Tracy Tam: Santa Command (2 page)

She lived in Florida, however, and the winter had been uncomfortably warm. When the air hit her, she smiled, welcoming the chill.

Walt's beeper squealed louder. “Fix this!” he demanded.

Tracy was inches from the stairway now, and once she got there, she'd be able to see straight down to the living room where Santa was filling her stocking. She crouched down as she got closer, and Phil caught a glimpse of his solution sitting in her shirt pocket. He relayed the information to Sasha.

As Phil's voice traveled through Sasha's tiny ear bud, Sasha saw exactly what Phil was referring to. That's why they worked as a team. Sasha saw the world from the ankles down. Phil and his cameras saw everything else. Sasha typed in a code to her wristcom and smiled as she sent out an activation signal to any wireless device within five feet. In this case, it was Tracy's cell phone, tucked carefully into her shirt pocket.

When the phone started blasting Beyoncé, Tracy yelped, then scrambled back to her bedroom. A split second later, her dad poked his head out of his room.

Mr. Tam looked up and down the hallway, but all he saw was Tracy's closed door and a bunch of shadows. The Inklings were well hidden, camouflaged both by darkness and magic.

When he was satisfied his daughter was safely in bed, he went back into his room. His muffled voice carried into the hallway once more. “If she was on that phone again—”

“Don't,” his wife said soothingly. “It's Christmas. She's probably gossiping with Kate, talking about what Santa will bring them.”

“Fine,” Mr. Tam sighed. “But next time, it's gone for a week.”

As the house settled back into a peaceful slumber, Phil wiped the sweat off his forehead. “There. Crisis averted.”

Walt raised one eyebrow. “Are you positive?”

“Well...” Phil surveyed the screen, which showed Santa still packing Tracy's stocking. Depending on how fast he worked, she had time to sneak out again. Phil ordered up another camera, this one in the bird's nest just outside Tracy's window. He had a clear shot of the curled up lump lying in her bed, and her long black hair trailing out from under the comforter and across her pillow. “Now, I'm positive.”

“Good,” Walt said. It was the closest to a compliment he ever gave on Christmas Eve. “Now, get Santa out of there and on to the next house.”

Phil cracked his knuckles. “Bring it on.”

Tracy

When Tracy's phone went off, she aborted Plan A and went straight to Plan B: Join the Party. She didn't like that she didn't get any video of Santa in her house, but she knew Plan B was where she would find the strongest evidence for her experiment.

She'd had her pillows and wig set up in her bed for hours, so it was a simple matter of climbing out of her window, which overlooked the roof. All she had to do was ease her way past her parents' window onto the larger section of roof over the garage. With no moon visible, she hoped it was dark enough that Santa and his elves wouldn't spot her. Did he bring his elves with him? She wasn't clear on the details, but that was where this experiment came in.

As she approached the sleigh, she noticed the absence of reindeer. Their reins were attached to the sleigh, sticking straight out, as if the animals were still in them, but they were nowhere in sight. She made a mental note: Reindeer = holograms? To her, that was more logical than the sign hanging on Santa's sleigh—Out for a drink of water. Be back in a flash.

Her grandmother always said that Santa's reindeer were glorious creatures, and that children should stay up at least once in their life to sneak a peek at them in flight. But Tracy knew that reindeer did not have wings, and without wings, they couldn't fly, plain and simple. Whatever her grandmother had seen had been an illusion.

Tracy circled the sleigh looking for a tiny projector or camera lens on the front of it to prove her theory. She couldn't find one, but at the back, she found something even better—a pair of jet engines attached between the sleigh's runners.
Yes!
Solid proof that the reindeer didn't actually fly the sleigh. By dawn, she was going to have a logical explanation for every aspect of Santa's big night.

She snapped several pictures with her phone, and then hopped into the back of the sleigh, breathing a sigh of relief that there weren't any elves hiding in there. After a quick glance around for Santa or nosy neighbors, she opened the notes file on her phone and added two words to the bottom—jet propulsion.
Then, she slid her phone back into her pocket and burrowed beneath four giant red bags, settling in for a long night.

She had been preparing for this night for the past two and a half months, ever since she'd heard her mom talking on the phone to her Aunt Susan. Tracy only heard one side of the conversation, but it had been enough.

“That's wonderful, Suze!” her mom had said. “I can't believe you found a doctor that can help Pim!”

Tracy nearly screamed for joy when she heard that. Her cousin, Pim, had been her best friend before the accident. After Pim fell out of that tree, all she ever did was lie in bed and stare at the TV. Her doctors said she should be fine, but she wasn't. She couldn't walk, and she rarely spoke. Most of the time Pim wouldn't even blink to show she understood what people were saying to her. If her aunt had found a doctor who could help, that was the best news in the world.

Of course, it was followed by the worst news in the world.

“It's going to cost how much?” The sadness in her mother's voice made Tracy sick to her stomach. There was a doctor out there who could fix Pim, but her aunt couldn't afford him. “Oh honey, I'm so sorry. If we had that much, I'd give it to you in a heartbeat, but we just don't.”

The words rung through Tracy's ears and bounced around in her mind. It couldn't be the truth. After the phone call ended, Tracy marched straight up to her mom. “How could you tell her that? There's gotta be some way to get the money.”

“Sweetheart, I know you miss having Pim around, but you have to understand that some things just aren't possible.” Her mom reached out to tuck Tracy's hair behind her ear.

Tracy ducked out of the way. She was furious that her mom had done nothing. She hadn't talked to her dad about it. She hadn't asked her boss for a raise. She hadn't offered to take out a second mortgage on their house. In the movies, people did all of those things to come up with money when it was important.

Tracy folded her arms across her chest and leveled her eyes at her mom. It was a stare that often made her mom give in, or ground her, depending on the situation. “There is a way, and if you're not willing to find it, then I am.”

The next week, her science teacher, Mr. Danner, gave her the answer on a bright green flyer.

“You should enter this,” he said. “You're on the younger end, but I think you're smart enough to come away with at least an honorable mention prize.”

“Prize?” Tracy's heart hammered wildly against her ribs as she traced the black lettering with her pointer finger.

State Science Fair

Open to all students Grades 5-8

Grand Prize: $5000

Tracy stopped reading there. Forget honorable mention, she was going for the grand prize. Five thousand dollars had to be enough to pay the doctor.

She spent the next few weeks combing the Internet and the library for ideas. It wasn't until she saw a magazine ad from the Santa Commission that she had her project. It reminded kids to have their lists in no later than November 20
^th
so Santa's elves had time to organize. But still, it wasn't the reminder that gave her the idea—it was the slogan.

Even magic needs a helping hand.

Tracy had never believed in magic. Behind every famous magic act, there was a foundation of science. Simple physics did not allow one man to travel the world in one night, but somehow he did it. The Santa Commission's slogan became her hypothesis.

The first part of her plan was simple—wait upstairs until Santa arrived.

She went to bed like normal, but she wore a pouch around her neck that contained all of the necessary supplies: bags for collecting samples, fingerprint kit, and a zip drive, just in case the sleigh had a computer. For the next two hours, she chugged can after can of Red Bull, keeping herself awake until she heard a scuffling sound on the roof. Then she grabbed her phone and crept into the hallway.

Her phone had a video recorder on it. Cameras often caught things the human eye couldn't see, and she planned to analyze her footage frame by frame for anything that could prove her theories.

After the hypothesis was formed, the next step of the Scientific Method was to collect data. That could only be done on Christmas Eve in the middle of the night. Climbing out of her window was easy. It was Santa's sleigh, with its lack of padding that was hard.

After she gave up on getting comfortable in the sleigh, she pulled a pair of scissors from her pouch and snipped a long strip from one of Santa's bags. The thin fabric felt like water in her fingers, slippery and silky, nothing like they sold in the sewing section at Walmart. She dropped it into a plastic baggie and mentally prepared a list of how she would analyze it later. She would study the fabric composition, and then she would cut it into pieces and check for water and fire proofing. A thorough scientist was a winning scientist.

She heard a tiny voice echo up the chimney right before a plume of dust escaped out the top. She ducked under the bags before anyone could spot her. A toy box poked out of one of them, its corner stabbing her in the spine. Cellophane crinkled as she tried to shift it to the non-poking side.

“Did you hear that?” asked a tiny, shrill voice.

Tracy froze, holding her breath while listening for the answer.

It came about a minute later when another voice said, “Squirrel. Over in that tree.”

“Good eyes,” said the first voice. “You ready?”

“Always.”

Then, Tracy heard the jingle of bells. She sunk further under the bags, hoping to stay hidden for at least an hour or two. By then it wouldn't matter if she was caught. She'd seen enough movies to know that Santa didn't mind a stowaway every now and then. He'd pat her on the head and take her home, probably with a snow globe or sleigh bell to remember him by. Little would he know that in addition to her trinket, she would have plenty of hard evidence for her project. Pictures. Video footage. Hair samples. Full chemical analysis of his red toy bags.

She smiled to herself and settled in as she heard Santa's boots clomping across the roof. He was here. And it was time to go.

Tracy

Tracy hadn't anticipated Santa's enormous size. The sleigh lurched as he climbed in, shifting the bags above her, and pushing her shoulder into the wooden floorboards. She clutched her neck pouch to her chest. Every time she'd run through this night in her mind, she'd envisioned only one thing going wrong—Santa accidentally grabbing her neck pouch and gifting it to some well-deserving child. Keeping her limps intact had never been part of the scenario. The back of Santa's seat squished her arm against her body until it went numb. The point of her scissors jutted out the top of her bag and pressed into her thigh. Did scientific experiments have to be so painful?

The next house was only a block away, and while Santa was gone, Tracy had time to shake out her tingling fingers, but little else.

For the next three stops, she kept sneaking her phone up above the bags to take blind shots of what she hoped were the reindeer, but she was so crunched up in the bottom of the sleigh, she couldn't see if she'd gotten anything worth using.

The reindeer weren't helping. They didn't make a single sound, not a snort or a huff to tell her which direction to point the camera. Their silence was good evidence for her theory that they were holograms, but there was also the fact that she couldn't hear anything else. The elves didn't say any more, and Santa never uttered a single “Ho Ho Ho.” Who knew a ride with Santa would be so…quiet? An eerie tingle crept up her spine. Or maybe that was the stupid toy box digging into a nerve and making her back go numb.

Her luck finally kicked in at the fourth stop when Santa removed the offending bag and took it down the chimney with him. She twisted her arm behind her back to examine the spot where her skin was screaming. She winced when she touched the tender area. This was for Pim, she reminded herself. What was one little scar compared to getting her cousin back?

With one less bag in the sleigh, Tracy was able to poke her head out and get her first glimpse of the reindeer. They looked pretty much like they did in the movies: antlers, brown and white fur, cow-like faces. But they didn't prance or paw their hooves, or move at all. Even if they were holograms, her grandmother had claimed they were majestic. These guys looked as if they'd been stuffed and mounted, a fancy rooftop decoration instead of the living, breathing creatures they were supposed to be. Was Santa even trying to make them look real?

She snapped about a dozen pictures, but just as she was about to climb out to get some close ups, a yellow plume of smoke appeared out of the chimney signaling Santa's return. Tracy ducked back down into the sleigh. The bag was dropped on top of her once more, minus the toy box with the sharp corners.

As they zoomed off to the next stop, Tracy went down her mental check list of items that she needed. At the next stop, she planned to see if she could get a video of her hand waving through the reindeer projections. Once more of the toys were gone and she had room to maneuver in the sleigh, she could snap some better pictures of them in flight. Would they actually look like they were flying, or would they stay stiff and still like they had been on the rooftop?

Pictures of Santa at his job might be a little harder to get, but not impossible. The hardest things would be the snippet of Santa's beard and saliva sample. Those were vital for the DNA testing. They would prove whether he was human, or some unknown species. For Tracy's hypothesis, she asserted he was something else. Santa was way too old to be human. Besides, how awesome would it be to prove the existence of a new species? With the money from that, she would be able to save Pim and buy her parents a huge mansion, probably in Beverly Hills.