"Hi, Van," she said cheerfully.Van was a senior at the high school. He was a handsome upper classman that had been vying for Patty's attention, almost...from the moment the pretty young freshman had appeared on campus.Unbeknownst to Patty, Van had befriended several freshman girls during the last three years of his high school tenure.Three years ago during his first year at the school, Van had fallen head over heels in love with a girl named Dominica Dawson. Dominica had been the most beautiful. The backside of the first elf seemed to ripple and shudder; the door in front of the creature got suddenly darker. Another Crack! wrinkled the air; the elf's shoulders sagged around a weird depression in the small of its back, and its head lolled forward and then seemed to sink straight down into its chest. The elf fell against the door and seemed to collapse in place, until the shoulders settled onto the hips. One leg twitched, but it was otherwise still.Another elf came in from the right,. "It's a wonderful evening, isn't it John?" Gillian said. Her eyes were wandering the horizon as she enjoyed herself."It is wonderful." Said John. He sat the pipe aside for a moment and folded the newspaper. "It's even more wonderful that I'm sharing it with you."Lights flickered over the mountain tops at the edge of the desert."What is that?" Asked Gillian.John glanced over the top of his newspaper and shrugged. At first the light looked like a very bright, twinkling star, of which there were. "I thought about putting Cumulus in wheel," Mike said, "And trying to run Ringo in a single lead, but I decided that it was not a real great idea, back in the woods. Next time we go out, let's leave a dog behind and run him in single lead for a while." Yeah," Mark said, "Or, we could take George, and try it with nine dogs. He's getting big enough to get the idea." I wouldn't want to take him out for a real long run, just yet," Mike said. "But there's no reason we couldn't run him up and down.