When the Christmas Eve activities died down, everyone trailed off to bed except for Hazel. She stayed in the living room and checked her phone every few seconds to see if Jeanette or Shelby had texted that they were on their way to pick her up yet. Hazel was eighteen – almost nineteen – and home in Multioak on her first collegiate winter break. Now that she had moved out, Hazel didn’t exactly need permission to leave her parents’ house at 11:30 p.m., but she preferred to sneak out anyway, mostly for nostalgic reasons, although she also didn’t want to have a conversation with either of her parents about where she was going and why and when she would be back.

Hazel preferred waiting in the living room to her old bedroom because, with most of her favorite possessions transferred to her apartment at school, the bedroom was a depressingly diminished version of itself. And besides, sitting on the couch and gazing at the Christmas tree between phone-checks was nice. It would have been even nicer if Hazel’s mom hadn’t decided to switch back to multicolored lights on the tree after years of warm yellowish-white lights. Hazel had advocated for an upgrade from multicolored to white lights when she was twelve, and her mom had seemed to agree at the time that white lights were less tacky, but Hazel had been out of the house for one Christmas decoration season, and the multicolored lights were back. Hazel’s mom said it was a “trial year” to re-evaluate her preference. But even with a less-than-deal light situation, Hazel enjoyed the festive solitude. Stillness held benevolent dominion over the entire house.

Hazel and her immediate family – mom, dad, two younger brothers – had opened one gift a piece after dinner, a Christmas Eve tradition stretching to Hazel’s mom’s childhood. The remainder of the gifts were clustered around the base of the tree, awaiting the arrival of all three of Hazel’s surviving grandparents early the following morning.

Utilizing her sharpest tooth, Hazel chewed through the plastic tag fastener on her new scarf. She’d wear the scarf out in the cold tonight with Jeanette and Shelby, if they ever showed up. Hazel didn’t feel like walking all the way to the garbage can in the kitchen, so she slipped the separated tag and fastener pieces down inside the couch cushions. By the time her mom discovered them, too much time would have passed for her to be annoyed, and she’d probably just assume it had happened inadvertently in the present-opening chaos.

Should she text her as-yet-un-broken-up-with boyfriend, Claude? This thought dispelled the niceness of the moment Hazel was having with the Christmas tree and her new scarf and the quiet and her family home. Thoughts of Claude tended to have that effect on the niceness of various moments of Hazel’s life. She wanted to end the relationship, but she also wanted to have a good reason, and Claude had not yet provided one. But waiting for him to do so made Hazel feel tense. What form would such a reason take? That unpredictability was part of the reason she wanted to be finished with Claude.

Hazel didn’t think Claude was cheating on her. She had no reason to believe he was, or ever would be, violent. She doubted he was selling drugs or committing other forms of crime. He wasn’t even rude or dismissive or condescending. But Hazel got the impression he was hiding aspects of himself, and that made her uneasy. And she didn’t think the aspects of himself that Claude was hiding were sinister, but why would he hide innocuous aspects of himself? Hazel didn’t even think Claude was hiding aspects of himself that she would find unattractive, or that she may have given him mistaken reason to believe she would find unattractive. It was as if he was hiding aspects of himself just to see if he could, almost like a personal challenge.

But Hazel’s evidence for any of this was not substantial. It boiled down to a few strange interactions she had witnessed between Claude and other guys on campus. The guys would walk up and say things to Claude – Hazel wished she could remember specific examples – and he would feign ignorance or confusion. She assumed the ignorance and confusion were feigned. The other guys seemed perplexed by Claude’s responses. What were some of the things they’d said to Claude? The problem was that whatever they’d said, it had all sounded so inconsequential that it was hard to recall. And when Hazel would ask Claude about these brief exchanges after the fact, he’d just say something like, “Oh, that guy’s in one of my classes” or, “Yeah, that guy knows Tad,” or, “I actually can’t remember that guy’s name,” and he’d never address the substance of the conversations, vague and truncated though they were.

Hazel decided not to text Claude. They’d had a conflict-free video chat earlier in the evening. That was plenty. For all he knew, she was asleep in bed, visions of sugar plums – she didn’t know what sugar plums were – dancing in her head.

In truth, Hazel hoped that her Claude problem, as well as many other problems in her life, would soon be either resolved or supplanted by new and different problems that she hadn’t yet tired of turning over in her mind, problems that were not stale, problems that were not beginning to fuse to her identity.

Hazel felt uneasy about her boyfriend and wanted to break up with him, but was anxious about doing so. She hadn’t done well in her first-semester classes, she didn’t like her major, but switching majors didn’t sound appealing, either, and she didn’t know what she wanted to do after college because any career at which she felt she’d be competent also seemed like it would be unfulfilling. She felt almost no connection to her college friends, and it was hard to imagine that she ever would. Her apartment didn’t feel like home, her roommates were not fun, and the town where her college was located was just a town where a college was located, not the “college town” she’d been led to believe it was.

These were not problems she should be forced to endure for any longer. They were so typical, so tedious. Yet, Hazel knew it was not within her power to separate herself from them. But this visit home, she hoped, would put her in position for outside forces to act upon her. At school, Hazel could feel the impossibility of escaping from her rut, she could feel the inevitability of her trajectory. But here? In Multioak? Things felt different. Her presence was an invitation for change. Good change, bad change, net-neutral change, but when the holidays ended and it was time for Hazel to return to school, she hoped that her immediate circumstances would be unrecognizable.

How might this happen?

Hazel had been born and raised in Multioak. She was one of Multioak’s native daughters. She belonged to Multioak. That had to matter. That had to count for something. Multioak would intervene as she had heard it had for so many others. Multioak would disrupt. Multioak would meddle. And Hazel would welcome it all with no qualifications. Bring it on. That’s what she was thinking: bring it on. She was desperate. Let her understanding of reality be shaken to its very foundations. Let her conception of truth be uprooted. Let her most fundamental beliefs be engulfed in a great conflagration and reduced to-

Hazel’s phone vibrated. The unpunctuated text message was from Shelby: on our way jeanettes driving ten minutes.

Hazel responded. I’ll wait at the end of my driveway. She wrapped her new scarf around her neck and crept to the hall closet for her coat, her hat, her mittens, her boots. She donned them all, slunk out of the house, and locked the door behind her. Hazel’s dad had shoveled the front walk and driveway yesterday morning, but light snow had, to everyone’s delight, begun to fall again during dinner, which meant the icy spots on the pavement were now veiled by a skiff of fresh powder. Hazel considered cutting across the yard, but disturbing the uniformity of the deeper snow felt wrong, so she hazarded the more treacherous route with a practiced shuffle and arrived at the mailbox by the curb without so much as an almost-slip, her way illuminated by the many-hued net lights her dad had draped over every dormant bush.

As she waited for the headlights of Jeanette’s car to appear, Hazel realized that she was not wearing enough layers. For cruising around in the car looking at outdoor Christmas displays with the heater running, sure, but not for sledding in the game preserve. But she didn’t want to be the one to suggest cruising instead of sledding. She wanted to be the kind of person who would be on the side of active, invigorating fun, not passive, comfortable fun. And besides that, she thought it more likely that Multioak would intervene to change her life if she was sledding in the game preserve. So, she would live with being cold. And maybe once she’d trudged up the hill towing a sled behind her a few times, she’d be glad she’d erred on the side of fewer layers.

By the time Jeanette pulled her white mid-sized SUV up to the curb, Hazel had her jaw clenched to keep her teeth from chattering. Shelby was already occupying the front passenger’s seat, so Hazel climbed into the back seat by herself, slid to the middle, decided to forego the seatbelt, and willed herself to soak up as much heat as she could to reestablish an acceptable core temperature before she was again exposed to the frigid Christmas Eve air. Music was playing through the stereo, but too quietly for Hazel to recognize. The sleds were loaded in the back, the third-row seat lowered to accommodate a toboggan along with two saucer sleds, one new and pink, one old and red.

Shelby, bundled like a toddler, asked Hazel how school was going. Were her classes hard? Were her professors nice? Were they smart? Were they funny? Jeanette, almost unrecognizable with her teeth fixed, asked Hazel if she had a boyfriend. Was he hot? Was he nice? Was he funny? These were pieces of information that her two ostensible best friends should have already known, but Hazel had not stayed in touch with them. She had been away, they had been here. She had been studying at a semi-prestigious university, they had been sort-of attending a local community college. She had been miserable, they had been whatever they’d been before she left them behind, more or less.

Jeanette drove lazily. She and Shelby both had thermoses full of hot chocolate, but it did not seem coordinated, so Hazel didn’t feel excluded. Just envious. Although cruising around and looking at outdoor Christmas decorations was not the goal of the outing, it happened naturally on the way out of Multioak. In terms of what looked good and what looked bad, Hazel and her friends were on the same page. They all valued thematic consistency. They all hated messiness.

The game preserve began a short distance beyond Multioak’s border. As the number of residences outside her window dwindled, Hazel noted that the clouds had begun to part and the moon shone through where it could, which would improve sledding conditions. The sign indicating the game preserve boundary came and went, and the road transitioned from snow-covered asphalt to snow-covered gravel, growling and crackling under the SUV’s wheels. Trees grew thick on all sides, and the road twisted through them as if trying to stay out of their way, trying to avoid their ire.

After ten minutes, the road rose to the top of a ridge and a smaller access road split off of it and dived into the woods, a luminescent white strip leading to whatever it was to which someone had decided someone needed access. This was the sledding hill. Jeanette guided the SUV to the side of the road and parked. The girls piled out. Hazel, against the odds, had actually started to become over-warm in the SUV, so the initial bite upon reentering the cold felt almost refreshing.

The new pink saucer sled belonged to Shelby, so she started the fun by taking it on its maiden voyage. Of course, the first trip down the hill isn’t the most fun. It takes a few runs to create the furrow of packed snow required to build up real speed. Shelby made it two-thirds of the way down the hill before her initial momentum was used up and she came to a sluggish halt. She stood and began the return trudge to the top from where Hazel and Jeanette waited. “We should all ride the toboggan together,” said Hazel. “That’ll make a nice track for the saucers.”

Her friends agreed.

“Jeanette, you ride in the front,” said Hazel. “Then, Shelby, you get on next. And then I’ll push you from behind to get us going and jump on the back.”

This should have worked, but Hazel misjudged the force of her own push, missed her jump, and the toboggan barreled down the hill without her, aided by the partial track Shelby had already established. Hazel, kneeling in the snow, feeling the cold seeping through her insulated leggings, watched as the toboggan swept past the point where Shelby’s saucer sled had stopped, bearing her friends swiftly to the point where the road leveled out and beyond before hitting a bump, skewing off course, striking a small stump, and dumping them in a drift where they lay and held their sides and cackled.

“Are you OK?” called Hazel. The snow dampened her voice.

Her friends didn’t respond. Maybe they hadn’t heard her. But they probably wouldn’t be laughing so hard if they were hurt.

As their laughter died down, Hazel waited for Jeanette and Shelby to stand and brush themselves off, but they didn’t. They remained two friend-shaped patches of darkness embedded in the drift.

“Hello?” called Hazel. She rose to her feet. She was about to call down to her friends again, when the murmur of casual conversation floated up to her. They were chatting. Hazel couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the tone was pleasant, unhurried, comfortable. She longed, then, to unburden herself to her friends, to join them in the drift and share her distresses, to listen to their trite advice, to open up in a way that would re-forge the connections they once shared, and in doing that, she couldn’t help but think, make herself a more attractive candidate for Multioak’s intervention. Didn’t that just seem like the kind of situation in which unforeseen events might impose and change her life? Lying in a snow drift in the woods bonding with old friends in the first hour of Christmas morning?

Hazel was considering whether she should sled down to her friends or walk down to them when she saw them sit up. They had fallen silent. She saw Jeanette pointing into the woods. She saw Shelby rest her hand on Jeanette’s shoulder. Hazel wanted to call out to them again, but sensed from their body language that she should not. She saw them stand, then, and wade out of the drift, moving with tentative strides in the direction Jeanette had pointed.

Hazel had taken three steps down the hill in pursuit of her friends when she heard the approach of another vehicle on the road behind her. She turned and saw the growing glow of headlights coming around the corner. Her first impulse was to scurry farther down the hill or duck behind Jeanette’s SUV or crouch behind a tree, anything to get out of sight. But then she realized: no. No, she shouldn’t hide because this was the form of Multioak’s intervention, almost certainly. She had become separated from her friends for a reason, kept back for this exact encounter. Wasn’t it odd for someone else to be at this place at this time on this night? Wasn’t this the sort of coincidental crossing of paths that could – no, must – lead to the dramatic transformation of her life?

The car rounded the corner. It moved slowly, driven with wisdom. It had to make its appointment with Hazel. It was almost there. Then, anything could happen. Maybe it would strike her, maybe it would strike a tree and she would extricate its passengers before they were caught in the explosion, maybe she would be invited inside, maybe she would be pulled inside, maybe her future husband would step out, maybe her future business partner would step out, maybe she would discover the car was driven by no one and that she was supposed to take the wheel and allow her instinct to guide her in a direction never before traveled by another person. Hazel positioned herself next to the road and waited. She was glad her coat was a bright purple color. She was highly visible.

The car slowed and stopped next to Hazel. She could not see through the window, could not see who or what was inside, if anyone or anything. Then, the window whirred open, the glass retreating into the door panel, and the inside of the car was revealed. Two people smiled out at Hazel. It took her a few seconds to realize that she recognized the couple. It was Cole and Selene Barstus, good friends of her parents.

“Hi, Hazel!” said Cole.

“Hi, Mr. Barstus,” said Hazel.

“Hello, Hazel,” said Selene.

“Hi, Mrs. Barstus,” said Hazel.

Cole and Selene smiled out at her. They looked tired, happy. Warm. Could they really be Multioak’s means of intervention? Even unwittingly? It would have to be unwittingly.

“So,” said Selene. She wore those thin, cotton gloves that are practically useless. “How’s school going, Hazel?”

Hazel suppressed a groan. “It’s going well,” she said.

“And how was your first semester?” asked Cole. His coat had a big, brown, faux-fur collar. Hazel wondered if he had tried to match the collar to his hair. If so, he’d done a bad job, because his hair was not that shade of brown, or any shade of brown.

Hazel didn’t understand how Cole’s question was different than his wife’s, so she answered it the same way. “It’s going well.”

Cole and Selene both nodded as if pleased by this new and unexpected insight.

“And how were your classes?” asked Selene.

Hazel wanted to shriek. Had her first two responses not sufficiently addressed this? “They’re all going well,” she said. “Everything’s going well.”

“We’re so happy to hear that,” said Cole. “Not that anyone was worried, of course. Everyone knew you’d be successful there. Are you learning a lot?”

“Yes,” said Hazel.

“You like your major?” asked Selene.

“Yes.”

“And you like your minor?” asked Cole.

“Yes.”

“How’s your schedule looking for next semester?” asked Selene.

“Great.” Hazel watched in quiet agony as the Barstuses tried to think of more inquiries in the same vein.

               Cole’s face brightened as another question occurred to him. “And what do you want to do with your degree?”

               Hazel played dumb. “Do with it?”

               “Yes,” said Selene. “What do you want to do with it?” She was enthused by her husband’s bold leap into the future.

               “As in, like, my career?” asked Hazel.

               Cole and Selene nodded, each in their own style.

               “I guess that’s what I’m at school to figure out,” said Hazel.

               Selene and Cole chuckled at the mild cleverness of this reply. “It was nice to see you,” said Cole. “Tell your parents we said ‘hi.’” The window began to glide upward.

               “Wait,” said Hazel.

               The window stopped. Cole and Selene regarded Hazel indulgently.

               “Was that all?” asked Hazel.

               Cole and Selene made exaggerated thinking faces so Hazel would be sure to know they were thinking. They looked at each other, then back at her.

               “Oh!” said Selene. She bumped her forehead with the heel of her palm. “We forgot to say ‘Merry Christmas!’” The car rolled away, the Barstuses’ laughter contained within by the completed closing of Selene’s window. Hazel noted that remembering that one had not said ‘Merry Christmas’ was not the same as saying ‘Merry Christmas,’ even if the mistake was acknowledged aloud and both words were uttered in sequence within said acknowledgement.

               But, more importantly, what had just happened? Or failed to happen? Too late, Hazel realized that Multioak’s intervention may have contained a test component. Had her dishonest, terse answers kept the life-changing portion of her encounter with Cole and Selene from coming to pass? Had her preconceived ideas of what the moment would look like prevented her from experiencing the moment properly? Had she missed her chance? Or had she simply misinterpreted the moment, assuming it was happening when it was not actually happening at all? Still, why hadn’t Cole or Selene asked Hazel what she was doing in the game preserve in the early hours of Christmas morning? Why hadn’t they felt compelled to explain what they were doing in the game preserve in the early hours of Christmas morning? There was definitely something Multioaky, something Multioakily peculiar about the whole thing. And yet, in the end, Hazel had been dragged through her least favorite dialogue for the hundredth time, and that was all. Every one of the problems Hazel had prior to the conversation with the Bartuses remained firmly in place, and her perspective on each of them was no different than it had been since they had reached maturity a few weeks ago.

               She shivered. The cold was inside of her again, which reminded her of where she was and what she had been doing just before she noticed the car and thought it was coming to prevent her current state from persisting to this point in her existence. Something strange had been happening to her friends at the bottom of the hill. Something out of the ordinary. Hazel thought that there might still be time to get in on it. She could run – or sled – to the toppled toboggan and follow Jeanette and Shelby’s boot prints into the forest. Maybe they needed help! Maybe the Bartuses and their inane questions had been Multioak’s way of distracting her long enough for her friends to fall into peril deep enough to warrant Hazel’s rescue mission, and this was now the beginning of the part of the moment that Hazel would recognize as the catalyst for the impending changes in her life.

               Hazel whirled from the road and hurried back to the crest of the hill just in time to meet Jeanette and Shelby as they concluded their return. They both looked different than they ever had in crucial ways. Drastic ways. Permanent ways.

Neither of them wanted to explain where they had been or what had happened to them. Neither of them wanted to sled anymore. They wanted to go back to their homes. They had left the toboggan tipped on its side next to the stump at the bottom of the hill. The toboggan belonged to Jeanette’s dad, but she didn’t care that he’d be mad that she’d left it behind. Hazel cared, though. It was his toboggan. He’d be disappointed if it was lost, and it would be inconvenient for him to have to make a special trip out here just to retrieve it. He’d be mad. He wouldn’t understand why his daughter had been so inconsiderate. Why his daughter and her friends had been so inconsiderate. Jeanette agreed to wait for Hazel if she wanted to go get the toboggan and pull it back up to the SUV.

               Hazel had hiked most of the way down the hill when she realized that she had not ridden a sled even once on this sledding trip, and that she was not going to. When she got to the toboggan and set it right-side up, Hazel paused to contemplate her friends’ tracks leading in among the trees. Although the tracks were only minutes old, they felt ancient, like prehistoric footprints left in the dried-up clay along the bank of a long-departed river. She could follow them if she wanted, but they would not lead her to whatever her friends had experienced without her. That was over, and she had missed it.

 

               At home, Hazel found that someone had unplugged the Christmas tree lights while she was gone. The living room did not welcome her back with coziness. It was just dark. The Christmas tree was an ominous silhouette.

Hazel went into her parents’ bedroom and hissed the word “mom” until her mom woke with a frightened gasp. When Hazel explained her reason for disturbing her, Hazel’s mom said she didn’t know who had unplugged the lights, but that she had thought everyone was in bed, and she also pointed out that she thought Hazel didn’t like the multicolored lights anyway so what did she care if they were plugged in or not, especially at this hour? And why had Hazel stuffed the trash from her scarf in the couch cushions instead of putting in the minimal effort needed to throw it out?

               Finding her way into her old bed at last, Hazel closed her eyes and tried to resist peeking at the gaps on the walls where her favored posters and pictures had been taken down and with her when she moved so they could make her college apartment feel more like home. Which had not worked. All that maneuver had accomplished was to make home now feel less like home.

But Hazel had larger concerns. Why had Multioak not taken an obvious opportunity to intervene in her life? Was she not worthy, somehow? Had her time spent away from Multioak rendered her unsusceptible to its influence? Had Multioak intervened in Jeanette and Shelby’s lives while Hazel suffered the indignities of her parents’ friends’ curiosity just to taunt her, to wound her? Or had the intervention gone exactly as Multioak had intended, but she was misinterpreting, misapplying, somehow resisting the changes it had meant to work in her?

Or maybe everything was on schedule. Maybe everything was going according to plan. Maybe these specific uncertainties were necessary to the process. Maybe answering these questions, or even accepting the lack of answers, was part of the journey.

Hazel sat up in bed.

The net lights on the bushes outside made the blinds on her bedroom window glow a combination of all primary and some secondary colors.

Her whole life, Hazel had heard stories of the kinds of things that happened to people in Multioak. Unlikely things, incredible things, impossible things, supernatural things. Never to people she knew directly, but friends of friends, cousins of cousins, exes of exes, acquaintances of neighbors, bandmates of coworkers. Why not her? What was different about her? Was the mere fact of desiring Multioak’s intervention disqualifying? Or was she not the right kind of person?

Kicking her covers down, Hazel swung her legs off of her bed and lowered her bare feet to the cool, hardwood floor with which her parents had replaced her pale green carpet after she moved out. Maybe it was all a matter of role. In all these accounts of other people’s lives changed for better or worse by Multioakish occurrences, there were mysterious strangers, strange mystery men and women speaking in cryptic tones, behaving unusually or reacting unusually to usual behavior or reacting to unusual behavior as if it were usual, and at every step they broadened horizons, shattered perceptions, shifted paradigms, shook foundations, challenged notions, rattled categories, and so on and so on and so on. Who were these people? How had they had gotten like that? Had some of them, like Hazel, at one point hoped to be the subjects of change? And had some of them, somewhere along the way, recognized that they were not meant to be subjects of change, but rather the agents of change, the perpetrators of change? That theirs was not to experience and become, but to execute and abide?

What if, to put it in terms almost too hacky to endure, Hazel was meant to be the Multioak she wanted to see in the world?

 

Not knowing exactly where to start, Hazel decided to assume an unassuming appearance. She dressed just as she had for the sledding outing with Jeanette and Shelby, slipped out of the house, slipped to the end of the driveway, and slipped on a patch of ice, steadying herself on the mailbox in time to prevent a bruised tailbone. With her balance recovered, Hazel headed down the sidewalk, stuffing her mittened hands into coat pockets not designed to accommodate hands in mittens of her mittens’ bulk.

In ten minutes, it would be three o’clock on Christmas morning. Nothing was open. No one was out. But no, not “no one.” There would be someone. A person, outwardly normal, but anxious, troubled. Drawn outside by reasons that, to their knowledge, had nothing to do with Hazel.

She came to the end of her block and crossed the street, maintaining pace and direction. At the end of the next block, she turned right on a whim, or maybe based on something more subtle than a whim. At the next intersection, she waited on the corner for a car with six inches of snow on its roof to putter past. It didn’t stop. The shadowy figure of its driver never looked at her. The wind picked up.

As Hazel continued onward, most of the properties she passed were decorated for Christmas, some with single strings of lights affixed to the gutters, some with elaborate displays that covered entire houses and filled lawns to the edge of the sidewalk and beyond, and many that were somewhere between those extremes. Some of these exhibited thematic consistency. Many did not.

Hazel saw one with a chimney illuminated by a spotlight. Flat, wooden Santa legs stuck out the top of the chimney. Hazel saw another with only green lights. Hazel saw another with an abstracted nativity scene. Hazel saw another where all of the lights blinked to the rhythm of a song she could not hear. Hazel saw another with a series of trains driven by teddy bears that flashed in sequence to give the appearance of forward movement. Hazel saw another with the words “HO HO HO” spelled out in lights on the roof. Hazel saw another with cutouts of characters she did not recognize. They looked elven, but also too specific to just be generic elves. Hazel saw another with prominent dark sections, whole swathes of dead bulbs. Hazel saw another with multiple fully-decorated artificial trees in the yard, and the wind had blown some of their ornaments from the branches where they fallen and skidded across the snow’s icy crust. Hazel saw another one that was all about gingerbread men. Hazel saw another one with those elven characters from that other one. Hazel saw one with a brilliant star somehow suspended forty feet in the air.

And Hazel saw a two-story, four-unit apartment complex with a young woman standing in front of it. The woman wore fuzzy boots, pajama pants, and a heavy coat. She smoked a cigarette. She appeared less cold than Hazel felt. The woman looked at Hazel without turning her head.

“Hello,” said Hazel, maintaining a flat affect.

“Hey,” said the woman.

“I have something to tell you,” said Hazel. “Something I want to tell you about.”

“Go for it,” said the woman. She blew a cloud of smoke out of the corner of her mouth farthest from Hazel. Her hair had snow in it though snow was not actively falling from the sky.

“You see the Christmas decorations on the houses this time of year,” said Hazel, careful not to phrase it as a question. “The lights and the lawn ornaments and all that.”

The woman seemed to perceive the absence of the question mark, and so said nothing.

“There are messages in them,” said Hazel. “You just have to find the right house and interpret the arrangement of lights, the color choices, the positioning of plastic or inflatable figures, the facial expressions on the angels in the nativity scene, the method of concealment of power cords or lack thereof.”

“Messages about what?” asked the woman.

“Do you have a significant other?” asked Hazel.

“Yeah,” said the woman. “A boyfriend, off and on. Currently on.”

“The decorations can tell you what he’s up to,” said Hazel. “They’ll reveal what he’s hiding. They’ll expose his secrets, no matter how trivial.”

“Huh,” said the woman.

“You don’t believe me,” said Hazel. She was proud of how enigmatic she sounded.

“Sure, I believe you,” said the woman. “It actually makes a lot of sense to me. Doesn’t seem like something someone would just make up and then wander around explaining to strangers. To me, that would be weirder than it being true.”

Hazel had been better prepared for skepticism, apprehension, or accusations of insanity. She thought she’d at least be asked to verify her claim. “OK,” she said. “All right, you believe me. So, what does that change for you?”

“Nothing,” said the woman. “Why would it?”

Hazel was taken aback. She almost forgot to maintain her flat affect. “Because if you find out what your boyfriend is hiding, then you’ll know if you should break up with him.”

The woman snorted. “If I should break up with him?”

“Yeah,” said Hazel. “Yes. And if you should, then you’ll have a good reason.”

“A reason?” The woman dropped her cigarette butt on the sidewalk and ground it under the toe of her boot. “If I’m looking for a reason to break up with a boyfriend, then that is the reason.”

“But doesn’t the possibility of messages about your personal life being hidden in the Christmas decorations of people who don’t know you raise other questions for you?” asked Hazel. “Bigger questions?”

“No,” said the woman. “I’m going to bed. Good night. Merry Christmas.”

 

On the walk home, Hazel chose a house at random, although who could say how random her choice really was? But she chose a house. She stood on the sidewalk and examined the overall effect of its decorations, then focused on the details, the specifics, the minutiae. She pulled her phone out of her pocket, used her teeth to remove her mittens, and texted Claude. Are you secretly into sports betting?

She didn’t expect him to text back until much later in the morning, but his response was immediate: No.

Do you paint miniatures?

No.

Do you have a terminally ill brother or sister?

No.

None of this meant one couldn’t find out what one’s significant other was up to by interpreting the exterior Christmas decorations on the right house. It might mean Hazel had chosen the wrong house. It might mean she was just bad at interpreting, or needed more practice. Or it might mean Claude was lying. Whichever it was, Hazel broke up with him right there. Claude seemed neither surprised nor angry nor heartbroken, although it was hard to evaluate his emotional response via text.

Back at her family’s house, Hazel took the initiative to plug the tree in again, then returned to her spot on the couch. She mentally ran down her list of problems, and she was surprised at how little effort it took to nudge each one into a black void from which it would never again emerge.