Free Santa Hunk by Kirsten Mortensen

Clare
Jordon’s friend,” he was, like, “I’m sorry, Clare who?”
    He’d never heard of
her.
    The guy who had hired
her, who signed off on her time cards, who’d been giving her all those extra
hours around the holidays—he told me I must be mistaken. No Clare Jordon had
ever worked there.
    I hit Call End on my cell
phone and thought, okay, that is really strange.
    Then I thought—is it
possible that I was mistaken about where she worked?
    Maybe she worked at a
different Abercrombie, not the Eastview Mall Abercrombie?
    So I got her purse to
look through it.
    It was definitely her
purse. It was the purse she’d had with her in the car the night before.
    But there was nothing in it
that had her name on it. No driver’s license, no credit cards.
    I checked her cell phone.
The phone I’d seen her use a zillion times.
    It was as blank as if it
were brand new. No texts, no record of calls, no contact list, no apps.
    Then I started to go a
little crazy. I go into her room, I start pawing through all of her stuff. And I
can’t find anything—
anything
—with her name on it.
    I get even crazier and
dig out my high school yearbook.
    There are no pictures
of her.
    There used to be, I
know
there used to be! Like on our senior year, I had her autograph the page
with her senior photo! But now—I can show you if you like, you can see for
yourself.
    The senior pictures are
in alphabetical order by last name. You’ll see Cindy Jacobs’ picture, and right
next to it: Zach Lindsey.
    No Clare Jordon picture between
them.
    Tell you what—I almost
lost my mind, when I looked at that page in the yearbook and there was no Clare
Jordon picture.
    Then I forced myself to
calm down, and I sat down on the couch and took a deep breath.
    And I thought:
Josh
Martin.
    So I called him up and he
says, “hey!”
    It struck me as kind of
odd—like he sounded surprised to hear from me. Happy, but surprised.
    So I say “hey” and then
he says, “it’s funny you called me. I’ve been thinking about you ever since we
ran into each other at the coffee shop. Savannah—would you like to go out with
me sometime?”
    I kind of gasped.
    “But—what about Clare?” I
said.
    “I’m sorry?”
    The exact same thing
her manager had said.
    My mind spun, hard,
trying to figure out how I was going to deal with this without coming across
like a complete idiot. “Clare Jordon,” I said. “I thought you were dating Clare
Jordon?”
    “Uh—no. Who told you
that? I don’t even think I know a Clare Jordon.”
    I was standing near the
couch.
    Now I flopped down onto
it.
    This was too, TOO
strange.
    I heard him kind of cough,
like he felt a little nervous. “So, uh, anyway—now that we’ve cleared that
up—what do you say? Saturday night, maybe?”
    What could I do? This was
Josh Martin.
The
Josh Martin. And it wasn’t like Clare wanted to date
him, too.
    “Okay, sure,” I said, my
voice kind of wobbly with the shock of it all.
    “Text me your address and
I’ll pick you up at seven, okay?”

SAVANNAH
    One last thing you might be wondering about.
    Her parents.
    I checked on them, too.
    I was very discreet, of
course! I mean, after I realized Josh had no memory of Clare, I wasn’t about to
barge up to her parents and ask them if they’d heard from their daughter, who
was my best friend, who’d disappeared into the woods with a strange man.
    But we’d grown up in the
same town.
    I was able to ask around.
    Here’s what I found out.
    As far as anyone was
concerned, the Jordons have only two children. Both are sons. Kyle, two years
older than me, is a decorated Army veteran. Stefan, four years older than me, got
married a couple years ago. His wife has a baby on the way now.
    Of course I have Clare’s
notes from her last Christmas with her family. And when I was first thinking
everything through I thought, maybe I should give the journal to her mom.
    But would it mean
anything to her?
    I decided it wouldn’t.
    At the most, it would
seem