Naughty Nine Tales of Christmas Crime by Steve Hockensmith

Author:Steve Hockensmith
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2010-11-02T07:00:00+00:00

NAUGHTY

If you think about it, Santa Claus is a little like Batman. He's a vigilante. He decides who's good and who's bad and he does something about it on his own terms. Goody-goody kids get toys. Brats get squat—or lumps of coal, though I think that got dropped in, like, the 1950s.

When I was a little girl, I'd start worrying about whether I'd been good enough that year sometime around Thanksgiving, and for the next month I was a little angel. It was scary to think I might not get any toys . . . but it was sort of reassuring, too. If Santa was really out there rewarding the nice and punishing the naughty, it meant things were fair. There was some kind of justice in the universe.

Well, that didn't last long. I mean, you try to get through elementary school believing life's fair. It can't be done. I stayed nice, though. Maybe it was just a habit by then.

I finally broke the habit this December. Life just pushed me too far, and I decided I was done with nice. Nice sucked. Santa wasn't watching, so what was the point?

It was time to give naughty a try.

I graduated from IU in the spring, so this was supposed to be my first Christmas as a bona fide, official, independent adult. A year ago, I would've pictured myself flying home for the holidays from New York or Chicago or wherever it was I'd have my cool gig and my funky bachelorette pad. But when the holidays rolled around, I didn't have to fly back to Indiana—I was still there. I hadn't found a gig, cool or uncool, and my mom's apartment hardly counts as a "funky bachelorette pad," even if she is a bachelorette again thanks to That Man.

"That Man" is what my mom calls my dad. He was spending Christmas in his new house in Atlanta with "That Woman," a.k.a. "That Girl," a.k.a. "That Blonde Slut," a.k.a. "That Little Bitch." I got a Christmas card from That Man with a check for fifty bucks in it. Mom didn't get a card or a check, which was typical. That Man owed my mom a lot of checks, which is why she'd gone from living in a big house on Knob Hill to a not-so-big house in town to a dinky apartment building between an auto parts store and a porn shop.

I was in that dinky apartment building with her because New York and Chicago aren't exactly clamoring for recently graduated liberal arts majors. In fact, nobody's clamoring for recently graduated liberal arts majors. When I was at IU, I thought I'd end up in publishing, communications or journalism, but it didn't take long in "the real world" to figure out that my only prospects were in food service, retail or prostitution. I told my mom once that I'd pick that last option over the first two in a heartbeat, and she just gave me this sad look that said, "Oh, honey—all those years, all that money .

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