Chapter 52 — Regarding Peter’s Failed Attempt to Stop the Reindeer Bullies with a Dinner Date
Full of fury, Peter went right to the kitchen pantry— that fully stocked facility of chefs prepping the next meal— and stole away with a choice selection of cheeses. He also nabbed a vintage bottle of wine and a pair of crystal glasses. He plundered a candelabra and small table as well. Back at the stables he set everything up: a romantic reservation for two, with candlelight, cheese and wine. The reindeer girls whistled at him as he walked to and fro, making salacious comments about the size of his ass, which he always thought was perfectly normally sized for a boy his age. He pushed Rarirurero out of her pen. The depressive reindeer shook her head and resisted, dragging her hooves in protest, but Peter was stronger, and with a death-grip upon her wrists, and grabbing her by the waist and lifting her completely off the ground, he wrested her out of the stables and sat her down at the fancy dinner table. A magic violin hung in the air beside her and squeaked out some Beethoven, or Mozart, or some baroque shit.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” Peter sat down across from her. “Oh, Rarirurero! Your jokes are so funny! And interesting too!”
“But I didn’t say anything.”
“Thank you for joining me on this romantic dinner date!” Peter shouted so the other reindeer could hear. “You know how special and important you are to me and Santa!”
“What are you talking about?” Rarirurero asked.
Together they sipped wine and gobbled up tiny cubes of cheese. Peter couldn’t tell the difference between extra sharp cheddar from ricotta, but he pretended to be a connoisseur and named each one— inaccurately— and hyped them up as being very rare and expensive. Rarirurero listened, and although she had fingers in her human form, was not used to using them while dining, and so she clumsily balanced the wine glass between all ten of her fingers, held perfectly straight, and struggled to lift up any cheese with its toothpick skewer. Peter would sometimes help navigate her fingers and teach her how to pinch or grasp things.
“Oh, Rarirurero!” Peter shouted. “You’re so sophisticated and mature! I bet no other reindeer in the North Pole is as knowledgeable about fine dining as you are!”
The other reindeer, although occupied with their games and hateful gossip, stole glances at the odd pair as their dinner date went on and on. It didn’t take long before the alcohol took hold of Rarirurero, and Peter began to think that feeding a reindeer half a bottle of red wine was a bad idea. She looked up at the sky and rolled her head in circles as if her skull and antlers were filled with lead, and like a human who begins manually blinking and breathing, she became acutely aware of their heaviness. Her posture changed too— rather than squeezing herself together in timid defensiveness, she lounged in her chair with her furry legs straight out. Her dull reindeer eyes blinked constantly, but never synchronized, as if one slow eye were trying to catch up with the other. Peter truly underestimated how much of a light weight she was, yet the show had to go on.
“Here you go! I want you to have this as a token of our special relationship!”
Peter handed her a perfectly square gift, the wrapping paper immaculate, ribbons snug and tight, the bow fluffy and symmetrical. Rarirurero struggled to open the paper with her fingers and resorted to her tearing it apart with her teeth. Within the box was a leather choker with a large golden bell.
“Oh it’s sooooo expensive!” Peter said. “No other reindeer has anything like it!”
Peter put it on the drunken reindeer and then stepped back to tell her how she looked like a supermodel. Rarirurero’s eyes looped around in her skull. She was too lost to respond to Peter’s compliment. In fact, she forgot what compliments were. Tomorrow morning, this conversation would all be a hazy mismatch of half-erased memories. She would wonder where this delicate golden bell had come from, and how it got around her neck, why her brain felt like it had been liquefied in a blender stuffed with ice and dynamite, and the greatest mystery of all: where did her shoes go? Not that the reindeer girls ever wore shoes, because, you know, the hooves.
From high up, off and away from one of the many towers of the workshop, Santa peered out the window and saw Peter and the reindeer together by the stables, having the strange dinner date out in the cold winter air. What she didn’t see were the reindeer in their changeling, semi-human forms. To her eyes, they were all normal reindeer, genderless and clopping about on all fours. Rarirurero didn’t sit in a chair, but stood over it, her snout hovering over the food. It was all very confusing and bewildering to her.
Rarirurero tucked her head and antlers under the table in embarrassment, and then hurled up a slurry of all that cheese and wine. Peter pat her on the back as she spat and spat, and then she took hold of the wine glass for another sip, but Peter took it away and suggested some water instead.
The peanut gallery of reindeer didn’t laugh. It was more like a hateful parody of laughter— doubled over, faces clinched painfully in joy, kicking the air, pale stomachs cramping. They couldn’t breathe! Peter’s plan had completely backfired. Hopefully the poor reindeer was blackout drunk and wouldn’t remember this moment. He walked the tipsy reindeer back into her pen and made sure she lay down on her side, not her back, and returned to the workshop.
“Hey, Peter, why don’t you hang out with us instead of the barf queen?” one of the reindeer said on his way back.
“Augh! I hate these reindeer!” Peter said. “They’re so sexy and topless!”
Back in the workshop Peter raided the toy factory. A space heater, blankets, pillows, rococo picture frames, plushies of all sorts of super kawaii Japanese characters, and a humidifier along with all sort of kitch nonsense. He even grabbed a few handfuls of fairy lights— pièce de résistance of every girl’s bedroom. He returned to Rarirurero’s pen, who lay half naked but fully hammered on the ground, and spent the next few hours decorating the place.
In no time her pen was a pink nightmare dripping with all sorts of things an eight year old girl would want— or an eighteen year old girl— they’re practically the same. A glittering monstrosity of fairy lights and blankets. Easily the coziest, girliest pen in the entire stable. But when the reindeer came trotting in for the night and saw what he did they burst out laughing again. They crowded around her pen and pointed at the various decorations and things one by one and laughed harder and harder, waking Rarirurero from her drunken stupor.
“Peter…” Her hand raised up and wobbily beckoned him nearer to her. “They’re bullying me even harder now. Maybe we should cut our losses.”
“No! Goddammit!” Peter slammed his fist down on a FluffBall Pyamu-ma plush. “The bullying is darkest just before the dawn. You must soldier on!”
Peter stormed out of the stables spazzing out as though his anger were something that could be shaken out of his body. He muttered something about “Stupid, sexy reindeer.” Part of him wanted to throw these naked deer girls into bed and take them all the bone zone— another part of him wanted to turn them into suede jackets.
Back in the workshop Santa caught Peter. The thin red general of Christmas looked cool and nonchalant by a window, sipping on a liquored up mug of hot chocolate.
“It’s very nice of you to help Rarirurero,” she said. “But what is your strategy, exactly?”
“I make the other reindeer jealous of her, and then they like her.”
Santa’s eyebrows twisted across her face in contemplation. “Because jealousy… leads to friendship?”
“No, no. It’s a punishment. Nobody punishes these cunty reindeer for bullying her. Sorry I said that word, but that’s what they are. They’re cunts, absolute cunts. Once the other reindeer start being nice, like her, then I’ll reward them as well.”
“With alcohol?”
“That was my fault. I didn’t think that one through.”
Silence burned between them with all the patience of a candle, and then Santa said, “Well I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
“Wait a second,” Peter said. “You’re a girl. What would make you jealous?”