What She Wants for Christmas. Janice Kay Johnson

      He glanced down at her hand and seemed to deliberate for a moment before he took it. His grip sent a shiver through her. When he released her, he flexed his fingers before balling them into a fist. Unfortunately his face told her remarkably little.

      “Monday,” he repeated, gave a brief nod and headed for his huge shiny blue pickup without a backward glance.

      Teresa wandered into the house. Both kids were waiting for her.

      “Who,” her daughter demanded, enunciating carefully, “was he?”

      “A hunk, wasn’t he?”

      Nicole’s lip curled. “He was dirty!”

      Teresa was in just the mood to provoke a little outrage. Musingly she said, “There’s something about a sweaty man…a day’s growth of beard…a little dirt under his fingernails…”

      “But, Mom!” Mark stared at her as if she’d gone stark-raving mad. “Then how come you won’t let me go to school dirty? How come I have to wash my hands before we eat? How come—?”

      “You’re not a man, stupid.” His sister didn’t even glance at him. “You’re a boy. A little kid. A—”

      “You think you’re so grown-up? Then how come the men aren’t all lined up outside?”

      “There isn’t anyone in this nowhere place I’d want lined up!” Nicole flared. “And can’t you tell when Mom is putting you on?”

      “Actually, I wasn’t,” Teresa said calmly. “He’s a very handsome man. Now, can we quit bickering? He’s also a logger who is going to take those wretched trees out for us. Monday.”

      “Cool,” Mark declared. “Can I watch?”

      “Nope. You’ll be in school by then, remember? Registration tomorrow.”

      “School!” Nicole collapsed on a kitchen chair. “Mom, what am I going to wear?”

      “How about leggings and a sweater?”

      “How about overalls and work boots?” her fifteen-year-old retorted bitterly.

      “Seems to me a pair of sacky overalls is one of your standards,” Teresa agreed. “Good idea.”

      “Please, please, please, can we go shopping?”

      “Nope.”

      “Why?” Nicole wailed.

      “Because I don’t want to,” Teresa said reasonably. “And you have a perfectly adequate wardrobe. Now, can I turn the oven on?”

      “Why didn’t you let me move in with Jayne?” Nicole jumped to her feet. “This place stinks!” She ran from the room and a moment later Teresa heard her feet thundering up the stairs.

      She’d probably spend the rest of the evening on the telephone with her friends in Bellevue. The long-distance charges would have to become an issue eventually, but for now Teresa figured they were a small price to pay. She sighed and saw Mark staring after his sister with almost as much bewilderment as his mother felt.

      “Like Bellevue was so great.” He stuffed some string cheese in his mouth. “What’s for dinner, Mom?”

      Thank God for one cheerful member of her family. “Chicken and artichoke hearts.”

      “Cool,” he said again. He even submitted to a hug, though he didn’t have a clue why she felt compelled to give it.

      “YOU SHOULD HAVE seen this guy.” Nicole flopped back against her pillow and rolled her eyes, even though Jayne couldn’t see. “I swear he had size-twelve feet, and these clumps of mud were sticking to his boots, and he wore overalls. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d been chewing on a piece of straw.”

      “He’s your neighbor?” Jayne sounded properly horrified.

      “No, he’s some kind of logger. Mom’s having some trees taken out.”

      “Well, then, you’ll probably never see him again.”

      “Everybody here looks like that,” Nicole said gloomily. “They’re all farmers or loggers or something. I heard these two girls talking the other day, and one of them is competing to become Dairy Princess at the fair next year. Can you imagine? The crown probably has horns on it!”

      Nicole wasn’t sure why, but she didn’t tell Jayne her mother had thought the logger was a hunk. No, that wasn’t true; she did know why. She was embarrassed. Her own mother, for crying out loud!

      “Listen,” Jayne said, “I gotta go. Maddy and Kelly and I are going to a film festival tonight. They’re running a bunch of foreign films. I don’t like subtitles, but Maddy says some of the guys are going, including—get this—Russell Harlan, so I’m wearing that red dress—you know, that one you helped me pick out—and my hair on top of my head in a scrunchy, and he can’t miss me, right?”

      Talking to her best friend hadn’t helped, Nicole thought a moment later, hanging up. Now she was more depressed. She was the one who’d liked Russ Harlan, not Jayne. He had these really dark eyes and he wore an earring and he was super intense about things. She’d wanted him intense about her. She was the one he was supposed to be noticing, not Jayne.

      “I feel like I’ve been sent to prison,” she said aloud to her empty room. Her room. Yeah, right. Her bedroom had had blue plush carpet and a cushioned window seat and its own bathroom. This room had peeling wallpaper, which her mother said they’d replace, and bare wood floors. Her gilt-trimmed bedroom set looked about as out of place as Nicole felt.

      They couldn’t stay in this dump. They just couldn’t. Things were great in Bellevue. Nicole wished she’d paid more attention to all Mom’s talk about buying into a veterinary practice somewhere. She’d been looking for so long Nicole quit listening when Mom talked about why she liked or didn’t like this town or that vet or whatever. Big mistake. She should have listened carefully. Instead, first thing she knew, her mother had gone ahead and done it. A For Sale sign appeared in their front yard, and they all drove up here one Saturday to look at houses.

      The sight of White Horse had put Nicole in shock. It had a whole two streets of businesses. One pizza parlor that she could see. One! The movie theater was this run-down little place that played a single movie at a time, a month or more after it’d opened in Seattle and Bellevue and even Everett. The high school was this huge ugly stucco building that must have been built fifty years ago. Mom thought it was great that you could walk anywhere in town. Great. Where were you supposed to go? The library? The bowling alley? Who bowled?

      And she had to register for school tomorrow and start the next day. Mom insisted that moving during the summer was easiest, so she wouldn’t be the only kid whose first day it was. Nicole had believed her then, but that was before she’d seen White Horse. How many new kids were there likely to be in the high school? Two? Three? She could just see it now: heads turning as she walked into each class, the stares as she went down the hall.

      Well, she didn’t care what a bunch of farmers thought, anyway. What she had to do was figure out how to get her mother to change her mind and move back to Bellevue.

      At first she’d thought it was hopeless, but lately she’d begun to wonder. The farmers around here didn’t want a woman vet, which Nicole thought sucked, except for the fact that her mom was looking more discouraged every day. Her mom had figured White Horse was some kind of rural paradise; she’d given Nicole and Mark all these lectures about how the move was as much for them as for her, because in a small town like this they were getting away from drugs and crime and gangs. So everything was supposed to be perfect, right?

      The first glimmerings of an idea brought creases to Nicole’s brow. Wait a minute—Mom was catching the drift, but too slowly. Dr. Craig would hire someone to take her place at the animal hospital in Bellevue; then, even if they left White Horse, they might have to go somewhere else. What if Nicole could speed up the