7/11

Written for Magazine Journalism course at UC Santa Barbara

Every Christmas, my family has lunch at 7/11. No matter the place, no matter the people, Christmas lunch takes place at 7/11.

It all began in the year 2002 (which is just ten months after I was born, so I feel it is important to note the origins of this tradition are all trickled down from my siblings and mother’s accounts). My family had just moved from the cornfield-ridden land of Lincoln, Nebraska to the small watertown of Annapolis, Maryland. With our dining room filled to the brim with Home Depot boxes and my father “on-call” at the hospital, my mother decided it would be acceptable to forgo the ham, green bean casserole, and scalloped potatoes. A small problem arose at the recognition that the town of Annapolis essentially shut down for the holidays. After the initial panic of four hungry children under the age of 10 and no restaurant open in sight, my mom piled us all into her black Acura MDX and drove until she saw any place that sold any sort of food and had lights on. Lo and behold, just five minutes up Forest Drive, there sat the fluorescent green, red, and orange glow of the 7/11 sign. I was told that on that fateful Christmas of 2002 my siblings were allowed to have anything they wanted from the convenience store. Tollhouse ice cream sandwiches, Coca-Cola Slurpees, and 7/11’s famous “homemade” taquitos filled their small arms. With four happy and fed children, my mother had officially established the Hupp’s most famous tradition.

My brother, William, was easily the biggest fan of this tradition. Each year his metabolism grew and, in turn, so did his order. One Christmas, he received this god-awful long brown terry cloth robe with his name embroidered in a white thread from my grandfather. And thus a new tradition was born, a tradition where Will would show up every Christmas at 7/11 like a kid in a candy store running through the aisles in his abhorrent brown robe. Will suffered from pretty severe depression from about the age of 14 on. Every year, it became a little more difficult

to pull him out of bed. The one thing that could always tear him from his dark cave during the holidays was our annual trip to 7/11. He’d roll out of bed, throw on his brown terry cloth robe, and climb into the backseat of the car. He always sat in the very back of the car, because he wanted to give his three sisters the middle row. That was Will’s way of expressing love: never saying it, but always showing it. He’d collect his goods, place them on the counter, and as soon as my mother had paid, he’d return to the back seat and start his feast. We’d zip home, and he’d return to his room. I was too busy with my new Barbie Dreamhouse or whatnot to even notice anything was wrong. It was Christmas, and we’d just had the most delicious lunch at 7/11. Despair seemed impossible.

I lied before when I implied that every single Christmas since 2002, we have ventured out to 7/11 for lunch. We have missed one year. My brother unexpectedly passed away a little less than a month before Christmas 2018. His funeral was just twelve days before, and it’s safe to assume that no one had much appetite for 7/11 that year. When we were scrounging through our stockings that year, at the very bottom there was a small gift card with the infamous orange, red, and green logo that had provided us so much comfort and love for the last sixteen years. The “To” line said, “Lipie” (a childhood nickname my sisters had given me), and the “From” said “William” in my mother’s mixture of cursive and print handwriting. All day I had repeatedly asked my mom and dad when we would be doing our annual outing. Every time, I received an exhausted, “Later Laura,” which translated to “That is the least of my concerns right now.” That was the first year since the tradition’s origin that the Hupp family did not go to 7/11 for Christmas lunch.

Change, though necessary, is probably the most difficult part of life, in my opinion. There is always so much talk about how amazing and growth-filled change is, which is true, but it is also incredibly shitty. After the holidays, my sisters went back to their busy lives in New

York. I was left home alone with two grief-stricken parents and no way out. At the beginning of the new year, I returned to my junior year of high school. For context, I went to a high school of only 400 students who all wore matching brown dress shoes and white polos with khakis or khaki skort. Word traveled like wildfire through the halls about my brother’s passing. So, on my first day back, you can imagine the stares and sad smiles that came my way. Even my closest friends treated me as a fragile China bowl that was bound to break at any moment. I was homesick in my own home. Our chatty family dinners were now silent. Photos of my sisters and me were replaced with solo shots of my brother. My parents were mearly coexisiting. The lack of 7/11 on Christmas of 2018 started a never-ending chain of changes to come. I remember exactly how all this change felt because it was so terrible. Imagine looking around at all the aspects of your life that felt so familiar and concrete and not recognizing a single thing. I can attest that it certainly impacts you as a person.

With the way this story is going, there is probably the assumption that I locked myself in my room and never came out and this story is being written from the confines of my closet. That probably would have been easier, but the thing about losing a sibling is that you can’t shut down. I was only 16 when Will died; I still had my entire life in front of me. Parents of children who have passed are allowed to and almost expected to, stop the way they once lived their lives. That was simply not an option for my sisters and me. So, I kept going. I went to school every day, kept my grades up, stayed involved, and tried my best to uphold the image of the Laura that everyone was used to. On my birthday in February, after he passed, one of my best friends posted an Instagram story with the caption, “Happy Birthday to the happiest girl in the world.” My sister texted me half a second later with a screenshot of the post and asked, “Is this a joke?” Although the irony of calling a girl who lost her brother three months prior “the happiest girl in the world” was comical, I claimed that title with the way I presented myself. No one expects the siblings of the fallen to crumble, so I didn’t.

I wrote an essay for AP Lang about our 7/11 tradition in the fall of 2019 and ended it in a very sad and mysterious way. It went something like “I don’t know if we will ever return to 7/11 on Christmas Day, but I sure hope we do.” Well don’t fret naïve 2019 Laura: we did. The Hupp family has made their epic return to 7/11 in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. I’m sure 2023 will follow suit. I’ll admit, the holidays are a lot more somber and the lunch feast smiles are a little less wide. That is okay, though. After staring at an empty stocking hanging on the fireplace all morning, I wouldn’t expect anyone to be as gleeful as the holiday wants you to be.

That’s the thing about change – you get used to it. Suddenly, it’s not so heavy anymore. I am now a professional at writing condolence texts to people who have lost loved ones. I remember exactly the texts that impacted me and the ones that felt forced. I genuinely want to open conversations about mental health, because I know how harmful it can be when these challenges go undiscussed. I talk to each of my family members every single day because we know what it’s like to not be able to do that anymore. I choose to be kind to every single person I see because I know the power of a little kindness. All those terrible, horrible emotions that I felt during the endless change that was happening in my young 16-year-old life taught me more than any college course or textbook. I would do anything in the world to have my brother back, but I wouldn’t change a thing about what my family and I have become and how we got here. When my children enter this world, I can’t wait to take them to 7/11 for Christmas lunch and show them all the treats their uncle, whom they’ll never have the pleasure to meet, would get. Maybe I’ll even get them brown floor-length terry cloth robes with their names embroidered in white cursive thread.