Work Text:
What I Did Over My Christmas Vacation
By Phoebe Weatherfield Caulfield
Class 4B-1
A lot of things happened over my vacation. I got a couple things on Christmas Day. My Mother and Daddy gave me thirty dollars. It’s the first year they gave me money instead of a present. They said I’m old enough now to do something responsible with it.
I gave Alice, my best friend in the whole wide world, a pair of gloves. She's always losing the ones she has. We leave school and all and then she suddenly remembers that she left her gloves in her desk. Once we get out the door she always says “I gotta go back for my gloves” and leaves me in the cold to run back in and get them! Whenever we're not looking everywhere for them she's worried about getting frost bite. So I got her a second pair so she has a spare. I think she liked them. She said so, anyways. She got me a scarf with an elephant on the end.
My brother, D.B. (they stand for something, but ever since he became a real writer everyone’s been calling him D.B.) sent me a journal with blank pages in it, since he knows I like to write stories. I'm writing my fourth sequel about Hazle Weatherfeild. I haven’t finished the other three yet but I got the idea for what happens after all those so I wanted to write it down before it went away. This time her father comes back again. D.B. and Daddy and Holden told me that her father can’t be “20 years of age” cause Hazle is 10 so that means he would have been around 10 when she was born. In the first place, I didn’t say he was 20, I said he was AROUND 20. But I get what they’re saying. Still, it would make a good reason for him to put her in an orphanage. I’m 10 and I know my parents would ship me right off to Siberia if I came home with a baby. And I’m certain that if stupid Curtis Weintraub from class got stuck with one he’d toss it right out of a speeding cab without stopping or nothing. Second, none of that matters exactly cause that gave me this thought that maybe he’s not really her father after all. Maybe he could be one of the bad guys who happens to be the culprit on one of the cases Hazle’s investigating. And this time he’ll be a tall attractive gentleman of 30 years of age so it makes more sense.
I’ll show it to D.B. the next time he comes home. You see, right now he’s out in Hollywood writing for the pictures. He hasn’t made one yet, but he’s really good so I’ll bet one of his will get made sooner or later. He’s not home much anymore, not even for Christmas, but that’s okay. That way I didn’t have to hide his present from him like I do with Mother and Daddy. Besides, I get his room while he's away. My brother Holden’s away too, but not for the same reasons. He was sent away to go to a boarding school called Pency, but he got kicked out. He told me before he told Mother or Daddy. I was SO mad at him. I thought Daddy was gonna kill him. He almost did last time. I've never been to France, but if I did I bet I still would have heard Daddy yelling at Holden. He's gotten kicked out around five times now. I really wish he would stop getting into so much trouble. He's always being lazy and swearing and smoking. He lit a cigarette in my room, and now my Mother thinks I smoke too!
I wish he didn't do that. I wish he wouldn't do a lot of things.
If he just tried to focus in school then he might have passed another class besides English. And he can’t even get that right! When I asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up he started telling me about this song he heard that made him think about catching children in rye if they fell off cliffs. But it’s not a song it’s a poem. I’m not even in High School and I know that! And besides, I know that’s what he wants to do and all, but it’s not exactly a real job you could apply for. What place has so many kids running off cliffs that you get a catcher instead of a gate? Would that cost less or more money? That's probably why Holden wanted to move away to a ranch, and I was gonna let him use my Christmas money to do it, but he gave most of it back and decided to stay after I started crying.
I couldn't help it! I just know that if he left he wouldn’t have come back this time. He doesn’t like it here and he wouldn’t have liked it there either. He never likes anything that way. I would’ve gone with him if he let me. I wouldn’t have been any trouble. Honest I wouldn’t! He took me to the park and I went on the carousel. I know I'm too big for it, but it was still fun. For Christmas he tried getting me this record that I've been wanting for the longest time, but it ended up getting broken. That's okay. I still got the pieces in my (or D.B.'s) drawer. Holden also let me keep his red hunting cap that he bought for a buck. I have to say I guess people look at you strange if you wear it in public when you're not hunting anything. But I still have it. I like the color. It matches my hair.
Luckily Daddy didn't kill Holden when we got home, because he got real sick. And not chicken soup sick neither, but hospital sick. Holden kept puking his guts and passing out. He must've caught it on his way home. Now everyone's all worried about him. I've been taking all of Holden’s calls at home since he's not there. I write down all of them in one of my notebooks. I'm used to it since D.B. and my parents are always getting calls when they're not home. They're usually from his old school. A few of them mentioned him in the hospital, but most of them didn’t know and just called to say “merry Christmas” and that's that. One of them was a guy from his fencing team asking if he found their gear or something. Some of them asked if he was in the "nut hut". I told them he wasn’t and they said “Uh huh, alright” but I could tell it wasn’t the honest kind of “alright”, y’know? I noticed one of them was this girl asking how he was doing. When I told Holden about it on one of the visits to the hospital and he said it was probably this girl he was supposed to trim a Christmas tree with. But when he said that he sounded disappointed. I don’t think he wanted it to be that girl. You should have heard the way he said it. It was the same tone as that not honest "alright". At least now he doesn't have to worry about missing school.
BUT this all happened before the very best part! The part where I got to play Benedict Arnold, practically the star in the school play “A Christmas Pageant for Americans”! They picked me cause they ran out of boys. That only happens when we play baseball! It was kind of funny dressing up in boy’s uniform, even if it was incredibly cheap-looking. I also had to wear this really itchy white wig but since I have red hair it would have been obvious whenever one of them would stick out. They tried cutting my real hair short but I still had strands sticking out, so my mother had to keep sticking them back with all these bobby pins. It hurt every time she put one in, like a bunch of needles getting pressed in my scalp. But I guess none of that is important now.
I had to have practiced all my lines about a million-bajilion times. I did it in D.B.’s room a lot cause it has lots of space and since I spend most of my part on my deathbed it’s hard to get myself into character in my little room with my dresses hanging up and the eyes of my stuffed animals looking at me. D.B. told me in one of his letters that when Shakespeare had his plays made they had a bunch of guys dress up as the girl characters. I’ll bet they had to be better actors than the ones in my class! I don't mean to sound like a diva or nothing, but I swear nobody else in class even tried to learn their lines. Ms.Callon had to keep whispering the right lines offstage to everybody, but even that didn’t work! There’s this real dramatic part where I’m dying in my bed and everything so I say "Let me die in this old uniform in which I fought my battles. May God forgive me for ever having put on another." and then Archie Norton, the one who plays the doctor, is supposed to say “May he eternally regret his treason in the afterlife.” but instead he just stops in the middle of the scene. They had to keep shortening the lines so everyone could remember them better, so it turned into “Let’s hope he’s learned his lesson in Heaven”.
Alice said that the same thing happened when she had to play Mary in the reenactment of the birth of Jesus for Church. She was so scared that she was gonna drop the baby, cause it was real and she's never had any little brothers or sisters. They should've just used a doll but I guess they wanted it to be realistic. When she tried to say her lines the baby started crying, and it didn't help that she had a really bad cold. Nobody could hear her or anything else with it screaming its head off.
Luckily we didn’t have too many play mistakes and if there were Mother didn’t notice. Ever since Daddy flew off for his business trip to California Mother's been crying a lot. She’s been getting these headaches and smoking more (but please don’t tell her I know that). She won't say so but it's cause Holden's sick, and Allie died when he got real sick three years ago. He was my other brother. I miss him too. I didn't know him as much but I miss him. When Mother and Daddy would go out and Holden and D.B. were away he'd be the only one at home with me. He was kinda weird, but real smart. A bunch of his stuff is still missing, like the glove he used to write all over when Daddy tried to get him interested in sports. I bet either D.B. or Holden took it. They would do that cause they miss him too.
Mother said it was “splendid” and got me all these lovely roses like a real actress in one of D.B.’s pictures. Right now they’re still in this vase in the kitchen. Roses die real quick, but I heard that if you flatten them in a book you can keep them. It might just be me who noticed. I’m sure if D.B. or Holden or even Daddy or Allie were there they might have noticed something too. They're the best at noticing things. Still, I wasn’t thinking that when I was bowing to the crowd. I just smiled, and I really meant it.
And that’s what I did over my Christmas vacation.