Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances

am not the villain of this story.’ Only I didn’t say that because I literally couldn’t talk. So it must have
looked like I agreed with her. Like I was admitting that I was a possessive, grabby, sex-freak stalker . . .
and not the guy who was in love with her, who had been in love with her for more than a year, who would
have done anything she asked. . . . ”
There  probably  was  a  point  after  the  breakup  when  Stuart  told  this  story  all  the  time,  but  he  clearly
hadn’t done it in a while. He was out of practice. His expression didn’t change a lot—all of his emotion
seemed  to  come  out  of  his  hands.  He  had  stopped  wringing  them,  and  now  they  shook,  just  ever  so
slightly.
“Addie  finally  walked  her  outside  to  talk  her  down,”  he  said.  “That’s  how  it  all  ended.  And  I  got  a
latte, on the house. So it wasn’t a total loss. I became the guy who was famously dumped in public when
his girlfriend cheated with the Cougar. Anyway . . . I had a point in saying all of that. My point is, that
guy . . . ”
He pointed accusingly at the phone.
“ . . . is a dick. Although that probably doesn’t mean much to you right now.”
My memories of the last year were playing back through my mind at super-speed, but I was looking at
them all from a different camera angle. There I was, Noah holding my hand, one step ahead of me, pulling
me through the hall, talking to everyone else but me along the way. I sat with him in the front row at school
basketball games, even though he knew that ever since I’d gotten hit in the face with a wayward ball I was
scared of those seats. But still, we sat there, me frozen in terror, watching a game that never interested me
to  begin  with.  Yes,  I  sat  with  the  upper-echelon  seniors  at  lunch,  but  the  conversations  were  repetitive.
All they ever talked about was how busy they all were, how they were building their résumés for their
college applications. How they were meeting with recruiters. How they were organizing their calendars
online. Who was recommending them.
God . . . I’d been bored for a year. I hadn’t talked about myself in ages. Stuart was talking about me. He
was paying attention. It felt foreign, a little embarrassingly intimate, but kind of great. My eyes filled up.
Seeing this, Stuart braced himself and opened his arms a little, as if inviting me to give up my efforts to

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contain  myself.  We  had  inched  marginally  closer  together  at  some  point,  and  there  was  an  expectant
energy. Something was about to give. I felt myself gearing up to start bawling. This made me angry. Noah
didn’t deserve it. I was not going to start crying.
So I kissed him.
I mean, really kissed him. I knocked him backward. He kissed me back. A good kiss, too. Not too dry,
not  too  wet.  It  was  a  bit  on  the  frantic  side,  maybe  because  neither  one  of  us  had  done  the  mental
preparation,  so  we  were  both  thinking,  Oh,  right!  Kissing!  Quickly!  Quickly!  More  movement!  Deploy
tongue!
It  took  us  about  a  minute  to  recover  and  settle  into  a  slightly  slower  pattern.  I  felt  myself  kind  of
floating  away,  when  there  was  a  huge  stomping  and  crashing  and  yelling  from  downstairs.  Apparently,
Debbie and Rachel had chosen this moment to tie up the sled dogs and return from their personal Iditarod
through  the  streets  of  Gracetown.  They  tromped  back  inside  in  that  ridiculously  loud  way  you  do  when
you come out of snow or rain. (Why does wet weather make you louder?)
“Stuart! Jubilee! I have special cupcakes from Santa!” Debbie was screaming.
Neither of us moved. I was still leaning on top of Stuart, essentially pinning him down. We heard her
come halfway up the stairs, where she must have seen the bedroom light on.
Again,  the  normal  parent  reaction  would  have  been  to  say  something  like,  “You  had  better  come  out
here this moment or I am releasing the tiger!” But Debbie was not a normal parent, so we heard her giggle
and creep away, saying, “Shhh! Rachel! Come with Mommy! Stuart is busy!”
Debbie’s  sudden  appearance  in  this  scene  made  my  stomach  turn.  Stuart  rolled  his  eyes  back  in  his
head in agony. I released him, and he jumped up.
“I should go down,” he said. “You okay? Need anything or—”
“I’m great!” I said, with sudden, insane enthusiasm. But Stuart was by now well used to my tactics, my
attempts to make myself look sane.
Quite sensibly, he bolted from the room.

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Chapter Twelve
W
ant  to  know  how  long  it  took  me  to  break  up  with  my  “perfect”  boyfriend  and  make  out  with  a  new
guy? It had taken . . . wait for it . . . twenty-three minutes. (I noticed Stuart’s clock when I first picked up
the phone. It wasn’t like I had a stopwatch.)
Much as I would have liked to, I couldn’t hide upstairs forever. Sooner or later, I was going to have to
come down and face the world. I sat on the floor in the doorway and listened as closely as I could to what
was happening downstairs. Mostly, all I could hear was Rachel banging on some toys, and then I heard
someone go outside. That seemed as good a cue as any. I quietly hit the stairs. In the living room, Rachel
was  noodling  around  with  the  Mouse  Trap,  which  still  sat  out  on  the  table.  She  gave  me  a  big,  toothy
smile.
“Were you playing with Stuart?” she asked.
The question was loaded. I was a filthy, filthy woman, and even the five-year-old knew it.
“Yes,”  I  said,  trying  to  keep  some  dignity.  “We  were  playing  Mouse  Trap.  How  was  the  snow,
Rachel?”
“Mommy says that Stuart likes you. I can stick a marble in my nose. Wanna see?”
“No, you probably shouldn’t—”
Rachel  stuck  one  of  the  Mouse  Trap  marbles  right  up  her  nose.  She  extracted  it  and  held  it  up  for
examination. “See?” she said.
Oh, I saw all right.
“Jubilee? Is that you?”
Debbie appeared at the kitchen door, looking flushed and well exercised and very damp.
“Stuart  just  went  across  the  street  to  help  Mrs.  Addler  shovel  her  path,”  she  said.  “He  saw  her
struggling. She has a glass eye and a bad back, you see. You two have a . . . nice afternoon?”
“It was fine,” I said stiffly. “We played Mouse Trap.”
“Is that what they’re calling it these days?” she asked, throwing me a terrible grin. “I have to go give
Rachel a quick bath. Feel free to make yourself some cocoa or whatever you like!”
She stopped short of adding “ . . . future child-bride of my only son.”
She  rounded  up  Rachel  with  a  pointed,  “Come  on,  we  can  go  upstairs  now,”  leaving  me  to  the  hot
chocolate  and  my  shame  and  misery.  I  went  to  the  living  room  window  and  looked  out.  Sure  enough,
Stuart was out there, lending a glad hand to his neighbor in her moment of need. He was just getting away
from me, of course. It only made sense. I would have done the same thing. It was perfectly reasonable to
deduce that I was only going to get worse. I would keep spiraling down, sinking deeper and deeper into a
mire of rash and largely inexplicable behaviors. Like my jailed parents before me, I was a live wire. Best
to go and shovel a few tons of snow for a glass-eyed neighbor and hope I went away.
Which was precisely what I had to do. Go away. Get out of this house and his life while I still had a
shred of dignity left. I would go and find my train, which was probably leaving town soon, anyway.
I moved quickly as soon as I made this decision, running to the kitchen. I picked up my phone from the
counter, smacked it around a little, and poked at the on/off button. I didn’t expect this to work, but there
was some mercy. After a moment or two, it struggled back into existence. The screen was off center and
the words were scrambled, but there was some life in the thing.
My clothes, coat, shoes, and bag were all in the laundry room off of the kitchen, in various stages of
dryness. I threw them on, leaving the sweat clothes on the washer. They had a container of plastic bags in

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the corner, so I took about ten of them. I felt bad taking something without asking, but plastic bags don’t
really count as “something.” They’re like tissues, except less expensive. As a last gesture, I reached over
and nabbed one of their holiday return address labels from an organizer on the counter. I would send them
a note when I got home. I may have been a complete lunatic, but I was a complete lunatic with manners.
Obviously, I had to take the back door, the one we had come in the night before. If I went out the front,
Stuart would see me. The snow had piled up against this door, at least two feet of it—and it was no longer
the  slushy,  wet  snow  of  the  night  before.  It  had  hardened  in  the  cold.  But  I  was  fueled  by  the  power  of
confusion and panic, which, like I said, is always ready and waiting to get to work. I threw all my weight
against the door, feeling it wobble and strain. I was worried that I might break it from the force, which
would have put an entirely different complexion on my departure. I could envision it all too clearly: Stuart
or Debbbie finding the dented door off its hinges, lying in the snow. “She came in, ravaged the boy, stole
plastic bags, and ripped off the door in her escape,” the police would say in the APB. “Probably making
her way to bust her parents out of jail.”
I managed to get it open just enough to force myself through, ripping my bags and scraping my arm in
the process. Once I was out, it jammed in position, so I had to spend another two or three minutes pushing
it  shut.  That  accomplished,  I  faced  another  problem.  I  couldn’t  return  the  way  we  had  come,  because  I
didn’t want to take another dip in the frozen stream. Not that I could have worked out that path anyway.
All of our tracks were gone. I was on a slight rise, facing an unfamiliar cluster of scruffy bare trees and
the backs of dozens of identical-looking houses. The only thing I knew for sure was that the stream was
below me, probably somewhere in those trees. The safest bet was to stick close to the houses and weave
my way through a few backyards. Then I could get back on a road, and from there, I assumed, it would be
easy to find my way back to the interstate, the Waffle House, and my train.
See my previous note about me and my assumptions.
Stuart’s subdivision didn’t follow the lovely, neat logic of the streets of the Flobie Santa Village. These
houses  had  been  plunked  down  with  an  alarming  randomness—unevenly  spaced,  on  crooked  lines,  like
whoever had designed the place had said, “We’ll just follow this cat, and wherever he sits down, we’ll
build  something.”  The  disorientation  was  so  bad  that  I  couldn’t  even  figure  out  where  the  road  was
supposed to be. Nothing had been plowed, and the streetlights of the night before were off. The sky was
white instead of the crazy pink of the night before. It was the bleakest horizon I’ve ever seen, and there
was no obvious route out.
As I trudged through the development, I had plenty of time to consider what I had just done to my life.
How was I going to explain the breakup to my family? They loved Noah. Not as much as me, obviously,
but a lot. My parents were clearly proud that I had such an impressive boyfriend. Then again, my parents
were in jail over a Flobie Elf Hotel, so maybe they needed to get their priorities in order. Besides, if I
said I was happier this way, they would accept it.
My  friends,  people  at  school  .  .  .  that  was  a  different  story.  I  hadn’t  dated  Noah  for  the  perks—they
were just part of the service.
And there was Stuart, of course.
Stuart,  who  had  just  witnessed  me  go  through  an  entire  rainbow  of  emotions  and  experiences.  There
was parents-have-just-been-jailed me, stuck-in-a-strange-town me, insane-and-can’t-shut-up me, kind-of-
snarky-to-the-strange-guy-trying-to-be-helpful  me,  breakup  me,  and  the  extremely  popular  jump-on-top-
of-you-unexpectedly me.
I had messed this up so very, very badly. All of it. The regret and humiliation hurt much more than the
cold. It took me a few streets to realize that it wasn’t Noah I was really regretting . . . it was Stuart. Stuart
who rescued me. Stuart who actually seemed to want to spend his time with me. Stuart who talked to me
straight and told me not to sell myself short.
This was the Stuart who would be so relieved to find me gone, for all of the reasons I just listed. As

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long  as  the  news  stories  about  my  parents’  arrest  weren’t  too  detailed,  I  would  be  untraceable.  Well,
untraceable-ish. Maybe he could find me online somewhere, but he would never look. Not after the freak
show I had just put on.
Unless I just wound up at his door again. Which, after an hour of wandering the development, I realized
was  a  real  danger.  I  was  looking  at  the  same  stupid  houses,  getting  stuck  in  cul-de-sacs.  I  occasionally
stopped and asked for directions from people who were shoveling their driveways, but they all seemed
really concerned that I was trying to walk that far and didn’t want to tell me how to go. At least half of
them asked me to come inside and get warm, which sounded good, but I wasn’t taking any more chances. I
had gone into one house in Gracetown, and look where it had gotten me.
I was slugging along past a group of little girls, giggling in the snow, when the despair really set in. The
tears were about to flow forth. I couldn’t really feel my feet anymore. My knees were stiffened. And that’s
when I heard his voice behind me.
“Hold up,” Stuart said.
I stopped suddenly. Running away is pretty pathetic, but it’s even worse getting caught. I stood there for
a moment, unwilling (and partially unable) to turn around and face him. I tried to arrange my expression in
the most casual funny-meeting-you-here, isn’t-life-hilarious! way I could. From the way my jaw muscles
were straining by my ears, I’m pretty sure it was a lot more like my I’ve-got-lockjaw! face.
“Sorry,” I said, through my clenched smile. “I just thought I should get back to the train, and—”
“Yeah,” he said, quietly cutting me off. “I kind of figured that.”
Stuart wasn’t even looking up at me. He pulled a proper, if slightly embarrassing, hat out of his pocket.
It looked like one of Rachel’s. It had a big pom-pom on top.
“I think you probably need this,” he said, holding out the hat. “You can have it. Rachel doesn’t need it
back.”
I took it and pulled it on my head, because it looked like he was prepared to stand there, holding it out,
until the snow melted around him. It was a tight fit but still brought a welcome warmth to my ears.
“I followed your footsteps,” he said, in answer to the unspoken question. “Snow makes it easy.”
I had been tracked, like a bear.
“Sorry to make you go to all that trouble,” I said.
“I didn’t have to go that far, really. You’re about three streets over. You just kept going in loops.”
A really inept bear.
“I  can’t  believe  you  went  back  out  in  that  outfit,”  he  said.  “You  should  let  me  walk  you.  You’re  not
going to get there this way.”
“I’m fine,” I said quickly. “Someone just told me the way.”
“You don’t have to go, you know.”
I wanted to say something else but couldn’t think of anything. He took this to mean that I wanted him to
go, so he nodded.
“Be careful, okay? And, can you just let me know that you made it? Call or—”
Just then, my phone started ringing. The ring must have been damaged by the water as well, so now it
had  a  high,  keening  note—kind  of  the  sound  I  imagine  a  mermaid  might  make  if  you  punched  her  in  the
face. Surprised. A little accusatory. Hurt. Gurgley.
It was Noah. On my messed-up screen, it actually said “Mobg” was calling, but I knew what it meant. I
didn’t answer; I just stared at it. Stuart stared at it. The little girls around us stared at us staring at it. It
stopped ringing, then started again. It pulsed in my hand, insistent.
“I’m sorry if I was an idiot,” Stuart said, speaking up to talk over the noise. “And you probably don’t
care what I think, but you shouldn’t answer that.”
“What do you mean you were an idiot?” I asked.
Stuart fell silent. The ringing stopped and started again. Mobg really wanted to talk to me.

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“I told Chloe I would wait for her,” he finally said. “I told her I would wait as long as it took. She told
me not to bother, but I waited anyway. For months, I was determined not to even look at another girl. I
even tried not to look at the cheerleaders. Not look, look, I mean.”
I knew what he meant.
“But I noticed you,” he went on. “And it drove me crazy, from the first minute. Not just that I noticed
you,  but  that  I  could  see  that  you  were  going  out  with  some  supposedly  perfect  guy  who  clearly  didn’t
deserve  you.  Which,  frankly,  was  kind  of  the  situation  I  was  in.  It  sounds  like  he’s  kind  of  realized  his
mistake, though.”
He nodded at the phone, which started ringing again.
“I’m still really glad you came,” he added. “And don’t give in to that guy, okay? If nothing else? Don’t
give in to that guy. He doesn’t deserve you. Don’t let him fool you.”
It rang and it rang and it rang. I looked at the screen one last time, then at Stuart, and then I reached my
arm back and threw the phone as hard as I could (sadly, not that far), and it vanished into the snow. The
eight-year-olds, who were truly fascinated with our every move at this point, chased after it.
“Lost it,” I said. “Whoops.”
This  was  the  first  time  in  all  of  this  that  Stuart  actually  looked  up  at  me.  I  had  dropped  the  horrible
grimace by this point. He stepped forward, lifted my chin, and kissed me. Kissed me, kissed me. And I
didn’t notice the cold, or care that the girls who now had my phone came up behind us and started going,
“OoooOOOoooOOoooh.”
“One  thing,”  I  said,  when  we  had  broken  apart  and  the  swirling  feeling  in  my  head  subsided.
“Maybe . . . don’t tell your mom too much about this. I think she has ideas.”
“What?”  he  asked,  all  innocence,  as  he  put  an  arm  around  my  shoulders  and  led  me  back  toward  his
house.  “Don’t  your  parents  cheer  and  stare  when  you  make  out  with  someone?  Is  that  weird  where  you
come from? I guess they don’t get to see it much, though. From jail, I mean.”
“Shut it, Weintraub. If I knock you down in the snow, these kids will swarm and eat you.”
A lone truck puttered past, and Tinfoil Guy gave us a stiff salute as he drove farther into Gracetown. We
all moved to make way for him—Stuart, me, the little girls. Stuart zipped open his coat and invited me to
tuck myself under his arm, and then we made our way through the snow.
“You want to go back to my house the long way?” he asked. “Or the shortcut? You have to be cold.”
“Long way,” I replied. “The long way, for sure.”

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a cheertastic christmas miracle
john green

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