Mum doesn’t make me go back down to the rest of the family. When I’ve finally stopped crying after what felt like hours but was actually barely half an hour, I ask in a low voice, “Can I sleep over at Sadie’s?”

She gives me this loving smile that fills the void inside my chest just ever so slightly, squeezes my shoulder and says, “Of course you can. Would you like me to bring over some food later?”

Sadie opens the door barely five seconds after I’ve pressed the bell button.

She gives me a tired and wary look. “I said I’m fine, Wells. There’s really no need to –” she starts to say but I interrupt her.

“I’m not gonna ask you to come over.” She looks different than even hours ago. Worn out somehow. A little like I feel. Her hair is messy and her cheeks are a little puffy.

Her eyes narrow a little as she takes me in. “Oh? What then?”

I give her a sheepish smile and lift the duffel bag with my things for the night. “Can I stay at your place for tonight? I… can’t be with them right now.”

Her eyes seem to recognise something in my features and understanding flashes. The smile she gives me seems almost relieved. “Uhm, of course. But it’s kinda messy right now so you’ll have to give me maybe twenty minutes to tidy up a little.”

“I can help,” I offer without much hope but she nods.

“Yeah, that’d be nice.”

I leave my shoes by the door, exchange them for the slippers she got for me some time ago, and follow her into the living room.

‘Kinda messy’, it turns out, is putting it very gently. It looks like an angry bull ran rampage in there. There’s a heap of ceramic shards not far from the fireplace, a small fir tree looks like it was flung forcefully through half the room, there’s a whole box of Christmas balls stomped to bits.

I don’t make the mistake of stopping in the door, though. Instead, I drop my bag by the stairs and then look at Sadie.

“So, we should probably get a container for the shards, huh?”

She pulls the corners of her mouth back in this smile-shrug, then turns and disappears. When she returns, she’s carrying an empty bucket and a vacuum cleaner with her. I take the bucket from her and carefully start to gather up the shards. It takes me a few seconds to notice that first, I’m already feeling better and second, Sadie is watching me.

I look up and with a sheepish smile, she says, “Thank you… for being here. It really means a lot.”

My face goes warm. “Of course. Y’know, you really could’ve asked.”

She gives an ever-so-slight nod.

But I get it, of course. She didn’t ask me the very same way I didn’t ask Kim, so saying that to her is hypocritical, really. So I add, “Wanna talk about it?”

She shrugs. “It was stupid, I guess. I tried to decorate and then I got upset and all worked up and then I got really angry…. Now I’m scared I might’ve damaged the floor with the tree.”

Of course she doesn’t want her parents to know.

Decisively, I walk over, put the tree up against the wall and inspect the floor. “Looks fine to me.” Then I shrug. “And even if not. It’s not like they’d notice, now, is it?”

A tiny smile starts to play around the corners of her mouth.

“So what do you say? Shall we do the decoration properly and have a nice Christmas far away from all the annoying and awful parents out there?”

Not that my parents are awful. But right now I’m definitely not going to draw the comparison.

She looks tentative at first but then a hint of the glitter returns to her eyes. “Yes, let’s do that. The stores are still open for another hour. I’m sure my parents wouldn’t mind if we had a nice time on them.”

So that’s what we do. We abandon the cleaning project I only just started, grab several bags and run down to the supermarket like children who just got their new fill of pocket money. Forgotten are the panic and discomfort as we reel into the store, wheezing for breath, our cheeks red from the cold. An elderly woman gives us a weird look as we giggle next to the vegetable aisle but that only makes us laugh harder. We plunder the aisle with Christmas goods, stuff our bags with gingerbread, cookies and confections, buy milk and heaps of hot chocolate. We get several strings of fairy lights and garlands, new Christmas balls and candles. The clerk’s jaw drops when we start loading up the till. Sadie pays a stupid high amount for everything. It’s way more than we could ever eat and we’re both aware of that but that’s also kind of the point. We’re here to have a good time and to also, possibly, piss off her parents.

Upon our return, we drop all the bags in the kitchen and only put away the things that need to be kept cool. Then Sadie gets her music box and we turn it up to the highest volume as we gather up shards in the living room, vacuum up the smaller ones and finish by sweeping the floor. It takes way longer than it ought to, simply because we spend a disproportionally long time dancing and singing into plastic-wrapped candle-microphones.

When we’re done tidying up, we gather all the different decorations and go crazy with them. It doesn’t matter how grown-ups would decorate the house. We hang Christmas balls in every place that will possibly hold them, not only because Sadie’s tree is too small to fit all the decorations. And then Sadie shouts over Fall Out Boy that she has an idea and leads me up the stairs where she starts lifting the mattress out of her bed.

“Do you think there’s a point when you’re too old to build pillow forts?” she asks with a twinkle in her eyes.

I shrug and she nods. “Right, because I don’t think so.”

And it turns out that I rather agree with her. Having a somewhat adult understanding of physics and concepts such as weight distribution surely doesn’t hurt, either. We build our fort right in the middle of the living room, with perfect view of the large TV, using all the chairs from around the dining table for reinforcement in the walls because eating at a table is boring. By the end, we have a cosy space, comfortably large enough for two, stuffed with all the pillows we could find and illuminated by a string of fairy lights. Sadie even created a little compartment to stash all the tasty but highly unhealthy food in.

By the time we’re done, it is well past eight PM and we’re both more than happy to accept the large box of curry Mum brings us when I text her. We eat lying on our stomachs in the pillow fort, only our heads and arms sticking out so as not to get her sheets dirty, all the while watching some silly Christmas romcom, giggling elatedly in between spoonfuls of steaming, tasty food. We end up eating so much of the food that we barely even make a dent in the heaps of gingerbread.

And then it’s late and we just dump the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink before getting ready for bed. We brush our teeth and change into our pyjamas, and then we get right back into the pillow fort. There’s no need to talk, when Sadie turns off the fairy lights and I look out silently at the dark silhouettes of trees in the garden. There’s no need to fill the dark with words, however meaningful. We’re just here, we’re with each other and that’s enough in a way that makes me strangely warm and comfortable.

Before long, I’ve fallen asleep.

***

The next morning, Sadie wakes me with hot chocolate and freshly baked rolls and a huge plate of beautifully arranged cookies. It takes me until we’re halfway through breakfast before I notice that there’s a present lying underneath the Christmas tree. It’s a small, flat square wrapped in white wrapper dotted with little reindeer.

Sadie notices my stare and begins to giggle uncontrollably.

I direct my stare at her. “Seriously? You just waited like that?”

She nods, her face starting to get red. “I hadn’t planned to but then somehow… it just happened.” Finally, she takes a deep breath and wipes a tear from the corner of her eye.

“Alright, now. Open it,” she demands expectantly, clapping her hands.

I get up slowly. I’m still too comfortable in the remnant sleepiness to run. I do sit down by the tree, though, and wait until Sadie has sat down next to me before opening it.

I kinda expect what I find inside – it’s not hard to tell through the wrapper. A blue, linen-bound photo album. What I don’t expect, though, is that only the first few pages have photos on them.

There are Henry and I in the forest after our visit to the zoo, there is Sadie sitting in a tree, pointing her camera down at us, there are Sadie, Henry, I and several of our classmates at Leon’s party, the night sky above the sea, the three of us at the autumn fair, Sadie and I when we were ice skating, the picture captured Sadie with open laughter and me with a positively terrified expression. Each of the pages has a unique design to them. On the page with the pictures from the autumn fair, she drew cute little pumpkins and a scarecrow, on the pictures of the beach she drew a beach and even taped a few weeds that look like she could’ve taken them from the dunes to the page. She even wrote song lyrics, quotes or comments on the page. On the autumn page, she wrote in neatly slanted script:

Autumn comes, the summer is past,

Winter will come so soon.

Stars will shine clearer, skies seem nearer,

Under the harvest moon.

Underneath the picture of her in the tree, she drew a little smiley face and wrote, thank you for a beautiful day! It’s so wholesome it makes my eyes sting.

“It’s supposed to last,” Sadie says when I look up with a raised eyebrow after having arrived at an empty page 8. “You’ll give it back to me every year a month or so before Christmas and I’ll put in new pictures, until either we die or it’s full. That way, I can put in more effort, it takes up less space and you have absolutely no excuse to ever throw it away.”

Then she notices the way I look at her and her grin broadens. “You like it?” she squeals.

I nod and she almost tackles me with her hug.

“Yessss!!” she shouts, completely oblivious to the rather short distance between her mouth and my ear. “I’ve wanted to do something like this for so long now!”

But I only flinch slightly at her volume and hug her back tightly.

“Thank you so much,” I whisper and really, I mean not just this book. I mean everything about her. The way she just appeared in my life right when I needed somebody like her, who keeps saying the right things and keeps not saying anything in just the right moments, somebody who sees through my shit and maybe chooses not to see through some of it, too.

“Thank you for spending your Christmas with me.”

I let out a short laugh. “There’s literally nowhere I’d rather be right now.”

She lets go of me and gives me a smile that’s probably meant to be casual and small but has pulled itself into dazzling proportions. “I’m glad.”

Then I get up. “Aight, now for your present.”

For just a moment, there’s surprise on her face, then the grin is back full force. “Yes, please.”

“I mean, I do have to warn you, it’s not even close to this but –”

She rolls her eyes in mock annoyance, never dropping her grin. “Shush now, I’m getting impatient over here.”

Quickly, I get over to my bag and get her present out from the very bottom, careful to hide it behind my back. I was really lucky I didn’t forget to pack it yesterday.

Then I turn around, both hands hidden behind my back and look at her expectantly.

She acts like she’s thinking really hard, then she snaps her fingers. “Left!”

With a grin, I pass her present over into my left hand behind my back and show it to her. Her eyes go big.

“Awwww!”

It’s a handmade rabbit plushy made from all sorts of patches, some soft like satin, others more plain like linen or even jeans. The eyes are black buttons and it’s wearing a little hand-knit jumper.

“This is amazing!” she gasps, taking it gently from my hands. “Where did you find it?”

“The autumn fair. I bought it while Henry distracted you.”

“After you two made up?”

I act enraged. “After you made us make up.”

But she only smirks and presses the not-so-plushy plushy to her cheek. “What should I name it?”

I’m way past asking aren’t you a little old for that? Not just because that’s an asshole question to ask but also because each of her plushies has a name and I find that little fact, like so much else about her, absolutely adorable in an almost envious way.

“What gender is it even?”

She raises an eyebrow. “What if it doesn’t have one?” Then she shrugs. “I think it’s a she.”

“Hm.” I scratch my chin. “What about Sardine?”

For a second, she just stares at me blankly, then she laughs. “Right, and her dream is to become a free diver and explore the beautiful reefs of Hawaii.”