Duncan,” Pop says. “The freeze didn’t touch them camellias they got. And it might perk her up.”

“You wanna leave her alone here?” Duncan says.

“Hey, babe!” My dad does that. He answers questions sometimes by simply fixing the issue first. “The boys are headed out for about twenty minutes. We’ll be back sweeping you off your feet soon enough!”

My mom, now back from whatever she went to do down the hall, responds, “Y’all can stay gone as long as you want!”

It’s a joke, and it’s got fake grumpy all over it, but we love her for it.

Christmas might be inconvenient for buying roses, but Paw and Maw’s garden flowers will be even better. Camellias for Rosalie isn’t nearly as good of a title, but in the real world and not a poem it’ll mean more to her.

Outside, it has frozen three nights in a row, and it’s getting close to it again tonight. My breath is white in front of me. Pop lights a cigarette, and the smoke seems like it’s hanging longer in the air. For a second it looks like we are breathing the same thing. Then he coughs into his fist and ruins the picture in a way that both terrifies me and makes me happy.

Maybe it’ll make him quit.

The truck heater blows cold air for the first five minutes, and part of me is rethinking this whole trip on a white horse. When it finally begins producing something almost warm, I’m back to being heroic. Pop backs up, still smoking, with me sandwiched between him and Duncan.

“You know that cough is telling you something,” I say, and really I have no idea where such boldness comes from. It’s like thinking about Paw and Maw’s garden—where do these thoughts and words come from sometimes?

“This trip about flowers for your mama or my lungs?”

I don’t say anything, the boldness now gone all at once.

He rolls down the window just a bit and tosses out a half-smoked cigarette just as we’re rolling away.

“It’s good you wanna take care of your mother like this,” he says. “Anything else on your mind?”

I know I have to admit it, because I think he senses these things. It’s not a bad thing to admit such things, but I don’t want to put him in a bad mood thinking about what happened with Grant.

“Yeah, Dad, I still hadn’t come through on those flowers for the baseball cards.”

“Good.”

It is the answer he was hoping for, and he is pleased with it. No bad mood.

“Plus Flowers for Algernon.”

He has no idea what that means.

“The mouse’s grave.”

“Well, whatever,” he says.

Paw Joe opens the door wearing two shirts, a sweater, and an expression that makes him look like Uncle Scrooge. But he says a warm hello somehow just with his eyes to all three of us.

“Merry Christmas. How’s the head?” he says to Duncan.

“It’s good.”

“Comin’ for some flowers, Mr. Joe,” Pop says. “It’s okay if Andre takes a few? He wants to surprise his Mumsy.”

I love when he says ‘Mr. Joe’ for some reason. And ‘Mumsy.’

“Sure, sure, Andy-boy, that’s a good gesture. Wait…”

He returns with some garden shears.

“Not straight across. Cut just above the place two leaves meet. Take as many as you want, just not all of ‘em. Now it’s too cold for an old man like me.”

“Thanks, Paw!”

“Merry Christmas, boys.”

He closes the door, and we go.

The camellias are thick and shiny, dark leaves around red, white, and pink blooms. I reach for the biggest pink one and almost take half the branch with it.

“Boy, we picking flowers, not clearing land.”

Pop laughs smoke into the cold. Him and Duncan are just alike.

“You gon’ need something to put ‘em in,” Duncan says.

“Go get some newspaper from Mr. Joe.”

Duncan goes.

I cut six pink camellias just like Paw taught me. They aren’t roses, no, but they come from Maw’s yard, and that’ll make Mumsy perk up. That makes them something roses from a regular ol’ store could never be. I understand at least that much and am happy I procrastinated so long.

Duncan gets back, with wet paper towels and newspaper, and we wrap the stems. I want to go visit Maw, but it’s way too cold. I figure I’m doing enough on my white horse for one cold Christmas anyway. Plus, Paw seemed to want to be alone.

“Pretty,” Pop says. “Your mama’ll like that. Might get me to buying her flowers sometime.”

It’s like the potato salad.

When I get into the truck, I hit the stem of one of the flowers, and it snaps. Not all the way, but one of the flowers is just kind of dangling there.

It’s like the potato salad when he’s grumpy about it.

“Dummy,” Duncan says.

I get in the truck and look at the half-dozen flowers. That’s the rules, I thought. You either get one or six or twelve. No in between. I look at my dad.

“We gettin’ home. Either give it to her like that, or break it off and give her five. She’ll like it all the same.”

I choose to break it. And it breaks me a bit.

When I carry the camellias into the house, the heat swarms my face like ants for a second. I had forgotten how cold I was while I was being heroic.

Pop and Duncan walk in with me, but stay behind as I walk toward her in the kitchen.

“Mom.”

She turns from the sink, and looks at the flowers. Her face changes before she says anything.

“These are Mama’s,” she says.

I hold them out. “They’re for you.”

“These are Mama’s,” she says again.

Mom takes them and brings them close to her face. She doesn’t cry, because it’s not really her way in a moment like this. She’ll cry over dead cats and dogs, or a St. Jude commercial, but not in times like this. I don’t know what the difference is, but I just know. She doesn’t hug me either.

“The baseball cards?” she says.

“Yes, ma’am. And just… for Christmas.”

“I need the right vase,” she says, turning away, after just a hint of a smile at me. “Not that short one. Where’s the clear one with the little rim?”

She asks this as if the entire mission will fail unless the flowers have the correct vase. And also as if we know where the vase is. But I’m okay with her reaction, because I think being fussy is how Mom gets herself back, how she avoids the tears.

Pop walks in behind me. “Mr. Joe said charge him florist price.”

“No he didn’t, Dad!”

He just laughs.

“I know better than that,” she says, and now she’s smiling and light again.

Later that night, me and Pop go outside with the telescope. Duncan follows with some pork roast sandwiches and fudge.

We set up on the concrete where we play basketball, where the ground is flat enough to do the job. From there, I can see the whole long route my eyes have to travel. Mom’s flowers and bushes fill one side of our yard. Past the wooden fence are Dad’s banana trees and all his other green stuff, then the chain-link fence, then Maw Blue’s long stretch of lawn. The pear tree rises out there in the dark, right behind the T-posts, and the huge white house sits off to one side. That’s where the most majestic of my backyard home runs land. After all that comes the street, then the row of houses on the other side.

Mr. Borel’s is right next to Paw Joe and Maw Gladys’ house. It always amazes me, but more so in the quiet of dark now, that I’ve really and truly never walked on that property.

The porch is one small square of light in the row of dark houses along Main Street. Well, actually a rectangle. Robot Santa is a tiny red piece moving sideways across it. His bells, even his “Ho, Ho, Ho,” reach us clearly now that it’s quiet.

“Find him,” Duncan says.

“I’m trying.”

The telescope moves easily when I touch the handle. That doesn’t mean I know how to aim it. I move the tube too far left, then too far right. I find the pear tree and one bright window in the white house. Way off. I find a porch post that looks like a white wall through the eyepiece. Then a glow. Then a red blur crosses the circle and disappears.

“I had him!”

“Well, get him again,” Pop says.

I follow the blur until it slows at the edge of the rectangle. Santa turns forward before starting the other way, just like he always does. For one second, or less than that, his painted face comes into focus, but I flinch. I look away. I think I saw a rosy red cheek, maybe a strip of white beard, maybe two coals for eyes.

Maybe. No, I don’t think I did.

I can’t say for sure. I might as well have seen nothing at all.

“What he look like?” Duncan asks.

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t get it focused?”

“I can’t. I just…”

Pop covers me by moving the telescope toward the moon. It takes him less time than it took me to find whatever I found in the rectangle. When I look again, the white blur sharpens into a moon a little fatter than half, with dark dents and black shadows along the line where the light stops. For a few seconds, it looks close enough to touch.

“Man,” I say.

I keep looking at that. I have no problem looking at that.

Duncan takes his turn, then Pop reluctantly joins in.

“Wow,” he says. “That’s amazing. The good Lord’s creation.”

Potato salad.

I feel like I’m part of the band, a real man among men even though I’m still twelve, like I did earlier when Coach Mom agreed with me on the Michael Jordan thing. I love it when anyone sides with me, but tonight is different. It’s my dad. It’s my big brother.

It doesn’t feel like they ever side with me.

Across all those yards and fences, under the bright Christmas moon, Robot Santa reaches the end of the rectangle and turns yet again. The bells follow a second later.

But it’s different this time.

BOOK 1, OPENING ACTS: https://www.amazon.com/Opening-Acts-51-Jeff-LeJeune-ebook/dp/B01AE27Z6K/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=zXHYw&content-id=amzn1.sym.f8e88413-4697-42ea-9bf7-b28eb886330d&pf_rd_p=f8e88413-4697-42ea-9bf7-b28eb886330d&pf_rd_r=139-6621698-8501458&pd_rd_wg=DrGRC&pd_rd_r=99424462-7e7d-4997-9bf9-b30614ec475d

BOOK 2, PRICE OF ADMISSION: https://www.amazon.com/Price-Admission-51-Jeff-LeJeune-ebook/dp/B0CQMSBQTT?ref_=ast_author_dp_rw&th=1&psc=1&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.xl7kVz_sP0fZ0aaqqE6fIxOXSc2593g-NRHBd2GHFrvrwGOTMM6xuRgqbN9Vt-xFdIN_r6mmi8m8nAbN-kdcbX_U3PuqnFJK8UoSNgkSl_uTZkNMZjms6jyUlIDfGUmpuZ0_A21JlYt_Jw3h7ptn3Q.YPuj1dreqtRNkqR-BN3CJW8q9jjtQEZwIh9YfV9uvWo&dib_tag=AUTHOR

The one shoe bothers me almost as much as the bucket. He looks dead almost. It means he felt so bad he couldn’t even finish something so simple he started.

“Close the door,” Dana whispers.

I step inside and close it behind me, but not all the way. I want enough light to see Duncan without allowing enough light inside to kill him.

“How’s your head?” I ask.

“Still there.”

The doctor is calling it a severe migraine, Mom told me. Duncan has to rest completely until the pain and nausea go away permanently. No running. No lifting weights. No basketball practice. No basketball at all until somebody examines him again.

If he misses enough of the season, he may be able to get a medical redshirt.

Dana wants him to quit basketball completely.

This sounds so unreasonable to me, so I risk sounding cold-hearted and ask him.

“I’ll redshirt,” he says, lifting one corner of the towel. He looks like Rocky from an earlier movie, his nostrils. “Rest up. Go back next year and eventually dominate at twenty-five.”

“You are not playing college basketball at twenty-five,” Dana says.

Duncan lowers the towel again and presses it against his eyes.

Rocky V has been out since November, and everybody knows Rocky finds out something is wrong with his brain and has to stop fighting. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I don’t appreciate Dana trying to steal Duncan’s dream. She just came into our lives.

I leave the room.

The cold weather makes my eczema worse, especially inside my elbows, and stress which is all the time keeps it going in the first place. And this thing with Duncan is definitely stressful

I scratch, maybe just to feel. No, I already feel. I scratch to move the pain.

The smell and sound from the sugar mill hangs over everything outside. It’s sugar and the Deaf Dome all in one. Inside, Mom is making a gumbo, saying it always tastes better after it has time to sit. She sounds like Pop when she talks like this. The whole house is smelling like Christmas and Christmas isn’t even here.

The Wish Book stays open on the coffee table, its corners curled and several pages weakened from my repeated looks. I have already studied everything I want often enough to identify it by the smallest visible piece. A red stripe. The corner of a box.

Paw Joe’s old prayer book is not nearly as colorful.

BLESSED BE GOD is printed across the black cover. Its pages are thin and worn, with ribbons that Paw Joe used to move carefully with the same damaged hands he once wrapped inside boxing gloves. The Wish Book tells me about everything I might receive for Christmas. Paw Joe’s book seems more interested in what I am supposed to give.

I spend more time with the Wish Book.

Across the street, robot Santa continues traveling back and forth on Mr. Borel’s porch. He rings his bell, turns, and follows the same little path again. He never gets tired. He never gets a migraine. He never has to decide whether to stop doing the one thing everybody knows him for.

At night, I dream about 42–40 again.

In one version, Pastor’s shot goes through, just as it really did. The old gym explodes, everybody rushes the court, and Holly Gale’s hand finds mine inside all those people.

In the other version, the ball reaches the rim and rolls around it.

And around it.

And around it.

Then crawls out like a cat as only a dream can seem.

The strangest part is that the scoreboard still reads 42–40. I just can’t tell which team has forty-two.

When I wake up, the house is quiet. The room is still dark. Robot Santa is probably on pause right now, and Christmas is one day closer than it was when I went to sleep.

Today makes both more urgent.

It is the last morning before Christmas break, which means I have two midterm exams standing between me and over two weeks of freedom—and missing Her. Every teacher keeps calling them finals, but the school calls them midterms. I don’t know how a test can be both things at once, but I’m not going to argue with people who control my grades.

For the first time in my life, I am not entirely counting down the minutes until Christmas break. It’s always had a magic all its own I’ve enjoyed as much as I can, just like anyone, I guess. Now that I’m at Hanson, though, part of me wants to enjoy it along with the Hanson magic at the same time. But I can’t have both.

It is a dirty, unexpected trick I should have been preparing for.

I’ll miss basketball practice and the gym and seeing everybody. I’ll miss the hallways. Mostly I’ll miss Holly Gale, which is ridiculous because I don’t even talk to her that much. But I see her every day. There is a difference between not talking to somebody and not being able to talk to somebody.

There is also the birthday party.

Against all odds, like the Phil Collins song serenading my daydreams of her, Pop said yes, you can have your birthday party here. And with zero grouch. That alone is a Christmas miracle.

I don’t want a party with slow dancing and awkward couple talk. No sir. I want basketball. I want a war. A pickup tournament with a clock and a scoreboard. In my head, I’m building fences to protect Mom’s plants, then remembering a chicken fence won’t stop a bouncing basketball intent on destruction. Holly Gale is feeding me every pass. I’m hitting every shot. We’re high-fiving til our palms are sore.

There is only one small problem.

I haven’t invited her.

I have been waiting for the right moment, which is another way of saying I have wasted every moment available so far. Now Christmas break is almost here, and the right moment is getting ready to leave McCloskey Hall without me.

I completely ignore the fact that the party will be at the end of January and I will have weeks to do this when we get back to school.

First I have to survive the exams.

“Got kids goin’ to school in the dark,” Pop mutters. He always says that, like it’s some crime. Even though he’s on my side technically, I don’t get the point. How else is this supposed to work? I’ve run the math: bus times, school times, practice schedules. It’s not ideal, but it’s necessary.

Still, I assume he’s right. He’s older. Maybe I’ll get it one day.

But one thing I don’t need more time to figure out is that my father should apply that protective instinct to himself—quit smoking, quit littering Little Debbie wrappers all over the yard, and quit pretending his disgusting habit isn’t making me sneeze all the time.

It is one of the most difficult things to wrestle with—to believe adults know everything and yet know as clear as a Louisiana summer sun that hardly any of them agree on anything.

“Andre, when you’re suffering like that, think of Jesus in the garden. Offer it up.” It’s the voice of religion class.

When I do that Pop gets upset with me. Carrying of the cross, not the agony in the garden, but same thing.

That voice in my head. Religion class. Monsignor. And Mom. Paw Joe. I love them all, but today I’m not in the mood for lessons. I feel too good. Not even Peter Reinhart and his smug hair could ruin this morning for me. He’s miles away in my mind, even if he’ll be pitching at me again this spring. The image of sending one of his fastballs sailing through a neighbor’s window feels slightly unholy, even disturbing, but I picture it anyway.

Some things haven’t changed, of course. My crooked teeth still catch my tongue sometimes, a rough little reminder. My thoughts are the robot Santa. My reflection is the truth under the bed. Magic on the surface, reality underneath.

But today, I’m just going to be happy.

The only problem is that happiness is about to be dismissed for Christmas break.

For most of my life, the last school day before Christmas has been one of the best days on the calendar. At St Jude, I would have counted down every bell like those construction paper links elementary kids use to count down the days. At Hanson, only a few hours and two midterms stand between me and freedom, and that freedom suddenly feels like the part I am not sure I want. Christmas is still Christmas, don’t get me wrong. But two weeks away from Hanson is also two weeks away from Holly Gale, and this first semester as a Tiger has been a blur as it is.

I have only eleven more semesters like that at Hanson.

Share

The first exam goes well enough that I don’t think about it much after I turn it in. The second one is reading, which should be the easier one because I actually enjoy reading now. It should also be the easiest place to ask Holly Gale about my party once the test is over.

Unless I wait to ask her in January like I will everybody else.

When I walk into Ms. Jones’ classroom, our final exams are stacked facedown on her desk. Holly Gale is already sitting down, talking to Rita. I try to figure out if she looks like somebody expecting to be invited to a birthday party.

But I discover she just looks like Holly Gale.

The third bell rings, Ms. Jones closes the door, and the room becomes so quiet I can hear people arranging their pencils.

Very different from the group that apparently made a teacher quit last year. It seems like everybody is just ready for the exam to be over.

“Take out your copies of Flowers for Algernon and your notebooks,” she says. “You may use both for the final section of the exam.”

An open-book test is almost like being allowed to bring another brain into the room with you.

I receive the exam.

The first pages have questions about vocabulary, stories we read earlier in the year, and different kinds of sentences. I move through those without too much trouble. Every now and then I glance toward the clock. Every now and then I glance toward Holly Gale.

She is working steadily, and I like this focus about her.

I force myself back to the exam. Or maybe it was Ms. Jones’ noticing.

The final section is about the novel that has stayed with me for days now. At first, I am thinking about points. I underline names and important sentences. I check my tiny notes. I make sure every answer says enough without saying so much that I run out of time.

Then Charlie begins to fade, just as he faded the first time I read it.

An ugly sadness overwhelms me again. I’m seeing it like I’m seeing it for the first time—Charlie’s deterioration in the last part of the book. In the beginning, people know things about Charlie that he doesn’t know about himself. They laugh at him, and he thinks they’re his friends. Then he becomes smart enough to understand everything. By the end, he is still smart enough to know what he is losing while he loses it.

That seems worse.

I wonder if people laugh at me behind my back.

No.

One of the questions asks how Charlie’s childhood affects his relationship with Alice.

Charlie’s mother is named Rose. Mine is Rosalie. Maybe those are not exactly the same name, but they are close enough to bother me.

All of this is so sad, man.

Mom isn’t abusive, of course. She gets ornery and smokes when I ask her not to and can drop a spoon into the sink hard enough to make everybody in the house pay attention, but she’s not Charlie’s mother. Still, it seems like Maw Gladys has some of the traits Rose has in the book, and that makes me wonder what Mom experienced growing up. She is married and has kids and seems to have everything figured out as a grown-up, but I know now that grown-ups can look like they have things figured out while staring through a window looking at Santa Claus trying not to cry.

I begin writing my answer in letters the size I wrote in my notebook the other day. I press the pencil hard.

“Andre, I’m going to need a magnifying glass,” Ms. Jones says when she passes me, making me jump a little bit. I was completely disconnected from this entire classroom for a minute there.

A couple people laugh and Ms. Jones quickly apologizes for disturbing us. They’re not laughing at me, I can tell. It is better for them to think I am showing off my ability to fit an entire novel’s worth of answers on half a sheet of the paper than for anybody to notice my eyes.

Another test question asks why the ending is important.

That is a large question for six lines of blank space.

I keep reading.

Charlie asks the reader to put flowers on Algernon’s grave.

The flowers Charlie asks the reader to get for Algernon remind me of the flowers I need to get for Mom.

Roses for Rosalie.

Could be the title of a poem one day.

I write it lightly in the margin of my exam, then erase it because Ms. Jones may think it is part of my answer. The words are still there if I tilt the paper toward the light.

The end of the book is really smart and moving. The whole book is, for that matter, so much so that I have to hide the tears, even now as I live it again. I am so appreciative of Ms. Jones and Hanson in general for letting us read it. I want to write deep and meaningful books like that when I get older.

I lower my head and pretend to check one of my microscopic answers.

When I finally look up and over, like it’s an instinct of mine, Holly Gale is looking at me from across the room.

Holly Gale saw me, I think.

She doesn’t smile. She doesn’t do anything. She just looks at me for a second, then turns back to her exam.

At least she isn’t gagging this time.

Maybe she saw the tears. Maybe she thinks I have something in my eye. Maybe she was looking at somebody behind me, even though the only thing behind me is Ms. Jones’ desk and a wall and some classroom posters.

I look there anyway.

“Five minutes,” Ms. Jones says.

I finish my last answer, check the whole test, then return to the question about the flowers. I add one final sentence, although I’m not sure whether I am answering Ms. Jones or Charlie.

Sometimes you should give somebody flowers before it is too late.

I’m finish.

I wait.

Everyone else finishes.

The tests are turned over.

The bell rings.

Books close, chairs scrape, and the reality that Christmas break is here elevates everyone into bedlam, like they’re inside Chicago Stadium for a Bulls-Pistons game, or the Deaf Dome for LSU vs UNLV. Somebody starts singing “No more pencils, no more books,” which is incorrect because we will have both again soon enough in January.

Ms. Jones simply tells us to leave our exams facedown on her desk and wishes us a nice break and a merry Christmas.

I should be cheering more than I am. I’m not against Christmas. I’m not even against the Bulls. I just don’t want two weeks of it standing between me and Hanson.

Between me and Holly Gale.

I pack slowly, waiting for the room to empty just enough for me to speak to Holly without the entire seventh grade hearing the word birthday. She’s slow to get out, but she’s got friends around her.

Then Dillon comes back in the classroom to hurry me up. Pastor is right behind him to talk to Didi. Right as he’s passing me, Holly Gale says to him, “We might go see Home Alone,” she says. “You and Didi come.”

We.

And she said it looking at him and, I swear, taking the quickest of glances at me at the same time. I want to ask who “we” is, but I confuse the question with the already flickering question about the birthday party, and suddenly I don’t know what to do.

The raucous in the hallway is sweeping the moment away. Dillon is sweeping me away. Pastor is my friend and if he’d just ask me to go with them…

“Nah,” I hear him say. “Y’all go. I’m going take a nap.”

Whew. I don’t have to worry about why he wouldn’t ask me to go. And it is a clean thought I take with me as I walk out of class not having succeeded in my original goal: She looked at me, for the tiniest of milliseconds, she looked at me. I know it.

She puts her copy of Flowers for Algernon into her bag and walks out with Didi and Rita.

This is it.

Your last chance.

(Before lots of chances in January).

She walks by and says excuse me, the only one of the three to say it.

I close my notebook with “Roses for Rosalie” hidden somewhere inside it, smile, put my hand on Dillon’s shoulder for no reason other than a weird swelling I feel inside, and walk out into the hall and into Christmas.

By the time the bus gets out of Baldwin on the way home, I have already invented five better versions of the conversation I’ll have with her in January, including one in which the bell does not ring at all, and Cone has already laughed at me five times for my random certainties again.

“She looked at you,” he says. “Practically begging for you to go see the movie with them!”

Laugh it up, Cone. Laugh it up.

Christmas is going to be the best yet. I’m already seeing things more clearly, and apparently, so is Holly Gale.

BOOK 1, OPENING ACTS: https://www.amazon.com/Opening-Acts-51-Jeff-LeJeune-ebook/dp/B01AE27Z6K/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=zXHYw&content-id=amzn1.sym.f8e88413-4697-42ea-9bf7-b28eb886330d&pf_rd_p=f8e88413-4697-42ea-9bf7-b28eb886330d&pf_rd_r=139-6621698-8501458&pd_rd_wg=DrGRC&pd_rd_r=99424462-7e7d-4997-9bf9-b30614ec475d

BOOK 2, PRICE OF ADMISSION: https://www.amazon.com/Price-Admission-51-Jeff-LeJeune-ebook/dp/B0CQMSBQTT?ref_=ast_author_dp_rw&th=1&psc=1&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.xl7kVz_sP0fZ0aaqqE6fIxOXSc2593g-NRHBd2GHFrvrwGOTMM6xuRgqbN9Vt-xFdIN_r6mmi8m8nAbN-kdcbX_U3PuqnFJK8UoSNgkSl_uTZkNMZjms6jyUlIDfGUmpuZ0_A21JlYt_Jw3h7ptn3Q.YPuj1dreqtRNkqR-BN3CJW8q9jjtQEZwIh9YfV9uvWo&dib_tag=AUTHOR

December rolls on, and Christmas is just sitting there waiting on the calendar, like a present under the tree tempting me to peek. Like something meant to stay hidden for a while, the way Paw Joe says the most important things are.

Hanson was supposed to be the last thing I could finally say was here. Christmas is different this year, and that makes everything seem unstable. It is coming, but so are other things. Things are always coming, and they’re things that nobody has wrapped or put under a tree.

It’s always an exciting time of year. I mean, who doesn’t like Christmas and time off from school, but this time, it’s tinged with something deeper. Maybe because the new Hanson life I waited so long for is here now, and somehow that has only made me notice everything else that is moving. Duncan might be home more often. Turns out the headaches weren’t just stress or dehydration like we’d hoped. (Or hangovers like my dad suggested one time). They diagnosed him with migraines, some of the worst kind. We found out more afterward, like how there were days he couldn’t even get out of bed, days he threw up from the pain.

A few nights ago I knew something was off before I even opened the door at the end of the hallway. The curtains were closed even though it was barely six, and Duncan was lying there with a wet towel over his eyes, Mom’s mop bucket on the floor, one shoe kicked off like he didn’t have the strength to finish the job. I said his name, just normal, not joking, not pushing. I was actually kind of scared. He lifted one finger without looking at me and said, “Not now, man.”

It was both a relief and a burden, just hearing him answer me in that moment.

There was something else I considered as I walked out. There have been plenty of times I’ve told Duncan to knock it off—and he’d just grin, ignore me, and then somehow make it worse. But I didn’t push him back like he does to me. I didn’t say anything else. I just stood there for a second and then left, because I could tell this wasn’t one of those moments to even consider any sort of brotherly revenge. Actually it never crossed my mind until now. And it hit me then, standing in the hallway again, that whatever was happening to him was bigger than anything we usually fight about, bigger than both of us, and that maybe the difference between us isn’t just that he doesn’t listen—but that I do.

The doctor ordered strict rest for a few weeks, to see if the symptoms fade before deciding whether to shut Duncan down for the rest of the season. If they do sit him, there's talk of a medical redshirt. Duncan jokes that with a few more redshirt years, he’ll be playing college ball at twenty-five and finally be able to dominate. Dana, and maybe even Mom, want him to hang it up for good.

I don’t know what I think about that. Part of me wants him to keep playing, like stopping would mean something worse than the headaches, and that the girls are just being girls about it all, but another part of me wonders if they’re right. Pop hasn’t said much, just that Duncan needs to be careful and listen to the doctors, which doesn’t really help me decide anything.

Paw Joe has been warning him since high school about how sports and attention can pull a person into something darker than we all realize.

Paw says Duncan needs to remember that the crowd gets to go home after the game. I nod when he says things like that, because it sounds important. Mostly I picture all those people eating nachos and yelling while Duncan is the one who has to go home with his head splitting open. Dana thinks the lesson is that he should quit. Duncan thinks the lesson is that everybody else should quit bothering him.

Share

—

This time of the year isn’t about how the clichés on TV go, the white snow of the commercials or building snowmen that melt every year. It’s about the drying and the cracking of eczema on your arms. At least in December I don’t have to make up reasons as to why I wear long sleeves so much. No one notices your eczema on the court.

It’s also about a cold with just enough chill for gumbo filled with onions for the rest of the family but not you, playing football by yourself in the tall ryegrass after the first slate of games on a Sunday, and the roaring sound of the sugar mill providing crowd noise for your one-on-no one basketball games outside in the driveway. It’s about Dad with his beer and satsumas, and Mom with her fudge. It used to be about Duncan’s ballgames and the Holiday Classic at Hanson and the Yuletide Classic at VC, but it isn’t that anymore.

It’s about the Santa robot across the street and the magic still holding on, despite Christmas not being what it was anymore.

But the magic might not be magic too. I mean, he walks the same few feet, rings the same bells, turns around, and starts over. Mr. Borel doesn’t even have to draw up a new offense for him. Santa turns outward every time.

Christmas songs are everywhere. The Sears Wish Book has been thumbed through till the pages curl. (No sports cards this year, of course). Paw Joe’s little black prayer book lies on top of it in the living room, its peeling spine and bookmark ribbons somehow shinier than the toys in the Wish Book. Sometimes I open it and look at the Latin without reading anything, which is probably not how prayer books are supposed to work.

But I’ll be flipping some of the pages, back and forth, with no real purpose behind it, and the jolly ol’ robot Santa Claus is walking back and forth ringing his bells in the distance at Mr. Borel’s house. I know Santa isn’t real anymore, but the magic is. And maybe that’s the part I don’t want to lose. Maybe that’s why I spend more time in the Wish Book. Maybe that’s why I haven’t walked up to see robot Santa’s face just yet. Some things are better from a distance.

Like that Latin.

Sometimes Mom watches the robot Santa from the window too. She doesn’t say anything, but I know she’s thinking about her mom. Maybe she isn’t watching him at all. Maybe she is watching herself as a little girl, when Maw was the one making Christmas and Mom was the one waiting. It's like she has this strange, cute mix of childlike wonder and humble suffering.

The pain part seems to be worse lately. There are moments when she seems fine, but sometimes she drifts off, lost in thought, like she’s staring into something beyond the glass. I don’t know how to ask her about it. The one time I tried, she just smiled, said oh nothing my baby, and told me to go outside and enjoy myself in the dirt or on my bike or with Grant or all three. It was strangely descriptive and exact, which threw me, but I did what she said.

But I still watch her sometimes, whether she's pondering on Santa or cooking or vacuuming or doing all the wonderful things she does for the family in the house and out of it, wondering what it is she's searching for. And that helps me because I know that I fluctuate between that warrior that throws no-hitters the night before nose surgeries and a little lost soul searching for something myself.

Thing is I know she won’t find it in that Santa, and for the life of me I don’t understand why something is tugging on me telling me that I still can.

Then again maybe Mom is thinking about Maw while I’m thinking about Mom, and neither one of us is thinking about Santa much at all. Or maybe she’s just wondering whether she unplugged the iron. This is the problem with trying to figure out what people are thinking.

Santa isn’t even real. We learned that last year, remember?

I watch Rudolph and Frosty again, like I do every year, but I don’t cry when Frosty melts this time. I think I’m different now. Maybe. Part of it is being at Hanson. Part of it is that Christmas changed last year, when I found the presents from “Santa” three weeks too early.

It’s okay, because I still have almost six years to experience the magic of Hanson, and I know Hanson is real.

Paw Joe and Pop wouldn’t understand—or maybe they would. They both call all that Santa stuff “humbug,” and I kind of like that about them. It’s made it easier for me to let go. I can even picture Mr. Stanley saying the same thing. Maybe all adults end up there eventually. It’s strange, though, how much effort goes into keeping that story alive for kids when the real one—Jesus’ birth—is so much better.

Last Sunday Paw sat beside me at the kitchen table and showed me where the ribbons went in the old prayer book. His fingers are bent and scarred from many afternoons of a hammer and nails, but they grew steady when he touched the pages.

“Read slow,” he said. “The prayers not going anywhere.”

Some of the pages feel like they belong to another religion altogether compared with religion class at school. They talk about judgment, reparation, spiritual combat, angels, devils, sacrifice, and death as if those things are as everyday and normal as baseball stats. That scares me a little. The same Church cannot be two different Churches, and I am not even thirteen yet, so I still assume the priests, teachers, and grown-ups know things I do not. But Paw Joe is a grown-up too, and he is very clearly different. I feel myself really listening to him.

Lately everything feels backward. Duncan lies in dark rooms. Pop coughs. Paw Joe is the oldest and most broken of all of them, but every time he talks about the Faith, he seems to be, I don’t know, bigger.

Santa is a lie but there is still truth there for me.

I still love the bells. And I still love the lights.

I wonder if this is what the Duncan myth is, the Hanson myth. If so, I don't ever want to find out that those things aren't real.

I don’t know what that makes Duncan and Hanson. They’re real—I’m almost positive. But sometimes Duncan seems more real running onto a basketball court than he does lying under a towel in his room. That doesn’t make sense, so I just try to avoid the room.

42-40 feels like both a long time ago and no time at all. I’ve dreamed of it twice since that night. Once, it was the bolt of joy from the victory, just as it happened. And once, it was the hell, literally as I’ve envisioned it in my prayers, because we had lost.

The game is over, but it doesn’t feel finished inside me. It’s still right there, like it just happened, like I could step back onto that court if I wanted to. And in some ways, since I know I will never be able to recapture it again, it almost feels as though it never happened. Maybe that’s why everything else feels a little sharper now, like I’m trying to hold on to whatever comes next, even as December keeps moving forward song by song and bell by bell toward Christmas.

42-40 did something real, but it got away, like a roach. Sunday morning still came. Dad still smoked, Duncan’s head still hurt, and I still had eczema. Apparently one victory does not mean you stay undefeated forever, and a victory like that, like that, should last longer. The taste of victory should stick around longer than just a few weeks.

I think I was picking up bits and pieces of how life and the world around me worked before, but everything seems to be, I don’t know, heightened now. Intensified may be a better word. Maybe it’s symbolic that I think I’m getting a telescope this year for Christmas. I am seeing things more up close and personal. Like Andre Agassi and Rocky. It’s in their eyes.

A telescope doesn’t really move anything closer, I know. It only makes things look closer, which seems close enough until you back away. Then you wonder if you were really seeing it as it is, considering your own eyes matter in the equation. Does the telescope’s help ruin what you see? What if we’re meant to see certain things only from a distance?

Or maybe it’s because there are some things I just don’t know how to see yet. Things I’m afraid of looking at too closely.

The strangest part of winning is that it has made my future larger instead of smaller. Before 42-40, I mostly worried that I might not be good at anything. Now I can picture basketball, baseball, writing, drawing, maybe tennis, and whatever Paw Joe keeps seeing when he looks at my hands. Every picture feels possible for about five seconds, and then all of them start shouting at once. If I choose one thing, am I quitting the others? If I become something Duncan never became, am I moving forward or leaving him behind?

I’m, well, I’m bigger now. There’s that word again. I feel exactly what Duncan and I were feeling when we went see Big that day.

And I’m learning that the meaning of “big” may not be someone’s size.

Inside our toasty home, the Christmas tree still stands in the corner of the den. Its branches are packed with decorations, all because of my mom. Every year after Christmas she goes to Hobby Lobby and buys a whole new color scheme while everything is 50% off. Then she puts it all in the attic and leaves it there for eleven months. Next year, it comes back out and somehow looks even better.

I always talk about my dad’s patience with backing out of the driveway and opening letters for Teche Farm, but I don’t give my mom enough credit for this. I don’t understand how she can buy all that stuff and not use it right away. That seems impossible to me. But I also know eleven months go by fast. That’s something I’ve learned.

It’s another lesson from the people I love. I want to learn it too. I want to be able to buy things on sale and actually wait to use them.

I am sharper and bigger because of 42-40, and yet, I am still so fragile.

Mom is in the kitchen, unwrapping silver bells, and she pops one in her mouth like it’s no big deal, smooth like a Michael Jordan dribble.

Across the street, robot Santa answers with his own bell, seemingly a beat off this time for some reason.

“I saw that!” I joke.

“Oh ya did, did ya?”

“Mmmm, fudge.” I unwrap a few for her while she finishes. She looks tired despite the exactness of her fingers. I know she’s probably aggravated with that pile of dishes that needs washing in the sink.

“The house looks great. The tree and mantle things are yours for the taking.”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t get it the way I wanted it this year.” She says this every year.

“Mom, you’re so patient with the decorations and the fifty percent off thing, to be able to wait that long. I don’t understand how discipline like that can’t transfer to something like cigarette smoking.”

“Look, Andre, don’t start with me. Let me enjoy my cigarettes.”

“Paw Joe quit,” I say. “He said the first week was terrible, and then he got tired of letting a little white stick boss him around.”

It's like taking a shot from the other side of the court when horsing around after practice. You know it’s not going in, but it's fun to try.

“Your fudge is the best. There needs to be a contest for that. Santa Claus may not be real anymore, but there’ll always be your fudge.”

“I got some regret with all that, even though it was always fun.”

She keeps stirring for a moment, like she’s deciding how much to say.

“I’ve been wondering if we’ve really done right by you and your brothers and sisters, making such a big deal about Santa Claus and cookies in the middle of the night. Maybe we should’ve been bringing you to midnight Mass or something instead.”

I consider how Paw Joe would be responding to this. I consider if Paw Joe was the one who inspired it.

“It is about the birth of Jesus Christ, after all. And Santa Claus was created after a real saint.”

These are things Paw Joe would say. These are things Paw Joe would have taught Mom when she was growing up.

“Mama never let your grandfather teach us like he wanted to teach us. He wanted to teach us the old ways. I think that's why he's doing so much to teach you now.”

Oh.

It all makes sense. And it probably makes Paw feel really bad, knowing he can only teach me these old ways now, when things are so hard and he has to take care of Maw while she’s sick.

I think about him turning the pages of the prayer book with those gnarled hands, the same hands that once repaired shoes, boxed men, managed baseball players, hammered nails, and held Maw’s wrists on the day she came at him with the knife. He doesn’t tell me any of that those times we sit at the table. He only straightens the ribbons and tells me to read slowly. Maybe that is why I listen.

I think of Duncan, and how he so often doesn’t listen.

I’m good at listening when Paw talks. I’m less good when Mom says to wash the dishes or Pop says I’m going to Capete with him. So I may not be as strong at listening as I’m making myself sound.

I smile. I consider the notions of honesty and myth. What really do those two things mean? Maybe a myth is a lie wearing a better uniform. No, that doesn’t work either. Hanson has better uniforms than St Jude, and Hanson isn’t a lie. Mom's fudge will live on long after she's gone. So will a fat man in a red suit somehow, and playing football in the rye grass. And yet neither of those things will last nearly as long as Jesus Christ himself, and yet again we don't give nearly enough attention to him, ever, even worse so during this time of the year.

I don’t like that I can even think “after she’s gone” now. I try to take it back, but thoughts don’t work that way.

“Paw Joe has a lot in him,” I say.

“One time when I was a little girl, I remember him saying, ‘God was born in a stable, and St. Nicholas was a real man. Why we need to make up another one?’ He said it while he was fixing one of my shoes, like he was aggravated with the whole world but still wanted me to be walking in the right shoes.”

“It’s okay, Mom. I love the way Christmas is here. I hope it never changes.”

“It’s not the same without Santa Claus, though.”

“We’ll still have all the family and food and presents. It’ll always be fun.”

I don't know if this realization came all at once for her or if it built up over time, like a game slowly getting out of hand, so I pull myself out of getting too emotional and go back to just enjoying it all, even if that means not thinking too hard about the truth. I can't handle all that right now anyway. I like Christmas, let's face it. And I get it, Santa Claus is an easier story for a parent, and definitely for a kid.

Santa is easy. Be good, write a list, leave cookies, and wake up to presents. Except everybody I know gets the presents anyway, even the kids who act like Reinhart and Boone. After a while, you start to realize the list doesn’t really decide anything—it’s just part of the show, like all the rest of the decorations.

Jesus is harder because he does not stay inside the manger scene. He follows you into the hallway at school, the driveway, confession, the cigarette smoke, and whatever you do when nobody is looking. Santa’s punishment is a threat nobody believes. Hell isn’t.

That thought feels too big for a kitchen where Mom is already fighting tears, so I leave it alone.

I look at the Nativity scene Mom has placed on a certain table every year. For the first time something hits me at soul level, the way Mary is looking at Jesus. Her face is not detailed in the statue, of course, but for one second the kitchen goes as still inside me as the gym before a free throw, and something warm and sudden fills in the parts the sculptor left blank. It feels like being seen completely and not turned away from. I know this is how my mother looks at me. Deep down inside, beneath the addiction to nicotine and her ornery moods, she loves me. She loves me so very much.

Maybe the real kind of magic is not believing something fake.

Maybe it has something to do with everybody still being here even when they aggravate one another. Dad smokes, Mom snaps, Duncan tortures me, and Paw Joe acts like every conversation may end with the Last Judgment. Then we all eat pork roast together. I’m not sure that qualifies as magic, but it is definitely our family.

Besides, winning 42-40 did not make Thomas Boone disappear from the earth. You have that crazy phone call with him after the game too. He’s not gone, obviously. It just means that if I ever see him again, I’ll have one easy thing to talk about with him.

“I love you, Mom. Nothing else ever has to change about Christmas, especially all the decorations and the pork roast.”

“Oh, Andre, what a charmer you’re becoming. Just like your father.”

Now I can really jive with that.

“Mom, I don’t want to change too much. Little bit at a time.”

“You’re probably right.”

This moment with Mom, with the smell of candles and the glory of Christmas decorations saturating the house, is a conversation all unto itself, in a language more honest than words could ever say. I watch her, so thankful now that presents aren't miracles from some distant magical figure, but carefully chosen sacrifices wrapped like silver bells in love on a limited family budget. That is why Mom shouldn't feel so bad. No, maybe she didn't bring the old ways to us as much as she could have, but whatever she and Dad brought was good. It was good through and through because we all have learned to be so thankful for the little we have.

I am holding on to old things like Mom's fudge, but I feel it's best to do that right now with her suffering inside so much. I'm having to create new ones for this new real world I apparently have to live in now, but I also know I'm not ready to be as holy as Paw. I don't want that. I want basketball and baseball and Holly Gale. I mean, I want Jesus too, but isn't how we've been getting him enough?

Maybe it isn’t Santa disappearing forever, now that their last kid knows, that’s taken the sweetness out of things for Mom and Dad. Maybe it's just that I'm growing up or maybe it's just that I overthink everything. And maybe this is as miraculous as anything about life needs to be, just watching the mother that loves you so dearly making your favorite candy and crying over the fact that she knows she'll never have that curly-haired little boy in her arms again and that her mom is dying as we speak. I think about how happy she was the night of 42-40 and I realize once again how much her sons' sports mean to her too. I have a flashback in the heart to those times when I used to tell my mom that I'd never get married, that I'd always stay at home, that the only thing Santa couldn't promise me was that she would always be here.

“I hope Dad’s in a good mood tonight.”

“Why wouldn’t he be?”

So many powerful emotions just thinking about it all, like everything is pressing in at once. No magic, no myths, just me and Mom, and surely God. I see the clock on the stove turn to 5:23 and I say another special prayer for Mom, this time thanking God for May 23 when she came into this world. Numbers are easier than feelings. Five-twenty-three is Mom. Four-twenty-eight is Pop. Eight-fourteen is Duncan. A clock can turn into a prayer before I have to figure out the right words.

So much of me feels like I'm reverting back to old things but I still have the awareness to cherry pick the right ones. The whole scene is more miraculous than any childhood fantasy, less heartbreaking because I have so much to be happy about now and to look forward to, like the day when Holly Gale will be sitting in one of these chairs inside my house enjoying Christmas Eve dinner with the family.

That future has a few problems I haven’t solved, including where Holly Gale would sit, whether I’d have to invite Grant, and whether Pop will be grumpy dad or awesome dad. But I’ll handle those later.

And I know that at some point soon—maybe if Dad comes home in a bad mood, or if I’m lying awake again in the middle of the night—this whole feeling, this clearer sense of Jesus and St. Nick over the fat guy, will poof, go right away.

It’s how that bouncing ball works—up and down are always coming before the other.

“It’s something, growing up.”

“It sure is,” she says, choking up, turning away and scooping out the marshmallow cream into the pot.

I realize how intertwined joy and sorrow really are. Like the Joyful and Sorrowful Mysteries. Maybe just the Joyful by themselves. Jesus is twelve when Mary loses Him for three days, which has always seemed more sorrowful than joyful to me.

So is everything sorrowful? Are even the highs actually lows because you know the lows are coming?

That game, that moment of triumph, came and went like the swish of the net, but its echoes are everywhere, in the way I see things, in the way I think, in the way I understand my mother’s pain now in a way I didn’t before.

They’re right here in this kitchen right now.

She’s stirring the fudge, her back turned, and I wonder if she’s thinking about her mom, about what Christmas meant to her growing up, about what she’s lost and what she’s still afraid of losing.

I want to tell her it’s okay, that Christmas is still Christmas, even without Santa, even with the truth and all the changes and cracks in everything. I want to tell her that her mom is going to be okay and that a miracle will happen, but I don’t really believe that anymore, not like I used to. I don’t say anything. I just unwrap another silver bell and let it melt in my mouth, the sweetness mixing with the ache I feel from seeing my mom hurt.

She wipes her eyes quickly, as if she knows I see her but doesn’t want to make a thing of it. “You ready for Christmas, my baby?”

I’m still her baby. It all makes sense to her as long as I’m her baby.

Like Mary and Jesus.

Tears bubble forth before I can press them back. I don’t know if I’ll ever figure out what I’m looking for, but maybe, just maybe, I’ll learn how to focus on the right things. Like looking through a telescope and finally turning the knob until the blur becomes a star. Not just staring at the shiny polyurethane on the stairs in an old gym, but seeing what’s above it, what’s beyond it, what it’s all pointing to. And maybe that’s what Christmas, and everything else, is really about.

“Yeah, Mom. I am.”

And for the first time in my life, I think I really mean it. Maybe Paw Joe is right. Maybe the real miracle was never Santa. Maybe I’ll feel really strong in that sentiment someday when I’m a dad.

For once in my life it seems the Hershey bells and the Santa bells are ringing the same tune, and somewhere underneath both of them, faint but steady, are the altar bells Paw Joe keeps teaching me to hear.

BOOK 1, OPENING ACTS: https://www.amazon.com/Opening-Acts-51-Jeff-LeJeune-ebook/dp/B01AE27Z6K/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=zXHYw&content-id=amzn1.sym.f8e88413-4697-42ea-9bf7-b28eb886330d&pf_rd_p=f8e88413-4697-42ea-9bf7-b28eb886330d&pf_rd_r=139-6621698-8501458&pd_rd_wg=DrGRC&pd_rd_r=99424462-7e7d-4997-9bf9-b30614ec475d

BOOK 2, PRICE OF ADMISSION: https://www.amazon.com/Price-Admission-51-Jeff-LeJeune-ebook/dp/B0CQMSBQTT?ref_=ast_author_dp_rw&th=1&psc=1&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.xl7kVz_sP0fZ0aaqqE6fIxOXSc2593g-NRHBd2GHFrvrwGOTMM6xuRgqbN9Vt-xFdIN_r6mmi8m8nAbN-kdcbX_U3PuqnFJK8UoSNgkSl_uTZkNMZjms6jyUlIDfGUmpuZ0_A21JlYt_Jw3h7ptn3Q.YPuj1dreqtRNkqR-BN3CJW8q9jjtQEZwIh9YfV9uvWo&dib_tag=AUTHOR