Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances by Myracle, John (good book club books TXT) 📕

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