Let It Snow

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 ru

“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

She 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 co

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 fu

“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.