Page 25 of Scary & Bright
“I think she left,” the doll said with wide, flat eyes.
“Pardon me?” I asked, already feeling my lips raise into a snarl. “What do you mean you think she left?”
“I mean she is gone. She left,” the doll said again, her face never dropping into that of worry or concern. Her embroidered mouth stayed in a smile as one of her hands rose to an ornament hanging from the nearest branch. “She got all bundled up, and she left. I watched it all happen myself.”
A deep sensation of dread sank into my skin, and I felt my heart literally skip a beat in my chest. It had been ages since I last experienced real, unbridled fear, but it came rushing back with an uncomfortable familiarity all at once.
“When exactly did this happen?” Mister asked the doll, noting me struggling to stay standing, let alone capable of asking the doll the most obvious of questions.
The doll put a hand to her chin as if she had to really think about her answer. “When everyone was yelling, I think.”
Mister’s single marble eye visibly rolled in his head with frustration. “And you didn’t think to say something?”
“Well, everyone was yelling.” The doll shrugged. “I thought I’d be polite and wait my turn.”
The panicked ringing in my ears drowned out the aggravated yammering of Mister, as well as the uncomfortable laughter and bumbling from all the rest of the toys. A guest had never escaped the castle before, but then again, there had never been a guest given the opportunity to escape. Perhaps it was my blind infatuation that had allowed me to glaze over the possibility or not even consider it in the first place, but either way, I wasn’t worried about my task. I wasn’t worried about keeping the balance. I wasn’t worried about the collar around my neck or the disappointment of Santa Claus. I wasn’t worried about Christmas.
As I charged down the stairs like an animal released from a cage, there was only one thing I was worried about. And that was Holly, who at that exact moment was stumbling around in the bitter cold wasteland that was the South Pole, and all because she was frightened of me.
All the questions I’d posed about how I was supposed to introduce myself properly no longer mattered. I had to find her before the cold took her.
12
HOLLY
I had never been so cold in my entire life. Before then, I was unaware that such a vicious cold even existed. My eyelashes were frozen, and the moisture over my eyes felt like it was frozen as well, forcing my vision to go blurry. If the blood in my veins wasn’t half-frozen like a slushy, I was certain it was well on its way. Even the rations I’d brought along back when I thought they’d make a difference froze in my pockets, and I was forced to drop them when the weight became too much. The steak knife I’d tucked into my sleeve got so cold that the metal actually burned my skin.
There was no way for me to tell how long I had been outside, and there was no way for me to tell if I was even going in a meaningful direction. As far as I could tell, there were no landmarks, and no way for me to gauge my location. I couldn’t even attempt to orient myself with the sun because the sky was covered in a thick layer of cloud almost as white as the snow, making things even more difficult to navigate. My plan to find some high ground had been a stupid one, in retrospect. This level of cold, this isolation, was entirely unfathomable to me until I experienced it. I knew it would be cold and difficult, but I had no previous understanding that my plan to run away and find help was me signing my own death certificate.
The entire world around me was frozen. White. Cold. Blurry. Miserable. I was beginning to make peace with the very real possibility that I had, perhaps, doomed myself to a fate even worse than being killed by Krampus—dying alone, frozen, in a polar vortex where I would be very aware of every moment as my heart slowed down to zero.
My mind wandered, likely as a self-preservation tactic, sort of like how you hear about people’s lives flashing before their eyes as they pass away. I thought back to the previous year, and how terribly things had gone, and how I reacted to the pain by not reacting at all. Perhaps I’d let a certain iciness take hold of me way before I stepped into the South Pole wasteland.
Just after I’d graduated from high school, my parents passed away in a freak car crash. The other driver, an exhausted trucker, came out of the incident unscathed—the first of many injustices I would blame on the state of the universe and the fact that I felt personally victimized by it. I was their only child, so the tragedy of their deaths forced me to withdraw from my first semester at college to organize my life and handle their estate. On top of being in mourning, I then was forced to realize just how much debt my parents had been in. It was more than they had ever clued me in on, and more than they had saved for.
In a matter of weeks, I lost my parents, the house I grew up in, my car, and my scholarship. I didn’t know if I ever fully recovered from the loss so much as I shoved it down so deep inside of me that it began to fester and grow like mold in a foundation. It was like my life had been split in half, and I became an entirely different person. There was Holly Before, and Holly After.
Holly After left much to be desired but still had something, as made evident by the man who would become my ex-fiancé. He’d asked for my number at the DMV of all places just a few years after my parents’ demise. His name was Ian, and he’d been sitting behind the counter doing his best to calm me down after learning how expensive it was to renew expired plates. Something about his boyish good looks and his resiliency against my nasty nature told me it was a good idea to exchange numbers, and that it was an even better idea to meet him for an evening walk to look at Christmas lights with hot chocolate.
That was the first Christmas since losing my parents that felt like… well, Christmas. It didn’t take long for us to tumble into one another, head over heels. We made plans to get married the following Christmas, in the evening under a canopy of string lights.
But, as things tended to go with me, I withdrew. I got sad, and things got tough, and I had no idea how to communicate with someone who actually wanted to work things out peacefully. Eventually, the love he had for me went stale, and I did nothing to prevent him from leaving. I did nothing to save myself, so I couldn’t save our relationship.
So, our apartment went cold, and he moved his things out with a final salute and a final goodbye.
“Good luck to you, Holly,” Ian said with the same warmth he’d always carried, even in the darkest of times. “I hope you find a way to be happy.”
But that was just the joke, wasn’t it? The sadness within me had become all of me. I couldn’t separate the sadness from myself. I couldn’t separate the anger. I was so exhausted, so deeply scarred on the inside that it was like I had forgotten how to be kind to myself or to others. Angry became my normal, sadness my default, and the walls around me were built taller, wider, and stronger.
None of this was comforting as my bleak reality began to set in once again. If I met my end alone in the snow, there wouldn’t be a soul back home to care about where I was. Except for the staff at Peace Lily Soaps—but would they be sad or just concerned if I was able to schedule around their requested days off?
I would die, it seemed, exactly as I lived. Alone, cold, and hidden in layers.
Feeling certain I had made a huge mistake, I looked behind me to see if I could identify the outline of the great castle from where I stood, but there was nothing but blistering cold and bright white in every direction. As much as it felt like I was walking in a straight line, I realized how easy it would have been for me to get turned around. Even if I turned myself a perfect one hundred and eighty degrees, there was no guarantee I would even be heading in the same direction I’d ventured from. On top of being both cold and lost, my musings had only illustrated how deeply meaningless my life had been at home. I had no friends, no family, and no reason for even trying to find a way home. There was nobody there waiting for me, and nobody who missed me. What was the point of survival if there was nothing to survive for?
The weight of these realizations dragged me down as the wind began to shove against me. With every step, I lost more faith. With every inhale, I started to hope my body would give out on me, but I kept walking—the part of my brain responsible for survival was pinging like crazy, forcing me to continue lifting one foot in front of the other until I couldn’t any longer.
The snow was deeper in some areas than others, and one miscalculated step had me falling forward into the snow. My instinct raged in my head, begging me to get up and keep moving, but as I rolled over onto my back in the lush, powdery snow, I just felt so comfortable. A dreamlike bliss washed over me as I stared into the sky that matched the absolute white blankness of the ground I lay on. I allowed my head to loll to the side, taking comfort in the heat of my breath as it warmed the part of the cloak I’d pulled over my face. It wasn’t enough to get me moving again or to allow me to feel any part of my body below my neck, but it was enough to relax me. My eyes flickered with exhaustion, and I became nostalgic for the winters of my youth. Laying there in the snow reminded me of building snow forts and crawling inside them. I liked feeling the cold sting of snow melt against my flushed cheeks, knowing I could be warm and dry the moment I was ready—or the moment my mother called me inside. Whichever came first.