Chapter One

JP and the Duke and I were four movies in to our James Bond marathon when my mother called home for the sixth time in five hours. I didn’t even glance at the caller ID. I knew it was Mom. The Duke rolled her eyes and paused the movie. “Does she think you’re going somewhere? There’s a blizzard.”

I shrugged and picked up the phone.

“No luck,” Mom said. In the background, a loud voice droned on about the importance of securing the homeland.

“Sorry, Mom. That sucks.”

“This is ridiculous!” she shouted. “We can’t get a flight to anywhere, let alone home.” They’d been stuck in Boston for three days. Doctors’ conference. She was getting kind of despondent about the whole Christmas-in-Boston thing. It was as if Boston were a war zone. Honestly, I felt sort of giddy about it. Something about me has always liked the drama and inconvenience of bad weather. The worse the better, really.

“Yeah, sucks,” I said.

“It’s supposed to blow through by morning, but everything is so backed up. They can’t even guarantee we’ll be home tomorrow. Your dad is trying to rent a car, but the lines are long. And even then it will be eight or nine in the morning, even if we drive all night! But we can’t spend Christmas apart!”

“I’ll just go over to the Duke’s,” I said. “Her parents already told me I could stay there. I’ll go over there and open all my presents, and talk about how my parents neglect me, and then maybe the Duke will give me some of her presents because she feels so bad about how my mom doesn’t love me.” I glanced over at the Duke, who smirked at me.

“Tobin,” Mom said disapprovingly. She wasn’t a particularly funny person. It suited her professionally—I mean, you don’t want your cancer surgeon to walk into the examination room and be like, “Guy walks into a bar. Bartender says, ‘What’ll ya have?’ And the guy says, ‘Whaddya got?’ And the bartender says, ‘I don’t know what I got, but I know what you got: Stage IV melanoma.’”

“I’m just saying I’ll be fine. Are you guys gonna go back to the hotel?”

“I guess, unless your father can get us a car. He’s being such a saint about all this.”

“Okay,” I said. I glanced at JP, and he mouthed, Hang. Up. The. Phone. I really wanted to return to the place on the couch between JP and the Duke and go back to watching the new James Bond kill people in fascinating ways.

“Everything’s fine there?” Mom asked. Lord.

“Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s snowing. But the Duke and JP are here. And they can’t really abandon me, either, because they’d freeze if they tried to walk back to their houses. We’re just watching Bond movies. Power’s still on and everything.”

“Call me if anything happens. Anything.”

“Yup, got it,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. God, I’m sorry about this, Tobin. I love you. I’m sorry.”

“It’s really not a big deal,” I said, because it really wasn’t. Here I was, in a large house without adult supervision, with my best friends on the couch. Nothing against my parents, who are fine people and everything, but they could have stayed in Boston right through New Year’s without my being disappointed.

“I’ll call you from the hotel,” Mom said.

JP apparently heard her through the phone, because he mumbled, “I’m sure you will,” as I said my good-byes.

“I think she has an attachment disorder,” JP said when I hung up.

“Well, it’s Christmas,” I said.

“And why don’t you come over to my house for Christmas?” JP asked.

“Shitty food,” I answered. I walked around the couch and took my place on the middle cushion.

“Racist!” JP exclaimed.

“It’s not racism!” I said.

“You just said that Korean food was shitty,” he said.

“No, he didn’t,” said the Duke, lifting the remote to restart the movie. “He said your mom’s Korean food was shitty.”

“Exactly,” I said. “I quite like the food at Keun’s house.”

“You’re an asshat,” said JP, which is what JP said when he didn’t have a comeback. As comebackless comebacks go, it was a pretty good one. The Duke restarted the movie, and then JP said, “We should call Keun.”

The Duke paused the movie again and leaned forward, over me, to speak directly to JP. “JP,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Can you please stop talking so I can go back to enjoying Daniel Craig’s outrageously good body?”

“That’s so gay,” JP said.

“I’m a girl,” said the Duke. “It’s not gay for me to be attracted to men. Now, if I said you had a hot body, that would be gay, because you’re built like a lady.”

“Oh, burn,” I said.

The Duke raised her eyes at me and said, “Although JP’s a freaking paragon of masculinity compared to you.”

I had no response to that. “Keun is at work,” I said. “He gets paid double on Christmas Eve.”

“Oh, right,” said JP. “I forgot that Waffle Houses are like Lindsay Lohan’s legs: always open.”

I laughed; the Duke just winced and restarted the movie. Daniel Craig walked out of the water, wearing a pair of Euro boxer briefs that passed as a bathing suit. The Duke sighed contentedly while JP wretched. After a couple minutes, I heard a soft clicking sound next to me. JP. Using dental floss. He was obsessed with dental floss.

“That is disgusting,” I said. The Duke paused the movie and scowled at me. She didn’t have much meanness in her scowl; she scrunched up her button nose and squared her lips. But I could always tell in her eyes if she got really pissed at me, and her eyes still seemed pretty smiley.

“What?” JP said, the floss dangling out of his mouth from between molars.

“Flossing in public. It’s just . . . Please put it away.”

He did, reluctantly, but insisted on the last word. “My dentist says he has never seen healthier gums. Never.”

I rolled my eyes. The Duke brushed a stray curl behind her ear and unpaused Bond. I watched for a minute, but then I found myself looking out the window, a distant streetlight illuminating the snow like a billion falling stars in miniature. And even though I hated to inconvenience my parents or deny them a Christmas at home, I could not help but wish for more snow.

Chapter Two

The phone rang ten minutes after we restarted the movie.

“Jesus Christ,” JP said, grabbing the remote to hit pause.

“Your mom calls more than a clingy boyfriend,” the Duke added.

I jumped over the back of the couch and grabbed the phone. “Hey,” I said, “how’s it going?”

“Tobin,” replied the voice on the other end of the line. Not my mom. Keun.

“Keun, aren’t you su—”

“Is JP with you?”

“He is.”

“Do you have speakerphone?”

“Uh, why do you w—”

“DO YOU HAVE SPEAKERPHONE?!” he shouted.

“Hold on.” As I looked for the button, I said, “It’s Keun. He wants to be put on speaker. He’s being weird.”

“Fancy that,” said the Duke. “Next you’ll tell me that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas or that JP has tiny balls.”

“Don’t go there,” JP said.

“Don’t go where? Into your pants with a high-powered magnifying glass on a search for your tiny balls?”

I found the speakerphone button and pressed it.

“Keun, can you hear me?”

“Yes,” he said. There was a lot of noise in the background. Girl noises. “I need you guys to listen.”

JP said to the Duke, “Where does the owner of the world’s smallest breasts get off impugning someone else’s personal parts?” The Duke threw a pillow at JP.

“YOU MUST LISTEN NOW!” shouted Keun from the phone. Everyone shut up then. Keun was incredibly smart, and he always talked like he had memorized his remarks in advance. “Okay. So my manager didn’t come to work today, because his car got stuck in snow. So I am cook and acting assistant manager. There are two other employees here—they are (one) Mitchell Croman, and (two) Billy Talos.” Mitchell and Billy both went to our school, although it would not be accurate to say that I knew them, on account of how I rather doubted either could pick me out of a lineup. “Until about twelve minutes ago, it was a quiet night. Our only customers were Tinfoil Guy and Doris, America’s oldest living smoker. And then this girl showed up, and then Stuart Weintraub”—another classmate, and a good guy—“arrived covered in Target bags. They distracted Tinfoil Guy a little, and I was just reading The Dark Knight and—”