The Secret Year by Jennifer R. Hubbard

smirked.
    “What lovebirds?”
    “Syd and Fred.”
    “Syd and Fred?” I asked, not sure I’d heard right.
    “Yeah, he’s been slobbering over her for two months,” Nick said.
    Paul laughed. “You shouldn’t have let her go, Colt, because he snagged her like
that
.” He snapped his fingers.
    “I don’t own her,” I said. “She can go out with anybody she wants.”
    “That’s the truth.” They kept laughing.
    I had a hard time believing that Syd liked Fred, especially this soon. But it was none of my business. I’d messed up things enough with her as it was.
     
    Tom called that week, while I lay on my bed recovering from a shift at Barney’s and thinking up excuses not to start studying for finals. “Hey, could you send me my walking stick?” he asked.
    “Your what?”
    “You know, Grandpa’s old walking stick. I think it’s in my closet somewhere. A friend of mine wants to use it in a play.”
    “How the hell would I mail it?”
    “Well, could you at least look for it? Just let me know if it’s there.”
    “All right.”
    He sighed. “So, have Mom and Dad come around yet?”
    “Oh, you know Mom. She’s okay. I don’t know about Dad. He still won’t mention your name.”
    “That’ll change,” he said, but he sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
    “It will. Don’t worry about it.”
    “Thanks, mate.”
    Mate
. He must’ve been watching some Australian movie; I could even detect that Down Under accent creeping into his voice. The last time he saw an English movie, he called me “old chap” for three days. My brother loved to experiment—with accents, clothes, hobbies, whatever. No wonder my parents thought being gay was something he might just be trying out for a while.
     
    At work Al made me put up decorations. I don’t know why he picked me, since I was probably the least festive person who worked there. And to make the job even less fun, he hovered, criticizing my wreath-hanging technique. “Don’t just plunk it on the nail like that,” he said. “Try to look happy, can’t you?”
    “You mean, show some holiday spirit?” He’d told me approximately forty-five times that afternoon to “show some holiday spirit.”
    “Exactly.”
    While I wound silver garlands around everything that would hold them, I thought about the Christmas before, and Julia. I was stuck on an entry in her notebook from last December. I had read past it and on into January. But then I’d gone back to it, reading it over and over until now I couldn’t get the words out of my head if I tried.
     
    Dear C.M.,
    I love Christmas. I feel like a little kid again. I love all the corny songs and TV shows. I love the lights and decorations, the red and gold and glitter. I’ve always hated it when they tear everything down in January, when everything goes gray and white again. Blech.
    Michael and I used to hunt all over the house for our presents. I got so psyched to find them, especially the things I really wanted and wasn’t sure I was going to get. Like this pink stuffed horse one year—don’t ask me why it had to be pink!
    I want to get you something, but I don’t know what. Anything we give each other, we’ll have to explain to people. But I’ll come up with an idea.
     
    She’d ended up giving me a book, Jon Krakauer’s
Into the Wild
. It was a good choice. I’d wanted to read it, and she knew that a book was something I could just stick on my shelf without anyone noticing it or asking who had given it to me.
    But I hadn’t gotten her anything.
    “I didn’t know we were giving presents,” I said, while we huddled in the back of her car, under a blanket she’d brought.
    “That’s okay,” she said, in this tone that told me it was definitely not okay.
    I didn’t know
, I wanted to say again. And I couldn’t even explain why I didn’t know, why it hadn’t occurred to me to get her a gift, why I hadn’t realized she might give me one. I guess I thought of all that as