Free Holly in Love by Caroline B. Cooney Page A

broom tips.”
    Christopher handed me a package. He’d bought me a flock of miniature china chickens and one gaudy old china rooster looking ready to peck my fingers! “I thought we’d put the dollhouse on a four by eight piece of plywood,” said Dad, “and you can make a yard and have the barn out back and leave a space for that gazebo you’re planning.”
    Even if it came in winter, Christmas was wonderful!
    I went upstairs to put on the new earrings. All my others were costume jewelry—enameled scarlet hearts, miniature crayons, preppy alligators, and that sort of thing. I slid into a wonderful daydream about the sort of dances and dates I’d have in the New Year where my grandmother’s filigree gold earrings would be just right. I could see myself swirling on a dance floor, sparkling like a princess.
    Downstairs I listened to the prayers for peace. Our Indian and Iraqi guests prayed in their own languages, and Mother spoke some old Latin prayers, and one of the students, a French major, prayed in French.
    Christopher had vanished outdoors. I’d gotten him a pair of snowshoes, and he was wild with excitement. My mother worried a little, looking out into lightly falling snow and talking of trackless wilderness in which Christopher could get lost, but actually we could see him just fine tramping across the college campus.
    A white Christmas. Two years (to the grief of the ski industry) since our last white Christmas. I sat indoors and dreamed and thought of peace and love.
    On December twenty-sixth, I called Kate to see what she’d gotten and whether we could get together. She’d gotten the new ski boots she was yearning for and had left very, very early to get a space on the slopes. I called Lydia, but she’d gone with her boyfriend to work on their ice sculpture.
    I called two other girls. They were both out. One was skiing with Kate, and the other had gone to a hill to take her little brother and sister sledding.
    I sat in my bedroom and stared at my doll-house and my lovely sweaters and the soft bubbly feeling of Christmas dwindled away. Christopher was out with his friends. My father was checking on three families he thought might be short of money to order fuel oil, and my mother was correcting term papers. Grandmother was back in Boston.
    It was a long day. Longer than any I could remember.
    I had plenty of projects I could start. Doll-house stuff. A kit from my uncle in Milwaukee for making Ukrainian Easter eggs: the kind with intricate designs on them. Some strange, rough-feeling but beautiful knitting wool from a sheep farm near us.
    But I was not in a crafts mood. I was in a company mood. I wanted to talk to a friend.
    I thought about telephoning Jamie, just to talk.
    Would it be as easy on the telephone as it was in person? Would we start laughing and telling stories right away? Or would he be startled and unable to figure out what I was doing on the line? Would he think I was chasing him? Be horrified and embarrassed?
    I wondered whether his parents had let him tow an antique threshing machine into the yard. What sort of gifts had been given Christmas Day to a boy who was crazy about steam engines?
    For supper, we had leftover ham and warmed-up sweet potatoes. It had such a day-after feeling to it. I couldn’t even finish eating.
    When the telephone rang I knew it was for somebody else. It felt like years since anybody had shown any interest in me, and I dragged myself around the table, clearing it, thinking that the only thing anybody wanted Holly Carroll for was doing the dishes.
    “For you, Holl,” said my brother.
    Jamie? I thought, and the thought surprised me. Why should he call? Why should I even think that he might? “Who is it?” I said.
    “Kate.” Christopher doesn’t care for Kate. She’s going to be eighteen next month and once or twice, when Christopher was ten or eleven, she actually babysat for him. Why, Kate’s almost two years older than Jamie, too, I thought. No wonder she