The Twelfth Night Before Christmas

1. The Twelfth Night Before Christmas

The Twelfth Night Before Christmas

Scene I

[A dingy apartment.]

Viola drinks, red-eyed, on her brother’s rundown futon in his messy apartment.

On the twelfth night before Christmas, I lose my mind.

Temporary insanity is the only reason I can think of for what I decide to do. You see, on the twelfth night before Christmas, I agree to become Santa Claus. Not the real one, mind you. I’m not that crazy.

Just a little crazy.

And sad.

And drunk.

And desperate.

“Next message,” my twin brother says, holding my phone out of reach despite my clumsy attempts to retrieve it.

“I told you I don’t want to play this anymore.”

“Uh, uh, uh.” I have no doubt he’d be wagging a finger in my face were his arm, the one not holding my phone, not broken. “If you want your phone so badly to call Satan—”

“Mal,” I correct.

“Same thing. If you want your phone, you first play my game: We listen to Asshat’s voice memos and every time he asks you to do something, you take a shot.

If at any point, we reach a message that is just a loving one with no requests, I’ll give you your phone back.

Then, you're free to pathetically beg your cheating ex to take you back.”

I pick up a cushion off the couch and throw it at him. It doesn’t go anywhere near him since we’ve already been playing this game for a while and I’m quite drunk. Extremely drunk.

Sebastian tsks at me. “Are you really throwing stuff at your injured brother?”

I glare at him. “You called me pathetic.”

He reaches over and pats the top of my head. “It was the nicest word available.”

“You’re a dick,” I slur. Seriously, when I agreed to play this game, I had no idea I’d lose so badly.

“No, this is what a dick sounds like.”

He presses play on another voice memo. Mal’s rich, deep voice rings out.

It sends a pang, a literal pang, into my heart.

“Hey, you. I’m running a little late coming home from the hospital.

I’d still like to get to the gym tonight, so if you could pack dinner up into a container for me to eat on the way, that’d be great. I love—”

I hold my breath. We’ve listened to maybe a dozen messages and he’s yet to say he loves me. This might be enough for me to get my phone back. I can call Mal and tell him that I forgive him, and I can get my life back and—

On the voice memo, Mal clears his throat. “—I’d love for it to have some protein in it this time. Just please, for once, consider my fueling needs. Do you have any idea how hard it is to go to the gym after the kind of day I had at work…”

The voice memo continues, discussing how hard his day was and what his protein needs are.

Sebastian stares at the phone like he can’t believe what he’s hearing.

Fair enough—had I not been getting those voice memos for the better part of a decade, I might not believe it myself.

It’s just that Mal always leaves voice memos when he’s in a hurry.

He doesn’t have time for the lovey stuff.

Face to face, he’s much more affectionate.

Usually.

Sometimes.

In the beginning.

“Viola,” Sebastian starts. He doesn’t finish the sentence.

I take a drink of the increasingly empty bottle of vodka and slide off the couch onto the floor. The floorboards creak in commiseration with my humiliation. I can’t bear to look at my twin. To have him look at me. To have him see how low I’ve fallen.

Instead of looking at him, I fix my eyes on the row of plants on a table by the window.

All the plants are dead, apparently for some time.

It kind of makes me mad, considering Sebastian asked me to water them all summer while he was off surfing.

Every day I came over and took care of those little babies. I don’t think he’s watered them since.

And now the man who can’t even take care of some plants is pitying me.

Fantastic.

If I could dissolve into his disgusting floor, I would. Live among the dust bunnies with nothing to do except haunt the darkened hell beneath his couch.

Sebastian slides down off the couch to sit beside me on the dusty floor. He doesn’t say anything, for once. We just sit and look at his dead plants.

“Is it bad that I still want to get back with him?” I ask eventually.

“Yes. Very.”

I lean my head onto his shoulder. “It’s just…

Look at me. Without him, I have nothing.

No apartment and no way of saving up for a new one until my work opens back up in January.

I have no plan. No... anything.” Tears fall from my eyes and soak through his t-shirt.

I know how pathetic I sound—how pathetic my tears are.

Mal always said that my crying, my neediness for validation, is exhausting. “Sorry. It’s just the alcohol talking.”

Sebastian sighs. “No, Viola. That’s him talking.”

“Facts talking. Right now, I don’t have an apartment or a job—”

Sebastian leaps up. Rude, considering he was weight-bearing, so I fall to the floor.

“You can have my job!” He looks excited, like he’s sharing a good idea instead of the worst idea in the whole world. “We’ll do the old twin-switcheroo.”

“Your job?” I ask. “As an almost professional surfer?”

He laughs, shaking his head. “No, my job as Santa!”

I must be drunker than I thought. I'm almost certain that my twin brother isn’t Santa. I feel like that’s something I would have picked up on during our childhood.

“You remember? I just got hired at Snowspruce Christmas Village, but I won’t be able to work there now since I broke my arm. You can just show up in costume, say you’re me, and no one will know. You can keep all the money and I’ll be able to keep the job lined up for next year. Win-win!”

Win-win. Sure.

Nothing is ever win-win with Sebastian. It’s a win for him while he whisks off to follow whatever his heart desires, while I pick up the pieces after him—water his plants, break up with his girlfriend, clean the moldy food out of his fridge.

“Just tell them you broke your arm, they’ll understand and still hire you back for next year.”

He shakes his head. “They wouldn’t. They’ll think I’m flaky.”

“You are flaky,” I say. He’s also spinning, although there’s a chance that’s just the vodka playing its tricky games.

“But they don’t know that. They can’t know that. Please, Viola. Just pretend to be me for a couple weeks, and everything will be okay. For both of us.”

Just pretend to be him. Like it’s that easy. “Seb, I’m a woman. They’ll know the second they look at me.”

He looks me over. “I’ll get you an extra-bushy beard.”

I stand up, stumbling only slightly as the apartment decides to jolt suddenly. “I still look like a woman,” I say, gesturing vaguely in my direction.

Sebastian makes a stupid, scrunchy face. “You have mannish shoulders.”

I try to hit him, but he somehow manages to evade me. The sudden motion makes my stomach churn.

“Okay, easy.” Sebastian grabs my shoulders and steers me towards the bathroom.

The walk does me a bit of good. I’m steadier by the time he parks me in front of the mirror. “Look,” he says, turning me to look at myself in his grimy mirror. He puts a hand over the lower part of my face. “Put a beard and a hat on, no one will know.”

That doesn’t do wonders for my newly single confidence. Not that he cares.

“People will know, and I’ll get fired.”

He shrugs. “Then you’ll be back here, but at least you’ll have been too busy to call Dr. Evil for a couple days.”

“And you think getting fired will be a win for me? That’ll be the ticket to turn things around for me?” I try for acerbic, but the sob in the middle takes some of the sting out of my words.

Sebastian gives me a side hug. He meets my eyes in the mirror and offers me a little half-smile. “The beauty about being at rock bottom is that you can do whatever the fuck you want. It can’t possibly get any worse.”

It can’t get any worse. Isn’t that just the most hopeful thing I’ve heard all day? Except, it actually is. I’ve considered all the ways my life has fallen apart in the last two days, but I’ve never thought about the fact that it can’t get any worse.

No one’s life has ever become worse by becoming Santa.

“Fuck it. Sure,” I mumble.

That’s all the encouragement Sebastian needs.

Faster than I could say ‘employment fraud’, my brother is off to his room to get his newly issued Santa suit.

Thus, leaving me alone to look at my drunken face in the mirror and imagine myself as Santa Claus.

It’s stupid. Idiotic. Moronic. But also, maybe fun?

I’d become convinced that all I had to look forward to was crying on my brother’s couch until January. But this? Being Santa at a Christmas village, bringing joy to kids? If it works, it just might make me the littlest bit happy.

God, I’d love to be happy.

Truly, I’d settle for not being sad.

And that is how, on the twelfth night before Christmas, I wind up staying up until two in the morning, dressed in my brother’s Santa suit, practicing my ho ho hos in his disgusting bathroom.

“Alright, Snowspruce Christmas Village,” I say, adjusting my belly and staring into my eyes that are as red as my suit. “Santa Claus is coming to town.”

My last thought before I pass out on the filthy floor is that there is no possible way this could ever work.

It would take a Christmas miracle. Still, I dream of Santa suits and smiling faces—my own among them.

Sebastian enters the bathroom and puts a blanket over his sleeping sister. He sighs, shaking his head.