Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances by Myracle, John (best color ereader .txt) 📗

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 hill. 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,