Because I can eat this prize without getting a stomach ache.
Wait. That doesn’t sound right…
“Yes.” I shrug helplessly. “He wouldn’t call if he weren’t desperate.”
Declan’s mind is a million miles away, his eyes smoking hot and aimed right at me. And then I realize he’s not a million miles away. He’s five miles away, at the mall, listening to “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” with visions of something way dirtier than sugar plums dancing in his head.
“Do they let you bring the costume home?” he asks.
I whack him hard with a fistful of tinsel. It flies up in the air and whirls around us, like a piñata filled with Angel Dust and disco balls from the 1970s.
Which is about on par with what we experience when we arrive at the mall.
Chapter Two
You know what the North Pole smells like?
Frightened kid pee, scented baby wipes, and Tiger Moms.
What are Tiger Moms? The same women who rule over their piano-playing prodigies, the kids mastering Chopin before they were weaned, who make Yo-Yo Ma look like a drunk homeless dude playing a broken recorder in East Cambridge, who raise soccer players who make Luis Suarez look like Rainbow Brite—and they’re lined up here at the mall with their kids, and they’re not taking “no” for an answer.
To anything.
“Tycho! Tycho!” screeches one blonde mother who looks disturbingly like Jessica Coffin with under-eye bags. “Tycho, don’t you dare sit down. You’ll crease!”
Crease. She’s dressed the kid in all white and he looks like a cross between President Snow from The Hunger Games and a Ralph Lauren ad. He’s three. Three. And you put him in white? Mommy Masochist.
Creasing is the least of his problems. Most three year olds can’t follow a two-step command, or watch an entire episode of Bubble Guppies without wiping nine boogers on the couch cushions, and she expects him to not crease?
“I don’t like waiting! You said your waiting app told you we wouldn’t wait, Mommy. Give me your phone. I want to play Paplinko!” Tycho whines. “Eat at P.F. Chang’s! I want to order from your app!”
“Manners!” his mother snaps back.
Her eyes glow red with the kind of intensity that only a well-educated, over-entitled Nanny Diaries-type mother can cultivate. My own mom suddenly seems cuddly and harmless, like Mrs. Brady with a side of Mrs. Weasley and a touch of Peg Bundy.
Okay, a lot of Peg Bundy.
“We were told, in the app, that there would not be a wait!” she yells at me. I am standing in front of Santa’s throne, a veritable pantheon to the advertising geniuses who have turned Christmas into a religious holiday, serving the new gods: Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express.
“App?” I ask, resisting the urge to pull the butt floss out of my crack. Butt floss? Oh, yeah. After Declan dropped me off at the main doors to go hunt a wooly mammoth…er, find a parking spot (either were equally likely on December 23rd at 3 p.m. in this particular mall parking lot), I’d found Greg, who had wordlessly handed me the elf suit.
I’ve seen models on GoDaddy Super Bowl commercials wearing more than this.
“App!” Mommy Masochist screams, texting while she’s yelling at me, her eyes on the screen but her lips devoted entirely to me. “The app!”
“An app for…what?”
Demon eyes flash at me and she holds up one perfectly French-tipped finger. “One second,” she says with a supercilious air that makes me want to crack that fingernail in half and use it like a ninja star to shave off that arched eyebrow. She’s blonde, hair pulled back in a twist, and she is wearing all red, open-toed shoes in December in Massachusetts, where nine inches of snow means everyone I know wears Fuggs and looks like a Jawa for four months of the year.
Red stiletto heels, open-toed and with these crazy ankle strap things that make her feet look like red flamingoes. If that’s fashion, then my Salvation Army wardrobe is starting to look good.
She ends her textfest and centers all her attention on me, taking as much time as she pleases to size me up. Her eyes catalog my bright green, satiny outfit, with sequins that spell out Ho Ho Ho across my boobs.
A careful examination under the blinking fluorescent lights of the employee bathroom two hours later will show that yes, indeed, I walked around the mall for three hours with just Ho on each nipple.
But I digress…
The green fabric cuts into my armpits, the shelf bra was designed for a ten-year-old gymnast, and what might have been appealing in a Mae West kind of way as the bustier pushes everything up instead makes me look like a can of Pillsbury biscuits.
One that someone pulled the string on.
And twisted.
The green, shimmery stockings are two sizes too small, and the crotch threatens constantly to pull down about six inches lower, which would make me look like I am wearing harem pants…except I’m wearing the closest thing to a g-string anyone can imagine, a tiny little red taffeta skirt circling my crushed hips like a bad case of eczema.
The costume design department for Blades of Glory is weeping with jealousy right now for not coming up with this.
Or maybe they did…
“Nice outfit,” Mommy Masochist says. “I need to speak with your manager,” she adds slowly. Her eyes cut away. “And tuck in your nip.”
I look down. Yep—headlight escaped, pointed right at the security guard by the service desk, who starts to stroke his billy club suggestively.
“Thanks,” I mutter, because one good turn deserves—