Wallace was humming that damn song again.

Veronica rolled her eyes and kicked him underneath the table with her knee high black leather boots that really did nothing for her reputation.

He glared. "Ow."

"That's my line," Veronica corrected. "Wallace, how many times have I told you not to hum that song? This is California. It is not nor will it ever begin to look like Christmas."

"It did that one time on Buffy," Wallace pointed out with a grin.

"Yes, and she dated a vampire, now didn't she?"

Veronica sat and waited for his inevitable comeback. The joking, “she has better taste in men than you.” It was really inevitable. After all, she’d dated a drug dealer and Logan Echolls. Even Duncan had been a problem what with the early possibility of being related to him. Oh yeah, she sure knew how to pick them. Veronica Mars didn’t just flirt with disaster. She had disaster’s babies and released them on to the world.

But Wallace didn’t say anything.

“Hey, Wallace?”

“Yes, Ms. Mars?”

“You can hum the damn song if you want.”

Wallace smiled and started up again. And even though it wasn’t beginning to look like Christmas, even though the holidays in Neptune, California were often accompanied by murder, deceit, scandal, and violence, she pretended that she was going to wake up on the twenty-fifth to a world that was white, new, and unsullied.

She pretended until the song ended. Then it was time for reality again.