Read You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas for Free Online Page A

with him down the hall and back to his room.
    I looked at the wretched structure on the table and I smiled. My gingerbread hovel had suddenly turned in to a loved—or at least somewhat appreciated—gingerbread
home
after all.

Claus and Effect
     
     
    A T MY ELEMENTARY school, the teachers always did a little something special to celebrate everyone’s birthday. About an hour before the yellow buses arrived to take us home at the end of the day, one of the teachers would unroll the torn but taped-back-together crinkly red paper streamer that was used over and over, year after year, and hang it from one end of the chalkboard to the other. HAPPY BIRTHDAY would be written in neat teacher-script on the board. And a couple of boxes of Twinkies would be opened and placed on the long fake wood table below the streamer and chalkboard sign. Apple juice would be poured into tiny paper cups from a half-gallon plastic jug. It was a small school in the country; such a makeshift little party was exciting for everyone.
    Except for Glen.
    Sooner or later, after the juice cups had been crumpled up and pelted at the girls and the last Twinkie was gone, somebody would always say, “Poor Glen, he never gets a party.” And this never failed to plunge the room into silence. “Yeah, that’s right. Hey Glen, that really sucks.”
    The two Brendas and a couple of other girls would walk over to Glen and put their hands on his shoulder, petting him lightly, as one would a bony and pitiful dog. Because of all their work with dolls, young girls could be shockingly maternal; they could confuse you and make you cry and want a grilled cheese sandwich.
    Glen, embarrassed by the clutch of empathetic girls and annoyed that the spotlight had once again been aimed at him would laugh uncomfortably and say, “It’s no big deal. I don’t care, really. I never do anything for my birthday anyway.”
    And all of us would then hold our breath because Glen had spoken the unspeakable.
    Glen had a disability more disfiguring than a burn and more terrifying than cancer.
    Glen had been born on the day after Christmas.
    “My parents just combine my birthday with Christmas, that’s all,” he explained.
    But we knew this was a lie. Glen’s parents just wrapped a couple of his Christmas presents in birthday-themed wrapping paper, stuck some candles in a supermarket cake, and had a dinner of Christmas leftovers.
    Mrs. Sobel had tried to make Glen feel less like a hobbled cripple by telling him, “I know just how it is, honey. My mother was born on Pearl Harbor day.”
    Everybody had just stared at her vacantly until Andi ruined it for everybody by raising her hand and saying, “My mother has pearls. She got them from her mother and she says when I’m grown-up, I’ll get to have them.”
    That was how Mrs. Sobel discovered that none of us had ever heard the words
pearl
and
harbor
combined before. Thus began a two-week social studies project where we learned about the fateful day and were each forced to paint our own small corner of a wall mural depicting bombs falling from the sky and sinking boats at one end and Japanese kids throwing Frisbees at the other, but none of us had ever seen a Japanese kid before, so they were drawn like what we saw in cartoons: black, jagged hair, two slanted slashes for eyes, and a karate robe. Mrs. Sobel approved and suggested a Japanese flag be added to the headband.
    In the corner, hidden by an explosion, I had slyly drawn an oyster with a pearl inside. I had written, “Don’t kill me, I’m so pretty!” as a tiny thought bubble coming from the pearl.
    Everybody had silently blamed Glen for this art project, a task we considered punishment. Still, nobody could really
hate
him for it the way they could hate, say, Allison Murray because she was always telling on everyone. Life itself had punished Glen enough already.
    I knew that I would rather spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair like one of Jerry’s Kids than suffer