Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances
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To Ilene Cooper, who has guided me through so many blizzards
Chapter One J P and the Duke and I were four movies in to our James Bond marathon when my mother called home for the sixth time in five hours. I didn’t even glance at the caller ID. I knew it was Mom. The Duke rolled her eyes and paused the movie. “Does she think you’re going somewhere? There’s a blizzard.” I shrugged and picked up the phone. “No luck,” Mom said. In the background, a loud voice droned on about the importance of securing the homeland. “Sorry, Mom. That sucks.” “This is ridiculous!” she shouted. “We can’t get a flight to anywhere, let alone home.” They’d been stuck in Boston for three days. Doctors’ conference. She was getting kind of despondent about the whole Christmas-in-Boston thing. It was as if Boston were a war zone. Honestly, I felt sort of giddy about it. Something about me has always liked the drama and inconvenience of bad weather. The worse the better, really. “Yeah, sucks,” I said. “It’s supposed to blow through by morning, but everything is so backed up. They can’t even guarantee we’ll be home tomorrow. Your dad is trying to rent a car, but the lines are long. And even then it will be eight or nine in the morning, even if we drive all night! But we can’t spend Christmas apart!” “I’ll just go over to the Duke’s,” I said. “Her parents already told me I could stay there. I’ll go over there and open all my presents, and talk about how my parents neglect me, and then maybe the Duke will give me some of her presents because she feels so bad about how my mom doesn’t love me.” I glanced over at the Duke, who smirked at me. “Tobin,” Mom said disapprovingly. She wasn’t a particularly funny person. It suited her professionally —I mean, you don’t want your cancer surgeon to walk into the examination room and be like, “Guy walks into a bar. Bartender says, ‘What’ll ya have?’ And the guy says, ‘Whaddya got?’ And the bartender says, ‘I don’t know what I got, but I know what you got: Stage IV melanoma.’” “I’m just saying I’ll be fine. Are you guys gonna go back to the hotel?” “I guess, unless your father can get us a car. He’s being such a saint about all this.” “Okay,” I said. I glanced at JP, and he mouthed, Hang. Up. The. Phone. I really wanted to return to the place on the couch between JP and the Duke and go back to watching the new James Bond kill people in fascinating ways. “Everything’s fine there?” Mom asked. Lord. “Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s snowing. But the Duke and JP are here. And they can’t really abandon me, either, because they’d freeze if they tried to walk back to their houses. We’re just watching Bond movies. Power’s still on and everything.” “Call me if anything happens. Anything.” “Yup, got it,” I said. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. God, I’m sorry about this, Tobin. I love you. I’m sorry.” “It’s really not a big deal,” I said, because it really wasn’t. Here I was, in a large house without adult supervision, with my best friends on the couch. Nothing against my parents, who are fine people and everything, but they could have stayed in Boston right through New Year’s without my being disappointed. “I’ll call you from the hotel,” Mom said. JP apparently heard her through the phone, because he mumbled, “I’m sure you will,” as I said my good-byes. “I think she has an attachment disorder,” JP said when I hung up. “Well, it’s Christmas,” I said. “And why don’t you come over to my house for Christmas?” JP asked. “Shitty food,” I answered. I walked around the couch and took my place on the middle cushion. “Racist!” JP exclaimed. “It’s not racism!” I said. “You just said that Korean food was shitty,” he said. “No, he didn’t,” said the Duke, lifting the remote to restart the movie. “He said your mom’s Korean food was shitty.” “Exactly,” I said. “I quite like the food at Keun’s house.” “You’re an asshat,” said JP, which is what JP said when he didn’t have a comeback. As comebackless comebacks go, it was a pretty good one. The Duke restarted the movie, and then JP said, “We should call Keun.” The Duke paused the movie again and leaned forward, over me, to speak directly to JP. “JP,” she said. “Yes?” “Can you please stop talking so I can go back to enjoying Daniel Craig’s outrageously good body?” “That’s so gay,” JP said. “I’m a girl,” said the Duke. “It’s not gay for me to be attracted to men. Now, if I said you had a hot body, that would be gay, because you’re built like a lady.” “Oh, burn,” I said. The Duke raised her eyes at me and said, “Although JP’s a freaking paragon of masculinity compared to you.” I had no response to that. “Keun is at work,” I said. “He gets paid double on Christmas Eve.” “Oh, right,” said JP. “I forgot that Waffle Houses are like Lindsay Lohan’s legs: always open.” I laughed; the Duke just winced and restarted the movie. Daniel Craig walked out of the water, wearing a pair of Euro boxer briefs that passed as a bathing suit. The Duke sighed contentedly while JP wretched. After a couple minutes, I heard a soft clicking sound next to me. JP. Using dental floss. He was obsessed with dental floss. “That is disgusting,” I said. The Duke paused the movie and scowled at me. She didn’t have much meanness in her scowl; she scrunched up her button nose and squared her lips. But I could always tell in her eyes if she got really pissed at me, and her eyes still seemed pretty smiley. “What?” JP said, the floss dangling out of his mouth from between molars. “Flossing in public. It’s just . . . Please put it away.” He did, reluctantly, but insisted on the last word. “My dentist says he has never seen healthier gums. Never.” I rolled my eyes. The Duke brushed a stray curl behind her ear and unpaused Bond. I watched for a minute, but then I found myself looking out the window, a distant streetlight illuminating the snow like a billion falling stars in miniature. And even though I hated to inconvenience my parents or deny them a Christmas at home, I could not help but wish for more snow. Chapter Two T he phone rang ten minutes after we restarted the movie. “Jesus Christ,” JP said, grabbing the remote to hit pause. “Your mom calls more than a clingy boyfriend,” the Duke added. I jumped over the back of the couch and grabbed the phone. “Hey,” I said, “how’s it going?” “Tobin,” replied the voice on the other end of the line. Not my mom. Keun. “Keun, aren’t you su—” “Is JP with you?” “He is.” “Do you have speakerphone?” “Uh, why do you w—” “DO YOU HAVE SPEAKERPHONE?!” he shouted. “Hold on.” As I looked for the button, I said, “It’s Keun. He wants to be put on speaker. He’s being weird.” “Fancy that,” said the Duke. “Next you’ll tell me that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas or that JP has tiny balls.” “Don’t go there,” JP said. “Don’t go where? Into your pants with a high-powered magnifying glass on a search for your tiny balls?” I found the speakerphone button and pressed it. “Keun, can you hear me?” “Yes,” he said. There was a lot of noise in the background. Girl noises. “I need you guys to listen.” JP said to the Duke, “Where does the owner of the world’s smallest breasts get off impugning someone else’s personal parts?” The Duke threw a pillow at JP. “YOU MUST LISTEN NOW!” shouted Keun from the phone. Everyone shut up then. Keun was incredibly smart, and he always talked like he had memorized his remarks in advance. “Okay. So my manager didn’t come to work today, because his car got stuck in snow. So I am cook and acting assistant manager. There are two other employees here—they are (one) Mitchell Croman, and (two) Billy Talos.” Mitchell and Billy both went to our school, although it would not be accurate to say that I knew them, on account of how I rather doubted either could pick me out of a lineup. “Until about twelve minutes ago, it was a quiet night. Our only customers were Tinfoil Guy and Doris, America’s oldest living smoker. And then this girl showed up, and then Stuart Weintraub”—another classmate, and a good guy—“arrived covered in Target bags. They distracted Tinfoil Guy a little, and I was just reading The Dark Knight and —” “Keun, is there a point?” I asked. He could ramble sometimes. “Oh, there’s a point,” he answered. “There are fourteen points. Because about five minutes after Stuart Weintraub showed up, the good and loving Lord Almighty looked kindly upon His servant Keun and saw fit to usher fourteen Pennsylvanian cheerleaders—wearing their warm-up outfits—into our lowly Waffle House. Gentlemen, I am not kidding you. Our Waffle House is full of cheerleaders. Their train is stuck in the snow, and they are staying here for the night. They are high on caffeine. They are doing splits on the breakfast counter. “Let me be perfectly clear: there has been a Cheertastic Christmas Miracle at the Waffle House. I am looking at these girls right now. They are so hot that their hotness could melt the snow. Their hotness could cook the waffles. Their hotness could—no, will—warm the places in my heart that have been so cold for so long that I have nearly forgotten they ever existed.” A girl voice—a voice at once cheery and sultry—shouted into the phone then. By now I was standing directly above the speaker, staring at it with a kind of reverence. JP was by my side. “Are those your friends? Oh my God, tell them to bring Twister!” Keun spoke again. “And now you realize what is at stake! The greatest night of my life has just begun. And I am inviting you to join me, because I am the best friend ever. But here’s the catch: after I get off the phone with you, Mitchell and Billy will be calling their friends. And we’ve agreed in advance that there’s only room here for one more carful of guys. I cannot further dilute the cheerleader-to-guy ratio. Now, I am making the first call, because I’m acting assistant manager. So you have a head start. I know you will not fail. I know I can count upon you to deliver the Twister. Gentlemen, may you travel safely and swiftly. But if you die tonight, die in the comfort that you have sacrificed your lives for that noblest of human causes. The pursuit of cheerleaders.” Chapter Three J P and I did not even bother to hang up the phone. I just said, “I gotta change,” and he said, “Me, too,” and then I said, “Duke: Twister! In the game closet!” I dashed upstairs, my socks sliding on the hardwood floor in the kitchen, and stumbled into my bedroom. I tore open the closet door and began feverishly sorting through the shirts piled on the floor in the vain hope that inside that pile there might be some wondrously perfect shirt down there, a nice striped button-down with no wrinkles that said, “I’m strong and tough but I’m also a surprisingly good listener with a true and abiding passion for cheers and those who lead them.” Unfortunately, there was no such shirt to be found. I quickly settled on a dirty but cool yellow Threadless T-shirt under a black v-neck sweater. I kicked off my watching-James-Bond-movies-with-the-Duke-and-JP jeans and hurriedly wiggled into my one pair of nice, dark jeans. I tucked my chin to my chest and sniffed. I ran into the bathroom and frantically swiped some deodorant under my arms anyway. I looked up at myself in the mirror. I looked okay, aside from the somewhat asymmetrical hair. I hustled back to the room, grabbed my winter coat off the floor, stepped into my Pumas, and then ran downstairs with the shoes half on, shouting, “Everybody ready? I’m ready! Let’s go!” When I arrived downstairs, the Duke was sitting in the middle of the couch, watching the Bond movie. “Duke. Twister. Jacket. Car.” I turned and called upstairs, “JP, where are you?” “Do you have an extra coat?” he answered. “No, wear yours!” I shouted. “But I only wore a jacket!” he shouted back. “Just hurry!” For some reason, the Duke still hadn’t stopped the movie. “Duke,” I repeated. “Twister. Jacket. Car.” She paused the movie and turned around to me. “Tobin, what is your idea of hell?” “That seems like a question that could be answered in the car!” “Because my idea of hell is spending eternity in a Waffle House full of cheerleaders.” “Oh, come on,” I said. “Don’t be an idiot.” The Duke stood up, the couch still between us. “You’re saying we should go out in the worst snowstorm in fifty years and drive twenty miles to hang out with a bunch of random chicks whose idea of fun is to play a game that says right on the box that it was designed for six-year-olds, and I’m the idiot?” I turned my head back toward the stairs. “JP! Hurry!” “I’m trying!” he called back. “But I have to balance the need to hurry with the need to look fabulous!” I stepped around the couch and put my arm around the Duke. I smiled down at her. We’d been friends for a long time. I knew her well. I knew she hated cheerleaders. I knew she hated cold weather. I knew she hated getting off the couch when James Bond movies were on. But the Duke loved Waffle House hash browns. “There are two things you cannot resist,” I told her. “The first is James Bond.” “True enough,” she said. “What’s the other thing?” “Hash browns,” I said. “Golden, delicious Waffle House hash browns.” She did not look at me, not quite. She looked through me, and through the walls of the house, and through the snow, her eyes squinting as she stared into the distance. She was thinking about those hash browns. “You can get ’em scattered on the grill, smothered with onions, and covered with cheese,” I said. She blinked hard and then shook her head. “God, I am always foiled by my love of hash browns! But I don’t want to be stuck there all night.” “One hour unless you’re having fun,” I promised. She nodded. As she got her coat on, I opened the game closet and grabbed a Twister box with crumpled edges. When I turned around, JP was standing in front of me. “Oh my God,” I said. He had found something terrible in some dark corner of my father’s closet: he wore a puffy, periwinkle onesie with tapered legs, an ear-flapped hat atop his head. “You look like a lumberjack with an adult-baby fetish,” I said. “Shut up, asshat,” answered JP simply. “This is ski-slope sexy. It says, ‘I’m just coming off the slopes after a long day saving lives with the Ski Patrol.’” The Duke laughed. “It actually says, ‘Just because I wasn’t the first female astronaut doesn’t mean I can’t wear her flight suit.’” “Jesus, fine, I’ll go change,” he says. “THERE IS NO TIME!” I shouted. “You should put on boots,” the Duke said, looking at my Pumas. “NO TIME!” I shouted again. I ushered them both into the garage, and then we were inside Carla, my parents’ white Honda SUV. Eight minutes had passed since Keun hung up. Our head start had probably already evaporated. It was 11:42 P.M. On a normal night, it took about twenty minutes to get to Waffle House. It would not prove to be a normal night. Chapter Four W hen I pressed the garage-door button, the scope of our challenge began to dawn on me: a wall of snow a couple feet high was pressed against the garage. Since the Duke and JP arrived around lunchtime, it must have snowed at least a foot and a half. I switched Carla into four-wheel drive. “I’m just gonna, uh . . . Do you think I should drive through it?” “JUST GO,” JP said from the backseat. The Duke had successfully called shotgun. I took a deep breath and eased Carla back. She lifted a little when we hit the snow but plowed most of it away, and I began to drive in reverse down the driveway. Actually, it was not driving so much as it was ice-skating backward, but it worked. Soon enough, thanks more to luck than skill, the car was out of the driveway, facing approximately toward the Waffle House. The snow on the streets was a foot deep. Nothing in our subdivision had been salted or plowed. “This is such a dumb way to die,” the Duke noted, and I was starting to agree with her. But from the back, JP shouted, “Spartans! Tonight, we dine in the Waffle House!” I nodded my head and put the car into drive and pressed the accelerator. The tires spun and spun, and then we shot off, the falling snow alive in the headlights. I couldn’t see the curbs of the road, let alone the painted lines dividing the lanes, so I mostly just tried to stay between the mailboxes. Grove Park is kind of a bowl, so to leave you have to drive up a very modest hill. JP and the Duke and I all grew up in the Grove Park subdivision, and I’ve driven up the hill in question thousands of times. And so the potential problem did not even occur to me as we started to climb. But soon, I noticed that the amount of pressure I placed on the accelerator pedal did not in any way affect the speed at which we were going up the hill. I began to feel a tinge of dread. We began to slow down. I pressed the accelerator, and listened as the tires spun on the snow. JP swore. We were still creeping forward, though, and I could now see the crest of the hill and the black pavement of the plowed highway above us. “Come on, Carla,” I mumbled. “Give it some gas,” JP suggested. I did, and the tires spun some more, and then suddenly Carla ceased climbing. There was a long moment between when Carla stopped moving forward and when she began to slide, tires locked, back down the hill. It was a quiet moment, a time of contemplation. I am generally pretty averse to taking risks. I was not the sort of person who hikes the entire Appalachian Trail or spends the summer studying in Ecuador, or even the kind of person who eats sushi. When I was little and I would get worried about stuff at night and it would keep me up, my mom would always ask, “What’s the worst that could happen?” She thought this was very comforting—she thought it would make me realize that the possible mistakes on my second-grade math homework would not have broad repercussions on my quality of life. But that’s not what happened. What happened was that I got to thinking about the worst thing that could happen. Say that I am worried that there are mistakes on my second-grade math homework. Maybe my teacher Ms. Chapman will yell at me. She won’t yell, but maybe she’ll gently disapprove. Maybe her gentle disapproval will upset me. And maybe I’ll start crying. Everyone will call me a crybaby, which will further my social isolation, and because no one likes me, I’ll turn to drugs for comfort, and by the time I’m in fifth grade, I’ll be strung out on heroin. And then I’ll die. That’s the worst that can happen. And it can happen. And I believed in thinking through these situations, so as to keep myself from becoming strung out on heroin and/or dead. But I had thrown all that out. And for what? For cheerleaders I didn’t know? Nothing against cheerleaders, but surely there were better things to sacrifice for. I felt the Duke looking at me, and I looked back at her, and her eyes were big and round and scared and maybe a little pissed. And only now, in the drawn-out moment of stillness, did I think through to the worst thing that could happen: this. Provided I survived, my parents would kill me for totaling the car. I would be grounded for years—possibly decades. I would work hundreds of hours over the summer to pay for car repairs. And then the inexorable thing happened. We began to fishtail back toward the house. I pumped the brake. The Duke pulled up the parking break, but Carla just slalomed backward, only occasionally responding to my frantic spinning of the steering wheel. I felt a slight bump and figured we’d hopped a curb; we were retreating down the hill now through the yards of our neighbors as we plowed through snow as high as the wheel wells. We rolled backward past houses, so close that I could see the ornaments on the Christmas trees through living-room windows. Carla miraculously dodged a pickup truck parked in a driveway, and as I watched for approaching mailboxes and cars and houses in the rearview, I happened to glance back at JP. He was smiling. The worst thing that could happen had finally happened. And there was a kind of relief in it, maybe. Anyway, something about his smile made me smile. I glanced over at the Duke, and then threw my hands off the wheel. She shook her head as if she were angry, but she cracked up, too. To demonstrate the extent to which I did not control Carla, I then grabbed the steering wheel and began dramatically turning it back and forth. She laughed some more and said, “We’re so screwed.” And then all at once the brakes started to work, and I could feel myself pressed against the seat, and then finally, as the road leveled out, we slowed to a stop. JP was talking too loud, saying, “Holy crap, I cannot believe we’re not dead. We are so not dead!” I looked around to try to get my bearings. About five feet outside the passenger’s-side door was the house of these old retirees, Mr. and Mrs. Olney. A light was on, and after a second of looking I could see Mrs. Olney, wearing a white nightgown, her face almost pressed against the glass, staring at us, her mouth agape. The Duke looked over at her and saluted. I put Carla into drive and cautiously made my way out of the Olneys’ yard and back onto what I hoped was the street. I put the car into park and took my shaking hands off the wheel. “Okay,” JP said, trying to calm himself. “Okay. Okay. Okay.” He took a breath, and then said, “That was awesome! Best roller coaster ever!” “I’m trying not to pee myself,” I said. I was ready to go home—back to James Bond movies—stay up half the night, eat popcorn, sleep a few hours, spend Christmas with the Duke and her parents. I’d lived without the companionship of Pennsylvanian cheerleaders for seventeen and a half years. I could manage another day without them. JP kept talking. “The whole time I was just thinking, Man, I am going to die in a baby-blue ski suit. My mom is going to have to identify my body, and she’s going to spend the rest of her life thinking that, in his private time, her son liked to dress up like a hypothermic porn star from the 1970s.” “I think I can manage a night without hash browns,” the Duke said. “Yeah,” I agreed. “Yeah.” JP protested loudly that he wanted to go on the roller coaster again, but I’d had enough. I called Keun, my finger shaking as I hit his speed-dial number. “Listen, man, we can’t even get out of Grove Park. Too much snow.” “Dude,” said Keun. “Try harder. Mitchell’s friends haven’t even left yet, I don’t think. And Billy called a couple of college guys he knows and told them to bring a keg of beer, because the only way these lovely ladies would ever stoop to talking to Billy is if they were intoxic— Hey! Sorry, Billy just hit me with his paper hat. I’m the acting assistant manager, Billy! And I will report your behav— Hey! Anyway, please come. I don’t want to be stuck here with Billy and a bunch of sloppy drunk people. My restaurant will get trashed, and I’ll get fired, and just . . . please.” In the back, JP chanted, “Roller coaster! Roller coaster! Roller coaster!” I just flipped the phone shut and turned to the Duke. I was about to lobby for going home when my phone rang again. My mom. “Couldn’t get a car. We’re back at the hotel,” she said. “Only eight minutes to Christmas, and I was going to wait, but your father is tired and wants to go to bed, so we’ll just say it now.” My father leaned into the phone, and I could hear his lackluster “Merry Christmas” an octave beneath Mom’s boisterous one. “Merry Christmas,” I said. “Call if anything comes up; we’ve still got two more Bond movies to watch.” Just before Mom hung up, my call waiting beeped. Keun. I put him on speaker. “Tell me you’re out of Grove Park.” “Dude, you just called. We’re still at the base of the hill,” I said. “I think we’re headed home, man.” “Get. Here. Now. I just found out who Mitchell invited: Timmy and Tommy Reston. They’re on their way. You can still beat them. I know you can! You must! My Cheertastic Christmas Miracle will not be ruined by the Reston twins!” He hung up then. Keun had a certain flair for the dramatic, but I could see his point. The Reston Twins could ruin almost anything. Timmy and Tommy Reston were identical twins who bore absolutely no resemblance to each other. Timmy weighed three hundred pounds, but he wasn’t fat. He was just strong, and incredibly fast, and thus the best football player on our football team. Tommy, on the other hand, could fit into one leg of Timmy’s jeans, but what he lacked in size, he more than made up for in crazed aggression. When we were in middle school, Timmy and Tommy would get into these epic fights with each other on the basketball court. I don’t think either of them had any of their original teeth. The Duke turned to me. “Okay, it’s not just about us anymore, or about cheerleaders. This is about protecting Keun from the Reston twins.” “If they get snowed in at the Waffle House for a few days, and run low on food, you know what’s gonna happen,” JP said. The Duke picked up the joke. She was good at that. “They’ll have to turn to cannibalism. And Keun will be the first to go.” I just shook my head. “But the car,” I said. “Think of the cheerleaders,” JP implored. But I wasn’t thinking of the cheerleaders when I nodded. I was thinking of cresting the hill, of the plowed streets that could take us anywhere. Chapter Five T he Duke, as usual, had a plan. We were still parked in the middle of the road when she shared it with us. “So the problem was that we ran out of speed on the way up the hill. Why? Because we didn’t carry enough speed to the hill. So back up as far as you can in a straight line, and then gun it. We’ll hit the hill going much faster, and the momentum will take us to the top.” It did not strike me as a particularly compelling plan, but I couldn’t think of a better one, so I drove backward as far as I could, the hill directly in front of us, barely visible through the fast-falling snow in the headlights. I didn’t stop until I was in somebody’s front yard, a towering oak tree a few feet behind Carla’s back bumper. I spun the tires a little to get down to the hard-packed snow. “Seat belts buckled?” I asked. “Yes,” they answered together. “Air bags all on?” “Affirmative,” the Duke said. I glanced over at her. She smiled and raised her eyebrows. I nodded to her. “I need a countdown, people.” “Five,” they said in unison. “Four. Three.” I put the gearshift in neutral and began revving the engine. “Two. One.” I slammed Carla into drive and we shot off, accelerating in fits and starts between moments of hydroplaning on the snow pack. We hit the hill at forty miles per hour, twenty-five over the Grove Park speed limit. I stood up out of the seat, pressed against the belt, all my weight on the accelerator, but the tires were spinning and we began to slow, so I tapered off. “Come on!” the Duke said. “You can do this, Carla,” JP mumbled quietly from the back, and she continued forward, slowing incrementally with each passing moment. “Carla, get your fat gas-guzzling ass to the top of the hill!” I shouted, hitting the steering wheel. “Don’t make fun of her,” the Duke said. “She needs gentle encouragement. Carla, baby, we love you. You are such a good car. And we believe in you. We believe in you one hundred percent.” JP began to panic. “We’re not gonna make it.” The Duke answered soothingly, “Don’t listen to him, Carla. You’re gonna do this.” I could see the crest of the hill again, and the newly plowed blacktop of the highway. And Carla was like, I think I can, I think I can, and the Duke just kept petting the dashboard, saying, “I love you, Carla. You know that, don’t you? I wake up every morning and the first thing I think is that I love Tobin’s mom’s car. I know that’s weird, baby, but I do. I love you. And I know you can do this.” I kept tapping the accelerator, and the wheels kept spinning. Down to eight miles per hour. We were approaching a snowdrift three feet tall where the snowplow had dumped all the snow, blocking our path. We were so close. The speedometer shuttering around five miles per hour. “Oh God, it’s a long way down,” JP said, his voice cracking. I glanced in the rearview. It sure was. We were still inching forward, but only just. The hill was starting to level out, but we were going to come up just short. I kept tapping the accelerator to no avail. “Carla,” the Duke said, “it’s time to tell you the truth. I’m in love with you. I want to be with you, Carla. I’ve never felt this way about a c—” The tires caught on the snow as I had the accelerator near the floor and we blew forward through the snowdrift, the snow as high as the base of the windshield, but we barreled past, half over the snowdrift and half through it. Carla bottomed out on the other side of the drift, and then I slammed on the brakes as we approached the stop sign. Carla’s back end fishtailed, and all of a sudden instead of being at the stop sign we were on the highway, facing in the proper direction. I let off the brake and started off down the highway. “YESSSSSS!” shouted JP from the back. He leaned forward and rubbed the Duke’s mess of curly hair. “WE JUST DID SUCH AN AWESOME JOB OF NOT DYING!” “You sure know how to talk to a car,” I told the Duke. I could feel my blood pressure in my entire body. She looked outstandingly calm as she finger-combed her hair back into place. “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” she answered. It was a blissful first five miles—the highway winds up and down some mountains, which makes for treacherous driving, but we were the only car on the road, and while the road was wet, the salt kept it from being icy. Plus, I was driving a cautious twenty miles an hour, which made the curves seem less terrifying. We were all quiet for a long time—thinking about the hill-topping, I guess—although periodically JP would exhale loudly through his mouth and say, “I can’t believe how not dead we are,” or some variant on that theme. The snow was too thick and the road too wet for music, so we just sat in silence. And then after a while the Duke said, “What is it with you and cheerleaders anyway?” She was saying this to me; I knew because for a few months I’d gone out with a girl named Brittany, who happened to be a cheerleader. Our cheerleading team was actually quite good; they were, on average, far better athletes than the football team they rooted for. They were also notorious for leaving a trail of broken hearts— Stuart Weintraub, the guy Keun had seen in the Waffle House, had been absolutely annihilated by this cheerleader Chloe. “Um, could it be how hot they are?” JP suggested. “No,” I said, trying to be serious. “It was a coincidence. I didn’t like her because she was a cheerleader. I mean, she’s nice, right?” The Duke scoffed. “Yeah, in that Joseph-Stalin-I-will-crush-my-enemies kind of way.” JP said to the Duke, “Brittany was cool. She just didn’t like you, because she didn’t get it.” “Didn’t get what?” asked the Duke. “You know, that you’re not, like, a threat. Like, most girls, if they have a boyfriend, they don’t want their boyfriend hanging out all the time with another girl. And Brittany didn’t get that you, like, aren’t really a girl.” “If by that you mean that I dislike celebrity magazines, prefer food to anorexia, refuse to watch TV shows about models, and hate the color pink, then yes. I am proud to be not really a girl.” It was true that Brittany didn’t like the Duke, but she also didn’t like JP. She didn’t even like me that much, really. The more we hung out, the more Brittany would get annoyed with my sense of humor and my table manners and everything, which was why we broke up. The truth is that it never mattered that much to me. I was bummed when she dumped me, but it wasn’t a Weintraub-style catastrophe. I didn’t ever love Brittany, I guess. That was the difference. She was cute and smart and not uninteresting to talk to, but we never actually did talk about much. I never felt like everything was at stake with her, because I always knew how it would end. She never seemed worth the risk. God, I hated talking about Brittany, but the Duke brought her up all the time, probably just for the unadulterated pleasure of annoying me. Or else because she never had any drama of her own to discuss. Lots of guys liked the Duke, but she never seemed interested in anybody. She didn’t want to talk your ear off about some guy and how cute he was, and how he sometimes paid her attention and sometimes didn’t and all that crap. I liked that about her. The Duke was just normal: she liked to joke around and talk about movies, and she didn’t mind yelling or getting yelled at. She was much more like a person than other girls were. “I don’t have a thing for cheerleaders,” I repeated. “But,” JP said, “we both have a thing for hot girls who love Twister. That’s not about loving cheerleaders, Duke: that’s about loving freedom and hope and the indomitable American spirit.” “Yeah, well, call me unpatriotic, but I don’t see the cheerleader thing. Cheer isn’t sexy. Dark is sexy. Ambivalent is sexy. Deeper-than-it-looks-at-first-glance is sexy.” “Right,” JP said. “That’s why you’re going out with Billy Talos. Nothing says dark and brooding like a Waffle House waiter.” I glanced in the rearview mirror to see if JP was kidding, but he didn’t seem to be. She reached around and punched him on the knee and said, “It’s just a job.” “Wait, you’re going out with Billy Talos?” I asked. I was surprised mostly because it didn’t seem like the Duke would ever go out with anybody, but also because Billy Talos was a beer-and-football kind of guy, whereas the Duke was more of a Shirley-Temple-and-live-theater kind of girl. The Duke didn’t say anything for a second. “No. He just asked me to Winter Formal.” I didn’t say anything. It seemed weird the Duke would tell JP about something but not me. JP said, “No offense, but Billy Talos is a little bit greasy, isn’t he? I feel like if you wrung out his hair every day or two, you could potentially end America’s dependence on foreign oil.” “No offense taken,” the Duke said, laughing. Clearly she wasn’t that keen on him. But still, I couldn’t picture the Duke with Billy Talos—oily hair aside, he just didn’t seem very, like, funny or interesting. But whatever. The Duke and JP moved on to an impassioned discussion of the Waffle House’s menu, and whether its raisin toast was superior to its regular toast. It was fun background noise for the drive. The snowflakes hit the windshield and instantly melted. The wipers shoved them aside. The high-beam headlights lit up the snow and the wet road, and I could see just enough of the asphalt to know where my lane was, and where I was going. I could have driven down that road for a long time before I got tired, but it was almost time to turn onto Sunrise Avenue and head through downtown toward the interstate and Waffle House. It was 12:26. In the morning. “Hey,” I said, interrupting them. “What?” asked the Duke. I stole a glance away from the road to talk directly to her. “Merry Christmas.” “Merry Christmas,” she said back. “Merry Christmas, JP.” “Merry Christmas, asshats.” Chapter Six T he banks of snow on either side of Sunrise Avenue were huge, as tall as the car, and I felt like we were driving at the bottom of an endless snowboard half-pipe. JP and the Duke were being quiet, all of us concentrating on the road. We had a couple miles to go before we got downtown, and then the Waffle House was a mile east, just off the interstate. Our silence was interrupted by a nineties rap song playing on JP’s phone. “Keun,” he said. He turned the speaker on. “WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU GUYS?” The Duke leaned around so she could be heard. “Keun, look out the window and tell me what you see.” “I’ll tell you what I don’t see! I don’t see you and JP and Tobin in the parking lot of the Waffle House! No word on Mitchell’s college friends, but Billy just heard from the twins: they’re about to turn onto Sunrise.” “Then we’re fine, because we’re already on Sunrise,” I said. “HURRY. The cheerleaders want their Twister! Wait, hold on . . . They’re practicing a pyramid, and they need me to spot them. Spot them. You know what that means? If they fall, they fall into my arms. So I gotta go.” I heard the click of Keun hanging up. “Floor it,” JP said. I laughed and kept my speed steady. We just needed to maintain our lead. As far as skiing down a road in an SUV goes, Sunrise Avenue isn’t bad, because unlike most streets in Gracetown, it’s pretty straight. With the tire tracks to guide me, my speed crept up to twenty-five. I figured we’d be downtown in two minutes, and eating Keun’s special off-menu cheesy waffles in ten. I thought about those waffles topped with melted Kraft singles, about how they tasted both savory and sweet, a taste so profound and complex that it can’t even be compared to other tastes, only to emotions. Cheesy waffles, I was thinking, taste like love without the fear of love’s dissolution, and as we came to the 90- degree curve Sunrise Avenue takes before heading straight downtown, I could almost taste them. I approached the curve exactly as I was taught in drivers’ ed: with my hands at two and ten o’clock, I turned the steering wheel slightly to the right while gently applying the brakes. But Carla did not respond appropriately. She kept going straight. “Tobin,” the Duke said. And then, “Turn turn Tobin turn.” I didn’t say anything; I just kept turning the steering wheel to the right and pressing the brake. We began to slow as we approached the snowdrift, but we never gave even the slightest hint of turning. Instead, we barreled into a wall of snow with a noise like a sonic boom. 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