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

onto my face. I hadn’t even noticed until then how numb my body had gotten, but it tingled as it warmed, coming back to life. I threw the soaking-wet Twister mat and spinner down onto the tiled floor, and shouted, “The Twister has arrived!”

Keun shouted, “Hooray!” but the news barely even warranted a glance from the gaggle of green across the dining room.

I grabbed Keun and hugged him with one arm and with the other mussed up the hair sticking through his visor. “I need some cheesy waffles in the worst way,” I told him. The Duke asked for hash browns and then collapsed into a booth next to the jukebox. JP and I sidled up to the breakfast counter and talked to Keun while he cooked.

“I can’t help but notice that the cheerleaders are not, you know, hanging all over you.”

“Yeah,” he said, his back to us as he worked the waffle irons. “Yeah. I’m hoping Twister will change that. They did try to flirt with Mr. I-Have-a-Ponytail-but-I’m-Still-Macho,” Keun said, gesturing with his head toward a guy passed out at a booth, “but apparently he is obsessed with his girlfriend.”

“Yeah, the Twister seems to be working really well,” I said. The wet mat lay crumpled on the floor, utterly ignored by the cheerleaders.

JP leaned over me to look at the cheerleaders and then shook his head. “It only occurs to me now that I can awkwardly glance at cheerleaders while eating pretty much every day during lunch.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I mean, they obviously don’t want to talk.”

“Indeed,” I said. They were crowded around three booths in a kind of oblong huddle. They were talking very fast, and very intently, with one another. I could hear some of the words, but they made no sense to me—herkies and kewpies and extensions. They were talking about a cheerleading competition. There are discussion topics I find less interesting than cheerleading competitions. But not many.

“Hey, the sleepy guy awakes,” JP said.

I looked over at the booth and saw a guy with dark eyes and a ponytail squinting at me. I recognized him after a second. “That guy goes to Gracetown,” I said.

“Yeah,” Keun answered. “Jeb.”

“Right,” I said. Jeb was a junior. Didn’t know him well, but I’d seen him around. He apparently recognized me, too, because he rose from the booth and walked up to me.

“Tobin?” he said.

I nodded and shook his hand.

“Do you know Addie?” he asked.

I looked at him blankly.

“A junior? Beautiful?” he said.

I scrunched up my eyes. “Um, no?”

“Long blonde hair, kind of dramatic?” he said, sounding both desperate and also like he couldn’t get his head around the fact that I wouldn’t know this girl he was rambling on about.

“Um, sorry, dude. Not ringing any bells.”

His eyes closed. I saw his whole body deflate.

“We started dating on Christmas Eve,” he said, staring into the middle distance.

“Yesterday?” I said, thinking, You’ve been dating for a day and you’re this worked up? One more reason to avoid the happy middle.

“Not yesterday,” Jeb says wearily. “A year from yesterday.”

I turned to Keun. “Dude,” I said. “This guy is in bad shape.”

Keun nodded while scattering the Duke’s hash browns on the grill. “I’m gonna give him a ride into town in the morning,” Keun said. “Although what’s the rule, Jeb?”

Jeb said it like Keun had told him the rule a thousand times before. “We don’t leave until the last cheerleader leaves.”

“That’s right, buddy. Maybe you should go back to bed.”

“Just,” Jeb said, “just if you happen to see her or something, will you just tell her I got, um, delayed?”

“I guess,” I said. I must not have been convincing enough, because he turned around and made eye contact with the Duke.

“Tell her I’m coming,” he said, and what’s weird was that she got it. Or seemed to. Or anyway, she nodded in a way that said, Yeah, I’ll tell her, if for some reason I see this girl I don’t know out in a snowdrift at four A.M. And as she smiled sympathetically to him, again I had the untakebackable thought.

Her smile seemed to please him. He slouched back to his booth.

I talked to Keun until he finished my waffle and delivered it to me steaming hot. “God, that looks good, Keun,” I said, but he’d already turned around to plate the Duke’s hash browns. He was picking the plate up when Billy Talos appeared, grabbed the plate, delivered it to the Duke, and sat down next to her.

I glanced back at them a couple times, leaning across the table and talking intently to each other. I wanted to cut in and let her know that he’d been flirting with one of several Madisons as we’d been trudging through the snow, but I figured it was none of my business.

“I’m going to talk to one of them,” I announced to JP and Keun.

JP was incredulous. “One of who? The cheerleaders?”

I nodded.

“Dude,” Keun said. “I’ve been trying all night. They’re packed too tightly to talk to just one of them. And when you try to talk to all of them, they just kind of ignore you.”

But I had to talk to one of them, or at least appear to. “It’s like lions hunting gazelles,” I said as we watched the gaggle intently. “You just find a straggler, and”—a tiny blonde girl turned away from the pack—“pounce,” I said, as I jumped up off the stool.

I walked up to her with purpose. “I’m Tobin,” I said, ex-tending my hand.

“Amber,” she said.

“Beautiful name,” I said.

She nodded, and her eyes darted around. She wanted a way out, but I couldn’t give her one yet. I fumbled for a question. “Um, any word on the status of your train?” I asked.

“Our train might not even leave tomorrow,” she informed me.

“Yeah, that’s too bad,” I said, smiling. I glanced over my shoulder toward Billy and the Duke, only she was gone. The hash browns still steamed off the plate; she’d poured the ketchup on a side plate to dip