Word Count: 1634

Paris hadn’t celebrated Thanksgiving since he was nine years old.

That wasn’t to say the LeFays had ever really made a big deal of the holiday. They hadn’t gone around the table sharing what they were thankful for, and his mother hadn’t decorated the entire house for it the way Momma Gallo changed her decorations for every seasonal holiday, but there’d at least been dinner. His mother would spend much of the day in the kitchen, preparing the turkey and sides while his father sat on the couch in the living room complaining about how boring the parade was on TV, with Paris on the floor playing with whatever toy had entertained him at the time.

With his mother’s sudden departure seven years ago, there hadn’t been much of a reason for he and his father to truly observe Thanksgiving. His father couldn’t cook a decent meal to save his life, and Paris hadn’t been in the mood to try. Instead, he went out, scouring the neighborhood for trouble while his dad sat at home by himself, morosely flicking through the TV channels and working his way through a case of beer.

As he’d grown older and discovered that the LeFay talent in the kitchen had merely skipped a generation, Paris had made more of an effort to spend most of the day at home. They never had a grand meal—not like what his mother used to put together—but they’d at least have dinner, though nothing to make Thanksgiving stand out too terribly much from any other day. As most dinners did between Paris and Henri LeFay, the holiday passed with grumbled bickering and silence. Then the kitchen was cleaned and the dishes were put away, and everything remained as sad and lonely and distant for them as it’d been the day his mother walked out the door.

But this year was different. Paris should have known it would be. Everything about this year had been different—and not all of it in a bad way. Some of it—most of it, he decided—had offered him a chance to have something good in his life. For once. Perhaps from now on.

He had the radio on in the kitchen, the volume turned low on the station that had been playing Christmas carols twenty-four/seven almost since the beginning of November. In the living room, the TV was on to show the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Chris sat on the couch watching, with Peter on the floor playing with Sassy and Anna.

Peter being turned into a cat—a kitten, really—made things quite a bit complicated over the holidays, especially if he and Chris intended to keep the bizarre circumstance—and their involvement in all the other bizarre circumstances that occurred within the city—from their parents. It had been easy at first. Momma Gallo had thought it incredibly sweet that Chris suddenly seemed to want to spend time with the little brother who annoyed him and hadn’t questioned it when Chris had insisted on taking Peter for a few days for fun and games and sleepovers at his apartment. From there, it was simply a matter of forging notes and making fake phone calls to Peter’s teachers to explain his absences from school, which Paris took to with ease, having had experience posing as his own mother over the phone and on paper plenty of times when he’d been younger.

But Thanksgiving threw a wrench in their carefully concocted ruse, and some quick thinking and a few carefully placed white lies had been all that had saved them from some very awkward, very difficult, and potentially tearful—on Momma Gallo’s part—explanations. As it turned out, the Gallos typically spent Thanksgiving in Boston visiting family, but after a phone call from Chris claiming projects, homework, and forthcoming exams, and Peter whining over the line about “you sent me to summer camp and I didn’t want to go and now I just want to stay home so can I please stay with Chris and Paris I really hate when Grandma pinches my cheeks,” Momma Gallo had relented and allowed her two younger boys to stay behind while she and Mr. Gallo caught their Wednesday morning flight and flew off for a brief vacation.

Which meant that Paris—who’d taken it upon himself to see that Chris and Peter actually ate more than delivery pizza and take-out Chinese while they were forced under the same roof with no parental supervision—was responsible for Thanksgiving dinner.

He couldn’t say he minded so much. His house hadn’t been so warm and full of noise since… well, he couldn’t really remember.

Paris was halfway through singing along to Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and putting the turkey into the oven when his father wandered out into the kitchen.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Paris shut the oven door and set the timer before turning around to face him. “What does it look like?”

Henri looked around the kitchen suspiciously. It was obvious he’d just woken up. He was red eyed and disheveled and had sleep lines on the side of his face. “It’s ten AM. Why are you cooking?”

“Because it’s Thanksgiving,” Paris said.

“So?”

“So I thought it might be nice to have dinner.”

“You’re making a turkey,” Henri pointed out.

“So?”

His father’s eyes narrowed to study him. Paris simply stood there and let him.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Henri finally asked.

“What do you mean?” Paris inquired in response.

“You’re making a turkey,” Henri repeated. “Why aren’t you out… doing things…?”

“What things?”

“Your… things,” Henri said, making a few uncomfortable motions with his hands that didn’t give much of an indication as to what he was trying to say. “Prancing around with your boyfriends or whatever. Getting into trouble.”

“One, I don’t have a boyfriend,” Paris told him. “I don’t have any boyfriends. Two, I haven’t ‘pranced around’ with anyone in a while. And three, is it really so horrible that I want to make Thanksgiving dinner?”

“It’s ******** creepy,” his father blurted out.

“Why?”

“Because it’s you and it’s Thanksgiving and we don’t do holidays. Why aren’t you out causing trouble anymore?”

Paris thought it was a little strange that his father would seem as if he wanted him to go out and make trouble, but he cut him some slack since that was mostly the sort of behavior they’d both gotten used to over the last handful of years.

“I’m not exactly a little kid anymore,” he explained with a quick shrug.

The song on the radio drifted off into another—one of Paris’s favorite carols, but he kept his attention on his father.

Henri stared at Paris with his eyes still narrowed. There were times when Paris wondered if his dad suspected that there was more going on with him than simply growing up. Neither of them ever said anything about it. Paris was content to keep his second life as far away from his dad as possible, and if Henri knew about any of the strange things happening in the city and suspected Paris being involved in some way, he pretended otherwise and acted as blind and ignorant about the whole thing as Paris hoped him to be.

“Why’s Chris here?” Henri asked after a few more moments of awkward silence had passed between them.

“His parents are out of town but he had to stay behind because of schoolwork and stuff. I didn’t want him spending Thanksgiving alone in his apartment. He’s about as helpless in the kitchen as you are.”

His father frowned but didn’t bother to counter the statement. “And the dog’s his?”

“Yeah.”

“And the other cat, too?”

“Yeah. The animal shelter’s full, so Chris and I are fostering him for a little while.”

It was way too easy to come up with a lie so quickly. Inside, Paris winced and wished it wasn’t, but he didn’t exactly want to share the truth.

His father watched him for a little while longer, looking him over before meeting his eye with another frown. Eventually, he stalked to the refrigerator to grab a carton of orange juice and pour himself a glass, before stomping out of the kitchen and grumbling under his breath, “You look like your ******** mother.”

It didn’t sound especially angry. If anything, his father sounded somewhat bewildered.

Last year, Paris would have denied it, maybe even been a bit insulted by the comment, but he found that it didn’t hurt so much anymore, and he laughed softly instead.

Slowly he approached the divide between the kitchen and the living room and stopped to observe the people within.

His father plopped down onto his normal spot on the couch, looking grumpy and mildly flustered and talking to Chris in a voice that was half a growl but not intentionally mean. Chris sat on the other side of the couch with his arm still in a sling from the attack he’d been the victim of a few nights ago, looking somewhat uncomfortable, but only from his wounds, and smiling that warm, kind smile that made Paris’s heart throb and his stomach feel funny. Peter rolled around on the floor in his kitten body, fighting Sassy for one of Paris’s brightly colored hair elastics.

It was an oddly domestic scene, one that hadn’t played out in their house for a long time, but Paris didn’t dislike it. On the contrary, he realized he liked it very much, and he smiled to himself as he turned to make his way back into the kitchen, softly singing along to the radio.

“And the Christmas bells that ring there are the clanging chimes of doom.. Well, tonight thank God it’s them instead of you…”