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Christmas Present

Trina is sitting with her hands on her knees, in the armchair next to the Christmas tree, staring at something on the far wall. Or maybe at nothing at all.

After a moment or ten, Virginie comes in with a mug in her hands. "Tea," she says, giving it to Trina, and sits down in the other chair.

Trina takes the mug, wraps her hands around it, but doesn't drink any of it. "Thank you. Eliza's . . .?"

"She is asleep," says Virginie.

"Visions of sugar plums," Trina says, sharp and dry.

"Excuse me?"

"Nothing. Don't worry about it," Trina says.

Another moment, and then Virginie says, "So that was your brother?"

"That was Logan, yes."

"And will he be visiting very often?"

Trina shakes her head. "No."

"Are you all right, Trina?"

"I'm . . . I'm fine. Thank you. You can go on ahead and call it a night, if you want. I'll lock up."

"Bonne nuit, then. Try not to stay up too late."

Only someone who knew Trina well would be able to tell just how forced the smile is. "But I have to wait up for Santa."

"Not too late," Virginie says.

Trina nods. But if the body language is anything to go by, she's going to be in that chair for a long, long time.

Christmas Future

Trina is sitting in the floor, facing a Christmas tree covered slightly haphazardly in ornaments clearly made by Eliza. Her hair is longer, she's older, and she's wearing -- if he's seeing correctly -- a green sweater with a poinsettia appliqued on it. And swearing under her breath at the present she's trying to wrap.

She has her back to the door, and therefore to the man who slips up behind her and covers her eyes with his hands. "Merry Christmas, Trina," he says, in her ear.

"Hey, you," she says, turning around, hands coming up to move his, and the lights catch the rings on her left hand. "You're supposed to be trapped in Chicago."

He pulls her to her feet, puts his arms around her waist, and kisses her. "Like eight measly inches of snow is going to keep me from finding a way home to my girls for Christmas. How is the munchkin?"

"Visions of sugar plums," Trina says, settling in against him. "Or possibly out of bed and wide awake, watching out the window for activity on neighborhood rooftops."

"My money's on the latter."

"Yeah, mine is, too," Trina says. "I'm really glad you're here. You can help wrap all this stuff."

"That the only reason you're glad I'm here?"

"No, but until the presents are wrapped, it's the only one I'm acting on."

He laughs, lets her go, and sits down. "So how's everything else?" he asks, and it's obvious that it's not so much a question about everything as it is about a particular something.

Trina shakes her head and sits down, too. "Can't stop it. Chris appreciates my concerns, but it's a nice juicy story and it's all public knowledge and public record, so there's really nothing I can do. Honestly, I think he's hoping that I'll make a fuss because, hell, can't buy that kind of publicity. Rewash all the family laundry in public, again, 'cause, you know, it's not like it'll ever come clean."

"I'm so sorry, sunshine," he says.

Trina shrugs. "It's just . . . Eliza's seven now. And she's old enough that she's going to start understanding what people are talking about. And her friends are going to know, and I just hate that she's going to have to deal with all the family fuck ups and scandals being back to front and center. And Chris is such a crap director that the movie's gonna suck anyway." Trina hands him a package. "Put that under the tree, would you?"

"I'm sorry," he says again. "We can talk to the lawyers again . . ."

"No, that's okay. I think the less we do the better, really, at this point," says Trina, picking up the next gift. "You have to hand it to him, though. Even dead, he's still managing to fuck up Christmas."

By 90909 standards, this would count as a pretty modest house, a four-bedroom ranch with a tidy yard, at the end of a cul-de-sac. It's typical of this neighborhood, which is the sort of place where people spend a little more than they need to at Christmas, but not the sort where people hire Victorian carolers to perform in clouds of special effects snow at their Christmas parties.

It’s Christmas Eve, and lights twinkle and glimmer in windows up and down the street, snatches of carols slip out when doors open, and Santa-playing parents are muttering about batteries not being included and badly written instructions as they put presents under trees for tomorrow morning.

Trina moved in over the summer, and she knows there were concerns about having a Famous For Being Famous retired starlet in down the street. She buys cookies from Girl Scouts and popcorn from Boy Scouts when they come around, she comes and goes quietly and at decent hours, and the closest she’s come to hosting a wild party was a Saturday afternoon baby shower. One of her neighbors brought her a casserole when she got home from the hospital after Eliza was born, and another made her daughter a tiny pink hat and booties, and Trina figures that means she’s passed some kind of test and this might actually wind up being home for a good long while.

( The Hidden Track )

Previously . . .

As far as Trina can tell, this Agent Booth person seems to be determined to vent his frustration at being a midlevel government drone by making her drive all the way down to Neptune for a ten-minute interview. Which is really annoying.

At least it gives her a chance to check up on Logan without having made a special trip to check up on Logan. (Special trips are something Echolls family interaction rules generally do not allow. In town anyway and dropping by is, however, all right.)

Trina is hoping Logan will answer the doorbell quickly -- the milkshakes she's brought are cold.

Previously . . .

She had meant to get over here sooner, see how her brother was doing in his new place, the one that doesn’t include turndown service and 24-hour meal delivery. Bring him a potted plant or some equally lame house-warming present.

Instead, she gets this as her first visit.

Well, they’re Echollses, after all. They don’t get to do normal.

Trina rings her brother’s doorbell, and waits.

A little known fact about Trina Echolls is that she is very much a morning person. This is something of a liability in Hollywood. "Morning person" just isn't nearly as good a career move as "night owl," since there aren't a lot of red carpet breakfasts, and no one is at all interested when you're photographed leaving Starbucks with a no fat half-caf extra foam grande sugar-free vanilla latte at 7:30, unless you're still in the clothes you were clubbing in last night.

So Trina doesn't often get to be a morning person, since even the most morningest of morning people has a hard time being bright eyed at 7AM if she went to bed at 4AM.

But last night she went to bed quite early, and this morning she got up at what her brother would likely consider an ungodly hour, and she drove to Neptune, arriving at a slightly later but still ungodly hour.

He should know it's her, when she knocks on the door to his suite. His sister has a quite distinct way of knocking on her little brother's door -- loud, sharp, insistant, and with just the tiniest hint of annoyance that there's even a suggestion she should have to ask to come in at all.

OK, so it wasn't exactly a Christmas out of the movies. But it went surprisingly well, given that most Christmases for the Echolls siblings have been one step removed from hellish.

And now Mary and Logan have gone home, and Chad's Grangran is snoring away in the guest room, and Trina is sort of absently tidying the living room, moving things from place to place, slightly restless, but not unhappily so.

Chad catches her arm as she goes past him, and pulls her down onto the couch beside him.

Trina has decided, in that way Trina decides things, that she's going to have a nice, happy, normal family Christmas. The fact that she has no nice, happy, normal family at any other time of the year does not deter her. She's going to have family and carols and cook food and there's going to be a Christmas like you have in the movies, not one like you have in the movie business. Which is why Logan has been Summoned for a holiday meal.

Chad has gone to pick up his grandmother, arriving at LAX late due to delays in Denver, and Mary will be along later. And Trina is cooking. A proper Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, all of which she is fixing herself.

OK, so she bought the rolls and the rum cake, because she doesn't bake, but she's making everything else. She bought fresh asparagus (which has now been boiling on the stove for two hours). She bought baking potatoes, wrapped in foild and ready for the microwave. And she has a twenty-two pound turkey. She pulled it out of the freezer midmorning, and as she has not has time to thaw it, she's just dumped dry stuffing in on top of giblets packet, flung it in the oven, and turned the oven up as high as it would go (self-cleaning).

Most importantly, she has a case of a very nice pinot gris, which she has already opened and started in on.

Now she's lighting the candles on the mantle, and humming (badly) along to the Pretentious Umlaüts' mostly forgotten and utterly forgettable album Home for Christmäs.

Sometimes a girl wants to see and be seen when she goes out in LA, and sometimes she really doesn't. If you're Trina Echolls, the former is usually the case and the latter is hard to pull off these days, after the thing with Nicole and Logan's . . . whatever that was on Larry King last night.

But she manages, at times like this, because Carl is the creme de la creme of maitre'ds. Which is why she's waiting for her little brother in a table tucked neatly in back of a restaurant (that can't be seen from the door or any of the windows), with iced tea, breaking a breadstick into pieces.

The "Out of Candy" sign is on the front door. The half-drunk bottle of wine is on the coffee table. The shirt she wore today is on the floor by the door to the kitchen. Trina is on the couch. And Bryan's hand is on the zipper on her skirt.

Which is when the phone rings four times before Trina's cheerful voice fills the room. "This is Trina, leave a message."

"Trina, it's Mom. Could you call me the moment you get this please?"

"You need to call her?" Bryan asks.

"Not at this instant," Trina says. Whatever Lynn is upset about can wait. Especially given what Bryan is, at present, doing with his tongue.

"Good," he says, his mouth drifting down to her -- and he then stops and looks up, as across the room, her cell phone rings for 20 seconds before falling silent, then rings again.

"It's nothing," she says, again, "just igno--"

The phone rings again. "This is Trina, leave a message."

"Trina, are you screening your calls? Because I need to talk to you right now. Pick up the phone, please."

"Oh, go to hell," Trina mutters, and then adds hastily, "Not you, Bryan. Her."

"We'll just ignore her," Bryan says, repeating her advice. And it's easy to, really, because he is doing his damnest to be distracting, and Trina isn't really listening to what Lynn is saying.

Until ". . . your help with Logan."

Shit.

Trina disentangles herself from Bryan and picks up the phone. "I'm here. What is it?"

The apartment is quiet for a several minutes, while Lynn lectures Trina on not answering her phone more promptly, and on her responsibilities to her family and so on and Trina drums her fingers on the kitchen counter and waits for her stepmother to get to the point. Bryan sits sulking on the couch, finishing off the wine.

"All right," Trina says finally. "I'll take care of it." She hangs up.

Bryan wraps his arm around her waist and pulls her back onto the couch. "Now where we before we so rudely interrupted?" he asks.

Trina shoves him away and gets up. "Bryan, I'm sorry, I have to go," she says, pulling her shirt on over her head.

"What? Now? You can't leave now. I'm . . ."

"Take a cold shower," Trina says unsympathetically, looking for her purse.

"Trina, I can't--"

"I'll be back," she says, digging her keys out of her purse, not answering his question. "You wait if you want, or you can go."

"Trina--"

"In or out, Bryan."

Fifteen minutes later, Trina is standing in front of Neptune High School, waiting for Principal Morehead to escort her drunken little brother out of the school Halloween party. And Bryan is just one more in her string of failed relationships.

( The Random Question Meme! )

Trina Echolls is not much of an actress (and enough of a realist to know it, if not to, you know, actually admit it out loud). But she’s a pro at acting like Trina Echolls the persona. (She has less of a handle on Trina Echolls the person.)

So the early afternoon has been a series of cups of coffee and phone calls, to her agent, to her publicist, to Chad's agent and publicist, to various lawyers. A statement has been issued, hitting the appropriate (and probably predictable) notes – it's not a joke, or a hoax, or a stunt blah blah blah both been in places recently that have been very lonely blah blah carried away by their reconnection blah blah thank their fans for their support and understanding and ask for privacy and patience blah blah blibbity blah. That done, they've gone back to not taking calls (except from their lawyers), and waiting for the latest coffee delivery from room service.

Trina is now curled up in the chair in the corner, wearing one of Chad's shirts and not much else (it hits her about mid-thigh), bare feet and no make up, hair caught up haphazardly on top of her head with the rubber band she found in the bottom of her purse. She's on the phone with Mary.

Chad is flipping through the television stations, passing Tinseltown Diaires on the Echolls Family, Behind the Music on the Pretentious Ümlaüts, the video for his latest single ("Agony" --airplay of which has quadrupled in the last 24 hours), a rather snide interview with Jerrica, and a special on celebrity weddings, before settling on a Cardinals game. That he's not wearing a shirt with the jeans might be explained by Trina's having appropriated it.

Ah, the glamorous life of a Hollywood It Couple.

As much of a B-lister as you have to be to wind up as a player on Celebrity Poker Grudge Match, you have to be even more stuck in mid-level mediocrity to wind up as the celebrity host, Steve Something, a man with a smile that's meant to be charming and comes off as smarmy and shows too many teeth. Trina cannot for the life of her remember why he was famous in the first place.

She's perched on the edge of the couch in the Losers' Lounge, explaining that while, yes, she's disappointed to be knocked out first, she thinks she's played well, and going all in with an ace in her hand and one on the table makes perfect sense, and really, there's no way she could have known about Chad's pocket aces, and yes, he does have a great poker face. And furthermore, yes, what really matters is that a great cause in a town that has been home to her family is getting $5000 and a little exposure, and yes, she does think her father would be pleased.

Having survived the post-defeat interview, and having been provided with a glass of Hpnotiq (which is the same bright blue as that rather tight sweater and that rather short skirt and those rather high heels), all she has to do is watch the rest of the game on the monitor, and make occasional witty comments to the host and the resident poker expert. Easy.

But allow, please, the narration to make one thing perfectly clear. She absolutely was not doing anything as cliched as playing footsie with her ex-boyfriend during the game. Her shoe fell off. And it's hardly her fault that she ran her right foot into (and around and between) Chad's ankles a few times, while she was trying to -- discreetly -- get her shoe back on. It certainly wasn't intentional. And it certainly wasn't intended to distract him from the cards.

The narration is, however, at a bit of a loss as to what his hand was doing on her thigh. That question is probably best left for Chad himself, who (if the current hand plays out the way it looks like it's going to) should be joining her any moment now.

Las Vegas is, and always has been, Trina's kind of town -- glitzy, bright, unapologetically brash and loud and thoroughly unashamed. But her favorite thing about Vegas (which no one who knew her would be likely to believe, if she were likely to admit it, which she's not) is that there's a certain degree of anonymity possible there. She can walk through the main room of a casino and most people are so distracted by the lights and the noise and the slim but tantalizing chance of hitting triple sevens on the slots that they never notice the daughter of America's latest murdered celebrity as she goes by.

But since there are those who notice, and a lot of them have cameras, it would hardly do for the daughter of America's latest murdered celebrity to be seen out and about, carousing in Vegas, not quite a month after the burial. Unless, of course, she had a good excuse. So when there's last minute drop out for Celebrity Poker Grudge Match, Trina has Howard pull every string he can reach (it's what agents are for), and even deigns to pull a few herself. It won't air till the fall, and she'll play for one of her father's favorite causes (the Neptune soup kitchen, to which he gave half a million dollar to the year before he died, for some reason) in order to continue his charity work, so it should all be perfectly respectable.

And, most importantly, it gives her a few days away from the madness that is LA, a chance to lose herself in the white noise of Las Vegas. She even -- rather impulsively -- brought only her "emergency" cell phone, the one only Logan and Mary and Howard have the number for. She's taking a vacation from life. She's cautiously optimistic about the whole thing.

So that is how she finds herself comfortably settled in the green room, hair and make up done, sipping mineral water, the first to arrive and waiting to see she's playing against. (In the mad rush, she hasn't bothered to check.) She's just going to sit back and enjoy the ride. She's here to have a little fun.

And hey, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right?

Aaron Echolls killed Lilly Kane. He clocked her with an ashtray, and left her to die by the pool. That’s the truth, and it’s basically the start of everything. (And if you don’t believe us, you can ask Lilly.) Exactly why he killed Lilly, well, you may think you know, but do you? Aaron is psychotic, and was clearly obsessed with his son’s girlfriend. Want proof? Well, that’s tough. There were tapes, of Aaron with a young blonde girl he called “Lilly” while doing things you shouldn’t be doing with your son’s underage girlfriend. It’s hard to tell from the tapes if she was Lilly or not. There’s another, with a blonde girl who clearly isn’t Lilly, in which Aaron indicates (boasts?) that he’ll be bringing Lilly along to join them next time.

(In case you’re wondering, it wasn’t Lilly. Oh, Aaron came on to her a time a two, and what with Logan and Lilly being on the outs at the time she died, who knows what might have happened the next time he tried it. But it never happened.)

So where are the tapes? The short answer is “gone” and the long answer is “Logan Echolls bought them from a Neptune deputy and wiped them, to preserve the memory of the love of his life.” This turned out to be problematic, because without the tapes, the prosecution’s case melts, as the testimony of critical witnesses Veronica Mars and her father and Logan is shredded by Aaron’s high powered lawyers.

Adding to the confusion is the mysterious disappearance of Lilly’s brother Duncan, who took off at the middle of the season with his kidnapped illegitimate daughter, and hasn’t been seen or heard from since. And then there’s Aaron’s Oscar buried in the Kane back yard, sporting Lilly’s blood and Duncan’s hair (planted by conniving Kendall Casablancas, trophy wife of Logan’s friend Dick’s father and sometimes playmate of Logan). And with an alternate suspect and some reasonable doubt, well, the long and the short of it is that Aaron Echolls, in the grand tradition of OJ Simpson and Michael Jackson, got away with it.

And the sad thing? Aaron’s not a shoe-in for skuzziest Neptune resident. Have you met the mayor? Woody Goodman, owner of Woody’s Burgers and major league baseball team the Neptune Sharks, all around good guy. Except for the part where he used his little league team as an escort service, which has led to unsavory things like blackmail and bus crashes. But you know, it’s hard to convince unrepentant jackass Sheriff Don Lamb to arrest the mayor, even when Keith Mars brings him everything he needs to do so. The mayor has fled the town.

And as for the bus crash, well, surely you’ve heard about that. Mysterious explosion takes causes a busload of Neptune High students (though not the rich kids, of course) to go off a cliff and plunge into the Pacific? It’s not clear just what the motivation behind that was, not yet, but with two of Woody’s victims among the passengers . . . this is Neptune. Nothing happens here by accident.

And even putting that aside, there are scores of little everyday dramas that play themselves out in this little town. There’s Eli “Weevil” Navarro, former PCH bike gang leader, whose final gift to his former followers was to tidy up their problems with rival gang the Fitzpatricks, and then take out the member who betrayed them. (If only those little kids hadn’t seen him from the back of their van . . .) All he wants right now is to graduate from high school and make his grandmother proud. He’s gone so far as to get Cindy “Mac” Mazkenzie and her moody boyfriend Cassidy “Beaver” Casablancas to tutor him in algebra.

Mac and Beaver – or Cassidy, as he would prefer we call him – have been a truly adorable couple for a few months. And he is a teenaged boy. So it’s a bit of a mystery why he isn’t interested in even trying to get to second base. Or his bizarre over-reaction to her when she tried to bring the topic up. But they seem to be somewhat back on track now, and have big plans for graduation night.

And then there’s the epic-worthy love story of Veronica Mars and Logan Echolls. These two have fought and loved their way through years and bloodshed, crisis and conflict, relationships with other people, and more snark than ought to be allowed by law. He finally worked up the nerve to tell her that he was still very much interested in her. Unfortunately, he was drunk at the time, and she panicked. And when she went back, he confessed that the previous evening was rather blurry, and, even more unfortunately, playmate Kendall was hanging about in his hotel room.

None of which explains where Veronica got Chlamydia. Duncan was her first and only, after all. They first hooked up at Shelly Pomroy’s party, both (unknowingly) drugged up, and after he dumped her because he thought he was her half-brother. (Turns out he wasn’t. In case you were wondering.) He panicked and left her to wake up alone and convinced she’d been raped. They had managed to put all that behind them, before he vanished into Mexico with his dead ex-girlfriend’s baby.

Now pretty much all bets are off.

Want to know more? Stick around. Because we, the Veronica Mars muns, are going to try to explain it all to you.

Aaron Echolls' Memorial Service (not to be confused with the private burial for the family and selected reporters) is being held in the Gold Ballroom of the Neptune Grand. The casket (closed of course, what with the gunshot head wounds and all) is on a raised platform, surrounded by a garden's worth of flowers. A video tribute is being projected onto one wall, and if Aaron's only daughter features in it rather more than can be reasonably expected, well, surely it's coincidence.

Trina is here, swathed and veiled in black, carrying a single calla lily (Daddy always was fond of lilies), looking pale and tragic and accepting the condolences of her family's Hollywood friends.

Logan is around somewhere, too, skulking around the edges, avoiding everyone he can, and keeping hold of his hip flask.

Come console the bereaved children.

Trina didn't make it back to Neptune for the trial. She was way too busy in LA, and hey, that's the business, right?

And it's not like she can come home, after the verdict is announced. For one thing, her family doesn't actually have a home any more.

But she can call.

"Hello, Daddy. How's feel to be a free man?"

<td align="center"> Trina Echolls --
[noun]:

A dance involving little to no clothing

'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com</td>