His Secret Santa

On his sixteenth birthday, just before Christmas, Holden Dunkel and his best friend, Jamie Dayton, used fake IDs to get into The Phoenix Club, a high-end gay strip club in New York City. While watching a sexy “Christmas” stage show, Holden meets a hot Santa stripper who wants to be his Secret Santa and offers him a Christmas/birthday gift he’ll never forget. After a mind-blowing rendezvous in a private booth, his secret Santa exhibits a mysterious side and invites Holden to come back on his eighteenth birthday, promising to reveal all his secrets.

Two years later, Holden still thinks about his secret Santa from the Phoenix Club and wonders if he’s still there—and if so, how he would recognize him without his mask. Thoughts of the stripper are magnified when he learns the senior class is to participate in a Secret Santa assignment. Holden dreads the assignment, and even more so when he draws McKenna Peterson’s name—the head cheerleader and girlfriend of his crush, quarterback Lincoln Pratt.

For the last four years, Holden has been invisible to the quarterback, though not so much to his girlfriend and his other football buddies who never miss a chance to ruin Holden’s day. His hopes of finding acceptance among his peers are all but dashed, now that senior year is half over. It wouldn’t take much to commemorate his last four years… just a warm look or friendly ‘hello’ from the quarterback. But since he first saw Lincoln back in freshman year, the guy never once acknowledged his existence. A few more months weren’t going to change that.

Holden doesn’t give a second thought to his own secret Santa, certain that whoever drew his name will simply opt out of the gift and never reveal their identity. He wonders if he should do the same with the cheerleader. Nothing he could give her would be received with gratitude or thanks. As the stress of the assignment builds, he finds himself thinking more and more about his secret stripper Santa, longing to be back inside the club—inside that private booth—where, for the first time in his life, he felt free to be himself, without judgment.

I will go back, Holden determines. Maybe he’s still there… maybe he will remember me.