Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances

take one good look at her and then I will look down again and reassess. One look.
I looked over at her. Her head was cocked toward me, her eyes unblinking, containing all of the colors.
She  sucked  her  chapped  lips  into  her  mouth  and  then  let  them  go,  and  there  was  one  strand  of  her  hair
coming  out  from  under  her  hat,  and  her  nose  was  rosy  red,  and  she  sniffled.  And  I  didn’t  want  to  stop
looking at her, but finally I did. I looked back down at the snowy parking lot beneath my feet.
“Will you say something, please?” she asked.
I  spoke  into  the  ground.  “I  always  had  this  idea  that  you  should  never  give  up  a  happy  middle  in  the
hopes of a happy ending, because there is no such thing as a happy ending. Do you know what I mean?
There is so much to lose.”
“Do you know why I wanted to go? Why I wanted to go back up that hill, Tobin? I mean, surely you
know it’s not because I cared if Keun had to hang out with the Reston twins or because I wanted to see
you fawn over cheerleaders.”
“I thought because of Billy,” I said.
She was really looking at me now, and I could see her breath all around me in the cold, surrounding me.
“I  wanted  us  to  have  an  adventure.  Because  I  love  that  crap.  Because  I’m  not  whatever-her-name-is.  I
don’t think it’s oh so hard to walk four miles in the snow. I want that. I love that. When we were at your
house watching the movie, I wanted it to snow more. More and more! It makes it more interesting. Maybe
you aren’t like that, but I think you are.”
“I wanted that, too,” I said, half interrupting her, still not looking for fear of what I might do if I looked.
“For it to keep snowing.”
“Yeah? Cool. So, cool. And so what if more snow makes a happy ending less likely? So the car might
get messed up—so what! So we might ruin our friendship—so what? I’ve kissed guys where nothing was
at stake, and all it ever made me want to do was to have a kiss where everything—”
I looked up at about the “nothing was at stake,” and I waited all the way until the “everything” and then
I couldn’t wait anymore, and my hand was on the back of her head, and then her lips on mine, the cold air
gone and replaced with the warmth of her mouth, soft and sweet and hash-brown-tastic, and I opened my
eyes and my gloves touched the skin of her face pale from the cold, and I had never before had a first kiss
with a girl I loved. When we parted, I looked at her, bashful, and said, “Wow,” and then she laughed and
pulled me back toward her and then from above and behind us, I heard the ding-dong of the Waffle House
door opening.
“HOLY. CRAP. WHAT. THE. HELL. IS. HAPPENING.”
I just looked up at JP, trying to wipe the goofy smile off my face.
“KEUN!” JP shouted. “GET YOUR FAT KOREAN ASS OUT HERE.”
Keun appeared at the doorway, looking down at us. JP shouted, “TELL THEM WHAT YOU JUST DID
TO EACH OTHER!”

---

“Um,” I said.
“We kissed,” the Duke said.
“That’s kinda gay,” Keun said.
“I AM A GIRL.”
“Yeah, I know, but so is Tobin,” Keun said.
JP  was  still  shouting,  seemingly  unable  to  modulate  his  voice.  “AM  I  THE  ONLY  PERSON
PROFOUNDLY  CONCERNED  ABOUT  THE  WHOLE  MAKEUP  OF  OUR  GROUP?  WILL  NO  ONE
THINK OF THE GOOD OF THE GROUP?!”
“Go gawk at cheerleaders,” the Duke said.
JP looked at us for a while and then he smiled. “Just don’t get all gooey with each other.” He turned
around and walked inside.
“Your hash browns are getting cold,” I said.
“If we go back in, no flirting with cheerleaders.”
“I  only  did  it  to  get  your  attention,”  I  confessed.  “Can  I  kiss  you  again?”  She  nodded  and  I  did,  and
there  was  no  second-kiss  drop-off  whatsoever.  I  could  have  kept  going  forever,  but  finally,  through  the
kiss,  she  said,  “I  actually  really  do  want  my  hash  browns,”  and  so  I  opened  the  door  and  she  ducked
beneath my arm and we ate dinner at three
A.M.
We hid in the back amid the giant steel refrigerators, our time interrupted only occasionally by JP coming
back  to  give  us  the  hilarious  details  of  his  and  Keun’s  aborted  attempts  to  engage  the  cheerleaders  in
conversation. And then the Duke and I fell asleep together on the red tile of the Waffle House kitchen, my
shoulder as her pillow and my jacket as mine. JP and Keun woke us up at seven, and Keun briefly broke
his  vow  never  to  abandon  the  cheerleaders  and  drove  us  to  the  Duke  and  Duchess.  It  turned  out  that
Tinfoil Guy drove the tow truck for them, and so Tinfoil Guy gave us a tow, and I jacked the car up in the
driveway so the axle wouldn’t break and just put the wheel in the garage, and then the Duke and I went
over to her house and opened presents, and I tried not to make it incredibly obvious to her parents how
incredibly gooey I felt about the Duke, and then my parents came home and I told them the car got jacked
when I was trying to drive the Duke home, and they yelled at me about it, but not for too long because it
was  Christmas  and  they  had  insurance  and  it  was  just  a  car.  I  called  the  Duke  and  JP  and  Keun  that
evening after the cheerleaders had finally left the Waffle House and everyone had eaten their Christmas
dinners. They all came over, and we watched two James Bond movies and then stayed up half the night
recounting our escapades. And then we all fell asleep, all four of us in four sleeping bags, like we’d been
doing forever, and nothing was different except that I didn’t actually fall asleep, and neither did the Duke,
and we just kept looking at each other, and then finally got up at, like, four thirty and walked a mile in the
snow to Starbucks, just the two of us. I overcame the confusing French of the Starbucks ordering system
and managed to get a latte, which contained the caffeine I so sorely needed, and then the Duke and I were
sitting next to each other in plush purple chairs, sprawled out all over those chairs, as tired as I had ever
been, so tired I could barely even smile. And we were talking about nothing, which she was still so good
at, and then there was a pause, and she looked over at me with sleepy eyes and said, “So far so good,”
and I said, “God, I love you,” and she said, “Oh,” and I said, “Good oh?” and she said, “Best oh ever,”
and I put the latte down on a table, awash in the happy middle of my greatest adventure.

---

the patron saint of pigs
lauren myracle

---