Monday, Dec 23, 2021
I woke up with a sense of purpose. I knew I had a job to do, and I knew I was the man for the job. It wasn’t for those faint of heart, but destiny had chosen me.

I had to convince Sara about Die Hard being the next movie in our Christmas movie marathon. It came down to Die Hard and Scrooged and I desperately wanted to save Scrooged as the last movie of the marathon, and not least because Pete had played the lead role in the school play just a few days earlier.

There was a symmetry in it. I didn’t know exactly what it was but surely it was there.

“Listen, Sara,” I began, as we sat at the kitchen table at breakfast. She was reading the newspaper and sipping her tea absentmindedly.

She looked up.

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Sunday, December 22, 2021
I spent the first half of the movie sitting in the office with Sara. She took the spare keys from me and put them in her jeans pocket.

“Just for safe keeping,” she said. “How’s your secret project going?”

“What secret project?” I replied. “How’s yours?”

“I don’t have a secret project. You have a secret project.”

“No, I don’t. You have one.”

“You.”

“No, you.”

We went back and forth like that for a couple of minutes.

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Sunday, Dec 22, 2021
I borrowed Sara’s key to our apartment – she wasn’t happy – and sprinted home. I couldn’t find the spare keys anywhere and when I finally gave up looking for them, our apartment looked like it had been burglarised. The sofa cushions were either on the floor or upside down (or both), kitchen drawers were open, the framed poster of Back to the Future hung crooked.

I knew I couldn’t blame it on Einstein, not all of it anyway. But I’d have to cross the bridge called Sara when she saw the mess. It occurred to me that I must’ve left the keys in my room at Mom and Dad’s so I rushed downstairs and instead of walking back to Atlas to take the Beetle, I got on my Crescent, and started pedaling as hard as I could.

As always, the wind was against me. It was raining, too.

But the bike ride also gave me twenty minutes to clear my head, calm down, and come up with new plans. I was afraid that I had made a lot of people angry, and just as in Ghostbusters II, the anger was poisoning everything.

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Sunday, Dec 22, 2021
When I returned to the office, I found Sara sitting in the big chair behind the computer. She looked at me the way only she could, as if she was x-raying me, and not in a see-through-my-pants kind of a way.

“What’s with the running back and forth to Kim’s? Why was it so important to send Sofie and Pete out together? What did you tell Pete just now?” she demanded.

“Oh, nothing, nothing. I just thanked him for helping out. And it goes twice as fast when they work together,” I said, and made my escape toward the coffee maker in the foyer.

Sara followed me there.

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Sunday, Dec 22, 2021
Dad came by around lunch time, to drop off the poster I had forgot to take with me when Sofie and I followed him to his secret storage. He had outdone himself again. This time he had obviously been inspired by National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, another late 80s classic.

It was a fantastic drawing of a man (who sort of looked like me, I could tell) dressed up as Santa getting electrocuted by Xmas lights. The Santa was on the roof of Atlas, with the sign glowing in the dark, and presents flying all around. On the bottom, instead of “Christmas Vacation”, it said “Christmas Movie Marathon.”

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