Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances

To Ilene Cooper, who has guided me through so many blizzards

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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

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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.

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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

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.