Come To Stay by Natalie Anglin

Author:Natalie Anglin [Anglin, Natalie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-12-08T06:00:00+00:00

Henry put up his door decorations on Tuesday. Where Jared had tried to make his door look like a gingerbread house, Henry made his look like a fireplace, complete with flames made of tissue paper and stockings attached to the ‘mantle’. In fact, when Jared looked closer, he realized that the stockings had Henry and Daniel’s names on them.

“This is war,” he muttered to himself. He stalked off to his room, wondering how he could make his door compete with Henry’s. “Lights. I need lights!”

He quickly dropped off his school things in his room then grabbed his wallet and headed out again. There was a Canadian Tire within walking distance so he went there and bought a couple of strings of Christmas lights that he could attach to his door.

He didn’t want to have to ask Henry for his doorstop a second time since this was a competition after all. Instead, he propped his door open with the small garbage bin — it wasn’t quite as open as he would have preferred but he had no better ideas and his pride prevented him from asking Henry for help — and he stood in an overturned box so he was tall enough to attach the end of the light to the top of the door. The lights were battery-powered, luckily, so he used sticky tack to attach it to the back of the door. That way, he could control whether the lights were on or off from inside his room.

“I see you’ve redecorated,” Henry said the next day when he came by so they could walk to lunch together.

“Hm?”

“Your door. You added lights.”

“Oh. Yeah. Did you see that I also added tinsel and pom-poms, so it looks more 3D?”

“How long did that take you?”

“Too long. Do you like it?”

Henry shrugged. “It’s okay.”

“Okay? I slaved over that door and all you have to say is that it looks okay?”

Henry grinned. “Fine, it looks good.”

“Thank you, was that so hard?”

“But we both know I’m going to win.”

Jared shoved his shoulder. Henry stumbled away from him and fell into somebody’s door. Unfortunately, the person who lived in that room happened to open the door at the exact same time, so Henry fell straight against his chest. Henry righted himself as quickly as possible and cleared his throat.

“Sorry,” he said. “Lost my, uh, balance.”

He walked rigidly back over to Jared and they went down the hall as quickly as possible without making it obvious. The other boy didn’t walk out of his room, his destination seemingly forgotten. As soon as the heavy door at the end of the hall closed behind him, Jared and Henry both burst out laughing.

“Never do that to me again,” Henry gasped.

Jared calmed himself down long enough to say in his defence, “That wasn’t my fault!” He fell into a fit of laughter again. “That was the worst possible timing, though.”

“Do you know who that was?” Jared shook his head, unable to speak. “Jared, I’m pretty sure it was Alex Ramirez, our floor representative.

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