Welcome to Gaia! ::

The older teenage girl -- much taller than she'd been when they were both in art class together -- pulled Carlisle over to the side of the busy, jam-packed room: she smiled at him, patting his arm to ensure that she hadn't yanked it out of its socket. The presents beside her were oddly shaped -- there was a long, wrapped-up cylinder of cardboard, and then beside it a short, squat package. It looked depressingly like it might be books: it was that type of shape.

"Sorry," Wisp apologised sincerely, "I didn't mean to take you away! But I thought, 'okay, if I don't grab him now, I will never find him again and he will think his Secret Santa is a gigantic jerk,' you know what I'm saying?"

"Cool," said the girl in front of him, apparently thrilled that he had gotten with the program. The path of least resistance generally was the best one to take with Wisp. "Well, happy holidays! I spent a while picking the stuff out," she added meditatively, "so if it kind of is all, um what, I'm really sorry."

Wisp passed him the cylinder: it was, to say the least, a slightly bewildering present, even if it whiffed vaguely of cool. Inside was obviously what the blonde girl came up with when she racked her brain to think of History!! -- it was a poster-sized painting of the Great Wall Of China, done Wisp Darnell-style, which was basically a riot of daubed colour and graffiti edges -- she had also judiciously, for no apparent reason, added in a couple of floating ghosts for no real reason other than that they looked cool.

The present that looked as though it might have been books turned out to actually be a pile of DVDs; it was all historical movies, ranging from documentary to historical backdrop -- Bridge Over The River Kwai, To Hell And Back -- though it also had, bizarrely, Titanic. "That's the only one worth watching," Wisp said apologetically and conspiratorially, "don't be worried but the boat sinks!! It is a sad ending."

It could've been worse.

Wisp lit up like a fistful of fairy lights: she glowed, and a couple of tiny yellow sparkles momentarily filled the air next to her head as she twinkled -- literally. It was hard not to respond to Carlisle's wide, totally unheld-back beam, and the thrill that he was happy even with a stack of seriously boring films that her mother had helped her pick out. "Well, merry Christmas," she said, "Woo, I did something right! Go me."

"I Googled 'history!'," explained Wisp, who really had just entered in history complete with exclamation mark into Google and had hoped for the best. "At first I was all, 'maybe I should get him some books' but I don't actually read any books myself unless they're about Edward Cullen who is a serious hottie, and books are usually completely boring and way too long and are filled with a jillion words I don't know. I'm no word nerd, yo. So I was like, 'movies!'. And then I just went to the store with a big list of titles."

She was thrilled it had gone over so well. "And I mean, you can do all kinds of rad stuff during movies too, right? Like eat popcorn." The blonde girl winked conspiratorially. "And you could watch them with a girlfriend, if you had a girlfriend, know what I mean? Aww, that would be so cute!" (Wisp was happy to forget that a few weeks ago she too had been Carl's age, and so the patronizing was off-base.)

"Anyway," she said, "happy holidays."

Wisp flung a peace! symbol at him, fingers splayed, and then skipped back off into the crowd. She was whistling as she went: it sounded like a horribly off-tune Jingle Bells.