Hamilton was looking at his watch as Jake walked into the darkened library.
"Sorry I'm late," she said.
"I was starting to think we should've synchronized our watches after all." But Hamilton was too excited to be annoyed. He grabbed her hand and started to pull her toward him for a kiss but stopped as soon as he saw her eyes. "What's the matter?"
"Oh, just another uplifting conversation with my mother."
"You want to talk about it?"
"No." But the tears were still welling up in her eyes.
"Baby, come here." He tried to put his arms around her, but Jake backed away, knowing that if she felt him against her she would break.
"No, let's get this done. We have to hurry."
"If something happened with your mom, that's more important than some stupid prank."
"Since when is it a stupid prank? You've been planning this for two months." Jake walked to a doorway and into the computer lab, and Hamilton followed her. He could tell she wanted to change the subject, so he let it go.
"I actually thought this up over a year ago," he said. "But I needed someone with computer expertise."
Jake slipped her backpack off her shoulder and set it on the counter next to a computer. "I had no idea you were such a prankster."
"It's a tradition. Every semester at Rawley ends with a really stellar prank, but for the last four years the resident physics genius, Colin Prescott, had a lock on the prankmaster throne. Some of his were brilliant. I still don't know where he got that cow."
"Ah, yes, the old cow-on-the-roof. Always good for a laugh."
"Yeah, but my dad could've done without the phone calls from PETA. But anyway, Prescott finally graduated, and I think I should take his crown. After all, I have something he didn't have."
"What's that?"
Hamilton dangled his extensive set of keys. "Access."
"But won't that just make you the main suspect, more likely to get caught?"
"I like how you think, Pratt. One step ahead of the game. And that's something else I have that Colin Prescott didn't have."
"What?"
"You."
Jake smiled, something painful still distracting her as she motioned toward the computers. "You really want to take twelve of these?"
"I'd take all of them if we could, but thirty monitors would be overkill. I think twelve will do, make a nice layout – if we just take the 17-inch screens. What do you think?"
"I can configure as many as you want, but how do we get them all up on the roof?"
"That's the beautiful part. See, years ago this library was the old dining hall, and this computer room was the kitchen, so . . . " He walked over to a bookcase and pushed it aside, revealing a square hole in the wall. "There's a dumb waiter."
"Wow. That's so cool. How'd you know that was there?"
"Because during winter break, when all the students and teachers are gone, I have plenty of time to explore. But the dumb waiter only goes to the second floor. So we have to get them to the roof from there. But I've got it all worked out."
The sun had set by the time Jake and Hamilton hoisted the last of the computers up on the roof of the library. Jake looked down at the snow-covered quad below them, lit gold and violet by the dying sunlight.
"How are they ever going to get these down?" Jake wondered aloud.
"That's rule number one of any good prank. It should be near-impossible for the authorities to remove."
"Um, 'the authorities'? You mean your dad?"
"I'm referring to the administration in general." This made Jake laugh, and Hamilton sighed. "OK, for the purposes of this evening, can we refer to him as 'the authorities'?"
"Sure, babe. Whatever toots your horn." Jake pulled some cables out of her backpack and began hooking up the computers as Hamilton turned on a flashlight so she could see.
"I was afraid we'd lose the light too quickly," Hamilton complained.
"We'll be fine. I could do this with my eyes closed."
"Good. I don't think anyone's gonna notice us up here, but still, I want to keep the flashlights to a minimum."
"Whatever you say. You're the mastermind. I'm just the techie."
"You're not just the techie. You're my techie." He knelt behind her and put a hand on her shoulder.
Jake smiled slightly. "Grab me the power strip, will ya?" Hamilton handed her the strip, one of the many components he had surreptitiously installed on the library roof over the past few days to save time that afternoon. Jake plugged in one of the computers, attached a keyboard, and turned it on. A loud cheerful ding let her know that it was working. "OK. All I have to do is set up a local area network. I'll make this one the server, and I'll dial in from my lap-top to activate the program." She stuck the disk in the drive. "It should be totally untraceable to us."
Hamilton shook his head in awe. "Wow." He watched her for a second, then looked at his watch again. "We only have half an hour if we want to catch everyone on their way to dinner."
"No problem. You can start arranging the monitors." She took off her gloves and began typing furiously. It was getting really cold.
Hamilton carried a few of the computer monitors over to the edge of the roof and stacked them on top of each other, testing them for stability. He walked back to get another one but stopped to watch Jake, trying to read her face. Finally he went over and sat down next to her. She was very focused on her work.
"Jake?"
"Yeah?"
"Are you going to tell me what happened with your mom?"
Jake took a deep breath and exhaled, her breath crystallizing in the frozen air. She kept her eyes on the computer screen as she said, "I'm not going to Paris. My mom's too busy."
Hamilton sighed. He didn't know what to say. It was impossible for him to believe that anyone could be too busy to make time for Jake, especially at Christmas.
"But don't worry about me," she said in response to his silence. "I'll be fine."
"Where are you going to go?"
"I'm not sure. Probably New York, but Consuela won't be there, so I don't know."
"You can't spend Christmas alone."
"Don't worry about it."
"Jake!" Hamilton put his hand over the computer screen and made her look at him. "Do you really think I'm not going to worry about this?"
Jake was silent.
"You can stay here," Hamilton said.
"No one can stay in the dorms during winter break."
"I don't mean the dorms. I mean, you'll stay at my house, with me."
"What? I can't do that."
"Sure you can. My parents have had students stay with us lots of times when their holiday plans fell through at the last minute. And especially if it's a friend of mine. They know you. I know they wouldn't mind."
"It's not them, Hamilton. It's me. I need a break. I need to be a girl for a while. I've been a boy for four months straight, and I'm about to go crazy. I wanted to go to Paris and wear dresses and buy an insane number of shoes that I'll never wear."
"If that's all, you could still go to Paris and just not see as much of your mother. I mean, you're pretty good at taking care of yourself."
"I could, but it's too painful to be around all of her stuff and . . . to know that she's nearby but just doesn't have the time to . . ." Jake stopped and changed tracks. "Besides, you won't be there. At least if I go to New York, maybe you can come visit me again."
"If you come to my house, you can see me all the time. And you can be a girl after my parents go to bed. You can paint your toenails and wear dresses and dance around in your underwear and prove to me what a woman you are. In fact, I encourage you to do all of those things."
Jake smiled but shook her head. "No, I can't, Hamilton. But thanks for offering."
Phase three of Hamilton's elaborate prank took them back to the boys' dorm. As they stepped out of the doorway onto the roof, Jake looked at the large satellite dish and remembered the last time she'd been there. It had been with Hamilton, when they'd first met at the beginning of summer session. Hamilton had thought she was a boy, and she had tried her best to play the part. But she'd been so taken by him; she thought he was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. And she couldn't help herself. Something inside her had taken over –
"Hey, remember this place?" Hamilton asked. "Where you launched me on my journey of sexual confusion?"
"I remember."
He pulled her toward him and looked in her eyes. "This was where we had our first kiss."
"As I recall, I did all of the kissing. You just kind of stood there."
"Yeah, I did."
And then something dawned on Jake that she hadn't thought about before. "But you didn't back away."
"No, I didn't."
"Wow . . . " she started.
"What?"
"You're gay!"
"Shut up!" He kissed her, and she tried to stop laughing and kiss him back. It was true, having him around made all the bad things go away. How she would get through three weeks without him she didn't know.
Jake halfheartedly pulled away. "Alright, do you want to get this done or not? I bet Colin Prescott didn't let himself get distracted during a prank."
"I doubt that Colin Prescott ever had a girlfriend." Hamilton kissed her once more then let go of her. Jake opened her backpack and pulled out her laptop. She turned it on and waited for it to boot up while Hamilton walked over to the wall and picked up two folding chairs and a blanket.
He set out one of the chairs for her. "Have a seat."
"Wow, you really planned this well, Fleming. You don't neglect a single detail, do you?"
"Nothing but the best for my partner-in-crime."
Jake sat down and started typing. "I just have to make the remote connection with the server," she explained. "It shouldn't take long."
Hamilton sat down in a chair next to her, thinking about their earlier conversation. "I don't know if I'd be able to visit you in New York again. My parents take the holidays pretty seriously. It's the one time of year that my dad stops being the Dean for a second and becomes just Dad."
Jake looked at him and smiled slightly. "You're lucky."
"Lucky how?"
"You're lucky to have a real family."
"A real family? Is that what you call growing up with two parents who were always busy playing mom and dad to three hundred teenage boys who were all total assholes to me?"
"But at least you have your parents. At least you always knew where you were going to be for Christmas."
"Yeah. Christmas. I got to open a million presents and then have no one to play with." Hamilton paused to rub his hands together and blow on them for warmth. When he continued, the bitterness in his voice eased into a sad irony. "When I was nine, I got these really cool Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers pajamas I'd been begging my parents to get me for Christmas. They weren't like those thin pajamas like the other super hero ones; they were warm, more like long underwear. Anyway, my mom got me two pairs so when I had a friend spend the night we could both wear them. But it was over a year before I had another sleep-over, and I outgrew them."
"Your friends didn't come over very often?"
"Not so much. We're so isolated out here, and it seems really far from town when you're a little kid. Besides, you don't make that many friends when you're home schooled."
"But you went to a real school for a while."
"That was when we first moved here, and I was only seven then. I think my parents didn't like the curriculum at the public school, or maybe it was the environment. I don't remember what their excuse was. I think my mom just wanted to keep an eye on me all day. At the elementary school I'd disappear in the middle of the day, and they'd find me hiding in the coat closet."
"Wait, so your mom taught all your subjects?"
"I had a separate math teacher but other than that, yeah. My mom wasn't much into science, either, at least not the textbook version. So science was mostly just 'appreciating the world around me' type stuff. We'd go out in the day and look at bugs, go out at night and look at stars." As he spoke, Hamilton gazed up at the clear night sky.
Jake watched his face, watched him smile slightly as he remembered. His life, his past, was so much the opposite of hers. So much time with his mother when he would rather have been at school with friends.
"Anyway," Hamilton summed up, "mostly I just hung out by myself."
"Yeah, I know that story."
"I guess you probably do."
Jake's attention was pulled back to the computer screen by a beeping. "OK, we've got the connection."
Hamilton turned to her with a grin and raised his eyebrows. "We're almost there, baby."
"Almost." She opened her backpack, pulled out a disk and slipped it into the drive. "Here goes nothing."
"Here goes project 'Merry Christmas Rawley.'" Hamilton leaned forward and looked down at the snow-covered quad, now dark except for the pools beneath the path lights, where students hurried toward the dining hall for their last supper before leaving campus. The bus for the airport wouldn't leave until seven the next morning, so almost everyone was still around. Hamilton looked at Jake, who was obviously trying to suppress her own misery and put on an excited face for him. "I guess it's not such a Merry Christmas, is it?" he asked.
Jake shook her head and tried to lighten the mood. The last thing she wanted was to ruin his holiday. "So, besides Power Rangers pajamas, what else did you want for Christmas when you were a kid?"
Hamilton was quiet for a moment, knowing the answer but hesitant to say it. "A little brother or sister."
"Really?"
"I was always asking my parents to have another kid."
"What would they say?"
Hamilton shrugged. "They just bought me a puppy instead. Every time I asked if they were going to have another baby, they gave me another puppy. Pretty soon I stopped asking. I mean, there are only so many dogs I can walk in a given day."
"So that's how you ended up with so many dogs."
"I just wanted somebody to play with, you know?"
"Somebody to wear the matching pajamas?"
"Yeah." Hamilton turned to Jake, and she took her eyes away from her computer screen long enough to gaze back at him for a moment. She looked into his clear blue eyes, and she could see the child that he was, not so long ago. It broke her heart to think of him so lonely.
They stared at each other silently, then turned their attention to the library rooftop across the quad, where the hijacked computer monitors were stacked near the edge to form a four-by-three grid, tilting slightly forward so as to be viewable from the ground below. All the screens lit up at once.
"All right, we're live and on the air," Jake said. "Time for lights out."
"Here we go." Hamilton's excitement came back to him, and he draped an arm around Jake's shoulders. It was all going according to plan.
Jake hit a few keys on her laptop, and the gymnasium building went completely dark.
"Gym's out," Hamilton said.
Jake punched a few more keys. "Girls' Dorm."
"Check."
"Boys' Dorm."
"Check."
Hacking into the electrical system to create a blackout – and get everyone's attention -- had been Jake's idea, and Hamilton loved it. He saw one last building succumb to darkness, so that only the library remained live. "Dining hall -- check. Cue the music."
Jake punched a few more keys. "Merry Christmas."
From somewhere above the quad, the familiar opening strains of a Christmas carol broke the silent night and boomed across the campus.
Oh come, all ye faithful
Joyful and triumphant . . .
And come they did. With the dining hall darkened, several students wandered outside and looked up to see the only light in the quad coming down from the roof of the library. They ran back inside and brought out other students.
Jake and Hamilton leaned forward and rested their arms on the ledge before them, watching the gathering crowd.
"I just think it'd be better with real fireworks, or at least some Roman candles," Hamilton complained.
"Hey, I've got nothing against pyrotechnics, but firecrackers are illegal in this state. I'm just trying to keep you out of jail. Besides, I think our computer version works just fine."
The computer screens lit up with colorful bursts of fireworks, the noisy crackling and blasts of canon-fire overwhelming the closing stanza of 'Oh Come, All Ye Faithful.' The sound system ratcheted up with a burst of heavy metal guitar, as Victorian choral music gave way to Quiet Riot's 'Cum On Feel the Noise.'
The quad below them was now full of people watching the display, and only now did the real show begin. The initial fireworks were replaced by images that Hamilton had created and Jake had split to fill up the twelve screens as if they were one – scratchy photos of Rawley teachers and students, colored over with fluorescent pink and green and animated like a rock video. They were an accumulation of photographs that Hamilton had secretly taken over the last year: the football team throwing up in the lake after a drunken celebration, a gym teacher sneaking a cigarette, Finn grabbing his crotch before yet another group of entering freshmen as he explained to them where 'passion' comes from. Laughter and cheers erupted from the ever-growing throng of students. A photo of the Dean kissing his wife by the lake elicited a collective "Awww" from the crowd. It was all in good taste, some of the photos a bit risqué, some a bit embarrassing for the individuals involved, but none of it mean.
Hamilton took it all in, admiring his own handiwork. He desperately wanted to go down and take credit for it all. He turned to Jake and was rewarded with her awestruck grin as she watched with her eyes glued to the display. For a moment he just watched her watching the show.
Jake was amazed. She'd seen most of the pictures before, since Hamilton had done a lot of the work on her computer, with its superior version of Photoshop. But he had put the final show together by himself, partly as a surprise for her. And it was even more impressive on the big screen they had created.
Jake turned to Hamilton, and he was looking at her, watching her reaction. She could tell by the look on his face that he didn't really care what the crowd in the quad thought; the only opinion that really mattered to him was hers. He so wanted to make her happy. And she wanted him to be happy.
And she wanted him to have someone to play with on Christmas morning.
"Hamilton?"
"Yeah?"
"You really think your parents wouldn't mind if –"
"I know they wouldn't," Hamilton interrupted eagerly. "And even if they did, I'd talk them into it."
Jake took a deep breath and bit her lip. "Then I want to spend Christmas at your place."
Beaming, Hamilton reached over and took her hand. "Jake, it's gonna be the best Christmas ever."
"Yeah, I think it will be."
Finally, the flashing images stopped, the music faded, and a message scrolled across the monitors:
HO, HO, HO! MERRY CHRISTMAS, RAWLEY! REMEMBER, SANTA KNOWS WHEN YOU'VE BEEN NAUGHTY – AND HE LIKES IT.
As the word 'naughty' scrolled across, a bright flare popped up into the sky overhead and burst into colored flame.
"Hamilton!" Jake yelled. Only then did she notice the tiny device in his hand.
Hamilton smirked proudly. "Did you think you're the only one who can set up a remote trigger?" Jake shot him a dirty look, but he shrugged it off. "Hey, one Roman candle never hurt anybody."
Jake shook her head but laughed in spite of herself. She leaned back as the show ended. The crowd of students below erupted with applause and cheers.
Hamilton threw his arm around Jake and pulled her close to him. He kissed her ear and murmured, "Not bad for our first try, huh?"
"We're only freshmen," she teased. "We've got time to work on it."
"I gotta say, Pratt, we make a pretty good team."
Jake rested her head on Hamilton's shoulder. "Colin Prescott, eat your heart out."
THE END