“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 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.
Chapter Two
The 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 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.”
Chapter Three
JP 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.
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.
Chapter Four
When 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 h
ill. 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.
Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances Page 9