“Keun, is there a point?” I asked. He could ramble sometimes.

“Oh, there’s a point,” he answered. “There are fourteen points. Because about five minutes after Stuart Weintraub showed up, the good and loving Lord Almighty looked kindly upon His servant Keun and saw fit to usher fourteen Pennsylvanian cheerleaders—wearing their warm-up outfits—into our lowly Waffle House. Gentlemen, I am not kidding you. Our Waffle House is full of cheerleaders. Their train is stuck in the snow, and they are staying here for the night. They are high on caffeine. They are doing splits on the breakfast counter.

“Let me be perfectly clear: there has been a Cheertastic Christmas Miracle at the Waffle House. I am looking at these girls right now. They are so hot that their hotness could melt the snow. Their hotness could cook the waffles. Their hotness could—no, will—warm the places in my heart that have been so cold for so long that I have nearly forgotten they ever existed.”

A girl voice—a voice at once cheery and sultry—shouted into the phone then. By now I was standing directly above the speaker, staring at it with a kind of reverence. JP was by my side. “Are those your friends? Oh my God, tell them to bring Twister!”

Keun spoke again. “And now you realize what is at stake! The greatest night of my life has just begun. And I am inviting you to join me, because I am the best friend ever. But here’s the catch: after I get off the phone with you, Mitchell and Billy will be calling their friends. And we’ve agreed in advance that there’s only room here for one more carful of guys. I cannot further dilute the cheerleader-to-guy ratio. Now, I am making the first call, because I’m acting assistant manager. So you have a head start. I know you will not fail. I know I can count upon you to deliver the Twister. Gentlemen, may you travel safely and swiftly. But if you die tonight, die in the comfort that you have sacrificed your lives for that noblest of human causes. The pursuit of cheerleaders.”

Chapter Three

JP and I did not even bother to hang up the phone. I just said, “I gotta change,” and he said, “Me, too,” and then I said, “Duke: Twister! In the game closet!”

I dashed upstairs, my socks sliding on the hardwood floor in the kitchen, and stumbled into my bedroom. I tore open the closet door and began feverishly sorting through the shirts piled on the floor in the vain hope that inside that pile there might be some wondrously perfect shirt down there, a nice striped button-down with no wrinkles that said, “I’m strong and tough but I’m also a surprisingly good listener with a true and abiding passion for cheers and those who lead them.” Unfortunately, there was no such shirt to be found. I quickly settled on a dirty but cool yellow Threadless T-shirt under a black v-neck sweater. I kicked off my watching-James-Bond-movies-with-the-Duke-and-JP jeans and hurriedly wiggled into my one pair of nice, dark jeans.

I tucked my chin to my chest and sniffed. I ran into the bathroom and frantically swiped some deodorant under my arms anyway. I looked up at myself in the mirror. I looked okay, aside from the somewhat asymmetrical hair. I hustled back to the room, grabbed my winter coat off the floor, stepped into my Pumas, and then ran downstairs with the shoes half on, shouting, “Everybody ready? I’m ready! Let’s go!”

When I arrived downstairs, the Duke was sitting in the middle of the couch, watching the Bond movie. “Duke. Twister. Jacket. Car.” I turned and called upstairs, “JP, where are you?”

“Do you have an extra coat?” he answered.

“No, wear yours!” I shouted.

“But I only wore a jacket!” he shouted back.

“Just hurry!” For some reason, the Duke still hadn’t stopped the movie. “Duke,” I repeated. “Twister. Jacket. Car.”

She paused the movie and turned around to me. “Tobin, what is your idea of hell?”

“That seems like a question that could be answered in the car!”

“Because my idea of hell is spending eternity in a Waffle House full of cheerleaders.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Don’t be an idiot.”

The Duke stood up, the couch still between us. “You’re saying we should go out in the worst snowstorm in fifty years and drive twenty miles to hang out with a bunch of random chicks whose idea of fun is to play a game that says right on the box that it was designed for six-year-olds, and I’m the idiot?”

I turned my head back toward the stairs. “JP! Hurry!”

“I’m trying!” 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.