by Leah Konen
The snow is still falling—it might have slowed a little bit, but it’s hard to tell in the dark—and I lean over the balcony, looking for our Mustang. It’s already got a blanket of white over it, and I can only hope that tomorrow we’ll be able to get out of here at a reasonable time.
And then at the same time, I don’t.
I take in the views around me, the confetti-like sprinkling of flakes, the darkness and the stillness on the highway. We’re in a snow globe—Noah and I, in this motel—and it may be crazy, but I don’t want to get out. I want to stay right here.
I imagine a world where I don’t have to go to my dad’s and walk the fine line of trying to be part of his family and wanting nothing to do with it, where I don’t have to eventually return to my mom and deal with the fallout of betraying her like I did.
Where I don’t have to do anything but cuddle up with Noah and stay warm.
I keep on walking, past 203, 204, 205, 206.
Maybe this feeling has nothing to do with my mom or my dad or Sophie, after all. Maybe it’s just that the idea of holing up in a shitty motel room with Noah for weeks on end is the most appealing thing I could think of right about now.
Maybe this is exactly what I want.
Who knows, maybe it’s even what I need.
The ice machine looks like it’s older than I am—by a lot, probably. I lift up the lid and dig around with the black plastic bucket I grabbed from the room. I’m not even sure why I need ice—it’s cold enough without it, and room-temperature water wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world right now, but ever since I was a kid, the first thing I used to do in hotel rooms was go to get the ice. It was my special duty, like Noah and the turkey timer.
We used to go to Asheville in North Carolina, once or twice a year. We’d stay at the Sheraton downtown. In a room with two big queen beds, one of which I got entirely to myself—the benefit of being an only child, I suppose. In the winters, we’d go to the Biltmore, see the Christmas decorations my mom was always so wild about. It was magical, those trips, and my mom planned the whole thing—they’d never have happened without her. We’d get the special edition Christmas ornament to add to our collection, the tree full and heavy with our yearly bounty. In the summers, we’d walk around, have brunch, go to the art shops. Whenever we’d get in, the first thing I would do was find the ice machine and perform my duty. My mom would make a big show of plopping a bottle of white wine in the bucket like we were super fancy, even though the standard hotel ice bucket hardly had space for a few cubes of ice and a bottle of wine.
When I was younger, my parents would hire a sitter for Saturday night. They’d get all dressed up and go out to a fancy restaurant, while the sitter and I ordered room service. Later, when I was twelve or so, I got to stay in on my own, rent a movie, and order as much food as I wanted.
I won’t ever do that again, I realize. Maybe I’ll go with just my mom, or maybe I’ll have kids of my own one day and drag them along, but I probably won’t. Because the memory is ruined now. Like scar tissue, there always, but painful and puffy—not to be poked at too much.
I get ten or so cubes into my bucket, but the rest is stuck together, a big old block you’d need one of those old-time soda-shop picks to get through, not that I’ve ever been to a soda shop that had that sort of thing, or a soda shop at all, for that matter, but I’ve seen enough horror movies to know that, at some point, that was a thing.
I slide the door shut and head back to the stairwell. I have eight dollars and seventy-five cents in change. I settle on three bags of Cheetos—because one can never have enough Cheetos, especially when junk food is your entire dinner—two bags of pretzels, two Cokes, and a pack of Skittles. My fingers are practically numb as I feed each crumpled bill in, but miraculously, the machine takes every last dollar, and the occasionally evil spiral dispensers don’t steal a single item from me. I tug at the hem of my sweater, making a basket of sorts to hold all the goodies, and I head back to the room.
Maybe—just maybe—it will all turn out great, I tell myself.
Maybe my dad will appreciate the gesture of me at least trying to come up for the faux wedding. Maybe we’ll have a wonderful week, the five of us, like our own little nuclear family. Maybe I’ll call my mom and apologize and we’ll do something clichéd and mother–daughter-y when I get back, like get mani-pedis together or something.
Maybe I’ll stay longer. Maybe a week will turn into a month and my fake nuclear family will become my actual one.
Maybe Kat and I will grow close, and we’ll spend the next five months carting Bea to practice and eating at the fancy brunch spot in downtown Hudson on Sophie’s dime, and flirting with boys down at Claverack Creek.
Or maybe even the cute stranger I spent a night with wherever we are now will become something else.
Maybe we will become something else.
I don’t know what will happen tomorrow—I don’t know how any of this will work out. I don’t know what Noah is thinking right now.
But I know this—at least we have tonight.
NOAH
7:33 P.M.
AMMY’S CHEEKS ARE STRAIGHT-UP PINK WHEN SHE walks in. She’s got a sweater full of snacks, an ice bucket hooked on her arm, and her hands are frigid white.
“You were gone forever,” I say. “I was starting to get worried.” I take the ice bucket from her hands. “Good thing we have ice after the day we’ve had!”
She shoots me a look.
“Sorry—bad joke. Thanks for getting everything.”
She pours the array of snacks onto the bed. “It’s a habit of mine,” she says, giving me a hint of her Ammy smile. “And by the way, it takes forever to feed crumpled dollar bills into a janky vending machine. Shouldn’t they have invented an app for that or something?”
“An app that flattens your crinkled dollar bills?” I ask.
She puts a hand on her hip. “No, where you just wave your phone in front of the machine and everything you want comes out without you having to pay.”
“It’s called iCrappyMotelSnacks. It’s on the horizon.”
She laughs rather loudly at my horrible joke. It makes me feel warm all over.
She waves her hand across the bed. “I did good, though, didn’t I?”
I don’t bother with the snacks for a moment. “You should have worn a jacket,” I say.
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
I don’t like the idea of her being cold and uncomfortable. And I’m still worried her feet will get frostnip. I rush to my bed, pull back the comforter, and tug at the fleecy blanket underneath. After a few pulls, it comes out.
Ammy raises an eyebrow. “Is that really necessary?”
I don’t bother to answer. Instead, I kick the remaining linens into a pile and walk up to her, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders.
“What is this, my cape?” she asks.
“Captain Obvious is nothing without his lesser-known counterpart, Queen Snark.”
Ammy smirks but her eyes are kind, and I can tell she thinks it’s funny, at least a little.
She takes her hands and wraps them in the corners of the blanket, pulling it tight beneath her chin. I rub my hands up and down her arms, trying to warm her up. “That any better?”
Her mouth breaks into a slightly off-kilter smile, and a piece of hair falls in front of her face. There are snowflakes on it, snowflakes melting right in front of my eyes.
“Yeah,” she says, her eyes on mine. My hands stop moving up and down. They rest on her shoulders for the smallest of seconds.
She doesn’t drop her gaze.
What would it be like to kiss her?
What would it be like to kiss that adorable smirk right off her face?
It’s too much. I drop my hands, take a couple of steps back. Clear my throat. And my head.
“Do you want to play cards?” I ask quickly.
She laughs. It sounds a little forced, or am I imagining that?
“You br
ought cards?” She pulls the blanket tighter and sits on her bed.
“Yeah,” I say. “Never leave home without them!”
Everything I’m saying sounds awkward, and my face goes red. I head to my bed and unzip the front pocket of my messenger bag, eager to escape her gaze for a moment. I dig through the gum, receipts, and a folded-up piece of paper where I’ve jotted down my poem for Rina.
Rina.
What the hell am I doing? I shake my head, reach into a different pocket to get the cards.
Our adventure is getting to me. We’ve been together for who knows how many hours now, we’ve been through what seems like hell and back, we’ve talked and talked and had to rely on each other . . . of course I’d be feeling all the feels, as Rina’s little sister always used to say.
This isn’t real. It’s nothing more than me having watched one too many romantic comedies in Rina’s company. It’s situational. I don’t know this girl. She won’t even tell me why she’s here.
If anything happened tonight, it would ruin everything with Rina.
Rina never liked my jokes. So much that eventually I stopped telling them.
Rina, who never liked a lot of things about me.
Ammy’s words ring in my head:
Why do you want to get back with her?
It’s too much to figure out, right here in this moment, so I fish for those damn cards like my life depends on it.
My hands land on the cards as Ammy starts in on the junk food. I take them out: a hole-punched deck my grandparents got me in Atlantic City. My grandma Jen was so good at blackjack, half the time she’d make money when she went there.
I don’t care what we play, I just need a distraction. Some time to get my head in order.
Before I hooked up with Bryson’s cousin, I didn’t think. I wasn’t kind to her—or myself. I need to think now.
Ammy means something to me, after what we’ve been through. I can’t use her to help me figure out whether I should be with Rina or not. I already know that if I kiss her, it will mean a whole hell of a lot.
I turn around, walk back to the bed, and sit down next to her.
The cards shuffle easily as my eyes survey the goods: pretzels, Skittles, soda, and . . .
“You got three bags of Cheetos?” I ask.
She bites her lip and scoots back on the bed, leaning against the headboard, the blanket still wrapped around her. “Too much?”
“No,” I say. “It’s just . . .”
“What?” she asks. “You’re not allergic, are you? There’s not any gluten, it’s just corn. Not that gluten is a real allergy, but . . .”
I shake my head.
“Oh shit, you don’t have celiac, do you? I guess it is an allergy if you have celiac. But no, you ate two sandwiches today. I saw you. . . .”
I laugh. “It’s nothing.”
She cocks her head to the side in that way she has of making me not care about anything besides telling her everything on my mind. “Come on,” she says. “What?”
“My mom has this dumb story about Cheetos, that’s all,” I say.
She pops a Cheeto into her mouth. “Go on. . . .”
I hesitate, feeling silly. It’s not a particularly interesting story. And it’s weird that it means so much to me right now.
Ammy shakes the bag like a bootleg maraca. She leans back, and her head hits a crappy painting of a pier. She scoots down, readjusting, her short hair fanning out so it looks like a dark seashell. “Come on,” she says, unaware I’m sitting over here writing poetry about her hair. “I want to hear.”
I breathe deeply, preparing. Even though it worked out, it still hurts to talk about. “My parents split up last year. Well, technically they got separated . . .”
Ammy stops midbite and sits up straighter against the fake wooden headboard, careful not to hit her head again. “I didn’t know your parents were split up. I thought you said—”
“They’re not,” I say quickly, as it seems to upset her. “Wait, are yours?”
She looks down, staring into the crinkly foil bag as if there’s an answer in there. It says everything.
“Anyway,” I say, and she looks back up at me. “Remember I said they were on a ‘renewing their love’ cruise?”
She laughs and seems to relax, now that the spotlight is once again off her. “I just thought that was because they were old.”
I laugh, too. “Give me some Cheetos,” I say. She does. I pop one into my mouth and wipe the orange flecks onto my jeans. “They separated because my dad was out of work as a professor. He was on a tenure-track but something happened with the head of his department. Anyway, he started doing this job that could hurt his back and really should have been done by a teenager. I’m not sure if that was all of it, but when he got hurt doing the job, I think that was the breaking point for her. My parents have a weird relationship with money—we seem to either have it and are spending it all the time, like with this cruise, or we don’t have it at all. And my dad was offered this gig at a community college, but he said a formerly tenure-track professor would never teach at a community college, especially the one in question—so he took this job instead. She got really pissed that he was risking his health to save his pride.”
Ammy nods. “That makes sense, I guess.”
“My dad’s not in the best shape,” I say. “Trust me, if you’d seen him up there laying roof, you would have said the same thing. Anyway, so a couple of months ago, my mom tells me that my dad quit the roofing job and took the community college one, and that they’re getting back together, and I’m happy, I really am, but I don’t know, I’d been pretty upset about their separation, and I worried they were doing it for me. My parents are the kind of people who would do something like that for me, so I asked her if it’s what she really wanted.”
Ammy nods, leans a little bit closer, puts the bag down.
What’s your story? I want to ask her. I want to abandon this one and hear hers.
“So what did she say?” Ammy asks.
I smile. “She said that there was this one night when they were first dating, and they were supposed to go to a nice restaurant in Hudson, but something went wrong with the reservation, so by the time they got it sorted all the restaurants were closed. They went to a deli and got an extra-large bag of Cheetos and two sodas, and they sat in my dad’s car by the train station—my mom had come all the way up from the city for the date—and they shared their dinner while waiting for the eleven o’clock train so she could go home.”
“And?” Ammy says. “So?”
I smile. “So my mom said she’d been unhappy with my dad, and he was being an idiot about the roofing job, but she said that to this day there was no one else on earth she’d rather share a bag of Cheetos with in a crappy car while waiting at the train station.”
Ammy raises an eyebrow. “So, what? I remind you of your mom? Eww,” she says, laughing.
“No, not at all. It’s just, I saw the Cheetos, and I thought about that story, and I thought about what she said, and I don’t know, I thought about how much fun I’ve had with you today, even though it’s been a nightmare, too. . . .” My voice trails off, and I look down at my hands.
“I don’t know,” I say finally, my eyes still locked on my hands. “I said it was a stupid story. I don’t know why I even told you.”
When I look up, Ammy’s staring back at me. Her smile is everything.
Everything I ever wanted.
In one person.
In this motel room.
Sitting across from me.
“It’s not stupid,” she says. “It’s not stupid at all.”
AMMY
7:44 P.M.
“MAYBE WE SHOULD PLAY CARDS,” I SAY.
Noah is staring at me, and somehow we’re sitting closer on the bed than we were when he started his story, and the only thing that really separates us is an ever-dwindling pile of vending machine goodies, and my heart is beating super-duper fast now, and I swear if I don
’t do something else, he’s going to feel it pounding, vibrating right through the springs of the lumpy mattress beneath us.
And then what?
He looks as relieved—and as disappointed?—as I am. He pushes the snacks aside and pulls out the deck of cards. Am I crazy, or are his hands shaking, just a little?
He starts to shuffle. A real bravado sort of shuffle, like you’d see in a casino or something. My mom was always trying to show me how to shuffle all fancy like that. She used to try and teach me all kinds of card games, too, but I wouldn’t have it. I’d rather go hiking with my dad. I’d rather be outside than cooped up, as she preferred, playing cards and completing puzzles. If she was going out, it was to go antiquing, to find more things to fill her nest inside. She was always working to make our house so beautiful, but I never really cared.
“What should we play?” he asks. “Gin? Rummy? Strip poker?”
I roll my eyes. “Please.”
He raises a hand. “I kid, I kid,” he says again, just like he did earlier in front of the 7-Eleven. I still find it funny. And adorable. I meet his eyes. His grin is wide, and I can see his imperfect teeth. Perfectly imperfect, I think to myself.
Lord. I have to stop.
“How about Go Fish?” I ask. One bag of Cheetos is officially finished. I open another.
He raises an eyebrow and runs a hand up and down his exposed arms, tugging at the Steelers shirt I hated initially and now pretty much just adore. “Are you cold?” I ask. “Do you want my blanket?”
He ignores me. “Go Fish is a game for five-year-olds,” he says. “You don’t know anything else?”
I sigh, thinking of all those times my mom implored me to do something she liked. Why was I so against it? It was like this unwritten rule in our house—Mom would screw up, so Dad and I would do our thing. We loved her, of course, but—well, sometimes it was just easier without her around. Weekends were more fun with just the two of us. Even the antiquing trips dwindled near the end, the one thing that had brought us all together, a little mix of both worlds.