All I Want for Christmas Is You (Short Story) Read Online Free

parents, but he was doing it to make her happy and hopefully to get her to stop chewing her nails until they bled.
    Night came early to Pittsburgh in the winter. And the neighborhood looked its best this time of year. Christmas lights brightened the poorest of the houses. Snow covered the worst of the sidewalks.
    They kicked their way through the middle of the street, through piles of freshly fallen snow. White flakes still tumbled from the sky, covering Maddy’s pretty curls, melting on her cheeks. He liked her any season, but Christmas and her birthday were always a good stretch of time for them.
    The air smelled like baking and pot roast, which made his stomach roar.
    Maddy’s mom was going to make something fancy. Fancy and weird. There was a good chance it would be gross. She was like that; looking through cookbooks to find something no one in the world really wanted to eat.
    Maddy , he thought, when he started to get grossed out thinking about what kind of dinner Maddy’s mom was going to make. Doing this for my girl.
    Two of the Lester kids and another boy ran by, dragging sleds. “Hey, Billy!” they shouted, their sleds banging into their legs as they came up behind Billy and Maddy. Billy turned to face them and took Maddy’s suddenly tense hand, curling it over his arm. There was a rumor that the oldest Lester kid had graduated from bashing car windows with a bat to mugging people with a knife. “You rich now or what?”
    “No guys, not rich.”
    “You look rich.”
    “Thanks.” He laughed and the kids laughed, too. The tension in Maddy’s arm relaxed.
    “When we gonna see you on TV and shit?”
    “Not sure, hopefully next season.”
    “Cool.”
    “See you around,” Billy said and turned to continue walking toward Maddy’s place.
    “Hey, lady,” the oldest Lester kid yelled and Maddy turned to look over her shoulder at him. “Call me when you wanna see what a real man can do.” He grabbed his crotch.
    “Go back home to your mom,” she yelled, and kept walking. A smile on her face.
    “It will be good to get out of this neighborhood, won’t it?” Billy asked, watching her carefully. They’d been so obsessed with the draft lately that she had stopped talking about what she wanted to do. And he didn’t know if that was good or bad. He could take care of her; it’s not like she had to work or go to school, but she wasn’t the kind of girl who wanted to be taken care of.
    “Yes. It will,” she sighed.
    “I’m in Rochester again until they call me up.”
    “I like Rochester,” she said. She’d worked hard to finish her credits early. She was done with high school except for graduation. Another thing she would tell her parents tonight.
    “I rented that apartment I told you about. In the house.”
    “You did?”
    “Yeah. I mean, we need a place and there are plenty of schools and stuff for you in Rochester. You know. College.”
    “I can’t really enroll there. What if you get called up?”
    “You can transfer, right?”
    “Yeah,” she stroked his arm. He could tell she was overwhelmed by all of it. “Good point, I guess. Let’s not worry about it right now, Billy.” She slipped her hand from his elbow to his palm, twining their fingers through their gloves. “Let’s just worry about tonight.”
    They stopped in front of Maddy’s house. It was the same kind of cookie-cutter special he grew up in. Two stories, a fenced-in yard. A cement porch. But Maddy’s mom had put up window shutters. They had bars on the windows but they didn’t look bad, like some of the barred windows in the neighborhood, not with the curtains and crap she had put up to hide them.
    In the spring the front walk was decorated with flowers, in the summer a vegetable garden grew in a small patch by the door, and now, in the winter, blinking white lights surrounded all the windows. A white and red star shone down from the chimney and Santa himself waved from the front door.
    “Looks good,” he