Let It Snow

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 a

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

JP 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 ru

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 ru

“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 ru

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 ru

The Duke and I were ru

When we reached the begi

“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 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.