Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances

Damn it. Carla tilting to the left. The windshield a wall of tar-speckled white.
Once  we  stopped,  I  spun  my  head  around  in  time  to  see  chunks  of  icy  snow  falling  behind  the  car,
beginning  to  cover  us  up.  I  responded  to  this  development  with  the  kind  of  sophisticated  language  for
which I am famous. “Crap crap crap crap crap crap crap stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid crap.”

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Chapter Seven
T
he Duke reached over and turned the car off. “Risk of carbon-monoxide poisoning,” she said matter-of-
factly, as if we were not stone-cold screwed ten miles from home.
“Out through the back!” she ordered, and the authority in her voice calmed me. JP scrambled into the
way-back and then opened the top hatch. He bolted out. The Duke followed, and then me, feetfirst. Having
now gathered my thoughts, I was finally able to eloquently articulate my feelings about the matter. “Crap
crap  crap!”  I  kicked  Carla’s  back  bumper,  as  the  snow  fell  wet  onto  my  face.  “Stupid  idea  God  stupid
God my parents crap crap crap.”
JP put a hand on my shoulder. “It’ll be fine.”
“No,” I said. “It won’t. And you know it won’t.”
“Yes, it will,” JP insisted. “You know what? It will totally be fine, because I’m going to dig the car out
of the snow, and someone will come by, and we’ll get help from them—even if it’s the twins. I mean, it’s
not like the twins are going to leave us out here to freeze to death.”
The Duke looked me over and smirked. “May I point out,” she said, “how much you will soon regret
not listening to my footwear advice back at the house?” I glanced down at the snow falling on my Pumas
and winced.
JP remained upbeat. “Yes! This is going to be fine! There’s a reason that God gave me ripped arms and
pecs, dude. It’s so that I can dig your car out of the snow. I don’t even need your help. You just chat among
yourselves, and let the Hulk work his magic.”
I looked at JP. He weighed perhaps 145 pounds. Squirrels have more impressive musculature. But JP
was unfazed.  He  tied down  the  earflaps of  his  hat.  He reached  into  his oh-so-tight  snowsuit,  pulled  out
wool gloves, and turned back to the car.
I  wasn’t  interested  in  helping,  because  I  knew  it  was  hopeless.  Carla  was  six  feet  into  a  snowdrift
almost  as  tall  as  my  head,  and  we  didn’t  even  have  a  shovel.  I  just  stood  in  the  road  next  to  the  Duke,
wiping the wisp of wet hair sticking out under my hat. “Sorry,” I said to the Duke.
“Eh,  it’s  not  your  fault.  It’s  Carla’s  fault.  You  were  turning  the  wheel.  Carla  just  wasn’t  listening.  I
knew  I  shouldn’t  have  loved  her.  She’s  like  all  the  others,  Tobin:  as  soon  as  I  confess  my  love,  she
abandons me.”
I laughed. “I never abandoned you,” I said, patting her on the back.
“Yeah, well, (a.) I never confessed my love to you, and (b.) I’m not even female to you.”
“We’re  so  screwed,”  I  said  absentmindedly  as  I  looked  back  to  see  JP  tunneling  his  way  around  the
passenger side of the car. He was like a little mole, and surprisingly effective.
“Yeah, I’m already kind of cold,” she said, and then stood next to me, her side against mine. I couldn’t
imagine how she could be cold beneath that gigantic ski coat, but it didn’t matter. It reminded me that at
least I wasn’t alone out here. I reached up and mussed her hat as I put my arm around her. “Duke, what are
we gonna do?”
“This is probably more fun than Waffle House would be, anyway,” she said.
“But the Waffle House has Billy Talos,” I said mockingly. “Now I know why you wanted to go. It had
nothing to do with hash browns!”
“Everything  has  to  do  with  hash  browns,”  she  said.  “As  the  poet  wrote:  So  much  depends  upon  the
golden hash browns, glazed with oil, beside the scrambled eggs.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. I just nodded and stared up the road, wondering when a car

---

would come to rescue us.
“I know it sucks, but it’s certainly the most adventurous Christmas ever.”
“Yeah, which is actually a good reminder of why I am generally opposed to adventure.”
“Nothing wrong with a little risk-taking here and there,” the Duke said, looking up at me.
“I  couldn’t  disagree  more,  and  this  just  proves  my  point.  I  took  a  risk,  and  now  Carla  is  stuck  in  a
snowbank, and I will soon be disowned.”
“I promise you that it will be okay,” the Duke said, her voice measured, quiet.
“You’re good at that,” I said. “At, like, saying crazy things in a way that makes me believe them.”
She stood up on her toes, grabbed me by the shoulders, and looked at me, her nose red and snow-wet,
her face close to mine. “You do not like cheerleaders. You think they are lame. You like cute, funny, emo
girls who I will enjoy hanging out with.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Yeah, that didn’t work,” I said.
“Damn it.” She smiled.
JP emerged from his snow tunnel, shook snow off his periwinkle onesie, and announced, “Tobin, I have a
small piece of bad news, but I don’t want you to overreact.”
“Okay,” I said, nervous.
“I can’t really think of an easy way to say this. Um, in your opinion, what would be the ideal number of
wheels for Carla to currently possess?”
I closed my eyes and let my head swivel up, the streetlight bright through my eyelids, the snow on my
lips.
JP continued, “Because to be totally honest, I think the best possible number of wheels for Carla would
be four. And right now there are three wheels physically connected to Carla herself, a nonideal number.
Fortunately,  the  fourth  is  just  a  very  slight  distance  away,  but  unfortunately  I  am  not  an  expert  in  wheel
reattachment.”
I  pulled  my  hat  down  over  my  face.  The  depth  of  my  screwedness  washed  over  me,  and  for  the  first
time I felt cold—cold at my wrists, where my gloves did not quite meet my jacket, cold on my face, and
cold in my feet, where the melted snow was already soaking into my socks. My parents wouldn’t beat me
or brand me with a hot coat hanger or anything. They were too nice for cruelty. And that,  ultimately,  is
why I felt so bad: they didn’t deserve to have a kid who broke a wheel off their beloved Carla on the way
to spend the small hours of Christmas morning with fourteen cheerleaders.
Someone pulled my hat up. JP. “I hope you’re not going to let a little hurdle like not having a car keep
us from the Waffle House,” he said.
The Duke, who was leaning against the half-exposed back end of Carla, laughed, but I didn’t.
“JP, now is not the time for funny ha-ha,” I said.
He stood up straighter, as if to remind me he was just a little bit taller than I, and then took two steps
into the middle of the road, so that he stood directly beneath the streetlight’s beam. “I’m not being funny
ha-ha,” he said. “Is it funny ha-ha to believe in your dreams? Is it funny ha-ha to overcome adversity in
order  to  make  those  dreams  come  true?  Was  it  funny  ha-ha  when  Huckleberry  Finn  rafted  hundreds  of
miles on the Mississippi River in order to make out with nineteenth-century cheerleaders? Was it funny
ha-ha when thousands of men and women devoted their lives to space exploration so that Neal Armstrong
could hook up with cheerleaders on the moon? No! And it’s not funny ha-ha to believe that on this great
night  of  miracles,  we  three  wise  men  must  trudge  onward  toward  the  great  yellow  light  of  the  Waffle
House sign!”
“Wise people,” the Duke said dispassionately.
“Oh,  come  on!”  JP  said.  “I  get  nothing  for  that?  Nothing?!”  He  was  shouting  now  over  the  sound-

---

muffling snow, and JP’s voice seemed to me the only sound in the world. “Do you want more? I’ve got
more. Lady and gentleman, when my parents left Korea with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the
considerable wealth they had amassed in the shipping business, they had a dream. They had a dream that
one  day  amid  the  snowy  hilltops  of  western  North  Carolina,  their  son  would  lose  his  virginity  to  a
cheerleader in the women’s bathroom of a Waffle House just off the interstate. My parents have sacrificed
so much for this dream! And that is why we must journey on, despite all trials and tribulations! Not for me
and  least  of  all  for  the  poor  cheerleader  in  question,  but  for  my  parents,  and  indeed  for  all  immigrants
who came to this great nation in the hopes that somehow, some way, their children might have what they
themselves could never have: cheerleader sex.”
The  Duke  applauded.  I  was  laughing,  but  I  nodded  to  JP.  The  more  I  thought  about  it,  the  stupider  it
seemed to go hang out with a bunch of cheerleaders I didn’t even know, who would only be in town for
one night, anyway. Nothing against making out with cheerleaders, but I had some experience in the field,
and while it was good fun, it was hardly worth trudging through the snow for. But what could I lose by
continuing that had not already been lost? Only my life, and I was more likely to survive by walking the
three miles to the Waffle House than the ten miles home. I crawled into the back of the SUV, grabbed some
blankets, made sure all the doors were closed, then locked Carla. I put a hand on her bumper and said,
“We’ll come back for you.”
“That’s right,” the Duke said soothingly to Carla. “We never leave our fallen behind.”
We had trudged no more than a hundred feet past the curve when I heard an engine rumbling.
The twins.

---

Chapter Eight
T
he  twins  drove  an  old,  muscled-up,  low-riding,  cherry-red  Ford  Mustang—not  the  kind  of  car
celebrated  for  its  handling  in  inclement  weather.  So  I  felt  sure  that  they,  too,  would  miss  the  curve,
probably rear-ending Carla. But as the engine noise grew to a roar, the Duke pushed JP and me to the side
of the road anyway.
They  came  roaring  around  the  corner—the  Mustang  kicking  up  powder  behind  it,  the  back  end
fishtailing  but  somehow  staying  on  the  road—tiny  Tommy  Reston  maniacally  turning  the  steering  wheel
back and forth. He was some kind of snow-driving savant, the little creep.
So great was the size difference between them that the Mustang tilted visibly to the left, where Timmy
Reston’s gigantic body had somehow been inserted into the passenger seat. I could see Timmy smiling, the
dimples an inch deep on his huge and meaty cheeks. Tommy brought the Mustang to a quick stop maybe
thirty feet in front of us, rolled down the window, and leaned his head out.
“Y’all run into some car trouble?” he asked.
I started to walk toward the car. “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “We ran into a snowbank. I’m glad to see you
guys. Could you give us a ride, at least to downtown?”
“Sure,” he said. “Get in.” Tommy looked past me then and, with a certain lilt in his voice, said, “Hey
there, Angie.” Which is technically the Duke’s name.
“Hi,” she said. I turned back to them and waved for JP and the Duke to come over. I was almost to the
car now. I stayed on the driver’s side, figuring that it would be impossible to slip into the backseat behind
Timmy.
I was even with the hood when Tommy said, “Y’know what? I got room in the back for two losers.”
And then louder, so JP and the Duke could hear him as they approached, he said, “But I don’t got room for
two  losers  and  a  slut.”  He  hit  the  accelerator,  and  for  just  a  second  the  tires  spun  on  the  Mustang  and
nothing  happened.  I  lunged  for  the  door  handle,  but  by  the  time  my  fingers  got  to  where  it  was,  the
Mustang had taken off. I lost my balance and fell down into the snow. The passing Mustang kicked snow
into  my  face  and  on  my  neck  and  down  my  chest.  I  spit  some  of  it  out  and  then  watched  as  Timmy  and
Tommy sped toward JP and the Duke.
They stood together on the side of the road, the Duke flipping Timmy and Tommy off with both hands.
As the Mustang approached, JP took a small step into the road and lifted one of his legs off the ground.
Just as the Mustang passed, he kicked its rear quarter panel. It was a small kick, kind of girlish. I couldn’t
even  hear  his  foot  making  contact  with  the  car.  And  yet,  somehow  it  upset  the  delicate  balance  of  the
vehicle  just  enough—and  all  at  once,  the  Mustang  turned  sideways.  Tommy  must  have  tried  to  gun  the
engine  while  turning  into  the  skid,  but  it  didn’t  work.  The  Mustang  shot  off  the  road  and  into  a  pile  of
plowed snow, disappearing entirely except for the brake lights.
I scrambled to my feet and ran toward JP and the Duke.
“Holy crap!” JP said, looking at his foot. “I am so frakkin’ strong!”
The Duke walked purposefully toward the Mustang. “We gotta dig them out,” she said. “They could die
in there.”
“Screw  that,”  I  said.  “I  mean,  after  what  they  just  did?  And  plus  they  called  you  a  slut!”  But  for  a
moment, I could see her blushing even over the windburn on her cheeks. I always hated that word, and it
particularly  pissed  me  off  to  hear  it  applied  to  the  Duke,  because  even  though  it  was  a  ridiculous  and
patently untrue thing to say about her, she was still embarrassed, and she knew that we knew that she was

---

embarrassed,  and  .  .  .  whatever.  It  just  pissed  me  off.  But  I  didn’t  want  to  call  more  attention  to  it  by
saying anything.
Regardless,  the  Duke  rallied  almost  instantaneously.  “Oh,  yeah,”  she  said,  rolling  her  eyes.  “Tommy
Reston called me a slut. Wah-wah. It’s an attack on my very womanhood. Whatever. I’m just happy that
someone’s acknowledging the possibility that I might be a sexual being!”
I  looked  at  her  quizzically.  I  kept  walking  toward  the  Mustang  with  her,  and  finally  I  said,  “Nothing
personal, but I don’t want to picture anyone who’s into Billy Talos as a sexual being.”
She stopped, turned, and looked up at me. Very seriously, she said, “Will you just shut up about him? I
don’t even really like him.”
I  didn’t  understand  why  she  was  so  upset  about  that  of  all  things.  We  always  ragged  on  each  other.
“What?” I said defensively.
And she said, “Oh, Christ, forget it. Just come help me save these retarded misogynists from carbon-
monoxide poisoning.”
And we would have, I’m sure. If necessary, we would have spent hours tunneling out the Reston boys.
But our efforts, as it happened, were not needed, because Timmy Reston, being the world’s strongest man,
just pushed aside thousands of pounds of snow and successfully opened his door. He stood up, only his
shoulders and head above the snow, and shouted, “You. Gonna. Die.”
It wasn’t entirely clear to me whether Timmy meant “you” singular, as in JP, who had already started
running, or “you” plural, as in a group of people that included me. But regardless, I took off, urging on the
Duke. I kept behind the Duke because I didn’t want her to slip without my knowing or anything. I turned
around to check the twins’ progress and saw Timmy Reston’s shoulders and head make their way through
the mass of snow. I saw Tommy’s head pop up in the space where Timmy had initially exited the car, and
he was shouting an angry, incomprehensible flurry of words, the words so smushed in on each other that
all I could really hear was his rage. We got past them while they were still trying to get all the way out of
the snowbank, and then kept running.
“Come on, Duke,” I said.
“I’m . . . trying,” she answered, breathing between words. I could hear them shouting now, and when I
glanced back, I could see that they were out of the snow and running toward us, gaining with every stride.
There was too much snow on both sides of us to run anywhere but on the street. But if we continued much
longer, the twins would catch us and, presumably, proceed to feast upon our kidneys.
I  have  heard  it  said  that  sometimes  in  moments  of  intense  crisis,  a  person’s  adrenaline  can  surge  so
much that for a brief period of time he experiences superhuman strength. And perhaps this explains how I
managed to grab the Duke, throw her over my right shoulder, and then run like an Olympic sprinter across
the slippery snow.
I carried the Duke for several minutes before I even started to get tired, never looking back and never
needing to, because the Duke was looking back for me, saying, “Keep going keep going you’re faster than
they are you are you are,” and even if she was talking to me like she talked to Carla on the way up the hill,
I didn’t care—it worked. It kept my feet pumping beneath me, my arm wrapped around her waist and the
small of her back, and I just ran until we reached a small bridge over a two-lane road. I saw JP lying flat
on his stomach on the side of the bridge. I figured he’d slipped, and slowed down to help him up, but he
just shouted, “No, no, keep going keep going!” And so I kept going. My breathing was quite labored now
as the Duke’s weight bore down on my shoulder. “Listen, can I put you down?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m getting kinda queasy anyway.”
I  stopped  and  let  her  down,  and  said,  “You  go  ahead.”  She  took  off  without  me,  and  I  just  slumped
down, hands on knees, and watched JP running toward me. In the distance, I could see the twins—well, I
could see Timmy, anyway; I suspected Tommy was hiding behind his brother’s endless girth. I knew the
situation  was  hopeless  now—the  twins  would  inevitably  catch  us,  but  I  believed  we  had  to  fight  on,

---

anyway. I took a series of quick, deep breaths as JP reached me, and then I started to run, but he grabbed
my coat and said, “No. No. Watch.”
So we stood there in the road, the wet air burning my lungs, Tommy bearing down on us, his fat face
dominated by a broad scowl. And then, with no warning, Tommy fell face-first into the ground, like he’d
been  shot  in  the  back.  He  barely  even  had  time  to  reach  his  hands  out  to  break  the  fall.  Timmy  tripped
over Tommy’s body and sprawled out on the snow, too.
“What the hell did you do?” I asked as we took off running toward the Duke.
“I used all my remaining floss to tie a trip line between the sides of the bridge. I raised it right after you
carried the Duke past,” he said.
“That’s rather awesome,” I said.
“My gums are already disappointed with me,” he mumbled in response. We kept jogging, but I couldn’t
hear the twins anymore, and when I glanced over my shoulder, I could see only the still-driving snow.
By the time we caught up with the Duke, the brick buildings of downtown surrounded us, and we finally
made our way off Sunrise onto the recently plowed Main Street. We were still jogging, although I could
barely  feel  my  feet  anymore  from  the  cold  and  the  exhaustion.  I  couldn’t  hear  the  twins,  but  I  was  still
afraid of them. Just one mile to go. We could be there in twenty minutes if we jogged.
The Duke said, “Call Keun, find out if those college guys have already beaten us.”
Still keeping pace, I reached into my jeans, pulled out my phone, and called Keun’s cell. Someone—not
Keun—answered on the first ring.
“Is Keun there?”
“This Tobin?” I recognized the voice now. Billy Talos.
“Yeah,” I said. “Hey, Billy.”
“Hey, do you got Angie with you?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said.
“Y’all close?”
I hedged my bets, not knowing if he would use the information to help his friends. “Reasonably,” I said.
“Okay, here’s Keun,” he said. Keun’s boisterous voice came on the line then. “What’s up! Where are
you!  Dude,  I  think  Billy  is  in  love.  Like,  right  now,  he  is  sitting  down  next  to  a  Madison.  One  of  the
Madisons. There are several of them. The world is full of Magical Madisons!”
I glanced over at the Duke to see if she had heard anything through the phone, but she was just looking
straight ahead, still jogging. I thought Billy had asked about the Duke because he wanted to see her, not
because he didn’t want her to catch him trying to hook up with someone else. Lame.
“TOBIN!” Keun shouted into my ear.
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“Uh, you called me,” he pointed out.
“Right, yeah. We’re close. We’re at the corner of Main and Third. We should be there in half an hour.”
“Excellent,  I  think  you’ll  still  get  here  first.  The  college  guys  are  stuck  on  the  side  of  the  road
somewhere, apparently.”
“Great. Okay, I’ll call when we’re close.”
“Awesome. Oh, hey, you guys have Twister, right?”
I  looked  over  at  JP,  and  then  to  the  Duke.  I  put  a  finger  over  the  mic  and  said,  “Did  we  bring  the
Twister?”
JP stopped running. The Duke followed suit. JP said, “Crap, we forgot it in Carla.”
I uncovered the mic and said, “Keun, I’m sorry, man, but we left Twister in the car.”
“Not good,” he said with a hint of menace in his voice.
“I know, it sucks. Sorry.”
“I’ll call you back,” he said, and hung up the phone.

---

We  walked  for  another  minute  before  Keun  called  me  back.  “Listen,”  he  said,  “we  took  a  vote,  and
unfortunately, you’re gonna need to go back and get the Twister. The majority agreed that no one will be
allowed in without Twister.”
“What? Who took the vote?”
“Billy, Mitchell, and myself.”
“Well, come on, Keun. Lobby them or something! Carla is a twenty-minute walk into the wind and plus
the Reston twins are back there somewhere. Get one of them to change their votes!”
“Unfortunately, the vote was three to zero.”
“What? Keun? You voted against us?”
“I don’t see it as a vote against you,” he explained. “I see it as a vote in favor of Twister.”
“Surely you’re kidding,” I said. The Duke and JP couldn’t hear Keun’s end of the conversation, but they
were now looking on nervously.
“I don’t kid about Twister,” Keun said. “You can still get here first! Just hurry!”
I flipped the phone shut and pulled my hat down over my face. “Keun says he won’t let us in without
Twister,” I mumbled.
I stood under the awning of a café and tried to kick the snow off my frozen Pumas. JP was pacing back and
forth on the street, looking generally agitated. No one said anything for a while. I kept looking up the street
for the Reston twins, but they didn’t appear.
“We’re going to the Waffle House,” JP said.
“Yeah, right,” I answered.
“We’re going,” he said. “We’re gonna take a different route back so we don’t run into the Reston twins,
and we’re gonna get Twister, and we’re gonna go to the Waffle House. It’ll only take an hour if we hurry.”
I turned to the Duke, who was standing beside me under the awning. She would tell JP. She would tell
him that we just needed to give up and call 911 and see if someone somewhere could pick us up. “I want
hash browns,” the Duke said from behind me. “I want them scattered and smothered and covered. I want
them chunked, topped, and diced.”
“What you want is Billy Talos,” I said.
She  elbowed  me  in  the  side.  “I  said  to  shut  up  about  that,  Jesus.  And  I  don’t.  I  want  hash  browns.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. I am hungry, and I am the kind of hungry that only hash browns will fix,
and so we are going back and we are getting Twister.” She just marched off, and JP followed her. I stood
under  the  awning  for  a  moment,  but  finally  I  decided  that  being  in  a  bad  mood  with  your  friends  beats
being in a bad mood without them.
When  I  caught  up  to  them,  all  of  our  hoods  were  scrunched  shut  against  the  oncoming  wind  as  we
walked up a street parallel to Sunrise. We had to shout to be heard, and the Duke said, “I’m glad you’re
here,” and I shouted back, “Thanks,” and she shouted, “Honestly, hash browns mean nothing without you.”
I laughed and pointed out that “Hash Browns Mean Nothing Without You” was a pretty good name for a
band.
“Or a song,” the Duke said, and then she started singing all glam rock, a glove up to her face holding an
imaginary mic as she rocked out an a cappella power ballad. “Oh, I deep fried for you / But now I weep
’n’ cry for you / Oh, babe, this meal was made for two / And these hash browns mean nothing, oh these
hash browns mean nothing, yeah these HASH BROWNS MEAN NOTHIN’ without you.”

---

Chapter Nine
T
he Duke and JP made great time up the street—they weren’t running, but they were sure walking fast.
My feet felt frozen, and I was tired from carrying the Duke, so I lagged behind a little, and the onrushing
wind meant that I could hear their conversation, but they couldn’t hear anything I said.
The Duke was saying (again) that cheerleading wasn’t a sport, and then JP pointed at her and gave her a
stern shake of the head. “I don’t want to hear another negative word about cheerleaders. If it weren’t for
cheerleaders,  who  would  tell  us  when  and  how  to  be  happy  during  athletic  events?  If  it  weren’t  for
cheerleaders, how would America’s prettiest girls get the exercise that’s so vital to a healthy life?”
I scrambled to catch up with them so I could get off a line. “Also, without cheerleading, what would
become of the polyester miniskirt industry?” I asked. Just talking made the walking better, the wind less
bitter.
“Exactly,” JP said, wiping his nose on the sleeve of my dad’s onesie. “Not even to mention the pom-
pom  industry.  Do  you  realize  how  many  people  around  the  world  are  employed  in  the  manufacture,
distribution, and sale of pom-poms?”
“Twenty?” guessed the Duke.
“Thousands!”  JP  answered.  “The  world  must  contain  millions  of  pom-poms,  attached  to  millions  of
cheerleaders! And if it’s wrong to want all of those millions of cheerleaders to rub all of their millions of
pom-poms on my naked chest, well, then I don’t want to be right, Duke. I don’t want to be right.”
“You’re such a clown,” she said. “And such a genius.”
I fell behind them again but trudged along, not much of a clown and not much of a genius. It was always
a pleasure to watch JP show off his wit and see the Duke rise to the occasion. It took us fifteen minutes to
circle back to Carla using a route that avoided Sunrise (and, hopefully, the twins). I climbed in through the
trunk and grabbed the Twister, and we took off over a chain-link fence and through someone’s backyard
so  as  to  head  straight  west,  toward  the  highway.  We  figured  the  twins  would  take  the  route  we  had
initially  taken.  That  route  was  quicker,  but  we  all  agreed  that  we  hadn’t  seen  a  game  of  Twister  in  the
hands of either Timmy or Tommy, so we didn’t think it mattered if they beat us.
We walked in silence for a long time past dark wood-frame houses, and I held the Twister over my head
to keep some of the snow out of my face. The snow had accumulated in drifts up to the doorknobs on one
side of the street, and I thought about how much snow can change a place. I’d never lived anywhere but
here. I’d walked or driven on this block a thousand times. I could remember when all the trees died in the
blight, and when they planted new ones in all these yards. And over the fences I could see a block over to
Main Street, which I knew even better: I knew each gallery selling folk art to tourists, each outdoor shop
selling the kind of hiking boots I wished I was wearing.
But  it  was  new  now,  all  of  it—cloaked  in  a  white  so  pure  as  to  be  vaguely  menacing.  No  street  or
sidewalk beneath me, no fire hydrants. Nothing but the white everywhere, like the place itself was gift-
wrapped in snow. And it didn’t just look different, either; it smelled different, the air now sharp with cold
and  the  wet  acidity  of  snow.  And  the  eerie  silence,  just  the  steady  rhythm  of  our  shoes  crunching
underfoot. I couldn’t even hear what JP and the Duke were talking about a few feet in front of me as I got
lost in the whited-out world.
And  I  might  have  convinced  myself  that  we  were  the  only  people  left  awake  in  all  of  western  North

---

Carolina had we not seen the bright lights of the Duke and Duchess convenience store when we turned off
Third Street and onto Maple.
The reason we call the Duke “the Duke” is because when we were in eighth grade, we went one time to
the  Duke  and  Duchess.  And  the  thing  about  the  Duke  and  Duchess  convenience  store  is  that  instead  of
calling you “sir” or “ma’am” or “you there” or whatever, the employees of the D and D convenience store
are supposed to call you either “Duke” or “Duchess.”
Now, the Duke arrived a little late to the puberty party, and on top of that, she also always wore jeans
and baseball caps, particularly in middle school. So the predictable thing happened: one day we went into
the Duke and Duchess to buy Big League Chew or Mountain Dew Code Red or whatever we were using
to  rot  our  teeth  on  that  particular  week,  and  after  the  Duke  had  made  her  purchase,  the  guy  behind  the
counter said, “Thank you, Duke.”
It stuck. At one point, I think in ninth grade, we were all at lunch and JP and Keun and I all offered to
start calling her Angie, but she said she hated being called Angie, anyway. So we kept with the Duke. It
suited her. She had excellent posture, and she was kind of a born leader and everything, and even though
she certainly no longer looked even vaguely boyish, she still mostly acted like one of us.
As we walked up Maple, I noticed JP slowing to walk next to me.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Listen, are you okay?” he asked. He reached up and took the Twister from me and tucked it under his
arm.
“Um, yeah?”
“Because you’re walking, like, I don’t know. Like you don’t have ankles or knees?” I looked down and
saw that I was indeed walking very strangely, my legs far apart and swiveling, my knees barely bending. I
looked a bit like a cowboy after a long ride. “Huh,” I said, watching my weird gait. “Hmm. I think my feet
are just really cold.”
“VERY FAST EMERGENCY STOP!” JP yelled. “We’ve got some potential frostbite back here!”
I shook my head; I was fine, really, but the Duke turned around and saw me walking and said, “To the D
and D!”
So  they  jogged  and  I  waddled.  They  beat  me  into  the  D  and  D  by  a  long  shot,  and  by  the  time  I  got
inside, the Duke was already at the counter, purchasing a four-pack of white cotton socks.
We weren’t the only customers. As I sat down in a booth at the D and D’s miniature “café,” I glanced
down to the far booth: there, with a steaming cup in front of him, sat the Tinfoil Guy.

---

Chapter Ten
“W
hat’s  up?”  JP  said  to  the  Tinfoil  Guy  as  I  pulled  off  my  soaked  shoes.  It’s  sort  of  hard  to  describe
Tinfoil Guy, because he looks like a somewhat grizzled but generally normal older guy except for the fact
that  he  never,  under  any  circumstances,  leaves  the  house  unless  his  entire  body  from  neck  to  toes  is
wrapped in tinfoil. I peeled off my nearly frozen socks. My feet were a pale blue. JP offered me a napkin
to wipe them off as Tinfoil Guy spoke.
“How  are  you  three,  on  this  night?”  The  Tinfoil  Guy  always  talked  like  that,  like  life  was  a  horror
movie and he was the knife-wielding maniac. But he was generally agreed to be harmless. He’d asked all
three of us the question, but he was looking only at me.
“Let’s see,” I answered. “Our car lost a wheel and I can’t feel my feet.”
“You looked very lonesome out there,” he said. “An epic hero against the elements.”
“Yeah. Okay. How are you?” I asked, to be polite. Why did you ask him a question! I chastised myself.
Stupid Southern manners.
“I’m enjoying a most filling cup of noodles,” he said. “I do love a good cup. And then I believe I’ll go
for another walk.”
“You don’t get cold, with the foil?” I couldn’t stop asking questions!
“What foil?” he asked.
“Uh,”  I  said,  “right.”  The  Duke  brought  me  the  socks.  I  put  on  one  pair,  and  then  another,  and  then  a
third.  I  saved  the  fourth  in  case  I  needed  dry  ones  later.  I  could  barely  squeeze  into  my  Pumas,  but
nonetheless, I felt like a new man as I stood up to leave.
“Always a pleasure,” Tinfoil Guy said to me.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Merry Christmas.”
“May  the  pigs  of  fate  fly  you  safely  home,”  he  responded.  Right.  I  felt  awful  for  the  lady  behind  the
counter, being stuck with him. As I was on my way out, the woman behind the counter said to me, “Duke?”
I turned. “Yes?”
“I couldn’t help but overhear,” she said. “About your car.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sucks.”
“Listen,” she said. “We can tow it. We got a truck.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah, here, give me something I can write down the number on.” I fished around in my coat pocket and
found  a  receipt.  She  wrote  down  her  number  and  name,  Rachel,  in  loop-heavy  script.  “Wow,  thanks,
Rachel.”
“Yeah. A hundred fifty bucks plus five bucks a mile, being a holiday and the weather and everything.”
I grimaced but nodded. An expensive tow was a hell of a lot better than no tow at all.
We were barely back out on the road—me walking with a newfound awareness of, and appreciation for,
my  toes—when  JP  sidled  up  to  me  and  said,  “Honestly,  the  fact  that  Tinfoil  Guy  is,  like,  forty  and  still
alive gives me hope that I can have a reasonably successful adulthood.”
“Yeah.” The Duke was walking ahead of us, munching on Cheetos. “Dude,” JP said. “Are you looking
at the Duke’s butt?”
“What?  No.”  And  only  in  telling  the  lie  did  I  realize  that  actually  I  had  been  looking  at  her  back,

---

although not specifically her butt.
The Duke turned around. “What are you talking about?”
“Your butt!” JP shouted into the wind.
She laughed. “I know it’s what you dream about when you’re alone at night, JP.”
She slowed and we caught up with her. “Honestly, Duke?” JP said, putting his arm around her. “I hope
this  doesn’t  hurt  your  feelings,  but  if  I  ever  had  a  sex  dream  about  you,  I  would  have  to  locate  my
subconscious, remove it from my body, and beat it to death with a stick.”
She shot him down with her usual aplomb. “That doesn’t offend me in the least,” she said to him. “If
you didn’t, I’d have to do it for you.” And then she turned and looked over at me. I figured she wanted to
see if I was laughing—I was, quietly.
We were walking past Governor’s Park, home to the biggest playground in town, when in the distance, I
heard an engine, loud and powerful. I thought for a second it might be the twins, but then I looked back,
and as it drove under a streetlight, I could see the lights above the roof. “Cop,” I said quickly, dashing off
into the park. JP and the Duke hurried off the road, too. We hunkered down, half behind a snowdrift and
half in it, as the cop drove slowly by, a searchlight arcing across the park.
Only after he passed did it occur to me to say, “He might have given us a ride.”
“Yeah, to jail,” JP said.
“Well, but we aren’t doing anything criminal,” I said.
JP mulled this over for a moment. Being outside at two thirty in the morning on Christmas certainly felt
wrong,  but  that  didn’t  mean  it  was  wrong.  “Don’t  be  an  asshat,”  JP  said.  Fair  enough.  I  did  the  least
asshatty thing I could think of, which was to take a few steps through the calf-high snow away from the
road and into Governor’s Park. Then I let myself fall backward, my arms out, knowing the snow would
meet me thick and soft. I lay there for a moment and then made a snow angel. The Duke dove down onto
her  belly.  “Snow  angel  with  boobs!”  she  said.  JP  got  a  running  start  and  then  jumped  into  the  snow,
landing  sprawled  out  on  his  side,  the  Twister  wrapped  in  his  arms.  He  stood  up  carefully  next  to  the
imprint of his body and said, “Outline of body at homicide investigation!”
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“Someone tried to take his Twister, and he died in heroic defense of it,” he explained.
I scampered out of my angel and made another, but this time I used my gloves to give my angel horns.
“Snow devil!” the Duke shouted, gleeful. With the snow all around us I felt like a little kid in one of those
inflatable moon walks—I couldn’t get hurt by falling. I couldn’t get hurt by anything. The Duke ran toward
me, her shoulder low, her head down, and barreled into my chest, tackling me. We hit the ground together
and then my momentum rolled me over her, and her face was close enough to mine that our freezing breath
intermingled between us. I felt her weight beneath me and something dropped in my stomach as she smiled
at me. There was a fraction of a second when I could have slid off of her but didn’t, and then she pushed
me off and stood up, brushing the snow off her coat and onto my still-prone body.
We got up and stomped back to the road and continued on. I was wetter and colder than I’d been all
night, but we were only a mile from the highway, and from there it was just a quick jog down to the Waffle
House.
We started off walking together, the Duke talking about how careful I needed to be about frostbite, and
me talking about the lengths I would go to in order to reunite the Duke with her greasy boyfriend, and the
Duke  kicking  me  in  the  calves,  and  JP  calling  us  both  asshats.  But  after  a  while,  the  road  started  to  get
snowy again, so I found myself walking on the fairly fresh tire track of what I assumed was that cop car.
JP was walking in one of the trails, and me in the other, the Duke a few steps in front of us. “Tobin,” he
said out of nowhere. I looked up and he was right next to me, high-stepping through the snow. “Not that
I’m necessarily in favor of the idea,” he said, “but I think maybe you like the Duke.”

---

Chapter Eleven
S
he was just walking in front of us in her shin-high boots, her hood pulled up, her head down. There’s a
certain something to the way girls walk—particularly when they aren’t wearing fancy shoes or anything,
when  they’re  just  wearing  sneakers  or  whatever—something  about  the  way  their  legs  connect  to  their
hips. Anyway, the Duke was walking, and there was a certain something to it, and I was kind of disgusted
with myself for thinking about that certain something. I mean, my girl cousins probably walked with the
same  certain  something,  but  the  point  is  that  sometimes  you  notice  it  and  sometimes  you  don’t.  When
Brittany the cheerleader walks, you notice it. When the Duke walks, you don’t. Usually.
I spent so long thinking about the Duke and her walk and the lazy wet curls down her back, and the way
the thickness of her coat made her arms stick out from her body a little, and all of that, that I took way too
long to respond to JP. But finally I said, “Don’t be an asshat.”
And he said, “You just spent a hell of a long time thinking up that quality comeback.”
“No,” I said finally. “I don’t like the Duke, not like that. I’d tell you if I did, but it’s like liking your
cousin.”
“It’s funny you should mention that, because I have a really hot cousin, actually.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Duke,” JP called. “What were you telling me about cousin-screwing the other day? It’s, like, totally
safe?”
She turned around to us and continued walking, her back to the wind, the snow blowing around her and
toward us. “No, it’s not totally safe. It raises the risk of birth defects slightly. But I was reading in a book
for  history  that  there’s,  like,  a  99.9999  percent  chance  that  at  least  one  of  your  great-great-great-
grandparents married a first cousin.”
“So what you’re saying is that there’s nothing wrong with hooking up with your cousin.”
The Duke paused and turned to walk with us. She sighed loudly. “That is not what I’m saying. Also I’m
a little tired of talking about cousin hookups and hot cheerleaders.”
“What should we talk about instead? The weather? It looks like we’re getting some snow,” JP said.
“Honestly, I would rather talk about the weather.”
I said, “You know, Duke, there are male cheerleaders. You could always just hook up with them.”
The Duke stopped talking and totally snapped. Her face was scrunched up as she yelled at me. “You
know what? It’s sexist. Okay? I hate to be, like, the watchdog for the ladies or whatever, but when you
spend a whole night talking about doing girls because they’ve got short skirts on, or how hot pom-poms
are, or whatever. It’s sexist, okay? Female cheerleaders wearing dainty little male-fantasy outfits—sexist!
Just  assuming  they’re  dying  to  make  out  with  you—sexist!  I  realize  that  you  are,  like,  bursting  with  a
constant need to rub yourself against girl flesh or whatever, but can you just try to talk about it a little less
in front of me?!”
I  looked  down  at  the  snow  falling  on  snow.  I  felt  like  I’d  just  gotten  caught  cheating  on  a  test  or
something. I wanted to say that I didn’t even care if we went to the Waffle House anymore, but I just shut
up. The three of us kept walking in a line. The swirling wind was at our backs now, and I stared down and
tried to let it push me on to the Waffle House.
“I’m sorry,” I heard the Duke say to JP.
“Nah, it’s our fault,” he responded without looking over. “I was being an asshat. We just need to . . . I
don’t know, sometimes it’s hard to remember.”

---

“Yeah,  maybe  I  should  thrust  my  boobs  out  more  or  something.”  The  Duke  said  that  loud,  like  I  was
supposed to hear it.
There is always the risk: something is good and good and good and good, and then all at once it gets
awkward.  All  at  once,  she  sees  you  looking  at  her,  and  then  she  doesn’t  want  to  joke  around  with  you
anymore, because she doesn’t want to seem flirty, because she doesn’t want you to think she likes you. It’s
such a disaster, whenever, in the course of human relationships, someone begins to chisel away at the wall
of separation between friendship and kissing. Breaking down that wall is the kind of story that might have
a happy middle—oh, look, we broke down this wall, I’m going to look at you like a girl and you’re going
to look at me like a boy and we’re going to play a fun game called Can I Put My Hand There What About
There What About There. And sometimes that happy middle looks so great that you can convince yourself
that it’s not the middle but will last forever.
That middle is never the end, though. It wasn’t the end with Brittany, God knows. And Brittany and I
hadn’t even been close friends, not really. Not like the Duke. The Duke was my best  friend,  if  I  had  to
pick. I mean, the one person I’d take to a desert island? The Duke. The one CD I’d take? A mix, called
“The  Earth  Is  Blue  Like  an  Orange,”  that  she  made  for  me  last  Christmas.  The  one  book  I’d  take?  The
longest book I’ve ever liked, The Book Thief, which the Duke recommended to me. And I did not want to
have a happy middle with the Duke at the expense of an Inevitably Disastrous Forever.
But then again (and here is one of my main complaints about human consciousness): once you think a
thought, it is extremely difficult to unthink it. And I had thought the thought. We whined about the cold.
The Duke kept sniffling, because we didn’t have any tissue and she didn’t want to blow her noise on the
ground. JP, having agreed not to talk about cheerleaders, kept talking about hash browns instead.
JP meant “hash browns” only as a symbol for cheerleaders—it was clear because he was, like, “My
favorite thing about the hash browns at the Waffle House is that they wear the cutest little skirts.” “Hash
browns are always in a great mood. And that rubs off. Seeing hash browns happy makes me happy.”
It seemed like as long as it was JP talking, the Duke didn’t find it annoying. She was just laughing and
responding by actually talking about hash browns. “They’re going to be so warm,” she said. “So crispy
and golden and delicious. I want four large orders. Also some raisin toast. God, I love that raisin toast.
Mmm, it’s going to be carbtastic.” I could see the interstate overpass in the distance, the snow piled high
on the sides of the bridge. The Waffle House was still probably a half mile away, but it was a straight shot
now. The black letters in their yellow boxes promising cheesy waffles, and Keun’s impish smile, and the
kind of girls who make unthinking easier.
And then as we kept walking, I began to see the light emerge through the thick veil of snow. Not the sign
itself at first, but the light it produced. And then finally the sign itself, towering above the tiny restaurant,
the sign bigger and brighter than the little shack of a restaurant could ever be, those black letters in their
yellow squares promising warmth and sustenance:
WAFFLE HOUSE
. I fell to my knees in the middle of the
street and shouted, “Not in a castle nor in a mansion but in a Waffle House shall we find our salvation!”
The  Duke  laughed,  pulling  me  up  by  the  armpits.  Her  ice-matted  hat  was  pulled  down  low  over  her
forehead. I looked at her and she looked at me and we weren’t walking. We were just standing there, and
her  eyes  were  so  interesting.  Not  in  the  usual  way  of  being  interesting,  like  being  extremely  blue  or
extremely big or flanked by obscenely long lashes or anything. What interested me about the Duke’s eyes
was the complexity of the color—she always said they looked like the bottom of trash-can bins, a swirl of
green and brown and yellow. But she was underselling herself. She always undersold herself.
Christ. It was a hard thing to unthink.
I might have kept gawking at her forever while she looked quizzically back at me had I not heard the
engine in the distance and then turned around to see a red Ford Mustang taking a corner at considerable
speed.  I  grabbed  the  Duke  by  the  arm  and  we  ran  for  a  snowbank.  I  looked  up  the  road  for  JP,  who’d
gotten quite a bit ahead of us now. “JP!” I shouted. “TWINS!”

---

Chapter Twelve
J
P swiveled around. He looked at us, piled in the snow together. He looked at the car. His body froze for
a moment. And then he turned up the road and began running, his legs a blur of energy. He was making a
break  for  the  Waffle  House.  The  twins’  Mustang  roared  past  the  Duke  and  me.  Little  Tommy  Reston
leaned out the rolled-down window holding a game of Twister and announced, “We gonna kill you later.”
But for the moment they seemed content on killing JP, and as they bore down on him, I shouted, “Run,
JP! Run!” I’m sure he couldn’t hear me over the rumbling of the Mustang, but I shouted it anyway, one last
desperate and furtive cry into the wilderness. From thence forth, the Duke and I were mere witnesses.
JP’s  head  start  dissipated  quickly—he  was  running  very  fast,  but  he  didn’t  have  a  chance  in  hell  of
beating a brilliantly driven Ford Mustang to the WH.
“I was really looking forward to hash browns,” the Duke said morosely.
“Yeah,” I answered. The Mustang reached the point where it could overtake JP, but JP just refused to
stop running or to get out of the road. The horn honked as I saw the Mustang’s brake lights flash on, but JP
just  kept  running.  And  now  I  realized  JP’s  insane  strategy:  he’d  calculated  that  the  road  was  not  wide
enough with the drifts for the Mustang to pass him on either side, and he believed that the twins would not
run  him  over.  This  seemed  to  me  a  very  generous  assessment  of  the  twins’  benevolence,  but  for  the
moment, at least, it was working. The Mustang honked furiously but impotently as JP ran in front of it.
Something changed in my peripheral vision. I looked up at the highway overpass and saw the outlines
of  two  heavyset  men  slowly  waddling  toward  the  exit  ramp,  carrying  a  barrel  that  seemed  to  be  very
heavy. The keg. The college guys. I pointed up to the Duke, and she looked at me, and her eyes got wide.
“Shortcut!” she shouted, and then she took off toward the highway, blazing through the snowbank. I’d
never seen her run so fast, and I didn’t know what she was thinking, but she was thinking something, so I
followed.  We  scampered  up  the  interstate  embankment  together,  the  snow  thick  enough  that  we  could
climb  with  ease.  As  I  jumped  the  guard  rail,  I  could  see  JP  on  the  other  side  of  the  underpass,  still
running. But the Mustang had stopped; instead, Timmy and Tommy Reston were chasing him on foot.
The  Duke  and  I  were  running  toward  the  college  guys,  and  finally  one  of  them  looked  up  and  said,
“Hey, are you—” but he didn’t even finish the sentence. We just ran past them, and the Duke shouted to
me,  “Take  out  the  mat!  Take  out  the  mat!”  I  opened  the  Twister  box  and  threw  it  in  the  middle  of  the
highway. I held the spinner between clenched teeth and the mat in my hands, and now, finally, I knew what
she wanted us to do. Maybe the twins were faster. But with the Duke’s brilliant idea, I realized we might
have a chance.
When we reached the beginning of the downhill slope of the exit ramp, I flipped out the Twister mat in
a single motion. She jumped down onto it butt first, and I followed suit, placing the spinner beneath me.
And she shouted, “You’re gonna have to dig your right hand into the snow to keep us turning right,” and I
said, “Okay, okay.” We started to slide down, gaining speed, and then as the ramp curved, I dug my hand
in, and we turned, still accelerating. I could see JP now on Timmy Reston’s back, trying in vain to slow
his gargantuan body as it marched toward the Waffle House.
“We  can  still  do  it,”  I  said,  but  I  was  having  doubts.  And  then  I  heard  a  deep  rumble  above  us,  and
turned around to see a keg of beer rolling down the exit ramp with considerable speed. They were trying
to kill us. That didn’t seem like good sportsmanship at all!
“KEG!” I shouted, and the Duke swiveled her head around. It bounced toward us with menace. I didn’t
know how much beer kegs weigh, but given the struggle of those guys to carry it, I imagined it weighed

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plenty  enough  to  kill  two  promising  young  high-school  students  on  a  Christmas-morning  outing  with  a
Twister  sled.  The  Duke  stayed  turned  around,  watching  the  keg  as  it  approached,  but  I  was  too  scared.
And then she shouted, “Now now turn turn turn,” and I dug my arm into the snow and she rolled toward
me, almost pushing me off the mat, and then things slowed down and I watched as the keg barreled past
us,  rolling  right  over  the  red  dots,  where  the  Duke  had  been.  But  it  shot  past  us,  hit  the  guard  rail,  and
bounced over. I did not see what came next, but I heard it: a very foamy keg of beer hit something sharp
and exploded like a huge beer bomb.
The explosion was so loud that Tommy and Timmy and JP all stopped dead in their tracks for at least
five seconds. When they began running again, Tommy hit a patch of ice and fell on his face. When he saw
his brother fall, the gargantuan Timmy suddenly changed tacks: rather than chasing JP, he hurdled through
the roadside snowdrift and started toward the Waffle House itself. JP, a few steps forward, immediately
made the same move so that they were headed toward the same door at slightly different angles. The Duke
and I were close now—close enough to the bottom of the ramp to feel the deceleration, and close enough
to the twins to hear them shouting at JP and at each other. I could see into the half-fogged windows of the
Waffle House. Cheerleaders in green warm-up suits. Ponytails.
But as we stood up and I gathered the Twister mat, I knew we were not close enough. Timmy had the
inside track to the front door as he pumped his arms, the Twister box looking comically small in his meaty
hand. JP was approaching from a slightly different angle, running his guts out through shin-deep powder.
The Duke and I were running as fast as we could, but we were well behind. I held out hope for JP, though,
until Timmy got a few strides from the door and I realized that he was plainly going to be first to the door.
My stomach sank. JP had come so close. His immigrant parents had sacrificed so much. The Duke would
be denied her hash browns, and I my cheesy waffles.
And then, as Timmy started to extend his hand for the door, JP pounced. He leaped into the air, his body
stretched out like a receiver reaching for an overthrown pass, and he got so much air that it seemed as if
he’d jumped from a trampoline. His shoulder nailed Timmy Reston in the chest, and together they fell into
a row of snow-draped shrubs next to the door. JP came up first, dashed for the door, pulled it open, and
locked it behind him. The Duke and I were within spitting distance now, close enough to hear the shout of
jubilation  through  the  glass.  JP  raised  his  hands  above  his  head,  fists  clenched,  and  the  joyful  scream
continued for what seemed like several minutes.
As JP stared out into the darkness toward us with his hands raised, I watched as Keun—wearing a black
“WH”  visor,  a  white-and-yellow-striped  shirt,  and  a  brown  apron—mobbed  JP  from  behind.  Keun
grabbed him by the waist and lifted him up, and JP just kept his arms raised. The cheerleaders, crowded
together at a bank of booths, looked on. I glanced down at the Duke, who was looking not at the scene but
at me, and I laughed, and she laughed.
Tommy  and  Timmy  banged  on  the  windows  for  a  while,  but  Keun  just  raised  his  hands  as  if  to  say,