Alex Carter is a puzzle.
It’s odd, because Zoe has never been much of a person for riddles and puzzles. She likes them well enough, and she can solve them with some effort, if she cares to, but usually she’s not one of these people who is given a puzzle and has to see it solved or finished.
But there’s something about Alex Carter. There’s something about him that inescapably compels her to solve his puzzle, and it takes her two months of writing to realize why — she seems to be the only person in his life who cares enough to try.
Normally, when he crosses out portions of his letters, she doesn’t try to read them — if he wanted her to, he’d have left them in — but every once in a while, she works to decipher what he changed his mind about saying, and his most recent letter is one of those.
He doesn’t like her assignment. She knew he wouldn’t when she gave it to him — that was part of the point. But she meant what she said to him. He doesn’t seem to get how incredible a friend he is. He’s loyal (to a fault, almost) and a fierce protector of the people he cares about, and he’s interesting, and sympathetic without relying on empty phrases and gestures, and he listens better than just about anyone she’s ever met, which is ironic given that he’s never technically listened to her.
She’s been compiling her mental list since she sent her last letter, but when she gets his reply, it becomes clear she’s going to have to rethink the presentation. Because in the middle of his argument that he’s not the person to determine what makes him a good friend, he writes and crosses out “Judging by my past experience, I must not be a good friend because everyone always” He ended that thought before he finished it, but there’s only so many ways she can imagine it ending, and all of them break her heart.
Because it does just about break her heart that he spends his life waiting for the people in it to get tired of him and walk away. It just about breaks her heart that he can’t think of more than five good qualities he has to offer. This, she thinks darkly, the thought staggeringly uncharitable, is what comes of only having a friend like Emma.
Well, not anymore. She’s going to make him see his worth if it’s the last thing she does. She is going to show him what it is like to be supported and appreciated and loved by a friend, and she is going to start with this list.
“That’s part of his Christmas present,” she says out loud, and she beams because it’s perfect. Zoe is an exceptional gift giver, largely because she refuses to limit herself to what is “feasible.” She starts as big and as huge as she can — what does she most want to be able to give Person A or Person B, no matter how huge or impractical or intangible it may be? Then she finds a way to make it happen.
With Alex? As soon as he talked about his Thanksgiving, she knew. She wanted to give him a happy holiday, full of family love and cheer and the warm, wonderful closeness that is supposed to be part of Christmas. Naysayers would tell her that is an impossible gift to give another person, but Zoe has never let her gifts be defined by supposed impossibility.
Honestly, she would invite him over to spend some of his Christmas break at her house in a heartbeat, if she thought he’d accept the invitation or enjoy himself at all rather than feel like an awkward ninth wheel. But welcoming as she knows her family would be, her parents plus her aunts plus her cousins plus Alex kind of sounds like a recipe for awkward disaster rather than holiday cheer. So she’d figured out the next best thing.
“Okay,” Zoe’s Aunt Rae says into the silence after Zoe plunks a glass jar down on the coffee table with a flourish. “I’ll bite. What’s the jar for, Zoe?”
Zoe grins. “This is my penpal’s Christmas present.”
“Who wants to be the one to break it to Zoe that she may have lost her touch?” Gina asks then in an exaggerated whisper. Zoe rolls her eyes with a smile.
“Ye of little faith, I haven’t lost anything. I am as much on point as ever. So gather ‘round, family, for your assistance is required.” She waits patiently while attention is moved from untangling Christmas lights, threading popcorn on garland strings, and unwrapping Bubble-wrapped nativity figures. When her parents and aunts and cousins are all paying attention, she continues.
“Alex’s parents are divorced, and his family . . .” She pauses, searching for the best way to explain without intruding on his privacy. “Well, his household is generally more full of tension than holiday cheer. So, I want to share some of ours with him. I’m going to leave this jar out and open while we decorate and make cookies and just enjoy a general sense of merriment. There’s no need to change what you do at all, but if you want to touch it as you walk past, infuse it with good thoughts and memories, you’re more than welcome to do so.”
“What a thoughtful gift, Zoe,” Aunt Laura says with a smile.
“You should invite him over here,” her mom says, turning back to the bowl of popcorn. “If his house is so tense over the holidays. He might need an escape.”
For some reason, the suggestion sends a little flutter of excitement through Zoe’s stomach. She decides to ignore it and shakes her head. “I don’t want to overwhelm him, and I have a feeling we would do that in a fairly extreme fashion. He and I haven’t even met yet, and he’s been the hesitant one through all this, so I’m gonna let him bring it up, I think.” She sits cross-legged on the carpet by her mom’s chair and, in sneaking a piece of popcorn from the bowl, misses the significant look her mom shares with Allie over her head.
“Well,” Joe booms, having finally successfully untangled the lights for the tree. “Let’s start Penpal Alex’s Happy Jar with some Christmas music, and let’s get this house ready to go!”
Vince Guaraldi blasts from the stereo in the next second, courtesy of Cate, and then the house is, for the next three hours, as Zoe likes it best — full of light and laughter and music and warmth. At this point, they have Christmas decorating down to a science — Joe and Rae tackle the lights on the tree, Laura and Mom string popcorn and cranberries into garlands for the tree, mantle, and bannisters, and Zoe and the girls start garlanding the whole house and unpacking Santas and Nativities. When the lights are on the tree, everyone drops everything else to hang ornaments and tinsel and stockings (though those don’t go on the tree).
At first, as everyone hurries about in a flurry of movement and activity, the jar simply sits open on the coffee table. But then, people start to touch it as they walk by, just little absent touches here and there, brief and fleeting. But then they get longer, then more meaningful, and at some point, Cate ties an extra length of ribbon around the neck, and suddenly, it’s like the jar has become a ninth person in the midst of the merriment. It travels with them — from the tree, to the fireplace mantle, to the kitchen — and it collects decorations as it goes. Allie curls a cascade of ribbons for the lid. Aunt Rae lines the bottom edge with holiday washi tape. Gina Modge-Podges a tissue paper snowflake to the side, and Zoe herself throws a handful of glitter onto the jar while the Modge-Podge is wet. Zoe’s mom uses some stickers to create a scene of Santa with his reindeer along the bottom edge of the jar. Aunt Laura gives up one of her handmade holly gift tags, and ties it to the lid with another scrap of ribbon, and Joe puts on the final touch — three mini-Christmas bows right on top.
“Feel the love, Alex!” Gina says while Zoe grins at their collective handiwork. She hadn’t planned on decorating the jar, but this is so much better.
She leaves the jar open all evening, through Christmas carols and and hot cocoa and Miracle on 34th Street. Her mom rests her fingertips on the lip of the jar while she prays before dinner, and when she includes blessings for those “for whom the holidays are not always joyous or peaceful,” Zoe knows who she means, and she hopes that someday, she’ll be able to tell Alex just how much love and warmth and familial acceptance went into this jar as it spent time with her family.
She fastens the lid down that night in her room, as she pulls her computer up to work on the second half of his gift. Before she dropped his letter off at Cuppa Joe’s this afternoon, she typed up the short list of what made him an amazing friend, so that she could expand on it as promised. Now, those words stare at her from her computer screen and she chews her lip, searching for the best way to go about expanding and explaining each of these points.
There’s something on the edge of her consciousness, driving this, something she can’t quite grasp or identify, about why this matters and why it’s so important. It’s because she needs him to know what she knows, to see him the way she sees him, but if anyone were to ask her to verbalize why she needs that, she wouldn’t be able to come up with a satisfactory answer. She just knows it’s important.
But she’s struggling, in a way she has struggled so rarely when talking to him. And it’s frustrating beyond belief, because she knows what she wants to say. But when she reads over the words she’s written, they sound disingenuous, too easy to dismiss or deflect.
With an aggravated sigh, she goes back to her first point and reads it out loud, hoping that might help. “You’re honest. You say the things that need to be said, and you have a way of pointing out the truth that makes it impossible to ignore. And if I said this to you in person, you’d just shrug it off and assume I was saying what you say to any generic friend. Ugh! Why is this so hard!”
There’s a knock on her bedroom door. “Come in,” she calls with a heavy sigh, pulling her feet up onto her computer chair and resting her forehead on her knees.
Allie pokes her head in. “You coming downstairs to join the sleepover, or are we starting Muppet Christmas Carol without you?”
Zoe manages a wan smile. “Don’t you dare,” she warns, then sighs again, running a hand through her hair. “I’ll be down, I just, I want to get this done.”
Allie frowns at the computer. “You aren’t seriously doing schoolwork this early into break are you?” Zoe smiles again, a little closer to her usual level of enthusiasm.
“No,” she says, tracing the edge of Alex’s jar. “This is the other half of Alex’s present, but it’s proving more difficult than I thought it would.”
Allie comes into the room and sits on the edge of Zoe’s bed, tucking one long leg under her while the other dangles over the side. Zoe swivels in her chair to face her cousin. “What’s the trouble?” Allie asks.
So Zoe explains the project, and what she wants to do and why (as much of the why as she can verbalize, at any rate). And Allie sits and listens, nodding and considering. “So,” she says at the end of Zoe’s explanation, “you’re struggling because you don’t feel that what you’re saying comes across as genuine? You think he won’t believe you?”
“Not exactly,” Zoe says, searching for the words. “I think . . . I think he’ll believe that I think these things are true, but I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to say these things in a way that convinces him that they’re true.”
Allie thinks about that for a long moment. Then she says, “Tell me about him.” Zoe blinks, then frowns.
“Tell you about him?” she repeats.
“Yeah. You say Alex Carter is a great friend. Convince me.”
Feeling only slightly awkward, she starts talking about Alex and their friendship and all the things she likes about him, all the worthwhile things she wants him and the rest of the world to know about him. The awkwardness doesn’t last long. She loses track of how long she talks — a while, certainly, and she pulls from her list at first, but then the things she’s saying grow from that, a litany of qualities she admires in him, ways she wishes she was more like him, and everything she’s come to rely on and appreciate.
When she finally runs out of things to say, Allie is smiling at her with a smile that Zoe can’t place. “What?” she asks, but Allie just shakes her head. “What?” Zoe asks again, a little more emphatic, because she feels like she’s missed something, something that Allie apparently finds endlessly amusing.
“Nothing,” Allie says. “Just . . . I wonder what Alex’s reaction would be if he could hear you say all that.” Zoe doesn’t think that is what Allie was thinking, but she decides not to press it.
“That’s what I’m trying to do,” she says instead, prompting Allie to shake her head in a thoughtful way.
“Have you ever,” she says slowly, “wondered what people say about you to other people when you’re not around?”
Zoe shrugs. “Sure.”
“This is like that. Now, I know, and you know, that you say the same things about Alex to me that you would say to him. But Alex doesn’t know that. Maybe what you’ve written sounds disingenuous to you because you’re hearing it through that filter. You think he’ll shrug it off. Dismiss it as one of those Oh, she’s just being nice, or Of course she’s saying that to my face kind of things. So I wish there was a way he could have heard you just now, describing him to me. I think that might have done what you say you want to do. Sometimes that shift from second to third person means everything.”
“Shifting from second to third,” Zoe repeats, but she’s talking to herself, not Allie. She chews her lip for a second, focus inward, mouthing words that Allie can’t decipher, but she doesn’t really need to. “Yeah,” Zoe finally says. “Yeah, okay.” And as if Allie isn’t even there, Zoe turns back to her computer and begins typing, her fingers flying across the keys with such a singular focus she barely even notices when Allie slips from the room, still hiding that knowing smile.
After a few minutes of uninterrupted typing, Zoe sits back, her list finished, a digital recreation of many of the things she just told Allie. Alone in her room, she reads aloud the things she just typed about Alex.
Occasionally, she rearranges a sentence or adds a new one or changes how she states something. She makes it personal and (she hopes) funny, but she writes about him the way she would describe him to someone else — third person. And it feels more natural.
When she’s convinced she has the words in the right places, she gets out some of her fancy paper and copies the words down onto the page. She’ll decorate it later, but for now, having the words to write is enough.
When the full list is written down, she stares at her last line: Alex is easy to like. It’s true, and it wraps up the tenth point nicely, but . . . it’s not how she wants to leave the document as a whole. A line pops into her head, but . . . She says it out loud, trying to decide if it’s too much or not. No, she finally decides after much deliberation. It is, after all, a sentiment he needs to hear. And it’s not like it isn’t true It’s not too much.
So she picks up her pen again and adds it in her neatest handwriting to the bottom of the page. Then she sits back and smiles at a job well done. This was so important, is so important, and she likes feeling that she’s done it justice. And before she can change her mind, she nods and stands and heads back downstairs, her last line echoing through her head in rhythm as she skips down the stairs to the sound of the overture of A Muppet Christmas Carol:
Alex Carter is a great friend, and I’m glad he’s mine.