Naomi Neale - Calendar Girl

"Hip, sassy, and filled with offbeat characters who will steal your heart."

-Katie MacAlister, USA Today bestselling author

Other books by Naomi Neale:

SHOP 'TIL YULE DROP (anthology)

MAKING IT

January 2005

Published by

Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc. 200 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher nas received any payment for this "stripped book."

Copyright 2005 by Vance Briceland

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

ISBN 0-8439-5470-1

The name "Making It" and its logo are trademarks of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

Printed in the United States of America.

Visit us on the web at www.dorchesterpub.com .

For all their help on this book, I really must thank my three best girlfriends in all the world. Lydia Cisaruk kept me sane on weekends by dragging me to karaoke, making me eat Jiffy Pop, and swapping stories about our past hobbies. Patty Woodwell overflowed with moral support and helpful criticisms when I most needed them. And Tahirah Shadforth, founder of the original Elizabethan Failure Society, has long been a dear friend and an imaginative dynamo. This one's for you, ladies!

Every Who down in Who-ville liked Christmas a lot. But the littlest Who with a man's hand on her fanny did not.

I expected the typical masher. Perhaps a standard-issue divorced dad, or a middle-aged businessman boasting a comb-over, a leer, and a winking eye. The white-haired gentleman behind me, though, could have headlined the "Jolly Old Grandfathers" section of a talent agency's casting book. "Heidi, observe this fine specimen!" he exclaimed when I whipped around. "We've discovered a prime example of the famed North Pole Elf!"

All afternoon, visitors to Mercer-Iverson had lined up by the hundreds to sit their children on our Christmas Grinch's lap. Lucky memy job required being nice to all of them. The evil overlords of Who-ville demanded compulsory cheeriness, including to sleepy-looking girls and their lecherous grandfathers. I was even luckier because Mercer-Iverson had seen fit to stuff its seasonal workers into uniforms that brought a new dimension to the word tights. The millennial fabric squeezing all oxygen from my bloodstream seemed to have been genetically modified with the DNA of a boa constrictor.

Bending down to talk to little Heidi in tights two sizes too small made muscles pop to places they were never intended to go. I suddenly seemed to be wearing my bum as a backpack. My fingers clawed at the elastic while I tried to stretch a smile across my face. "Hi there, sweetheart!"

Heidi backed away in a hurry, eyes wide. I was used to her reaction. I too would be frightened of a crazed woman grabbing her own butt, wearing a smile rarely seen on anyone not overdosed with Zoloft. "You're not an elf," she accused with narrowed eyes. "That's right! I'm a Who."

"A what?" Her grandfather leaned down and cupped his ear, not quite hearing me. "A Who."

"A who? A what? Who are you?"

"Nan Who!" I pointed to my name tag, emblazoned with Seussian lettering.

"And what, pray tell, is a Who?"

When I straightened back up again, the bottom half of my buttocks sprang down to the back of my knees as if strapped to a bungee cord, while the top half remained firmly in place. Rain made me stagger sideways. "Why, a Who is a citizen of jolly Who-ville," I forced out, clutching my lower back with one hand and gesturing to the Christmas fantasy village with the other. Crap. Something was seriously wrong down in the antipodes. It seemed as if I had four butt cheeks instead of two. Had I given myself a horizontal Who-wedgie?

"Jeez! Stop holding up the line!" yelled a woman with a thick Jersey accent, a dozen feet away. The long row of parents lining the Astroturf approach to the lair was restless. Some of them had already waited for over an hour to see the only department-store Grinch in Manhattan.

I clutched at my behind, trying to pry out the elusive elastic buried inches deep in my flesh while I soothed the savages. "From this point you may expect a fifteen-minute wait..." The groan rising from the crowd drowned out the rest of my sentence.

"Excusez-moi. Parlez-vous franais?" A short man with horn-rimmed glasses plucked at my fur-trimmed Christmas Who-jacket.

His request warred with all the others. "Where's the goddamned restroom? If I leave for the god-damned restroom will I lose my god-damned place in this god-damned line?"

"Fifteen minutes is outrageous! Who is your manager?"

"How much are photographs?"

"What's a Who?" I heard once again from behind me.

I closed my eyes. Why, oh why, had I given up smoking two years ago? For my health? What had possessed me to want to live to the age of twenty-eight? What was the point, I ask?

That's when I felt the hand again.

"Ex. me, sir!" It was the closest I could come to a rebuke without betraying my anger. Grandpa only winked when I removed his wandering digits from my quadruple Who-crack. "Reena Who, I'm on break," I called out to the woman guarding the cave door. Ignoring the crowd's groans and threats and the fact that I wasn't due lunch for another thirty minutes, I hobbled to the multicolored entrance of our break room.

Inside, the Whos down in Who-ville were crabby as Sneetches. They wrenched their Who-groins and their Who-out-of-reaches. The interior of the Who-ville Postal Office was alive with the hiss of fingernails across nylon when I stepped through its petite front door. After the latch clicked shut, I broke the sound barrier throwing myself to the break room floor, where I squirmed until I'd managed to get my control-top candy-striped tights down around my knees. Of course, the sonic boom could have been the sound of my butt rebounding into its proper shape. I wanted to weep with relief. "Oh thank God!"

Not one of the dozen other Whos seemed to think it out of the ordinary for me to be flailing on the floor, legs in theair, tights in a twist. Safdar Who stepped over me on his way to one of the rickety benches along the wall, tugging his Who-ass and his Crotchamacallit without giving me a second look. Plunk a sticky margarita glass in my hand, smear my lipstick, and hang a cigarette butt from the corner of my mouth, and I could've been my alcoholic roommate from three years ago who stuck me with three months' worth of back rent.

I craved a burger. I needed a drink. I needed St. John's wort to get my black mood back on balance. Most of all, I wanted a muumuu. A nice, loose muumuu.

With her Who-bootie, Amanda Who nudged me from where she sat on a bench. Her mouth busily assaulted a wodge of grape-flavored bubblegum I could smell even above the faintly antiseptic smell of the floor wax. I'd heard she was trying to quit smoking. Like me, she wore her tights around the knees. "Nan, Damien's looking for you," she said without greeting.