“Is that all? I’m not trying to rush you out of here or anything.”
“That’s all.”
“Great.” She rang me up and handed me the bag.
A little fir tree sat by the register and as I was about to leave, an ornament caught my eye. A silver bird.
“She’s pretty, isn’t she?” the lady asked.
“Gorgeous.” My mom used to call me her songbird when I was little. I hadn’t remembered that in a while. I nodded at the lady behind the counter. “Thank you.”
“Merry Christmas.”
I reached the door just as the guys burst into the store with a gust of cold air and laughter.
“Amalie,” Sawyer said when he saw me. “Hey.”
Wes and Logan waved but continued into the store.
“Hi. How was breakfast?” I asked Sawyer.
“Too much food.”
My stomach let out a little gurgle that only I heard.
“Oh, speaking of.” He thrust a small Styrofoam box toward me. “You want my leftovers? I’m not sick or anything.”
“Thank you, I was just about to look for something to eat.”
“I saved you, then.”
“For sure.” He had no idea just how much.
I found a bench outside, next to a large bike made of iron that was bolted to the ground. I opened the small box to see what Sawyer had ordered for breakfast: eggs and bacon. I was glad nobody was around to see me eat it with my fingers.
My still-wet socks were beginning to turn my toes into icicles when the guys came out of the store.
“It’s not exactly a bike for riding,” Sawyer was saying.
“That’s why it’s a dare,” Wes responded as if this was obvious.
Sawyer circled the bicycle. The wheels were taller than he was. He gave it a shake to ensure it was securely bolted. “Fine.” He handed the couple bags that he was holding to Logan.
“Are you always the daree and never the darer?” I asked Sawyer.
“It seems that way,” he said.
“Oh, please,” Wes said. “Don’t fall for his ‘poor me’ act. He’s dished out just as much as he’s taken.”
Sawyer laughed, planted his foot on an iron spoke, and swung his leg up and over the seat. “There,” he said. “Done.”
“Not yet,” Wes said. “Say it.”
“You guys are jerks, you know that?” Sawyer said.
“Say it.”
He let out a huge sigh, then yelled, “Look at me, I’m a little boy on a big bike!”
A couple who had been walking by turned and scowled at him. I could feel my own face heating up even though Sawyer didn’t seem embarrassed at all.
The memory of my last time standing on the stage at school in Milan washed over me. My throat tightened, like it thought I was going to try to sing and it was once again refusing me. I clenched my teeth.
Sawyer jumped off the bike and plopped onto the bench next to me.
“I don’t know if I want to be seen with you,” I said through my tight throat.
“I understand.”
Wes pointed down the street. “I saw a candy store up there. Should we check it out?”
“Go ahead. I’ll catch up,” Sawyer said.
Logan handed Sawyer back his bags and the guys took off, kicking snow at each other the whole way down the street.
“You can say it,” Sawyer said.
“What?”
“We’re immature.”
“As long as you know.”
Sawyer studied my face for a moment. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” My expression must’ve shown my unwanted memory.
“What did you buy?” he asked, nodding toward the bag on my lap.
“Christmas.”
“You bought Christmas? That sucks for the rest of us.”
“It really does.” I opened the bag and held it out to him. “Smell.”
“Smell?”
“I dare you,” I said in a deep-voiced impersonation of Wes.
“Ouch.” Sawyer grabbed at his chest. “But you know me, I can’t turn one of those down.” He leaned over the bag and took a whiff. “Oh,” he said in surprise. “That is Christmas.”
I smiled. “What about you? What did you buy?”
“I bought a scarf for my mom and another gift for you-know-who.”
“Your crush?”
“Yep.”
I felt a prickle of curiosity. “Wait, do I know her?” I asked.
“She goes to our school,” he said.
“The one I haven’t been to since June?”
“Yes, that one.”
But I’d been going there for the three years before that. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“What’s her name?”
He let out a single laugh. “I’m not telling you that. I have to save some face in case she rejects me.”
Who might Sawyer like? I tried to picture some of the girls on the periphery of his friend group. Maybe Lani? I had once seen them talking in the cafeteria and she was beautiful.
“Oh.” Sawyer reached into his bag. “And I bought these.” He pulled out a pair of socks and handed them to me.
“You bought these for me?”
“Converse aren’t great in the snow.”
“You’re very observant. I’ll add that to the list of facts I’ve learned about you.” And thoughtful. He was definitely thoughtful.
“What about you?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“It hasn’t escaped my notice that the only person we learned facts about in the car yesterday was me. So you owe me a few facts about yourself.”
I smiled and shook my head. “You had the advantage of other people listing facts about you. It’s much harder to think of interesting facts about myself on the spot like this.”
“Okay, fair enough. How about you tell me when you think of some?”
“Deal.”
DECEMBER 23, 1:25 P.M.
“How was your nap?” Sawyer asked his sister as we pulled back onto the freeway.
“Better than nothing,” Heather answered. “The important thing is that the snow stayed away.”
“We’re not supposed to have any more snow now,” Sawyer said, checking his weather app. “We already beat it.”
“I hope so.”
DECEMBER 23, 2:30 P.M.
“Sawyer,” Heather said an hour later. “What do you call white stuff that falls down from the sky?”
I peered out the window. We’d made it through a red rocky canyon and into Utah when the flakes started floating down. Soft at first, harmless, and then whipping around the car like they wanted to carry us off the road.
“I have no service right now,” Sawyer replied with a straight face. “I’m not sure what that stuff is without the internet to tell me.”
“Very funny,” Heather said. “Add a couple more hours to the trip, people.”
“We’re never getting home,” Wes said. “We’re going to have to become one with nature and live amongst the rocks.”
“Can you all keep it down?” Logan said. “I’m trying to nap.”
This set off a series of screams from Heather and Wes.
“Did you call your parents at our last stop?” Sawyer asked me in the chaos.
“No. I’m surprising them.”
“They don’t know you’re coming home for Christmas?”
“Oh, is that what a surprise means? Never mind.”
He smiled. “And you haven’t seen each other in four months?”
“No.”
“Are you excited?”
I was both excited and terrified. “Beyond.”
“Are you surprising your friends too?”
“Nobody knows I’m coming.”
“What was the school in Italy like?”
“It was really cool. There were people from all over the world and we met in this really old building with hand-painted tile floors and mosaics on the walls.�
� I paused. “And it was … much harder than I thought it would be.”
“Wait, do you speak Italian?” Sawyer asked.
“I thought I did. But then I showed up there and learned very quickly that I don’t speak it well. Some of the classes were in English though, so that was nice.”
“How did you learn Italian?” Sawyer asked. “Our school doesn’t offer it as a language choice.”
“I wanted to be an opera singer. Most operas are in Italian.”
“Wanted to be?”
“Want to be,” I corrected hurriedly. “So when I was ten, my parents found a private tutor and I’ve been taking lessons ever since.”
“Wow. And you didn’t think that was an interesting fact you could share?”
“I told you I would share the facts as they came to me.”
“True, but if the fact that you speak a second language isn’t just sitting there waiting to be bragged about, I’m not sure that you know yourself at all.”
I sort of agreed with that statement—I wasn’t sure I did know myself, and maybe it had taken me going to Italy to realize it. “I told you, I don’t speak it that well. It’s not a bragging point.”
“It is. Put that one on the list of things you share in the first five minutes of talking about yourself.” He held up a clear plastic bag that he had filled in the candy store earlier, when we’d joined up with Logan and Wes. “Another fact, almost equally as interesting would be: What is your favorite candy?” He tilted the bag toward me.
“I take it yours is anything gummy.”
“Lucky guess.”
I pulled out a green-and-white gummy worm from the sea of gummy bodies. “I’m actually more of a salty person.”
“Interesting.”
“Is it?”
He smiled. “For sure.”
“Speaking of random interesting facts, can I ask you a question?”
“Anything,” he said in a faux serious voice.
“How does a junior win one of those back-of-the-yearbook awards? I thought those were reserved for seniors.”
“Is that even a real question? Have you seen my smile?” He put it on full display for me.
I laughed.
Logan, who must’ve been listening in on our conversation from where he was laid out on the seat in front of us, raised his hand. “He can thank me for that award.”
“It was a dare,” Sawyer said. “Wes dared Logan to put someone’s name on the ballot and apparently there is not a good vetting process because my name got through to the voting round. But my smile did the rest, Logan.”
“Of course it was a dare,” I said.
“See,” Heather said. “You’re learning.”
“I think Heather and Amalie are jealous of the dare stories we have,” Wes said thoughtfully. “You need some stories of your own. I have a dare for you, Heather.”
She glanced at him once, waiting for the challenge.
“I dare you to let me drive.”
Heather laughed long and loud. When she stopped, she said, “The difference between me and you guys is that I don’t need to prove myself in some weird way. I can just say no.”
Wes threw a piece of candy at her—something small and red. “You’re no fun.”
“If it hadn’t been for me, none of your parents would’ve let you go on this trip,” Heather protested. “So I disagree. I am the most fun.”
Sawyer whispered just loud enough for only me to hear. “I dare you to throw this gummy worm at the back of Wes’s head.”
Without a second thought, I grabbed the gummy worm and flung it at Wes. It hit him right in the temple, then landed on the center console.
“Sawyer, keep your candy to yourself.” Wes picked up the gummy worm and ate it.
“That was Amalie,” Sawyer said.
“Yeah right.”
Sawyer looked at me as if I should fess up and I just gave him a shrug and a smile. It was a stupid, easy dare, but I had a feeling that Sawyer didn’t think I would do it. But I had. And there was something very freeing about that.
DECEMBER 24, 12:01 A.M.
“It is the twenty-fourth of December, I declare only Christmas music to be sung or played from here on out.” Heather changed the station as the clock on the dash clicked over to 12:01 a.m. Mariah Carey’s voice rang out.
“Am I the only one awake?” Heather asked.
“Nope. I’m up,” I said.
I waited for Sawyer to chime in that he was awake as well, but he said nothing. I glanced over to find him leaning his head against the window, his eyes closed.
“Just us, huh?” Heather said.
“Apparently.”
“Have we all scared you yet?” Heather asked. “I know you weren’t planning on more than a day with a bunch of strangers.”
We passed a sign that said ten miles to Beaver, Utah. The last eight hours had only taken us another three hundred miles.
“I just spent a semester with a bunch of strangers, so this is nothing.”
“They weren’t strangers the entire semester though, right?” Heather asked.
“I got to know my roommate. She was nice.” I would actually miss her. “But with a language barrier and the competitive nature of the school, a lot of times I felt very much …”
“Alone?”
“Yes.” I swallowed hard.
Heather glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“Why was it so competitive?” she asked.
“Because we were literally competing for parts in showcases,” I explained. “Scouts would come from different colleges to hear us. Scholarships were on the line.” I twisted my hands in my lap, remembering. “I just needed to step away from it all, to see if it would help.”
“Help with what?”
“Everything.” But most of all my voice. My ability to perform.
“And how’s it going so far? Your step away from it all?”
I considered this question. “Well, it would help if we weren’t running away from snowstorms, but aside from that, it’s actually been surprisingly … fun.”
Heather laughed. “My brother has that effect on a lot of people. He’s good at getting people out of their comfort zones, but in a comforting way.”
“I can see that.” That was the perfect way to describe him.
“It’s because he’s been there.”
“Been where?” I asked.
“Inside of himself, wound tight, needing to let go of things he couldn’t control.”
“Is that where you think I am?” I asked.
“Isn’t it?”
She could tell this from the front seat of a car, overhearing snippets of conversation? Or was I the picture of uptight? The picture of fear?
A peppy rendition of “Jingle Bells” came on the radio, startling me. At that same moment, Heather gasped. The car seemed to hydroplane across the road, sliding sideways before gaining traction again. I caught my breath, my heart pounding. None of the boys had woken up.
“That’s it,” Heather said firmly. “We’re stopping for the night. It’s way too icy out here.”
DECEMBER 24, 12:48 A.M.
Heather found the first motel she could, and headed into the lobby to ask about vacancies. The rest of the car had woken when we’d pulled to a stop in the parking lot.
I sat nervously fidgeting for a while before I whispered, “Sawyer?”
He leaned closer. “Yeah?”
“I can’t pitch in for the motel. I have like seven dollars to my name. I can pay you back later though.”
“What? Oh. Don’t worry about it. Look at this place.” He gestured outside the window. “It’s probably fifty bucks a night, tops.”
“Thank you.”
I could tell he wanted to ask me questions about my money situation but then Heather opened the car door, waved a key card, and said, “One room, two beds, one couch. We will deal with this like adults.”
“But there�
�s only one adult here,” Wes said. “How are we supposed to do that?”
She chose to ignore him. “Everyone needs to schedule time for a shower because this car is getting ripe. We’ll leave as soon as the sun heats up the road a bit.”
She really was like a mini-mom.
We all piled out of the car and everyone gathered their luggage. I only had my backpack, which had next to nothing in it. Why had I packed all my toiletries in my check-on bag? I didn’t even have a change of clothes.
Heather directed us up a set of stairs and she unlocked a door at the top. The room was so cold I could see my breath.
“I’ll get the heat going,” Sawyer said, finding the wall unit.
Heather flung her bag on the closest bed and looked at me. “Are you okay sharing with me or do you want the couch?”
“I’m okay sharing.”
She went to the desk, grabbed a pen, and drew a grid on the top sheet of a pad of paper. “Fifteen-minute showers. Fifteen more minutes hanging out in the bathroom. Then your time is up. I get the first one so I can sleep after.”
It was nearly one a.m. Which meant the last shift would be from three to three thirty. That was the shift I would take since I wasn’t even paying for this.
Heather shut herself in the bathroom and Wes turned on the television. “We are not watching a weather channel,” he preemptively said. “We are watching something festive.”
“Festive?” Logan said. “What are you, ninety?”
Wes flipped through the channels until he came to a Claymation cartoon about a snowman.
“I’ll be right back,” Sawyer said.
“Are you checking to see if this place has a pool and a hot tub?” Wes asked.
“I’m going to see if they have a gift shop.” He pulled the door shut behind him.
This wasn’t exactly a five-star hotel. He’d be lucky to find a tube of toothpaste or a roll of Mentos.
I set my backpack on the bed and unzipped it, hoping to magically find the items that I knew I’d packed in my suitcase. My suitcase, still sitting on a plane. Or possibly already landed in Fresno.
The only thing in my backpack was a book I’d already read on the first leg of the trip, a pack of gum, a pair of headphones, and my passport. I made a mental note to always pack one change of clothes in my carry-on from now on.
Snow in Love Page 3
