Stranger With My Face by Lois Duncan

Author:Lois Duncan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780316175616
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Christmas Day began early for us as it must for every family with young children. Neal and Megan were in my room at dawn, bouncing onto my bed and jerking me into consciousness with shrieks of excitement.

“Santa came!” Meg squealed. “The stockings are lumpy!”

Neal, from the mature vantage point of his eleven years, said condescendingly, “She peeked already,” and then added with honesty, “So did I. That pile of stuff under the tree got higher since last night.”

At their ages there was no way in the world that either of them could still have been a true believer, but the game was not to admit it. “When people stop believing in him, Santa stops coming,” Dad had always told us. “That’s when they stop having stockings.” Faced with this ultimatum, I myself had professed absolute belief until I was almost thirteen.

Even now the anticipation and the sense of wonder continued. There was still something magical about rising on Christmas morning to find that sometime while I had been sleeping gifts had appeared.

This morning, however, it was different. I felt tired and uncaring. The pale gray of the sky outside the balcony doors made me want to roll over and press my face into my pillow.

“The sun’s not even up yet,” I snapped at the children. “Why don’t you go back to bed for a while? The presents will still be there an hour from now.”

“But it’s Christmas!” Neal exclaimed. “Dad and Mom are getting up. They said to come wake you.”

The astonishment in his voice made me feel guilty for my Scrooge-like behavior.

“Okay,” I said more gently. “Run on down and get started. I’ll be there in a minute, as soon as I can get myself into gear.”

They went rushing off like racers hearing the starting gun, and I sank back onto the pillow, fighting the desire to haul the covers up over my head and bury myself again beneath protective layers of sleep.

But I couldn’t. I was awake now. The day must be faced, and with it the ego-shattering reality of the fact that, as Meg had so bluntly put it, I had been “stood up.” It was something that had never happened to me before. Whatever Gordon’s faults may have been, he, at least, had been reliable. If he and I made a date to do something, we did it.

“That Rankin kid needs a lesson in manners,” Dad had remarked last night as he attempted to force a carving knife through a loin of pork that had shriveled into a dried-out lump. “If he wasn’t coming, he could at least have let us know, so we could have eaten while the food was still chewable.”

“Maybe he didn’t understand Laurie was asking him for tonight,” Mom said. “He might have thought she meant tomorrow.”

“He understood,” I told them. “Some emergency must have come up. He’ll call and explain it, I’m sure.”

But the evening had passed, and the phone had not rung. We finished dinner and sang some carols and read through the Christmas story, which was our holiday custom.

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