The Gift not Given Read online

my budget. I got him an extensive modeling kit imported from a store in Tokyo. It contained not only his favorite anime girl, but her mecha as well. Derrick had bought out the American stores’ models for a long time, but this one wasn’t an American release. The Japanese classes I took in undergrad came in handy for ordering it. Well, my friend from class who majored in Japanese helped too.

  Ah, but to return to Jerry’s present. I planned to make him sugar cookies with pumpkin and chocolate frosting, just like the ones he always got at Starbucks around Thanksgiving. I had to make them by hand because their season was so short. However, I had added a creative touch that I was very proud of. Jerry’s favorite movie was Star Wars. He liked it so much that he’d read most of the fiction written about the Star Wars universe. Even when he piled on massive critiques about the writing or the lame direction the stories had taken, he couldn’t seem to stop reading them. So I got on E-bay and hunted down some Star Wars cookie cutters. My plan was to bake them the day before the party, and…voila! A thoughtful, creative Christmas present for under fifteen bucks. Miracles do happen sometimes in the holiday season.

  Well, I still had to make the cookies. And I really didn’t have much cooking experience. Even after a year with Derrick, despite his patient tutoring, I still couldn’t cook as well as him. It was a family joke especially popular with Derrick and his father Bill.

  But I couldn’t go on thinking forever. There was still Derrick’s list of people to add. I switched to his profile and gagged to see Kris at the top of his friend’s list, again. She was also first on Derrick’s invitation document. Not surprising, since Kris, Derrick and his guy friends had been tight for forever. They hadn’t come here for college like I did; they’d lived here all their lives and knew pretty much everything about each other.

  I wasn’t jealous, so don’t get me wrong. Derrick and I had been exclusive for over eight months. But it really grossed me out how Derrick always went on about what “good friends” they were. Kris was not a good friend to him! She came to see Derrick when she wanted something, whenever she had a relationship problem or needed money. But as soon as he invited her somewhere, there was always big drama about whether she was going to show. (If I took bets on Kris’s unreliability, I’d be so rich!) And when she stood Derrick and the group up, multiple times, I might add, he pouted for days! If Scottie or Tony ever treated Derrick that way, he’d totally chew them out and maybe beat the crap out of them. Kris got away with murder in the group because she was a girl and because (wise girl) she hadn’t slept with any of the guys.

  I finished adding the rest of Derrick’s friends, bringing our invite count to one hundred and five. Not that I was worried. Derrick had invented a law that stated, “The number of party attendees equals the number of facebook invites multiplied by 0.28.” I had yet to see it proven wrong. It would bring our number down to a conservative 29.4.

  To take my mind off Kris, I opened Jerry’s webpage, where he posted his recent writings and, once in a gold moon, a journal entry. Today he had written a poem about snowfall and meditation. His poetics always stirred up my own inspiration. I sighed as I read and reread it. Then I drifted off to the archive. An hour or two slipped away.

  A hand clamped down on my shoulder.

  “Sorry, Leah. Gee, you must have jumped a mile!” Bill, Derrick’s dad, grinned down at me.

  “Hello, sir,” I managed weakly.

  “Derrick is finally hustling out to get our Christmas tree! He wants your company if you can hurry.”

  “Sure I can. Tell him just a minute.”

  Bill shuffled off.

  I took a deep breath to compose myself, then hurriedly clicked off the webpage. Good thing Bill’s eyes were old. He hadn’t been wearing his glasses and wouldn’t know that I had been on Jerry’s page.

  Suddenly I felt angry at my guilt. What was weird about looking at an all-text webpage? It was sure better than mooning over pictures of Kris and disapproving of the latest guy she was throwing herself at.

  {****}

  The Christmas party was scheduled for December 20. It was a Tuesday night, by which time, even extended and makeup finals would have ended.

  I spent so much time at Derrick’s that Bill took to informing Miriam, “I think we got us a squatter.”

  Saturday clean through Monday were food shopping and cooking days. On Monday afternoon and well into the evening, Derrick and I went on a cleaning frenzy, clearing all of Bill and Miriam’s “treasures” from the living room so guests could mill about, and sit on the couches, and so forth.

  Although I had been checking facebook compulsively to see the RSVP’s, Jerry’s had yet to come in. I wasn’t too worried about it, though. It had never been his way to respond to invitations. He always said, “You can never plan anything.” It was a very spontaneous philosophy that I often wished I had the courage to adopt.

  Tuesday morning and afternoon, I stayed home from Derrick’s to bake Jerry’s cookies. The rolling part was when the fun began. I forgot to sprinkle flour on the wax paper for the first round, resulting in a sticky mess, most of which ended up in the sink and trash can. Rather flustered, I prepared a second batch of dough. I mangled more good guys than the Dark Side trying to get them off the wax and onto the cookie sheet. By the time everyone was in the oven, roughly 2.5 times the combined preparation and cooking time had elapsed.

  Dazed at how fast time was going, I stumbled off to make the icing. I had gotten the ingredients from a classmate who worked at Starbucks (though I had to buy him a drink first), and the proportions were his guesses. It seemed that I hunched over the bowl for ages adding more cinnamon, then more nutmeg, then more chocolate, trying to get the taste right.

  Twenty minutes later, I smelled cookies. It was the perfect holiday aroma! In ten more, I achieved what I seemed to remember as the pumpkin and chocolate taste. I hadn’t really liked the cookies when I had tried them myself.

  Then I saw the smoke rising from the oven.

  Cursing, I yanked the tray out. There was no time to start again. I had to start west in an hour, or I’d be late for the party!

  When I pulled them out of the oven, R2D2, the ewoks, and the jawas looked exactly alike. So did Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and C3PO: tall skinny humanoids whose arms and legs broke off when I tried to ice them. I knew you were supposed to wait for the cookies to cool first, but I still had to dress for the party. I had an ominous feeling Derrick might need help, too. Right before starting the frosting, I had texted Derrick about his paper. His snarky reply stated, “I’m almost done, k? Get off my back!!!”

  To my chagrin, it was going to be hard to determine what even the four non-problem children (Yoda, the Death Star, the Millennium Falcon, and Darth Vader) were once they were iced. I slathered them in chocolaty pumpkin goodness anyways. I mean, Darth Vader wore black, right? The rich brown icing was close to that. And Darth was Jerry’s favorite character.

  While I was cleaning up, my dad padded into the kitchen sniffing like a blood hound.

  “These cutters suck,” I complained. “Unless I did the cookies in model paint or something, you’d never recognize them!”

  “Why not put the icing on the side?” Dad asked.

  I dropped the cookie sheet into the sink with a clank. “Now he tells me,” I grumbled. But at least the cookies were done. I had already planned how I would present them to him.

  First, I would lure Jerry outside to admire Derrick’s extensive handiwork with the Christmas lights. He would be relieved to escape the very public living room gift exchange with would-be paparazzi snapping unflattering Facebook pictures. For a time, we would walk in companionable silence, then settle into the porch swing hanging from the two-hundred years old oak tree.

  “It’s like Lothlorien,” I would remark. We would speak for a while about the quiet that falls over everything in winter; how the darkness deepens; the way the tiny lights gleam like stars that drifted to earth.

  Then Jerry would open the cookie tin. H
e would laugh in delight at his favorite characters, then make jokes about biting off their heads. Maybe he would like the taste, and maybe not, but the thought would touch him. He would smile at me.

  What was it about shadows that made a person look better? Was it because their flaws were hidden? Or maybe you filled in their features with your imagination and, if you liked them, ideals? Restaurants were, in my opinion, really onto something, using romantic candlelight. But back to the gift.

  After Jerry smiled, my favorite part would happen: the hug.

  I lingered on thoughts of his scent and warmth while getting ready, at least until I realized I still had to work out how Jerry would see the cookies in the dark. They weren’t a cheap clichéd a holiday gift, after all. They were Star Wars cookies! That was the one pitfall of ambient lighting. But first I had to make it to the party.

  Despite leaving my house fifteen minutes late, I arrived at Derrick’s house before any guests. Derrick, I saw when Miriam escorted me to the living room, was running on energy drinks. He darted around the living room and kitchen, checking and rechecking everything.

  “Leah!” he barked without greeting me, “get the drinks out of the garage! Dad, start the Christmas lights on the tree. Mom, man the door. Come on, come on, what are you standing around for? They’ll be here any