The Usual Fanfic Disclaimer:
Merry Yule! Here's a fun little tale that popped in as I've been finishing "The SF Vampire"...
The characters of Frank & Joe Hardy, their dad Fenton and Aunt Gertrude all belong to the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Those characters as portrayed here are based on the 1970s TV show, "The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries", created by Glen A. Larson and starring Parker Stevenson & Shaun Cassidy as Frank and Joe, with shades of the 1950s Disney "Hardy Boys" serial, "The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure". The wonderfully out-there Sharon Anderson is taken from the '70s episode "The Creatures Who Came On Sunday", original screenplay by David Balkan.
Quick tour for those not familiar with the show: Laura Hardy is dead (both in '70s show & Disney), Aunt Gertrude lives with the family to help raise the boys (both in '70s & Disney), Bayport is in Massachusetts, and the supernatural is accepted as real (at least, it's real for Joe!). While Callie Shaw and Chet Morton are in the '70s show, Chet's sister Iola isn't; she's never mentioned, and Joe never dated her. However, Iola IS in the Disney serial, and that's the depiction I'm following here.
This is a prequel to "Voodoo Doll" and a sequel to "In Excelsis Deo". It's set in 1971, before a lot of the technology we have now existed — so if you think "Well, why didn't they just…?", it's because it didn't exist back then.
Note: I've gotten a few PMs about Kris's childhood being "extreme" — folks, what I describe is *light*. Check Amazon for a book called "To Train Up A Child" by the Pearls, and weep — yes, seriously, someone wrote a book advocating child abuse as the best "Christian" way to discipline a child, with techniques so harsh that the book's been linked to several child murders.
# # #
December 1971, Bayport MA
"But, Shimá, I don't even like her!"
"You know, I believe that may be the point," Mar said, as she peeled another onion.
Kris Mountainhawk sat at the kitchen table, helping her adopted mother Mar chop onions, carrots, and parsnips for the venison roast. School that day had been an absolute disaster; Kris was eleven, almost twelve, but everyone treated her like a little ignorant kid. The teachers had made everyone pull names out of a basket for something called "Secret Santa", something even more baffling to Kris than the whole idea of Christmas was. They had to do a lottery to decide who to be nice to? Miss Hawkins had explained it — in Kris's case, three times, with everyone laughing behind her back — but Kris still didn't get the reasoning.
If someone hated you the rest of the year, a couple weeks in December wouldn't change that. Her Gift knew that; the couple times she'd cautiously lowered her mental-shields in class had proven that much.
"But they know I don't know all that stuff. None of the other kids like me. No one's gonna want me being nice to them." Kris chopped at the big carrot with a bit more force than was necessary; the end flipped off the cutting board. "I don't like them, and they don't like me."
She'd hoped to draw Joe's name — she was good friends and official-kid-sister to the Hardy brothers, both Joe and his older brother Frank, who lived next door. Joe would understand if she didn't get it right. He'd tease her, but it'd be fun teasing, not mean, and Frank was always patient with explaining things. But to make her get presents and goodies for someone she barely knew and didn't like? And to force someone else do the same for her? It wouldn't make them like her.
Worse, she'd drawn the name of someone even lower on the school totem pole than she was. Kris was well aware that she was considered a bottom-scraper, a little mousy blonde dummy that the other kids laughed at — the mean kind, the stuff that didn't stop. She'd started school late, shortly after she and Mar had moved to Bayport; the other kids had scared Kris, all noise, laughter, and roughhousing, and she'd kept mostly to herself until it was too late to change anything.
Bad enough being outside of the established friendships, but worse, because of her size (runty), undocumented age (her original parents had never registered a birth certificate), and the fact that those parents had never sent her to school, she'd initially been placed in the 3rd grade — third, as if she'd been a baby. Even after Mar's adoption was finalized and Kris had been declared eleven by the courts just before Christmas last year, the school had resisted moving her up with kids her age.
This year, after a lot of special tutoring and arguments from Mar, Kris had been grudgingly allowed to move to the 6th grade — Joe's class — but none of the kids let her forget that she was a dummy, especially since she still had sessions in the Special Ed trailer to catch up.
But Kris had drawn Sharon Anderson's name from the basket. Kris was a dummy, but Sharon was an out-and-out weirdo. That was what all the other kids said, anyway. Kris didn't know why; none of them would talk to her long enough to find out, and she wasn't about to hang around Sharon and make her own situation worse.
"Consider it a learning experience, shiché'é," Mar said. "Go cut some rosemary and thyme, if you would, please. Just a handful."
No use arguing, then. Kris sighed as she pushed up from the table and went into the back sunroom — Mar had converted part of the patio into an add-on room of big windows (walls and ceiling), a room that always smelled of sun, warm earth, and herbs. Mar being the cool adult of the neighborhood helped Kris's status a little, not much; Mar was an honest-to-goodness real Navajo Indian, originally from the Arizona reservation. She taught karate at the Y and would've volunteered to be the Girl Scout leader for the middle school, if the other mothers hadn't protested that she taught "unfeminine" things like wilderness survival.
"Hey, Tagalong."
Kris looked up from the herb pots. Grinning at her, Joe Hardy stood in the sunroom doorway. Damp with snow, his shaggy gold-brown hair hung in his hazel eyes; his puffy-nylon Red Sox coat was unzipped, showing his usual red flannel shirt, and both were an inch or so short of his wrist. He was only a couple months older than she was, but he was a head taller; she barely came up to his chin.
"Aunt Gertrude sent me over to get some fresh mint." Joe inhaled deeply. "I love how it smells in here. She's almost got Dad talked into doing this at our house." Then he stopped. "You've got Christmas rose!"
The star-shaped white flowers had bloomed yesterday; Mar had them along the window-wall, where they'd get the most sun. Kris nodded. "Mar likes them a lot. She hates poinsettia. She says something that needs that much work to bloom shouldn't be alive in the winter."
Joe had gone over to the plants, touching the white blooms reverently. "Mom loved it, too. It was her favorite flower. You know the story?"
"There's a story?" Kris loved fairy tales of all kinds, even more so if they involved legends and myths around objects and plants. It made the stories more real.
"Uh-huh. Mom said angels make it grow. A little shepherd girl didn't have a present to give baby Jesus, and she started crying, and the flowers grew where her tears fell."
Kris looked down at the rosemary pot. She could hear what Papa would've said about that story: heathen, pagan, and blasphemous. If it wasn't in the Bible, it wasn't true, according to Papa. Everything that people called "Christmas", Papa had said (usually with a slap), was really old pagan devil-worship and that people were too sinful to follow the Truth.
Joe was shaking his head, his smile sad; his mother had died before Kris had moved out here. "I tried telling Mom that flowers grew from seeds, and she just laughed and said I'd understand when I was bigger."
Maybe the story wasn't really about Jesus originally, but this was Joe; he wouldn't know. Stories only interested him if it involved crime, mysteries, or other gory stuff. Kris would look it up at the library later, or maybe Mar's new encyclopedias had the story. "Well, Mar got these from Cohen's Greenhouse. Unless angels pooped out the manure for the fertilizer."
"Kris!" Joe whooped into laughter. "Angel poop. Wait 'til I tell Frank!"
"Kris?" Mar called, from the kitchen. "I need those herbs, please."
Oh. Yeah. Kris cut a quick handful of the rosemary and thyme sprigs, as Joe pinched off a double-handful of mint; there was always too much mint. "The Rose'll bloom most of the winter," Kris said, as they went back to the kitchen. "Maybe Mar can make a cutting for you, and you can have one for yourself."
Joe shook his head. "I'd just kill it. I can't even keep a cactus alive. Who'd you get for Secret Santa?"
They weren't supposed to tell, but it wasn't like she'd drawn his name. "Sharon."
"Oh man. Really? She'll be easy. Glue together a bunch of rocks and say a UFO left it in the backyard."
Kris looked at him, unsure if he was teasing. "What about you?"
"Ain't telling." Joe stuck his tongue out at her. "We're not supposed to tell, remember? And you told! You told!"
"So you're really saying you got me," Kris retorted, as she handed the herbs to Mar. But when Joe didn't answer and only snatched a cookie from the basket on the counter, Kris got suspicious. "You did? You got my name? Joe…! Don't look at me like that! Did you really get me?"
"Not telling!" He stuck his tongue out again and ran out the door. That was answer in and of itself, and Kris just stared after him.
"That boy," Mar said, shaking her head. "Only two speeds, fast forward and face down in the dirt, I swear."
"Mar, he got me for Secret Santa!" They weren't supposed to tell, but a lot of the others had anyway; Kris had seen Beverly's clique in Frank's class giggling over their slips of paper and making googly-eyes at the boys, not that the boys in question noticed.
Mar raised an eyebrow. "So?"
"But that means I need to —"
"No," Mar cut her off. "You do not do anything special. That's not the point, if I understood your teacher's letter right. You focus on who you drew, not on who you wanted to draw. You do for Joe what you were going to do anyway for Christmas, just as you're doing for Frank."
"But I only got Sharon. She's weird. She's won't care."
Mar looked at her.
Kris swallowed the rest. Uh-oh.
"You mean," Mar said evenly, "just as whoever got you might be going, 'I only got Kris Mountainhawk, she's weird, let's ignore her.' You're saying you won't care?"
"That's not fair. That's not the same!"
"It is." Mar stared her down. "The only difference is that it's you on the receiving end."
Kris looked down at the table.
"I expected better of you, little squirrel. I didn't think you'd want to hurt someone like that." Mar picked up another onion. "I wonder. Did your original parents call you weird, too? I doubt they cared what you thought."
Eyes burning, Kris only pushed herself away from the table and left the kitchen, went up to her bedroom and slammed the door. That hadn't been fair. She wasn't anything like her original parents. She wasn't. She wouldn't be.
All this, over some stupid thing the teachers had thought up. The whole Christmas gift-giving & trees & lights stuff was crazy to begin with: why a special day to give gifts? And why was it so important to give gifts now? All the trees and lights were pretty and everything, but why put up all that just for one day to give gifts? None of it had anything to do with Jesus. Even Mar hadn't been able to explain it in any way that made sense.
But this — this Secret Santa thing just bordered on insane.
But crazy or not, Kris wanted to do something special for both Joe and Frank. They were her only real friends. Well, her only real friends her age, anyway; Joshua was older and had gone to Vietnam. She hadn't seen him since she'd moved out here, and Mar had explained that any gifts for him were best limited to cookies and candy that he could share with his unit. And Frank and Joe's circle definitely weren't her friends. Kris was okay with a couple of them, but they only let her tag along because of Frank and Joe. Even Callie, who was nice to everybody, never invited Kris to any of the parties or sleepovers that the girls at school had.
Mama and Papa had never let Kris have friends. They'd kept her home. They'd never had anyone over. Kris had gotten beaten whenever they'd caught her playing with other kids, and Papa had scared those other kids so badly that none of them ever came back.
Frank and Joe knew about her original parents and why Kris had run away. They understood all the trouble she was having, and they'd never laughed, they'd never teased — well, except in a fun way that didn't hurt — they'd never called her names. They'd just decided that she needed a couple big brothers to help her, and had adopted her last Christmas — notarized certificate and everything!
Here Joe was supposed to spend the next couple weeks doing extra special things for her on account of some dumb lottery at school, and she wasn't supposed to do anything back, because she'd drawn someone different?
No, no, no. Not going to happen….