As I practiced my meanest face—tongue wagging out, nose crinkled, eyes at a most hateful glare—I saw Benny standing behind me in the bathroom hallway. “Why are you making kit en faces in the mirror?” he asked, yawning.

“They’re mean faces!” I said.

Benny said, “Look, that outfit you’re wearing is gonna scare papi o more than your mean kit en face. What are you wearing, Lit le Miss Quinceañera Gone Batshit?”

I looked down at my out t: oxford uniform school shirt tucked into a knee-length lime-green felt material skirt with a reindeer embroidered on it, candy-cane-colored swirled stockings, and beat-up Chucks on my feet.

“What’s the mat er with my outfit?” I asked, smiling upside down into a … *shudder* … frown. “I think my out t is very festive for the day before the day before Christmas. And for a movie about a reindeer. Anyway, I thought you went back to sleep.”

“Bathroom break.” Benny inspected me head to toe. “No,” he said. “The shoes don’t work. If you’re gonna go with that out t, you might as well go all out. C’mon.”

He took my hand and dragged me to the closet in my room. He perused through the heaps of Converse sneakers. “You don’t got no other types of shoes?” he said.

“Only in our old dress-up-clothes trunk,” I said, joking.

“Perfect,” he said.

Benny darted over to the old trunk in the corner of my room, pulling out tull e tutus, yards of muumuus, #1 FAN baseball caps, reman hats, princess slippers, platform shoes, and an alarming number of Crocs, until nally he grabbed for our Great-aunt Ida’s retired tasseled majoret e boots, with taps still on the toes and heels. “These fit you?” Benny asked.

majoret e boots, with taps still on the toes and heels. “These fit you?” Benny asked.

I tried them on. “A lit le big, but I guess.” The boots spiced up my candy-cane-colored stockings nicely. I liked.

“Awesome. They’ll go great with your winter hat.”

My winter head-warming accessory of choice is a vintage red knit hat with pom-poms dangling down from the ears. It’s “vintage” in the sense of being a hat I made for my fourth-grade school Christmas pageant production of A Christmas Carol(ing) A-go-go, the Dickens-inspired disco musical I had to heavily lobby our school principal to allow to be staged. Some people are so rigidly secular.

My out t complete, I walked outside toward the subway. I almost returned inside to change my shoes from the majoret e boots to my old familiar Chucks, but the tapping noises from my feet hit ing the pavement were comfortingly festive, so I didn’t, even though the boots were too big and my feet kept almost walking right out of them. (These boots were made for … slipping out of … la la la … ha ha ha.) I had to acknowledge that despite my excitement to follow the trail of mystery snarl, any boy who left me a ticket to see Gramma Got Run Over by a Reindeer would unlikely turn out to be a keeper. The title, quite simply, o ended me. Langston says I should have a bet er sense of humor about these things, but I don’t see what’s so funny about the idea of a reindeer going after one of our senior friends. It is a known fact that reindeers are herbivores who subsist on plant life and shun meat, so I hardly think they’d be gunning for someone’s gramma. It upset me to think about a reindeer harming Gramma, because we all know that if that happened in the real world and not in the movies, then the Wildlife Service would go hunting for that reindeer and do away with the poor antlered guy when it was probably Gramma’s fault get ing in his way like that! She always forgets to wear her glasses and osteoporosis hunches her walk and slows her down. She’s like a walking bull ’s-eye for dear ol’ Bambi!

I gured the whole point of bothering going to the movie at all would be to possibly get a look at mystery boy. But the dares he’d left inside my stocking with the Moleskine notebook, on a Post-it note placed onto the movie ticket, had said: DON’T read what I wrote in the notebook until you’re at the theater.

DO write down your worst Christmas memory in the notebook.

DON’T leave out the most horrific details.

DO leave the notebook behind for me, behind Mama’s behind.

Thank you.

I believe in honor. I didn’t read the notebook ahead of time, which would be like peeking in your parents’ closet to see your Christmas present stash, and I vowed to hold of reading it until after the movie.

As prepared as I’d been to dislike Gramma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, I was completely unprepared for what I’d nd at the cinema.

Outside the theater showing this particular movie, there were rows of stroll ers in uniform formation against the wall. Inside was complete pandemonium. The 10 a.m. show, apparently, was the Mommy and Me viewing, where moms could bring their babies and toddlers to watch really inappropriate movies while the lit le ones babbled and burped and cried to their hearts’ content. The theater was a cacophony of

“Wah wah” and “Mommy, I want …” and “No!” and “Mine!” I barely had a chance to pay at ention to the movie, what with having Gold sh crackers and Cheerios thrown in my hair from the aisles behind me, watching Legos hurl through the air, and unsticking Great-aunt Ida’s taps from the sippy cup liquid spil age on the floor.

Children frighten me. I mean, I appreciate them on a cute aesthetic level, but they’re very demanding and unreasonable creatures and often smell funny. I can’t believe I ever was one. Hard to believe, but I was more put o by the movie theater than the movie. I only made it through twenty minutes of watching the black comedian man playing a fat mama on the screen while rows of mommies tried to negotiate with their toddlers in the seats before I couldn’t take it any longer.