Page 49

She didn’t seem bothered by my stealing her compliment because I hadn’t been able to think of anything else. “What do you want to build?”

“Um,” I said. “A…house?”

“No, I mean, what kind?” she said. “Usually, people decorate theirs in, like, red and green for Christmas, but maybe we could do something for Hanukkah? Since you were saying you guys kind of get the short end of the stick around the holidays.”

I was surprised at how much her words touched me. I mean, it was just a stupid gingerbread house that I didn’t care about at all, but I felt seen. “Wow. Okay, sure. That sounds cool.”

She pushed all the red and green stuff to one side, then reconsidered and picked out some green M&M’s and Necco Wafers. “I feel like this will make good grass.”

Of course, pushing aside the Christmas stuff raised the question about what decorating for Hanukkah actually meant. “I don’t know, I feel like most people I know never really decorated for Hanukkah the way people decorate for Christmas,” I said. “I mean, maybe we could do blue and white lights?” We surveyed our collection of candy, most of which was red, green, or white. “Or maybe just put a frosting menorah in the window?”

That semi-decided, we set about constructing our walls, hoping the frosting would hold the confection together. “When you and Seth were dating, did you guys celebrate the holidays a lot together?” I asked.

She squinted at a crack in the sheet of gingerbread she was trying to fit into one of our slots. “Sure, we’d do at least something together. I’d go home for Hanukkah to light the candles with his family, and he’d come celebrate Christmas with mine. I’d go home with him for the Passover seder, and he’d come to mine for Easter. It actually made things easier that we had different religions. Nobody fighting over who gets us for Christmas or Easter dinner.”

That was probably true. Though, in my case, we wouldn’t be fighting about where to spend the holidays. One, because several Jewish holidays conveniently had multiple nights of celebration; there were two Passover seders and eight nights of Hanukkah. And two, because I wouldn’t be celebrating with my family. Seth and I could spend all of the holidays with his family. I could see it now: Bev moaning about being starving on Yom Kippur while Benjamin mused about how maybe he should try intermittent fasting every day; Bev making Seth sing the Four Questions every year at Passover because he was the youngest person at the table and telling him that if he no longer wanted to be the youngest he was welcome to make someone younger.

I glanced back at Seth again. He and Dan had managed to construct a wobbly tower that was at least two feet high; Seth’s shoulder flexed as he reached up to stick a gumdrop on the roof.

“How’s the fake relationship going?” Freya said in my ear. My eyes instinctually darted around to make sure nobody had overheard, but she’d judged correctly; the music was too loud. “Is it weird that I’m rooting for you guys?”

“Rooting for what?” Somehow the mischief in her voice didn’t point toward the answer being to pull a successful one over on Bev and Benjamin.

Her eyes twinkled, not unlike Santa Claus in every Christmas movie ever. “No reason.”

That was clearly a lie, but I didn’t want to push it. Okay, that was also a lie—I did want to push it, but something was stopping me. Maybe I was afraid of hearing the answer.

So I changed the subject. “Are you dating anyone right now?”

She glued a gumdrop to the wall of our house with frosting, then grimaced as it fell right off, displacing a Life Savers candy porthole (we’d decided our house would have portholes rather than windows, because they were a lot easier to make). “Ugh, dating in New York is the worst. I swear they’re holding a Worst Guys Ever convention at the Javits every week. That’s the only thing to explain the quality of my matches.” She shrugged. “But it’s okay. I have enough going on where a boyfriend would probably just complicate things anyway.” She cocked her head. “Unless you know anyone you want to set me up with?”

I snorted. “Fat chance there.” The only guys I knew well enough for that were my fake boyfriend and my ex-boyfriend.

“Have you dated much? Like, for real, I mean?” she asked, and her voice was so nonjudgmental, I found myself spilling the whole story of my relationship with Connor, from those painful stand-up days to our even more painful breakup.

Somehow, among all the word vomit, I found it in myself to marvel at how good she was at listening. She gave sympathetic nods at all the right times, frowned angrily at the moments where Connor was a douche, made mmms of agreement when I told her what I’d done and said in response. It was a skill I’d never had. I was not the sympathetic café worker who listened to all her customers’ problems and gave them free coffee when they’d had an especially bad day; I was the problem they talked about.

The funny thing about growing up with parents like mine is that I became hyperaware of how the people around me were acting and listening and behaving so that I could be careful not to set them off by doing anything bad, but I never got to figure out the right way to do things instead.

But it didn’t seem to bother Freya that I wasn’t reacting properly, whatever reacting properly meant, which was another thing that touched me. “What a douchebag,” she said. “Good riddance to him.”

I had no idea why that made me so defensive. Connor had called me a frigid bitch, for god’s sake. “I don’t know. It wasn’t totally his fault.”

“There’s no excuse for the things he said to you, whether or not you were a good fit as a couple,” she said firmly. Then cracked a smile. “You deserve better. Can you hand me one of those boxes of Nerds? I’m going to make a gravel path to the front door.”

I handed over a box of Nerds, thankful that she hadn’t lingered on the nice thing she’d said to me. Compliments made me want to puke.

As she laid out a winding rainbow path that looked like something a fairy might walk down, she launched into some stories of recent first dates, one of which was apparently a taxidermy enthusiast who’d worn a stuffed mouse on his shirt like a brooch. “I thought it was real at first. Like, that a real mouse was crawling up his shirt. I screamed and jumped away from the table, and the table next to us saw it, too, and after that, forget it. It was a stampede.” She paused and considered. “He was very nice, though. Are my standards too low?”

After what she’d said to me earlier about deserving better, I felt we’d crossed into that level of friendship (?) where I could be honest. “Sorry, but maybe.”

I braced myself for her to get insulted, but she only sighed good-naturedly. “And that’s not even mentioning the guy who came prepared with a questionnaire aimed at finding out how fertile I am.”

Soon enough, our gingerbread house was finished. Freya handed over the tube of frosting with the smallest tip. “You do the honors.”

Bending forward and squinting like I was competing at the highest levels of latte art (a real competition I’d once entertained the thought of entering before realizing I couldn’t afford the time off and the travel), I frosted a tiny menorah into our house’s front porthole. It was so small you could barely see it, but that was okay. Freya and I would both know it was there.

I backed off feeling satisfied, but a crash from behind us told me my fake boyfriend wasn’t doing quite as well. Seth and Dan’s tower had finally collapsed like a Jenga game, scattering their table with gingery debris and smashed bits of candy. Both Seth and Dan were laughing, showing they weren’t too devastated. Seth glanced back at me, mid-laugh, and our eyes met.