The crazy thing was it worked. For a while.

Ten years of Christmas, Oklahoma’s tourist trappings helped bring the town back from the depression it’d fallen into when Chandler Chickens closed down. The grand plan was for everything to reference Christmas: Mitzi’s Café & Pie Shop became the Gingerbread Café, the Springfield Grocery Store became Claus Kitchen, Buddy’s Repairs became Santa’s Sleigh Repair, and so on.

But then Ralph Tater-Hall embezzled several million dollars from the city’s flush coffers and absconded to parts unknown before he could be arrested.

Christmas never really recovered.

It was six years since then. Six long and increasingly lackluster years. You wouldn’t think a town could go to seed in less time than the entire run of the TV series Lost, but you’d be wrong. It could and it did.

I was there.

Which contributed to why I wanted to leave.

To be fair, Mom probably helped foster that longing, too. For as long as I could recall she talked about how she had always planned to leave Christmas when she graduated from high school and make her mark on the world, but “life got in the way.” That was a nice, if not subtle, way of referring to the fact my dad knocked her up their senior year (with me) and from that point on all thoughts of her leaving were tucked away.

But I was starting to think those plans were merely dormant and not forgotten.

She’d never said anything. Directly. More like she’d use me as an example of someone who “had the whole world ahead of her,” could go anywhere, be anything if I played my cards right. And I would sometimes catch a faraway longing in her blue eyes as she watched me, especially after I achieved something. I think she considered my scholastic achievements as a sort of escape pod.

She was the one who brought up Barrington to me.

By the time I reached my freshman year at Christmas HS—home of the Sonic Santas!—the seeds had already been planted that getting into an elite, out-of-state boarding school would be a real coup. It’s possible I would have wanted to go without Mom’s influence, but there’s no way to know for certain.

Chicken/egg. Mom/me. Same/same.

I remember I was in the middle of studying for my AP US History exam when she came into my bedroom and set the catalog for Barrington on my desk. It had been shiny and almost book-sized, like the Restoration Hardware megacatalog, with a photo of the school grounds and the main deep-red brick administration building I now know was Remington Hall.

She’d brought many other schools to my attention before, but I knew right away this one was different.

“Here,” Mom had said, still in the skirt suit she favored for work. “This is the place.”