“What the hell did you do?” I asked as we took off running toward the Duke.
“I used all my remaining floss to tie a trip line between the sides of the bridge. I raised it right after you carried the Duke past,” he said.
“That’s rather awesome,” I said.
“My gums are already disappointed with me,” he mumbled in response. We kept jogging, but I couldn’t hear the twins anymore, and when I glanced over my shoulder, I could see only the still-driving snow.
By the time we caught up with the Duke, the brick buildings of downtown surrounded us, and we finally made our way off Sunrise onto the recently plowed Main Street. We were still jogging, although I could barely feel my feet anymore from the cold and the exhaustion. I couldn’t hear the twins, but I was still afraid of them. Just one mile to go. We could be there in twenty minutes if we jogged.
The Duke said, “Call Keun, find out if those college guys have already beaten us.”
Still keeping pace, I reached into my jeans, pulled out my phone, and called Keun’s cell. Someone—not Keun—answered on the first ring.
“Is Keun there?”
“This Tobin?” I recognized the voice now. Billy Talos.
“Yeah,” I said. “Hey, Billy.”
“Hey, do you got Angie with you?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said.
“Y’all close?”
I hedged my bets, not knowing if he would use the information to help his friends. “Reasonably,” I said.
“Okay, here’s Keun,” he said. Keun’s boisterous voice came on the line then. “What’s up! Where are you! Dude, I think Billy is in love. Like, right now, he is sitting down next to a Madison. One of the Madisons. There are several of them. The world is full of Magical Madisons!”
I glanced over at the Duke to see if she had heard anything through the phone, but she was just looking straight ahead, still jogging. I thought Billy had asked about the Duke because he wanted to see her, not because he didn’t want her to catch him trying to hook up with someone else. Lame.
“TOBIN!” Keun shouted into my ear.
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“Uh, you called me,” he pointed out.
“Right, yeah. We’re close. We’re at the corner of Main and Third. We should be there in half an hour.”
“Excellent, I think you’ll still get here first. The college guys are stuck on the side of the road somewhere, apparently.”
“Great. Okay, I’ll call when we’re close.”
“Awesome. Oh, hey, you guys have Twister, right?”
I looked over at JP, and then to the Duke. I put a finger over the mic and said, “Did we bring the Twister?”
JP stopped running. The Duke followed suit. JP said, “Crap, we forgot it in Carla.”
I uncovered the mic and said, “Keun, I’m sorry, man, but we left Twister in the car.”
“Not good,” he said with a hint of menace in his voice.
“I know, it sucks. Sorry.”
“I’ll call you back,” he said, and hung up the phone.
We walked for another minute before Keun called me back. “Listen,” he said, “we took a vote, and unfortunately, you’re gonna need to go back and get the Twister. The majority agreed that no one will be allowed in without Twister.”
“What? Who took the vote?”
“Billy, Mitchell, and myself.”
“Well, come on, Keun. Lobby them or something! Carla is a twenty-minute walk into the wind and plus the Reston twins are back there somewhere. Get one of them to change their votes!”
“Unfortunately, the vote was three to zero.”
“What? Keun? You voted against us?”
“I don’t see it as a vote against you,” he explained. “I see it as a vote in favor of Twister.”
“Surely you’re kidding,” I said. The Duke and JP couldn’t hear Keun’s end of the conversation, but they were now looking on nervously.
“I don’t kid about Twister,” Keun said. “You can still get here first! Just hurry!”
I flipped the phone shut and pulled my hat down over my face. “Keun says he won’t let us in without Twister,” I mumbled.
I stood under the awning of a café and tried to kick the snow off my frozen Pumas. JP was pacing back and forth on the street, looking generally agitated. No one said anything for a while. I kept looking up the street for the Reston twins, but they didn’t appear.
“We’re going to the Waffle House,” JP said.
“Yeah, right,” I answered.
“We’re going,” he said. “We’re gonna take a different route back so we don’t run into the Reston twins, and we’re gonna get Twister, and we’re gonna go to the Waffle House. It’ll only take an hour if we hurry.”
I turned to the Duke, who was standing beside me under the awning. She would tell JP. She would tell him that we just needed to give up and call 911 and see if someone somewhere could pick us up. “I want hash browns,” the Duke said from behind me. “I want them scattered and smothered and covered. I want them chunked, topped, and diced.”
“What you want is Billy Talos,” I said.
She elbowed me in the side. “I said to shut up about that, Jesus. And I don’t. I want hash browns. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. I am hungry, and I am the kind of hungry that only hash browns will fix, and so we are going back and we are getting Twister.” She just marched off, and JP followed her. I stood under the awning for a moment, but finally I decided that being in a bad mood with your friends beats being in a bad mood without them.
When I caught up to them, all of our hoods were scrunched shut against the oncoming wind as we walked up a street parallel to Sunrise. We had to shout to be heard, and the Duke said, “I’m glad you’re here,” and I shouted back, “Thanks,” and she shouted, “Honestly, hash browns mean nothing without you.”
I laughed and pointed out that “Hash Browns Mean Nothing Without You” was a pretty good name for a band.
“Or a song,” the Duke said, and then she started singing all glam rock, a glove up to her face holding an imaginary mic as she rocked out an a cappella power ballad. “Oh, I deep fried for you / But now I weep ’n’ cry for you / Oh, babe, this meal was made for two / And these hash browns mean nothing, oh these hash browns mean nothing, yeah these HASH BROWNS MEAN NOTHIN’ without you.”
Chapter Nine
The Duke and JP made great time up the street—they weren’t running, but they were sure walking fast. My feet felt frozen, and I was tired from carrying the Duke, so I lagged behind a little, and the onrushing wind meant that I could hear their conversation, but they couldn’t hear anything I said.
The Duke was saying (again) that cheerleading wasn’t a sport, and then JP pointed at her and gave her a stern shake of the head. “I don’t want to hear another negative word about cheerleaders. If it weren’t for cheerleaders, who would tell us when and how to be happy during athletic events? If it weren’t for cheerleaders, how would America’s prettiest girls get the exercise that’s so vital to a healthy life?”
I scrambled to catch up with them so I could get off a line. “Also, without cheerleading, what would become of the polyester miniskirt industry?” I asked. Just talking made the walking better, the wind less bitter.
“Exactly,” JP said, wiping his nose on the sleeve of my dad’s onesie. “Not even to mention the pom-pom industry. Do you realize how many people around the world are employed in the manufacture, distribution, and sale of pom-poms?”
“Twenty?” guessed the Duke.
“Thousands!” JP answered. “The world must contain millions of pom-poms, attached to millions of cheerleaders! And if it’s wrong to want all of those millions of cheerleaders to rub all of their millions of pom-poms on my naked chest, well, then I don’t want to be right, Duke. I don’t want to be right.”
“You’re such a clown,” she said. “And such a genius.”
I fell behind them again but trudged along, not much of a clown and n
ot much of a genius. It was always a pleasure to watch JP show off his wit and see the Duke rise to the occasion. It took us fifteen minutes to circle back to Carla using a route that avoided Sunrise (and, hopefully, the twins). I climbed in through the trunk and grabbed the Twister, and we took off over a chain-link fence and through someone’s backyard so as to head straight west, toward the highway. We figured the twins would take the route we had initially taken. That route was quicker, but we all agreed that we hadn’t seen a game of Twister in the hands of either Timmy or Tommy, so we didn’t think it mattered if they beat us.
We walked in silence for a long time past dark wood-frame houses, and I held the Twister over my head to keep some of the snow out of my face. The snow had accumulated in drifts up to the doorknobs on one side of the street, and I thought about how much snow can change a place. I’d never lived anywhere but here. I’d walked or driven on this block a thousand times. I could remember when all the trees died in the blight, and when they planted new ones in all these yards. And over the fences I could see a block over to Main Street, which I knew even better: I knew each gallery selling folk art to tourists, each outdoor shop selling the kind of hiking boots I wished I was wearing.
But it was new now, all of it—cloaked in a white so pure as to be vaguely menacing. No street or sidewalk beneath me, no fire hydrants. Nothing but the white everywhere, like the place itself was gift-wrapped in snow. And it didn’t just look different, either; it smelled different, the air now sharp with cold and the wet acidity of snow. And the eerie silence, just the steady rhythm of our shoes crunching underfoot. I couldn’t even hear what JP and the Duke were talking about a few feet in front of me as I got lost in the whited-out world.
And I might have convinced myself that we were the only people left awake in all of western North Carolina had we not seen the bright lights of the Duke and Duchess convenience store when we turned off Third Street and onto Maple.
The reason we call the Duke “the Duke” is because when we were in eighth grade, we went one time to the Duke and Duchess. And the thing about the Duke and Duchess convenience store is that instead of calling you “sir” or “ma’am” or “you there” or whatever, the employees of the D and D convenience store are supposed to call you either “Duke” or “Duchess.”
Now, the Duke arrived a little late to the puberty party, and on top of that, she also always wore jeans and baseball caps, particularly in middle school. So the predictable thing happened: one day we went into the Duke and Duchess to buy Big League Chew or Mountain Dew Code Red or whatever we were using to rot our teeth on that particular week, and after the Duke had made her purchase, the guy behind the counter said, “Thank you, Duke.”
It stuck. At one point, I think in ninth grade, we were all at lunch and JP and Keun and I all offered to start calling her Angie, but she said she hated being called Angie, anyway. So we kept with the Duke. It suited her. She had excellent posture, and she was kind of a born leader and everything, and even though she certainly no longer looked even vaguely boyish, she still mostly acted like one of us.
As we walked up Maple, I noticed JP slowing to walk next to me.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Listen, are you okay?” he asked. He reached up and took the Twister from me and tucked it under his arm.
“Um, yeah?”
“Because you’re walking, like, I don’t know. Like you don’t have ankles or knees?” I looked down and saw that I was indeed walking very strangely, my legs far apart and swiveling, my knees barely bending. I looked a bit like a cowboy after a long ride. “Huh,” I said, watching my weird gait. “Hmm. I think my feet are just really cold.”
“VERY FAST EMERGENCY STOP!” JP yelled. “We’ve got some potential frostbite back here!”
I shook my head; I was fine, really, but the Duke turned around and saw me walking and said, “To the D and D!”
So they jogged and I waddled. They beat me into the D and D by a long shot, and by the time I got inside, the Duke was already at the counter, purchasing a four-pack of white cotton socks.
We weren’t the only customers. As I sat down in a booth at the D and D’s miniature “café,” I glanced down to the far booth: there, with a steaming cup in front of him, sat the Tinfoil Guy.
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.
Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances Page 12
