Aunt Santa

Prologue

20 years earlier...

Sara looked up as a train went roaring past them on the platform.

"Guess that's not it," said her friend Sam. He kicked a rogue pebble onto the tracks as soon as the last car had passed.

"You didn't have to wait with me." Sara let her heavy backpack fall to her feet and she nudged it between her legs. "Really."

"Are you kidding? I love a dramatic train goodbye." Sam mimed a slow and romantic wave to the imaginary train window.

"Plus we didn't have anything else to do." Mo, their other roommate, had shoved her hands into her coat pockets so hard that her arms were practically straight. She tapped the back of Sam's knee with her foot, laughing as it buckled. "Don't fall on the tracks!"

"You're the one who kicked me!" He reached out to kick her.

"Stop! This is dangerous behavior," Mo complained. Sam rolled his eyes at Sara in such an exaggerated way that he did risk falling onto the tracks. It was exactly Mo's style to provoke them and then complain when they did what she pushed them to do.

The two of them continued to try and knock each other over when the other wasn't looking and at one point Mo did fall to the ground, shrieking through a laugh. Sara laughed too, trying not to notice how the other people on the platform stared at them. Just a few more annoying college kids in the annoyingly college town, she thought. Nothing to see here.

She was just thinking about how much she was going to miss them when Mo caught the look on her face. "So, what's the first thing you're going to do when you get home?"

"Ah." Sara had been trying not to think about it. "Probably just go to my room. I don't know." She'd want to call them, she knew, but she wouldn't. She didn't want to seem pathetic.

"Sam, stop. I swear, I will push you onto the tracks myself." Mo put up her hands in a fake boxing move. Just then, an announcement came overhead that the southbound train to Claremont was due in five minutes. Sara felt her heart sink.

"What will you guys do this week?"

Sam and Mo looked at each other and shrugged. "Probably nothing," Mo offered. Sara was the only one going home for Christmas. Mo's father was on an annual fishing trip in the Florida Keys with some buddies from his hunting lodge. "It's just better this way," Mo insisted when it came up. Her mother had died when she was nine and the holidays made her father sad.

Sam's family were all in San Diego, but his father had just been laid off so things were rough at the moment. He claimed he wasn't going home because they weren't "holiday people" but Sara and Mo both knew it was the price of the plane ticket that would keep him in their little apartment over the break. Despite Sam's moaning over the cheesy holiday traditions, whenever Sara wanted to do something "Christmas-y," it was Sam who joined in first. He'd strung up the lights in their windows all on his own.

At one point when Mo was out, Sara had even convinced him to drink hot cocoa and watch one of those old Christmas cartoon specials. He'd sighed into his mug. "I really do not want to be one of those basic gays who loves Christmas. What's next, pumpkin spice lattes?"

She poked his ugly Christmas sweater. "I think that ship has sailed."

"I can guess what we'll be doing all week," Sam replied. "Sitting around and moping, probably. Eating pints of ice cream. Listening to emo music." He flashed Sara a look over Mo's head. She'd broken up with her boyfriend Dan the day before. It wasn't the first time they'd declared it over and Sara suspected it wouldn't be the last.