“The Flobie Five?” I repeated weakly.
“The Flobie Five were the topic of the day at work. I think every other customer brought them up. They had footage of the riot playing all day on the news. . . . ”
News? Footage? All day? Oh, good. Good, good, good. Famous parents—just what every girl dreams of.
“Everyone loves the Flobie Five,” he said. “Well, a lot of people do. Or, at least, people think it’s funny.”
But then he must have realized it wasn’t so funny for me, and that that was the reason I was wandering through a strange town on Christmas Eve with bags on my head.
“It makes you very cool,” he said, taking big, jumping steps to get in front of me. “CNN would interview you, for sure. Daughter of Flobie! But don’t worry. I’ll keep them back!”
He made a big display of pretending to hold back reporters and punching photographers, which was tricky choreography. It did cheer me up a little. I started playing the part a little myself, throwing my hands up over my face as if flashbulbs were going off. We did this for a while. It was a good distraction from our reality.
“It’s ridiculous,” I finally said, after I almost fell over as I tried to dodge an imaginary paparazzo. “My parents are in jail. Over a ceramic Santa house.”
“Better than for dealing crack,” he said, falling back in line beside me. “Right? Must be.”
“Are you always this chipper?”
“Always. It’s a requirement for working at Target. I’m like Captain Smiley.”
“Your girlfriend must love that!”
I only said it to make myself seem clever and observant, expecting him to say, “How did you know that I . . . ?” And I would say, “I saw the photo in your wallet.” And he would think I was very Sherlock Holmes and I would seem a little less deranged than I first appeared back at the Waffle House. (Sometimes, you have to wait a little bit for this kind of gratification, but it’s still worth it.)
Instead, he just whipped his head around quickly in my direction, blinked, and then turned back down the road with a very determined stride. The playfulness was gone, and he was all business.
“It’s not too much farther. But this is where we have to decide. There are two ways we can go from here. The down-this-road way, which will probably take us another forty-five minutes at the rate we’re going. Or the shortcut.”
“The shortcut,” I answered immediately. “Obviously.”
“It is way, way shorter, because this road bends around and the shortcut goes straight through. I’d definitely take it if it was just me, which it was up until a half an hour ago. . . . ”
“Shortcut,” I said again.
Standing in that storm, with the snow and wind burning the skin off my face and my head and hands wrapped in plastic bags—I felt I really didn’t need any more information. Whatever this shortcut was, it couldn’t be much worse than what we were already doing. And if Stuart had been planning on taking it before, there was no reason why he couldn’t take it with me.
“Okay,” Stuart said. “Basically, the shortcut takes us behind these houses. My house is just behind there, about two hundred yards. I think. Something like that.”
We left the blinking yellow path and cut down a completely shadowy path between some houses. I pulled my phone out of my pocket to check it as we walked. There was no call from Noah. I tried to be stealthy about this, but Stuart saw me.
“No call?” he asked.
“Not yet. He must still be busy.”
“Does he know about your parents?”
“He knows,” I said. “I tell him everything.”
“Does that go both ways?” he asked.
“Does what go both ways?”
“You said you tell him everything,” he replied. “You didn’t say we tell each other everything.”
What kind of question was that? “Of course,” I said quickly.
“What’s he like, aside from being tangentially Swedish?”
“He’s smart,” I said. “But he’s not obnoxious smart, like one of those people who always have to tell you their GPA, or give you subtle hints about their SAT score or class rank or whatever. It’s just natural to him. He doesn’t work that hard for grades, and he doesn’t care that much. But they’re good. Really good. Plays soccer. He’s in Mathletes. He’s really popular.”
Yes, I actually said that. Yes, it sounded like some kind of sales pitch. Yes, Stuart got that smirky I’m-trying-not-to-laugh-at-you look again. But how was I supposed to answer that question? Everyone I knew knew Noah. They knew what he was, what he represented. I didn’t usually have to explain.
“Good résumé,” he said, not sounding all that impressed. “But what’s he like?” Oh, God. This conversation was going to go on.
“He’s . . . like what I just said.”
“Personality-wise. Is he secretly a poet or something? Does he dance around his room when he thinks no one is looking? Is he funny, like you? What’s his essence?”
Stuart had to have been playing with my head with this essence stuff. Although, there was something about how he had asked if Noah was funny, like me. That was kind of nice. And the answer was no. Noah was many things, but funny was not one of them. He usually seemed relatively amused by me, but as you may have noticed by now, sometimes I can’t shut up. On those occasions, he just looked tired.
“Intense,” I said. “His essence is intense.”
“Good intense?”
“Would I date him otherwise? Is it much farther?”
Stuart got the message this time and shut up. We walked on in silence until it was just empty space with a few trees. I could see that far off, at the top of an incline, there were more houses. I could just make out the distant glow of holiday lights. The snow was so thick in the air that everything was blurry. It would have been beautiful, if it didn’t sting so much. I realized my hands had gotten so cold that they’d rounded the corner and now almost felt hot. My legs wouldn’t last much longer.
Stuart put his arm out and stopped me.
“Okay,” he said. “I have to explain something. We’re going over a little creek. It’s frozen. I saw people sliding on it earlier.”
“How deep a creek?”
“Not that deep. Maybe five feet.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s somewhere right in front of us,” he said.
I looked out over the blank horizon. Somewhere under there was a small body of water, hidden under the snow.
“We can go back,” he said.
“You were going to go this way, no matter what?” I asked.
“Yeah, but you don’t have to prove anything to me.”
“It’s fine,” I said, trying to sound more certain than I felt. “So, we just keep walking?”
“That’s the plan.”
So that’s what we did. We knew we’d hit the creek when the snow got a little less deep, and there was a slight slipperiness underneath us instead of the thick, crunching, solid feeling. This is when Stuart decided to speak again.
“Those guys back at the Waffle House are so lucky. They’re about to have the best night of their lives,” he said.
There was something in his tone that sounded like a challenge, like he wanted me to take the bait. Which means I shouldn’t have. But I did, of course.
“God,” I said. “Why are all guys so easy like that?”
“Like what?” he said, giving me a sideways glance, slipping in the process.
“Saying that they’re lucky.”
“Because . . . they’re trapped in a Waffle House with a dozen cheerleaders?”
“Where does this arrogant fantasy come from?” I said, maybe a little more sharply than I intended. “Do guys really believe that if they are the only male in the area, that girls will suddenly crawl on top of them? Like we scavenge for lone survivors and reward them with group make-out sessions?”
“That isn’t what happens?” he asked.
I didn’t even dignify that remark with a comeback.
“But what’s wrong with cheerleaders?” he asked, sounding very pleased that he’d gotten such a rise out of me. “I’m not saying I only like cheerleaders. I’m just not prejudiced against them.”
“It’s not prejudice,” I said firmly.
“It’s not? What is it then?”
“It’s the idea of cheerleaders,” I said. “Girls, on the sidelines, in short skirts, telling guys that they’re great. Chosen for their looks.”
“I don’t know,” he said tauntingly. “Judging groups of people you don’t know, making assumptions, talking about their looks . . . it sounds like prejudice, but—”
“I am not prejudiced!” I shot back, unable to control my reaction now. There was so much darkness around us at that moment. Above us, there was a hazy pewter-pink sky. Around us, there were only the outlines of the skinny bare trees, like thin hands bursting out of the earth. Endless white ground below, and swirling flakes, and a lonely whistle of wind, and the shadows of houses.
“Look,” Stuart said, refusing to quit this annoying game, “how do you know that in their spare time, they aren’t EMTs or something? Maybe they save kittens, or run food banks, or—”
“Because they don’t,” I said, stepping ahead of him. I slipped a little but jerked myself upright. “In their spare time, they get waxings.”
“You don’t know that,” he called from behind me.
“I wouldn’t have to explain this to Noah,” I said. “He would just get it.”
“You know,” Stuart said evenly, “as wonderful as you think this Noah is—I’m not all that impressed with him right now.”
I’d had it. I turned around and started walking the way we had come, taking hard, firm steps.
“Where are you going?” he asked. “Oh, come on . . . ”
He tried to make it sound like it was no big deal, but I had simply had it. I stamped down hard to keep my gait steady.
“It’s a long way back!” he said, hurrying to catch up with me. “Don’t. Seriously.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, like I didn’t really care very much. “I just think it would be better if I . . . ”
There was a noise. A new noise under the whistle and the squeak and shift of ice and snow. It was a snapping noise that sounded kind of like a log on a fire, which was unpleasantly ironic. We both stopped exactly where we stood. Stuart flashed me a look of alarm.
“Don’t mov—”
And then the surface beneath us just went away.
Chapter Six
Maybe you’ve never fallen into a frozen stream. Here’s what happens.
1. It is cold. So cold that the Department of Temperature Acknowledgment and Regulation in your brain gets the readings and says, “I can’t deal with this. I’m out of here.” It puts up the OUT TO LUNCH sign and passes all responsibility to the . . .
2. Department of Pain and the Processing Thereof, which gets all this gobbledygook from the temperature department that it can’t understand. “This is so not our job,” it says. So it just starts hitting random buttons, filling you with strange and unpleasant sensations, and calls the . . .
3. Office of Confusion and Panic, where there is always someone ready to hop on the phone the moment it rings. This office is at least willing to take some action. The Office of Confusion and Panic loves hitting buttons.
So, for a split second, Stuart and I were unable to do anything because of this bureaucratic mess going on in our heads. When we recovered a little, I was able to take some stock of what was happening to me. The good news was, we were only in up to our chests. Well, I was. The water came exactly breast-high. Stuart was in up to his mid-abdomen. The bad news was, we were in a hole in the ice, and it’s hard to get out of a hole in the ice when you are pretty much paralyzed with cold. We both tried to climb out, but the ice just kept breaking every time we put pressure on it.
As an automatic reaction, we grabbed each other.
“Okay,” Stuart said, shivering hard. “This is c-cold. And kind of bad.”
“No? Really?” I screamed. Except there wasn’t enough air in my lungs to allow me to scream, so it came out like a spooky little hiss.
“We . . . s-should . . . b-break it.”
This idea had occurred to me, too, but it was reassuring to hear it said out loud. We both started smashing at the ice with stiff, robotlike arms, until we reached the thick crust. The water was a bit shallower, but not by much.
“I’ll boost you up with my hand,” Stuart said. “Step up.”
When I tried to move my leg, it refused to cooperate right away. My legs were so numb that they didn’t really work anymore. Once I got them going, Stuart’s hands were too cold to support me. It took some tries, but I eventually got a foothold.
Of course, once I got up, I made the important discovery that ice is slippery, and therefore very hard to hold on to, especially when your hands are also covered in wet bags. I reached back and helped pull Stuart, who landed flat on the ice.
We were out. And being out felt a lot worse than being in, weirdly enough.
“Iss . . . not . . . tha . . . far,” he said. It was hard to understand him. My lungs felt like they were wobbling. He grabbed my hand and pulled me toward a house just at the top of the rise. If he hadn’t dragged me, I would never have made it up the hill.
I have never, ever been so happy to see a house. It was entirely outlined by a faint greenish glow, interspersed with tiny dots of red. The back door was unlocked, and we stepped into a paradise. It wasn’t that it was the most amazing house I had ever been in—it was simply a house, with warmth, and a residual smell of cooked turkey and cookies and tree.
