Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances Read online

  I felt the Duke looking at me, and I looked back at her, and her eyes were big and round and scared and maybe a little pissed. And only now, in the drawn-out moment of stillness, did I think through to the worst thing that could happen: this. Provided I survived, my parents would kill me for totaling the car. I would be grounded for years—possibly decades. I would work hundreds of hours over the summer to pay for car repairs.

  And then the inexorable thing happened. We began to fishtail back toward the house. I pumped the brake. The Duke pulled up the parking break, but Carla just slalomed backward, only occasionally responding to my frantic spinning of the steering wheel.

  I felt a slight bump and figured we’d hopped a curb; we were retreating down the hill now through the yards of our neighbors as we plowed through snow as high as the wheel wells. We rolled backward past houses, so close that I could see the ornaments on the Christmas trees through living-room windows. Carla miraculously dodged a pickup truck parked in a driveway, and as I watched for approaching mailboxes and cars and houses in the rearview, I happened to glance back at JP. He was smiling. The worst thing that could happen had finally happened. And there was a kind of relief in it, maybe. Anyway, something about his smile made me smile.

  I glanced over at the Duke, and then threw my hands off the wheel. She shook her head as if she were angry, but she cracked up, too. To demonstrate the extent to which I did not control Carla, I then grabbed the steering wheel and began dramatically turning it back and forth. She laughed some more and said, “We’re so screwed.”

  And then all at once the brakes started to work, and I could feel myself pressed against the seat, and then finally, as the road leveled out, we slowed to a stop. JP was talking too loud, saying, “Holy crap, I cannot believe we’re not dead. We are so not dead!”

  I looked around to try to get my bearings. About five feet outside the passenger’s-side door was the house of these old retirees, Mr. and Mrs. Olney. A light was on, and after a second of looking I could see Mrs. Olney, wearing a white nightgown, her face almost pressed against the glass, staring at us, her mouth agape. The Duke looked over at her and saluted. I put Carla into drive and cautiously made my way out of the Olneys’ yard and back onto what I hoped was the street. I put the car into park and took my shaking hands off the wheel.

  “Okay,” JP said, trying to calm himself. “Okay. Okay. Okay.” He took a breath, and then said, “That was awesome! Best roller coaster ever!”

  “I’m trying not to pee myself,” I said. I was ready to go home—back to James Bond movies—stay up half the night, eat popcorn, sleep a few hours, spend Christmas with the Duke and her parents. I’d lived without the companionship of Pennsylvanian cheerleaders for seventeen and a half years. I could manage another day without them.

  JP kept talking. “The whole time I was just thinking, Man, I am going to die in a baby-blue ski suit. My mom is going to have to identify my body, and she’s going to spend the rest of her life thinking that, in his private time, her son liked to dress up like a hypothermic porn star from the 1970s.”

  “I think I can manage a night without hash browns,” the Duke said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Yeah.” JP protested loudly that he wanted to go on the roller coaster again, but I’d had enough. I called Keun, my finger shaking as I hit his speed-dial number.

  “Listen, man, we can’t even get out of Grove Park. Too much snow.”

  “Dude,” said Keun. “Try harder. Mitchell’s friends haven’t even left yet, I don’t think. And Billy called a couple of college guys he knows and told them to bring a keg of beer, because the only way these lovely ladies would ever stoop to talking to Billy is if they were intoxic— Hey! Sorry, Billy just hit me with his paper hat. I’m the acting assistant manager, Billy! And I will report your behav— Hey! Anyway, please come. I don’t want to be stuck here with Billy and a bunch of sloppy drunk people. My restaurant will get trashed, and I’ll get fired, and just . . . please.”

  In the back, JP chanted, “Roller coaster! Roller coaster! Roller coaster!” I just flipped the phone shut and turned to the Duke. I was about to lobby for going home when my phone rang again. My mom.

  “Couldn’t get a car. We’re back at the hotel,” she said. “Only eight minutes to Christmas, and I was going to wait, but your father is tired and wants to go to bed, so we’ll just say it now.” My father leaned into the phone, and I could hear his lackluster “Merry Christmas” an octave beneath Mom’s boisterous one.

  “Merry Christmas,” I said. “Call if anything comes up; we’ve still got two more Bond movies to watch.” Just before Mom hung up, my call waiting beeped. Keun. I put him on speaker.

  “Tell me you’re out of Grove Park.”

  “Dude, you just called. We’re still at the base of the hill,” I said. “I think we’re headed home, man.”

  “Get. Here. Now. I just found out who Mitchell invited: Timmy and Tommy Reston. They’re on their way. You can still beat them. I know you can! You must! My Cheertastic Christmas Miracle will not be ruined by the Reston twins!” He hung up then. Keun had a certain flair for the dramatic, but I could see his point. The Reston Twins could ruin almost anything. Timmy and Tommy Reston were identical twins who bore absolutely no resemblance to each other. Timmy weighed three hundred pounds, but he wasn’t fat. He was just strong, and incredibly fast, and thus the best football player on our football team. Tommy, on the other hand, could fit into one leg of Timmy’s jeans, but what he lacked in size, he more than made up for in crazed aggression. When we were in middle school, Timmy and Tommy would get into these epic fights with each other on the basketball court. I don’t think either of them had any of their original teeth.

  The Duke turned to me. “Okay, it’s not just about us anymore, or about cheerleaders. This is about protecting Keun from the Reston twins.”

  “If they get snowed in at the Waffle House for a few days, and run low on food, you know what’s gonna happen,” JP said.

  The Duke picked up the joke. She was good at that. “They’ll have to turn to cannibalism. And Keun will be the first to go.”

  I just shook my head. “But the car,” I said.

  “Think of the cheerleaders,” JP implored. But I wasn’t thinking of the cheerleaders when I nodded. I was thinking of cresting the hill, of the plowed streets that could take us anywhere.

  Chapter Five

  The Duke, as usual, had a plan. We were still parked in the middle of the road when she shared it with us. “So the problem was that we ran out of speed on the way up the hill. Why? Because we didn’t carry enough speed to the hill. So back up as far as you can in a straight line, and then gun it. We’ll hit the hill going much faster, and the momentum will take us to the top.”

  It did not strike me as a particularly compelling plan, but I couldn’t think of a better one, so I drove backward as far as I could, the hill directly in front of us, barely visible through the fast-falling snow in the headlights. I didn’t stop until I was in somebody’s front yard, a towering oak tree a few feet behind Carla’s back bumper. I spun the tires a little to get down to the hard-packed snow.

  “Seat belts buckled?” I asked.

  “Yes,” they answered together.

  “Air bags all on?”

  “Affirmative,” the Duke said. I glanced over at her. She smiled and raised her eyebrows. I nodded to her.

  “I need a countdown, people.”

  “Five,” they said in unison. “Four. Three.” I put the gearshift in neutral and began revving the engine. “Two. One.” I slammed Carla into drive and we shot off, accelerating in fits and starts between moments of hydroplaning on the snow pack. We hit the hill at forty miles per hour, twenty-five over the Grove Park speed limit. I stood up out of the seat, pressed against the belt, all my weight on the accelerator, but the tires were spinning and we began to slow, so I tapered off.

  “Come on!” the Duke said.

  “You can do this, Carla,” JP mumbled quietly from the back,
and she continued forward, slowing incrementally with each passing moment.

  “Carla, get your fat gas-guzzling ass to the top of the hill!” I shouted, hitting the steering wheel.

  “Don’t make fun of her,” the Duke said. “She needs gentle encouragement. Carla, baby, we love you. You are such a good car. And we believe in you. We believe in you one hundred percent.”

  JP began to panic. “We’re not gonna make it.”

  The Duke answered soothingly, “Don’t listen to him, Carla. You’re gonna do this.” I could see the crest of the hill again, and the newly plowed blacktop of the highway. And Carla was like, I think I can, I think I can, and the Duke just kept petting the dashboard, saying, “I love you, Carla. You know that, don’t you? I wake up every morning and the first thing I think is that I love Tobin’s mom’s car. I know that’s weird, baby, but I do. I love you. And I know you can do this.”

  I kept tapping the accelerator, and the wheels kept spinning. Down to eight miles per hour. We were approaching a snowdrift three feet tall where the snowplow had dumped all the snow, blocking our path. We were so close. The speedometer shuttering around five miles per hour.

  “Oh God, it’s a long way down,” JP said, his voice cracking. I glanced in the rearview. It sure was.

  We were still inching forward, but only just. The hill was starting to level out, but we were going to come up just short. I kept tapping the accelerator to no avail. “Carla,” the Duke said, “it’s time to tell you the truth. I’m in love with you. I want to be with you, Carla. I’ve never felt this way about a c—”

  The tires caught on the snow as I had the accelerator near the floor and we blew forward through the snowdrift, the snow as high as the base of the windshield, but we barreled past, half over the snowdrift and half through it. Carla bottomed out on the other side of the drift, and then I slammed on the brakes as we approached the stop sign. Carla’s back end fishtailed, and all of a sudden instead of being at the stop sign we were on the highway, facing in the proper direction. I let off the brake and started off down the highway.

  “YESSSSSS!” shouted JP from the back. He leaned forward and rubbed the Duke’s mess of curly hair. “WE JUST DID SUCH AN AWESOME JOB OF NOT DYING!”

  “You sure know how to talk to a car,” I told the Duke. I could feel my blood pressure in my entire body. She looked outstandingly calm as she finger-combed her hair back into place.

  “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” she answered.

  It was a blissful first five miles—the highway winds up and down some mountains, which makes for treacherous driving, but we were the only car on the road, and while the road was wet, the salt kept it from being icy. Plus, I was driving a cautious twenty miles an hour, which made the curves seem less terrifying. We were all quiet for a long time—thinking about the hill-topping, I guess—although periodically JP would exhale loudly through his mouth and say, “I can’t believe how not dead we are,” or some variant on that theme. The snow was too thick and the road too wet for music, so we just sat in silence.

  And then after a while the Duke said, “What is it with you and cheerleaders anyway?” She was saying this to me; I knew because for a few months I’d gone out with a girl named Brittany, who happened to be a cheerleader. Our cheerleading team was actually quite good; they were, on average, far better athletes than the football team they rooted for. They were also notorious for leaving a trail of broken hearts—Stuart Weintraub, the guy Keun had seen in the Waffle House, had been absolutely annihilated by this cheerleader Chloe.

  “Um, could it be how hot they are?” JP suggested.

  “No,” I said, trying to be serious. “It was a coincidence. I didn’t like her because she was a cheerleader. I mean, she’s nice, right?”

  The Duke scoffed. “Yeah, in that Joseph-Stalin-I-will-crush-my-enemies kind of way.”

  JP said to the Duke, “Brittany was cool. She just didn’t like you, because she didn’t get it.”

  “Didn’t get what?” asked the Duke.

  “You know, that you’re not, like, a threat. Like, most girls, if they have a boyfriend, they don’t want their boyfriend hanging out all the time with another girl. And Brittany didn’t get that you, like, aren’t really a girl.”

  “If by that you mean that I dislike celebrity magazines, prefer food to anorexia, refuse to watch TV shows about models, and hate the color pink, then yes. I am proud to be not really a girl.”

  It was true that Brittany didn’t like the Duke, but she also didn’t like JP. She didn’t even like me that much, really. The more we hung out, the more Brittany would get annoyed with my sense of humor and my table manners and everything, which was why we broke up. The truth is that it never mattered that much to me. I was bummed when she dumped me, but it wasn’t a Weintraub-style catastrophe. I didn’t ever love Brittany, I guess. That was the difference. She was cute and smart and not uninteresting to talk to, but we never actually did talk about much. I never felt like everything was at stake with her, because I always knew how it would end. She never seemed worth the risk.

  God, I hated talking about Brittany, but the Duke brought her up all the time, probably just for the unadulterated pleasure of annoying me. Or else because she never had any drama of her own to discuss. Lots of guys liked the Duke, but she never seemed interested in anybody. She didn’t want to talk your ear off about some guy and how cute he was, and how he sometimes paid her attention and sometimes didn’t and all that crap. I liked that about her. The Duke was just normal: she liked to joke around and talk about movies, and she didn’t mind yelling or getting yelled at. She was much more like a person than other girls were.

  “I don’t have a thing for cheerleaders,” I repeated.

  “But,” JP said, “we both have a thing for hot girls who love Twister. That’s not about loving cheerleaders, Duke: that’s about loving freedom and hope and the indomitable American spirit.”

  “Yeah, well, call me unpatriotic, but I don’t see the cheerleader thing. Cheer isn’t sexy. Dark is sexy. Ambivalent is sexy. Deeper-than-it-looks-at-first-glance is sexy.”

  “Right,” JP said. “That’s why you’re going out with Billy Talos. Nothing says dark and brooding like a Waffle House waiter.”

  I glanced in the rearview mirror to see if JP was kidding, but he didn’t seem to be. She reached around and punched him on the knee and said, “It’s just a job.”

  “Wait, you’re going out with Billy Talos?” I asked. I was surprised mostly because it didn’t seem like the Duke would ever go out with anybody, but also because Billy Talos was a beer-and-football kind of guy, whereas the Duke was more of a Shirley-Temple-and-live-theater kind of girl.

  The Duke didn’t say anything for a second. “No. He just asked me to Winter Formal.”

  I didn’t say anything. It seemed weird the Duke would tell JP about something but not me. JP said, “No offense, but Billy Talos is a little bit greasy, isn’t he? I feel like if you wrung out his hair every day or two, you could potentially end America’s dependence on foreign oil.”

  “No offense taken,” the Duke said, laughing. Clearly she wasn’t that keen on him. But still, I couldn’t picture the Duke with Billy Talos—oily hair aside, he just didn’t seem very, like, funny or interesting. But whatever. The Duke and JP moved on to an impassioned discussion of the Waffle House’s menu, and whether its raisin toast was superior to its regular toast. It was fun background noise for the drive. The snowflakes hit the windshield and instantly melted. The wipers shoved them aside. The high-beam headlights lit up the snow and the wet road, and I could see just enough of the asphalt to know where my lane was, and where I was going.

  I could have driven down that road for a long time before I got tired, but it was almost time to turn onto Sunrise Avenue and head through downtown toward the interstate and Waffle House. It was 12:26. In the morning.

  “Hey,” I said, interrupting them.

  “What?” asked the Duke.

  I sto
le a glance away from the road to talk directly to her. “Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas,” she said back. “Merry Christmas, JP.”

  “Merry Christmas, asshats.”

  Chapter Six

  The banks of snow on either side of Sunrise Avenue were huge, as tall as the car, and I felt like we were driving at the bottom of an endless snowboard half-pipe. JP and the Duke were being quiet, all of us concentrating on the road. We had a couple miles to go before we got downtown, and then the Waffle House was a mile east, just off the interstate. Our silence was interrupted by a nineties rap song playing on JP’s phone. “Keun,” he said. He turned the speaker on.

  “WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU GUYS?”

  The Duke leaned around so she could be heard. “Keun, look out the window and tell me what you see.”

  “I’ll tell you what I don’t see! I don’t see you and JP and Tobin in the parking lot of the Waffle House! No word on Mitchell’s college friends, but Billy just heard from the twins: they’re about to turn onto Sunrise.”

  “Then we’re fine, because we’re already on Sunrise,” I said.

  “HURRY. The cheerleaders want their Twister! Wait, hold on . . . They’re practicing a pyramid, and they need me to spot them. Spot them. You know what that means? If they fall, they fall into my arms. So I gotta go.” I heard the click of Keun hanging up.

  “Floor it,” JP said. I laughed and kept my speed steady. We just needed to maintain our lead.

  As far as skiing down a road in an SUV goes, Sunrise Avenue isn’t bad, because unlike most streets in Gracetown, it’s pretty straight. With the tire tracks to guide me, my speed crept up to twenty-five. I figured we’d be downtown in two minutes, and eating Keun’s special off-menu cheesy waffles in ten. I thought about those waffles topped with melted Kraft singles, about how they tasted both savory and sweet, a taste so profound and complex that it can’t even be compared to other tastes, only to emotions. Cheesy waffles, I was thinking, taste like love without the fear of love’s dissolution, and as we came to the 90-degree curve Sunrise Avenue takes before heading straight downtown, I could almost taste them.