Текст книги "Let It Snow"

Автор книги: John Green

Соавторы: John Green,Lauren Myracle,Maureen Johnson
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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

Chapter Ten

“What’s up?” JP said to the Tinfoil Guy as I pulled off my soaked shoes. It’s sort of hard to describe Tinfoil Guy, because he looks like a somewhat grizzled but generally normal older guy except for the fact that he never, under any circumstances, leaves the house unless his entire body from neck to toes is wrapped in tinfoil. I peeled off my nearly frozen socks. My feet were a pale blue. JP offered me a napkin to wipe them off as Tinfoil Guy spoke.

“How are you three, on this night?” The Tinfoil Guy always talked like that, like life was a horror movie and he was the knife-wielding maniac. But he was generally agreed to be harmless. He’d asked all three of us the question, but he was looking only at me.

“Let’s see,” I answered. “Our car lost a wheel and I can’t feel my feet.”

“You looked very lonesome out there,” he said. “An epic hero against the elements.”

“Yeah. Okay. How are you?” I asked, to be polite. Why did you ask him a question! I chastised myself. Stupid Southern manners.

“I’m enjoying a most filling cup of noodles,” he said. “I do love a good cup. And then I believe I’ll go for another walk.”

“You don’t get cold, with the foil?” I couldn’t stop asking questions!

“What foil?” he asked.

“Uh,” I said, “right.” The Duke brought me the socks. I put on one pair, and then another, and then a third. I saved the fourth in case I needed dry ones later. I could barely squeeze into my Pumas, but nonetheless, I felt like a new man as I stood up to leave.

“Always a pleasure,” Tinfoil Guy said to me.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Merry Christmas.”

“May the pigs of fate fly you safely home,” he responded. Right. I felt awful for the lady behind the counter, being stuck with him. As I was on my way out, the woman behind the counter said to me, “Duke?”

I turned. “Yes?”

“I couldn’t help but overhear,” she said. “About your car.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sucks.”

“Listen,” she said. “We can tow it. We got a truck.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah, here, give me something I can write down the number on.” I fished around in my coat pocket and found a receipt. She wrote down her number and name, Rachel, in loop-heavy script. “Wow, thanks, Rachel.”

“Yeah. A hundred fifty bucks plus five bucks a mile, being a holiday and the weather and everything.”

I grimaced but nodded. An expensive tow was a hell of a lot better than no tow at all.

We were barely back out on the road—me walking with a newfound awareness of, and appreciation for, my toes—when JP sidled up to me and said, “Honestly, the fact that Tinfoil Guy is, like, forty and still alive gives me hope that I can have a reasonably successful adulthood.”

“Yeah.” The Duke was walking ahead of us, munching on Cheetos. “Dude,” JP said. “Are you looking at the Duke’s butt?”

“What? No.” And only in telling the lie did I realize that actually I had been looking at her back, although not specifically her butt.

The Duke turned around. “What are you talking about?”

“Your butt!” JP shouted into the wind.

She laughed. “I know it’s what you dream about when you’re alone at night, JP.”

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 running start and then jumped into the snow, landing sprawled out on his side, the Twister wrapped in his arms. He stood up carefully next to the imprint of his body and said, “Outline of body at homicide investigation!”

“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 connect to their hips. Anyway, the Duke was walking, and there was a certain something to it, and I was kind of disgusted with myself for thinking about that certain something. I mean, my girl cousins probably walked with the same certain something, but the point is that sometimes you notice it and sometimes you don’t. When Brittany the cheerleader walks, you notice it. When the Duke walks, you don’t. Usually.

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 funny you should mention that, because I have a really hot cousin, actually.”

“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.

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 annoying. She was just laughing and responding by actually talking about hash browns. “They’re going to be so warm,” she said. “So crispy and golden and delicious. I want four large orders. Also some raisin toast. God, I love that raisin toast. Mmm, it’s going to be carbtastic.” I could see the interstate overpass in the distance, the snow piled high on the sides of the bridge. The Waffle House was still probably a half mile away, but it was a straight shot now. The black letters in their yellow boxes promising cheesy waffles, and Keun’s impish smile, and the kind of girls who make unthinking easier.

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 running, his legs a blur of energy. He was making a break for the Waffle House. The twins’ Mustang roared past the Duke and me. Little Tommy Reston leaned out the rolled-down window holding a game of Twister and announced, “We gonna kill you later.”

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 running very fast, but he didn’t have a chance in hell of beating a brilliantly driven Ford Mustang to the WH.

“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 running or to get out of the road. The horn honked as I saw the Mustang’s brake lights flash on, but JP just kept running. And now I realized JP’s insane strategy: he’d calculated that the road was not wide enough with the drifts for the Mustang to pass him on either side, and he believed that the twins would not run him over. This seemed to me a very generous assessment of the twins’ benevolence, but for the moment, at least, it was working. The Mustang honked furiously but impotently as JP ran in front of it.

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 running. But the Mustang had stopped; instead, Timmy and Tommy Reston were chasing him on foot.

The Duke and I were running toward the college guys, and finally one of them looked up and said, “Hey, are you—” but he didn’t even finish the sentence. We just ran past them, and the Duke shouted to me, “Take out the mat! Take out the mat!” I opened the Twister box and threw it in the middle of the highway. I held the spinner between clenched teeth and the mat in my hands, and now, finally, I knew what she wanted us to do. Maybe the twins were faster. But with the Duke’s brilliant idea, I realized we might have a chance.

When we reached the beginning of the downhill slope of the exit ramp, I flipped out the Twister mat in a single motion. She jumped down onto it butt first, and I followed suit, placing the spinner beneath me. And she shouted, “You’re gonna have to dig your right hand into the snow to keep us turning right,” and I said, “Okay, okay.” We started to slide down, gaining speed, and then as the ramp curved, I dug my hand in, and we turned, still accelerating. I could see JP now on Timmy Reston’s back, trying in vain to slow his gargantuan body as it marched toward the Waffle House.

“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.

The explosion was so loud that Tommy and Timmy and JP all stopped dead in their tracks for at least five seconds. When they began running again, Tommy hit a patch of ice and fell on his face. When he saw his brother fall, the gargantuan Timmy suddenly changed tacks: rather than chasing JP, he hurdled through the roadside snowdrift and started toward the Waffle House itself. JP, a few steps forward, immediately made the same move so that they were headed toward the same door at slightly different angles. The Duke and I were close now—close enough to the bottom of the ramp to feel the deceleration, and close enough to the twins to hear them shouting at JP and at each other. I could see into the half-fogged windows of the Waffle House. Cheerleaders in green warm-up suits. Ponytails.

But as we stood up and I gathered the Twister mat, I knew we were not close enough. Timmy had the inside track to the front door as he pumped his arms, the Twister box looking comically small in his meaty hand. JP was approaching from a slightly different angle, running his guts out through shin-deep powder. The Duke and I were running as fast as we could, but we were well behind. I held out hope for JP, though, until Timmy got a few strides from the door and I realized that he was plainly going to be first to the door. My stomach sank. JP had come so close. His immigrant parents had sacrificed so much. The Duke would be denied her hash browns, and I my cheesy waffles.

And then, as Timmy started to extend his hand for the door, JP pounced. He leaped into the air, his body stretched out like a receiver reaching for an overthrown pass, and he got so much air that it seemed as if he’d jumped from a trampoline. His shoulder nailed Timmy Reston in the chest, and together they fell into a row of snow-draped shrubs next to the door. JP came up first, dashed for the door, pulled it open, and locked it behind him. The Duke and I were within spitting distance now, close enough to hear the shout of jubilation through the glass. JP raised his hands above his head, fists clenched, and the joyful scream continued for what seemed like several minutes.

As JP stared out into the darkness toward us with his hands raised, I watched as Keun—wearing a black “WH” visor, a white-and-yellow-striped shirt, and a brown apron—mobbed JP from behind. Keun grabbed him by the waist and lifted him up, and JP just kept his arms raised. The cheerleaders, crowded together at a bank of booths, looked on. I glanced down at the Duke, who was looking not at the scene but at me, and I laughed, and she laughed.

Tommy and Timmy banged on the windows for a while, but Keun just raised his hands as if to say, What can I do? and eventually they walked back toward the Mustang. As we approached the Waffle House, we walked past them, and Timmy lunged menacingly at me, but that was it. When I turned to watch them go, I saw the three college guys trying to scoot down the exit ramp.

The Duke and I reached the door finally, and I pulled on it; Keun unlocked it, saying, “Technically, I shouldn’t let you in, since only JP beat the Restons. But you have the Twister.” We pushed past him, and the warm air rushed onto my face. I hadn’t even noticed until then how numb my body had gotten, but it tingled as it warmed, coming back to life. I threw the soaking-wet Twister mat and spinner down onto the tiled floor, and shouted, “The Twister has arrived!”

Keun shouted, “Hooray!” but the news barely even warranted a glance from the gaggle of green across the dining room.

I grabbed Keun and hugged him with one arm and with the other mussed up the hair sticking through his visor. “I need some cheesy waffles in the worst way,” I told him. The Duke asked for hash browns and then collapsed into a booth next to the jukebox. JP and I sidled up to the breakfast counter and talked to Keun while he cooked.

“I can’t help but notice that the cheerleaders are not, you know, hanging all over you.”

“Yeah,” he said, his back to us as he worked the waffle irons. “Yeah. I’m hoping Twister will change that. They did try to flirt with Mr. I-Have-a-Ponytail-but-I’m-Still-Macho,” Keun said, gesturing with his head toward a guy passed out at a booth, “but apparently he is obsessed with his girlfriend.”

“Yeah, the Twister seems to be working really well,” I said. The wet mat lay crumpled on the floor, utterly ignored by the cheerleaders.

JP leaned over me to look at the cheerleaders and then shook his head. “It only occurs to me now that I can awkwardly glance at cheerleaders while eating pretty much every day during lunch.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I mean, they obviously don’t want to talk.”

“Indeed,” I said. They were crowded around three booths in a kind of oblong huddle. They were talking very fast, and very intently, with one another. I could hear some of the words, but they made no sense to me—herkies and kewpies and extensions. They were talking about a cheerleading competition. There are discussion topics I find less interesting than cheerleading competitions. But not many.

“Hey, the sleepy guy awakes,” JP said.

I looked over at the booth and saw a guy with dark eyes and a ponytail squinting at me. I recognized him after a second. “That guy goes to Gracetown,” I said.

“Yeah,” Keun answered. “Jeb.”

“Right,” I said. Jeb was a junior. Didn’t know him well, but I’d seen him around. He apparently recognized me, too, because he rose from the booth and walked up to me.

“Tobin?” he said.

I nodded and shook his hand.

“Do you know Addie?” he asked.

I looked at him blankly.

“A junior? Beautiful?” he said.

I scrunched up my eyes. “Um, no?”

“Long blonde hair, kind of dramatic?” he said, sounding both desperate and also like he couldn’t get his head around the fact that I wouldn’t know this girl he was rambling on about.

“Um, sorry, dude. Not ringing any bells.”

His eyes closed. I saw his whole body deflate.

“We started dating on Christmas Eve,” he said, staring into the middle distance.

“Yesterday?” I said, thinking, You’ve been dating for a day and you’re this worked up? One more reason to avoid the happy middle.

“Not yesterday,” Jeb says wearily. “A year from yesterday.”

I turned to Keun. “Dude,” I said. “This guy is in bad shape.”

Keun nodded while scattering the Duke’s hash browns on the grill. “I’m gonna give him a ride into town in the morning,” Keun said. “Although what’s the rule, Jeb?”

Jeb said it like Keun had told him the rule a thousand times before. “We don’t leave until the last cheerleader leaves.”

“That’s right, buddy. Maybe you should go back to bed.”

“Just,” Jeb said, “just if you happen to see her or something, will you just tell her I got, um, delayed?”

“I guess,” I said. I must not have been convincing enough, because he turned around and made eye contact with the Duke.

“Tell her I’m coming,” he said, and what’s weird was that she got it. Or seemed to. Or anyway, she nodded in a way that said, Yeah, I’ll tell her, if for some reason I see this girl I don’t know out in a snowdrift at four A.M. And as she smiled sympathetically to him, again I had the untakebackable thought.

Her smile seemed to please him. He slouched back to his booth.

I talked to Keun until he finished my waffle and delivered it to me steaming hot. “God, that looks good, Keun,” I said, but he’d already turned around to plate the Duke’s hash browns. He was picking the plate up when Billy Talos appeared, grabbed the plate, delivered it to the Duke, and sat down next to her.

I glanced back at them a couple times, leaning across the table and talking intently to each other. I wanted to cut in and let her know that he’d been flirting with one of several Madisons as we’d been trudging through the snow, but I figured it was none of my business.

“I’m going to talk to one of them,” I announced to JP and Keun.

JP was incredulous. “One of who? The cheerleaders?”

I nodded.

“Dude,” Keun said. “I’ve been trying all night. They’re packed too tightly to talk to just one of them. And when you try to talk to all of them, they just kind of ignore you.”

But I had to talk to one of them, or at least appear to. “It’s like lions hunting gazelles,” I said as we watched the gaggle intently. “You just find a straggler, and”—a tiny blonde girl turned away from the pack—“pounce,” I said, as I jumped up off the stool.

I walked up to her with purpose. “I’m Tobin,” I said, ex-tending my hand.

“Amber,” she said.

“Beautiful name,” I said.

She nodded, and her eyes darted around. She wanted a way out, but I couldn’t give her one yet. I fumbled for a question. “Um, any word on the status of your train?” I asked.

“Our train might not even leave tomorrow,” she informed me.

“Yeah, that’s too bad,” I said, smiling. I glanced over my shoulder toward Billy and the Duke, only she was gone. The hash browns still steamed off the plate; she’d poured the ketchup on a side plate to dip them into like she always did, but then left. I left Amber and walked over to Billy.

“She went outside,” he said simply.

Who in their right mind would go outside when the hash browns and the warmth and the fourteen cheerleaders were all inside?

I grabbed my hat from the counter and pulled it down low over my ears, and then I put my gloves back on and ventured back into the wind. The Duke was sitting on the curb of the parking lot, just barely underneath the awning, half protected from the still-falling snow.

I sat down next to her. “You missed the postnasal drip?”

She sniffled and didn’t look up at me. “Just go back inside,” she said. “It’s not a big deal.”

“What’s not a big deal?”

“Nothing’s not a big deal. Just go back inside.”

“‘Nothing’s Not a Big Deal’ would be a good name for a band,” I told her. I wanted her to look up at me so I could assess the situation, and finally she did, and her nose was red, and I thought she was cold, but then I thought maybe she had been crying, which was weird, because the Duke doesn’t cry.

“I just . . . I just wish you wouldn’t do it in front of me. I mean, what is interesting about her? Tell me what is interesting about her, seriously. Or any of them.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You were talking to Billy Talos.”

She looked up at me again and this time held my gaze as she spoke. “I was telling Billy that I didn’t think I could actually go to the stupid formal with him, because I just can’t bring myself to stop liking someone else.”

The idea crept up on me slowly. I turned toward her, and she said, “I realize that they giggle and I actually laugh, that they show their cleavage and I have none to show, but just so you know, I am also a girl.”