One of Dad’s biggest disappointments with the city we moved to was that most of the winter was dominated by rain. Even when we did get snow, it was only a few days before the rainwater would wash it all away, mix it with the mud in the street gutters and cover the sidewalks with a brown, icy slush.

            “All I heard about these cities was the snow,” he would complain. “That the winter here is so beautiful. And for what? Ada, look out the window. Tell me what you see.”

            I didn’t move my eyes from the videogame I was playing. Ingrid had just given me her handheld console. “It’s wet.” I could hear the rain even without turning to look outside.

            Dad huffed angrily and began chopping the head off the fish we were having for dinner. He put the head in a container, storing it in the fridge so we could use it for cooking stock later. Ingrid emerged from her room, stood at the kitchen counter in front of the fish-ridden cutting board, and tied her hair up. Ingrid had beautiful black hair. Mom said it shined like a raven’s feathers. When she tied it up, the strands falling down out of the hair band drifted through the air like ribbons.

            “Can’t Ada debone it?” Ingrid whined. “I always do it.”

            “She doesn’t know how to,” Dad replied. “Make sure she’s watching you. That way she’ll learn faster.”

            “She’ll learn the fastest if she actually does it.”

            “Ingrid, don’t be ridiculous. You can’t hand a child a knife.” I clenched my hands tighter console. I hated when people called me child or kid. They said the word like it somehow made me less than them. Like everything I knew and did could be dismissed.

Dad continued lecturing Ingrid. “And she will learn if you keep deboning the fish in front of her, even if she’s not paying attention. People always learn what they see.”

            I picked up the console and ran away from the kitchen.

            “Ada!” Ingrid screamed. “Come back! Come back or I’m taking my console away!” Reluctantly, I returned. I played my game while standing next to Ingrid, watching her debone the fish out of the corner of my eye. There was a certain fluidity to her movements, the way she handled the knife, the metal glinting in and out of the fish as she sliced it open and slid out the bones. That was what she earned for all the shifts she had taken at the restaurant.

            The room was permeated by the scent of brine, something that, over time, had seeped into the floorboards from the restaurant downstairs. I couldn’t understand how Mom and Dad still insisted on having fish for dinner so often. They would work all day at the restaurant, preparing fish and other seafood, and then would come home and make even more of it. I daydreamed of nights where I could come home from school with Ingrid and Mom would be preparing chicken congee for dinner. Once, I had asked my parents if they could change the restaurant completely, hoping it would lessen the amount of fish dinners we had.

            “Why can’t you?” I protested. “You own it anyway! Can’t it be one of those fried chicken restaurants?” I wasn’t thinking about it at the time, but I wasn’t enthralled with the idea of fried chicken for dinner every night either. In response, Mom and Dad had sighed and said people were expecting certain things of them.

            No matter what I thought, tonight’s dinner was another plate of fish and rice. Mom and I cleaned the plates. When it was all done, I hurried up the stairs up to the attic. I had used to share a room with Ingrid, but when I found out we had an attic, I begged and pleaded to sleep there. Ingrid certainly didn’t have a problem with it. I told Mom and Dad that since the restaurant took up our whole first floor, we needed to use all the space we could. It wasn’t a large room, but it was mine.

There was a small rectangular window on the wall; through it, I could see the tops of all the other buildings around us. It was starting to snow. Being in the attic made me feel powerful. There I was, all alone, standing at the apex of the world.

━

My homeroom teacher at school was a man that was tall and thin, with wavy blonde hair that radiated out the side of his head. Mom had said he looked like a sunflower. I sat in the seat right next to him, close enough to trace each individual strand of hair with my eyes. Sitting in the desk to my left was the boy that had freckles powdered across his face. He didn’t like me, but I didn’t mind. It was because of that smell, the one from the restaurant that soaked into my family’s clothes, hair, skin. The freckled boy had taught me that, somehow, there was a world of difference between being told you smell the ocean and being told you smell like fish. The day he had told me that, I went home scrubbed myself with so much soap Ingrid had to take out a new bar. It didn’t work.

My teacher held a green dry-erase marker and wrote the date on the whiteboard. He started talking, saying something about it almost being the end of the year. I did notice some decorations strewn around the classroom. There were paper snowflakes at various levels of intricacy taped to the walls. Artificial leaves and berries were positioned above doors in splotches of green and crimson.

“It’s almost the end of the year,” my teacher said. “Is everyone excited?” The class’s heads bobbed up and down in agreement. Although I had no idea what the decorations or excitement was for, I found myself nodding along.

My teacher called the freckled boy next to me to come up and give papers to the whole class. On the paper was a black outline of a hook with stripes arcing across. It was labelled candy cane. My classmates and I crowded around the box of pencil crayons in the classroom and fought for our lives to grab the colours we wanted.

“Once you finish, you can come up here and grab a real candy cane,” my teacher announced. He pulled out a container filled with the same hooks on the paper, except they were much smaller, wrapped in plastic, and coloured red and white. I looked at the pencil crayons I had chosen – blue, orange, light green. That wasn’t right, not at all. Hurrying back to the pencil crayons, I swapped the colours I originally held for the right ones; in this case, the only thing I needed was a bright, beautiful red. I glanced around the classroom and saw all the other kids using a smorgasbord of colours – there was magenta, neon blue, brown, even someone using a yellow highlighter. I smiled. I was the only one who had gotten it right.

            I completed my candy cane and took a look at my artwork. It was all within the lines. In small text beneath the box, a phrase caught my eye. It’s almost Christmas!

            Christmas. I had heard some other kids mention that word in the past few days, I was sure of it. That was what everyone was so excited about, what the decorations were for.

            Next, I took a pair of scissors from the teacher’s desk. The curved parts of the candy cane might’ve been harder to cut, but for me it wasn’t a problem. I was starting to have the grace of Mom and Dad and Ingrid, the confidence with knives. I cut through the paper, and the scraps fluttered down onto my desk like leaves. On one scrap: what do you want for Christmas? There it was again, that word. Why was it that I had forgotten about a few minutes ago, but found it everywhere I looked now?

            When I presented my candy cane to my teacher, he took it and inspected the colours, the curve of the cut. He was surprised.

            “Excellent job, Ada,” he said. “I’m impressed.” He picked out a candy cane from the box on his desk and handed it to me. “Why don’t you sit and wait for everyone else to finish?”

            The sun began to peek out over the clouds outside and shone through the window, reflecting off the frost that had accumulated on the grass outside. I spent the next few minutes peeling away at the plastic wrap on the candy cane. Mom and Dad didn’t let me grow my nails past my fingertips. They told me that if I did, it would get caught on a wire or a door and my whole finger would’ve been hurt. In that moment, I might’ve sacrificed a finger to get the candy cane out of the plastic.

            By the time I did manage to unwrap it, most of the class had finished their colouring. I held up the candy cane to my eye and looked through the hook. It was slightly sticky to the touch. My teacher was taping up the paper candy canes we had made to the window of the classroom. I held the candy cane by the hook and bit off part of the long end.

            Immediately, I heard a peal of laughter. “What are you doing?” giggled the freckled boy next to me. The candy cane, crushed by my teeth, fragmented into little shards that poked along the right wall of my mouth.

            “Eating my candy cane,” I said matter-of-factly.

            “You’re supposed to suck on it, not bite it!” The freckled boy beckoned to the girl next to him and pointed at me while saying something before continuing to speak. “And you’re holding it the wrong way.”

            He had the hook of his candy cane in his mouth, like a pacifier. What did he know, anyway? I had seen his paper – he hadn’t even used the right colours on the candy cane. His was yellow and dark blue. I scanned the room, but everybody else was eating it the same way. Embarrassed, I flipped mine around and held it by the broken end, sitting the hooked part against my tongue.

            “Did you ever have a candy cane before, Ada?” probed the freckled boy. “Do you even do Christmas?” It seemed like a harmless question, but it was the expression on his face that gave away his intentions. A plan to whisper the answer around the classroom, tell everyone the fish girl didn’t know what Christmas was.

            I stared in defiance. “Of course I do.”

            That day, at lunch, I sat at a table with other kids eating. Ingrid told Mom and Dad that we ate together, but in truth she never wanted me to talk to her friends. The kids I sat with were all positioned near the window, looking outside, pointing at the sky and saying I think that’s a snow cloud. They talked more about Christmas, and I became a detective undercover.

            I learned Christmas was a day close to the end of the year where everybody got presents. There was a tree and big socks, and a big man dressed in red flew over your house to give you gifts. I learned there were songs, and events, and sales at the mall. One of the girls with bragged that last year, she had gotten a bike. I wondered how someone could put a bike in wrapping paper. Someone else asked how big red man could’ve fit a bike in his sleigh.

            “Come on,” said the girl with the bike, “he’s not even real. Nobody can fly that fast.”

            “He is!” insisted another boy with a shaved head.

            “Yeah,” I added on, perking up. “He is. He’s real.” The other kids looked at me, and I began to sweat under my collar. “I saw him,” I declared.

            “In your house?” the boy asked.

            “No,” I replied, “in the sky. Far away. Like a plane.” Sometimes, planes flew above the restaurant. In the night, they flashed red lights through the air.

            “I’m sure you did, Ada.” It was the girl with bike again. I wanted to punch her in the teeth.

            By the end of the day, my homeroom teacher had added something to the classroom. A small tree, potted in blue ceramic and live. In his hands, he held a little shiny orange ball with a golden string looped above it.

            “To be honest, I only have this one bauble,” he confessed. “So I hope you can all bring your own. If everyone brings one, we can cover the tree.”

            While everyone was leaving, I walked up to the bauble and inspected it. It had a gold-tinted reflection of myself visible on the surface. I put my eye close to the bauble to get a closer look, and the reflection distorted my eye, blowing it up big and stretching it from one end of the room all the way to the other.

━

            That night, by some miracle, we weren’t having fish. Mom was stir-frying vegetables and meat. The fragrance sizzled up from the pan and wafted around the building, drawing me down from the attic.

            I tugged on the back of Mom’s shirt. “What’s Christmas?” I asked.

            She answered without turning around. “Why are you asking? Some nonsense people here celebrate. It’s a holiday here, that’s it. We’ll be able to get lots of customers. Every other restaurant is closing that night.” Mom put a slab of meat on the cutting board and stuck her knife into it, slicing it across with a thud. Red juices were squeezed out by the pressure and leaked out onto the counter. I didn’t flinch. The decapitation of fish was a near daily occurrence in the restaurant – this didn’t bother me.

            “Can we celebrate Christmas?” I pleaded.

            “Ada, that whole thing is just an excuse for people to spend lots of money. I don’t even know what they’re celebrating. Getting gifts? I can get you a gift, if you’d like. But we have to keep the restaurant open that night. The rest of that crap is a bunch of plastic that people buy to use for one day out of the entire year.”

            There was some truth to what Mom said. All that stuff – the tree, the baubles, the candy canes and red berries – I had never seen it the rest of the year. Still, I wanted a bauble. I wasn’t a girl who smelled like fish. I was a girl who ate stir-fry and put shiny baubles on the Christmas tree.

            After dinner, I must’ve spent the rest of the night looking for a bauble. My hopes of finding something beautiful diminished until all I was looking for was anything small I could hang.

            “Ada!” Ingrid complained. “What do you keep running up and down the stairs for?”

            I went into her room. “I want a bauble.”

            “You won’t find one here.”

            “Then what do I do? I need to put a bauble on the tree?”

            Ingrid looked exasperated. “Who cares whether you put one on? There probably won’t be enough space for people to notice.”

            I hurried back up to the attic. It late into the night, and I was getting tired. I took a pair of scissors from my school bag and cut one of my hair ties. Then, I cut out a circle of white paper and stabbed a pencil through the top to make a hole for me to put the hair tie through. Pinched between my index finger and thumb, I held my makeshift bauble up in the air. In the moonlight, it seemed to shine. When I let go of the hair tie, though, the whole thing fell to the floor.

━

            The morning after, right at the start of class, the girl who had gotten a bike for last year’s Christmas brought a red bauble of her own. It had a snowman on it, engraved in using glittery rhinestones. She put it on one of the top branches of the tree. I spent the entire class staring at that bauble, watching the way light scattered off it. Sometimes, a draft entered the room and the bauble rotated enough that I could see a warped reflection of myself in it, shaded in red. I looked at it for the first hour, and then the second, and then before I knew it I was moving classrooms. In other classrooms, I looked at their tree. Someone had a star on the top of theirs. Another had scattered tinsel around the branches. During lunch, I fantasized about walking up through the desks like there was a red carpet beneath me, hanging my perfect bauble on the highest branch of the miniature tree and watching it glow.

            At the end of the school day, I trekked over to Ingrid’s classroom. She had biology, and I wasn’t allowed to come in because it was a lesson only older kids could look at. Ingrid came out of the class doors, and then we both waited at the bus stop before riding back and walking two blocks home.

            We weren’t there for long. There was a parent meeting at the school that night, and the students were supposed to come too. Most of Ingrid’s friends had been allowed to stay home, but Mom and Dad insisted that me and Ingrid attend. They forced us to dress up too, make us look our best.

            I tried using a hair clip to put my hair up, and Ingrid laughed, telling me I looked like I had a tarantula on my head. Mom and Dad wore their nicest clothes, and then Ingrid told them they were being too formal, so Dad ditched the tie and Mom put on a different dress and wore flats instead of heels.

            Ingrid and I sat on a different floor of the school during while the parents mingled downstairs. We let our hair down and Ingrid took off the choker she was wearing. Occasionally, a parent’s voice was loud enough that it echoed up the stairs and we could hear what they were saying. I never heard Mom or Dad’s voice, not loud like that.

            “I thought kids your age were here,” Ingrid grumbled. “You’re not old enough to be left at home. Shouldn’t you be hanging out with them?”

            I mumbled something incoherent before speaking. “I don’t like them.” I didn’t mention that they wouldn’t be thrilled to see me, though I was sure Ingrid knew already.

            I wandered off further into the school, peering into other classrooms. Ingrid followed. Most of them had the same layout as my homeroom, but they had different desk arrangements, marks on the whiteboard, decorations on the wall.

            At the very end of the hall, there was a classroom that looked similar to mine. Their plastic Christmas tree was in the exact same spot, on a table near the teacher’s desk. On it, I saw a treasure. The most beautiful, deep blue bauble I had ever seen. The moonlight outside leapt in through the window and bounced off the bauble. The room glowed faintly of blue.

            I pointed excitedly. “That! I need something like that, Ingrid. I need it, I do.”

            Ingrid squinted her eyes. “I’m sure you can find something like that at the supermarket. It’s probably cheap.”

            “No,” I asserted. “I need one exactly like that. It’s beautiful.”

            Something happened downstairs and all the parents cheered. Ingrid sauntered back to the bench, we were at before, sitting down with a huff.

            “Mom and Dad won’t buy it for you, you know. They don’t care about any of that holiday stuff.”

            “But I need it,” I repeated. “Or else I’ll be the only one who doesn’t put a bauble on the tree.”

            Ingrid sighed. “It’s not going to matter. You’ll still miss out on all the other things. The songs. The gifts. The celebration.”

            I stood in front of Ingrid, not wanting to sit back down on the bench yet. To do that would admit defeat, that the bauble was out of reach.

            “We’re not like them, Ada. We don’t celebrate that stuff. They know that. A bauble can’t fix that.”

She gestured to the stairs and continued. “I’m not any different. Mom and Dad aren’t any different. There’s a reason we never hear their voices. They don’t talk.”

            I looked at the stairs, because I didn’t want to look at Ingrid.

“You could do the whole celebration,” she said. “You could cut a tree down from the forest and bring it inside and cover it in lights and still, everybody else would know you’re not like them, not even close. That’s just the way things go.”

With nobody else on the second floor, the school was strangely quiet when me and Ingrid weren’t speaking. The only noise was the echoes from downstairs, some wisp of a distant conversation.

Without saying anything else, I walked down the stairs and started looking for Mom and Dad. They were standing off to one side, cups in their hands, looking at the other adults. A group of kids my age flocked around a snack table on the near the entrance to the room.

I told them I wanted to go, and they didn’t protest. Dad went upstairs to get Ingrid and Mom walked me back to the car. The snow outside was hurled through the air by the wind, tapping at our shoulders and heads. By the time Dad finally came back with Ingrid, she had her choker back on. She hopped in the car, sat adjacent to me, and deposited something in the empty space between us.

It was the bauble I had seen in the classroom. Even in the lighting of our car, it was brilliant. Anxious, I picked it up, holding it in my palm. It was the same as the one I had seen, down to the bend in the string from where it had been hung on the tree. I hugged Ingrid. There were no words. I noticed, though, that a splotch of red was blooming up the end of her right finger. There was blood, just a little bit.

I didn’t realize until later, but she must’ve broken her nail picking the lock to the classroom door.

━

The next school day, I was the first one in class. I sat at my desk and waited for everyone to file in, keeping the bauble hidden in my dress pocket. When I was sure everybody was present, I rose from my desk, stepped over to the tree, and hung at right at the top, on the same level as the red snowman one the girl with the bike had brought. I turned back around and smiled to the class. For the rest of class, I noticed people’s eyes being drawn to the shine, the azure gleam of my bauble in the sun. Over the next days, I sat a little closer to the other kids at lunch. I spoke more in class and during break. The freckled boy didn’t say a thing to me. Even as the rest of their class brought in their own baubles, you could still see mine at the top.

The girl who had gotten a bike last Christmas positioned herself at the front of the classroom. Her hair hung down her back like a curtain. She pointed to my bauble and said to her friend, “It’s so pretty.” She swiveled around on her back foot and locked eyes with me.

“Where did you get it, Ada?” she asked.

“My mom got it,” I muttered.

“Oh, where?” She was speaking loud enough for everybody else in the room to hear. I didn’t dare glance behind me because I was afraid to see anyone that might be spectating.

I gazed at the bauble hanging there, catching the light. “The store,” I answered. The girl waited for a beat, as if she was expecting me to say more, before prodding further.

“Which store?”

“I don’t remember.”

I didn’t want to look at the bauble anymore. Instead, I trained my eyes on the clock at the front of the room. The arrows ticked slowly, going around and around in their dance.

“Was it expensive?” the girl’s friend asked. “It looks expensive.”

I shrugged.

The girl smiled the way Ingrid did when she was making fun of me. “So, you don’t remember anything about it?”

The truth was that I knew nothing at all about my bauble. Not how it had been made or what it cost. I only knew how it had been taken.

“No,” I said quietly.

The conversation moved on to other things. The bauble sat on the top of the tree in its cushion of branches. It was shining, yes, and it was hanging on the tree. But Ingrid had been right. They all knew it wasn’t mine, not really.

━

The steam coming off the pot Ingrid was standing at billowed up into the alcoves of our home, filling the roof with the heavy smell of brine. It was late in the night, and so the only thing coming through the windows was the flickering rays of the moon.

Ingrid stirred the mixture constantly with a large wooden spoon. Inside of it, I could hear the rattling of fish bones hitting the edge of the pot, the squelch of the scales and flesh as it was sifted around in the broth, slowly dissolving into unidentifiable particles. A fish, like all animals, lost its identity when it was eaten, when it became nothing more than meat.

When she was done, I watched Ingrid hold the pot over a sieve before dumping everything through it and collecting the liquid in a jar underneath. I took all the bones and flesh that had been caught in the sieve and set it on a paper towel to dry. We could feed it to the crows the next day.

While Ingrid sealed the jar, I put on my winter jacket. Outside, it was cold, and the sky was clear. Ingrid handed me the jar before putting on a jacket of her own, and I held it to my chest like a diamond.

The heat of the jar kept me warm while the two of us walked along the streets in the night. Ingrid held my hand and made sure I didn’t go anywhere, but otherwise we didn’t speak as we moved. We didn’t need to. Although it was a familiar path, Ingrid made sure I was always on track.

We arrived at school and straddled the edge of the building until we arrived at a certain wall. There, I followed a path Ingrid pointed out to me, while she waited outside. There was a window to the bottom floor of the school that was just barely left open. I used all my strength to peel it down, then cradled the jar in my jacket as I tumbled through it and onto the floor of a classroom.

The halls were dark and empty. I found my way to my classroom and set my eyes on the tree in its pot. Slowly, I unscrewed the lid of the jar. There was a pungency inside that drifted into the air of the classroom. The thing about getting used to a smell is that you don’t realize how strong it is until its in a place it shouldn’t be.

I tilted the jar over the base of the trunk and watched it disappear into the soil. It didn’t take long. It all was absorbed and only left a faint stain on the dirt and a scent. After a moment more looking at the tree, I closed the jar and left.

The next day at school, everyone was wondering why the leaves of the Christmas tree were so getting so yellow so soon. Why it smelled, ever so slightly, of salt. The teacher sat at his desk and frowned, saying Sorry class, I don’t what’s wrong with the tree. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. I sat at my desk, holding my backpack close to my heart. I was keeping my secret, and I was keeping it tight.

By the end of the week, the tree looked so bad the teacher elected to remove it. That day, after class, I waited for my teacher to leave and then went back into the classroom. The pot had been taken away, leaving behind a circle of dirt on the ground. In front of the dirt was a box with all our baubles inside. He must have taken them off.

There, alone in the classroom, I looked into the box of baubles. They were all plastic, and they were reflective. I could see my face in each one of them, but it was warped. I stared at a big one in the centre, moving my face closer and closer until my image stretched across the bauble’s surface. The only thing to see in my reflection was the black expanse of my pupil.