Mom is on campus, finishing up some paperwork. I have already showered, eaten breakfast (who am I kidding—brunch), and unloaded the dishwasher. I throw a load of laundry into the washing machine and look around for something else to do, but the house is clean, I have no schoolwork, and there’s nothing I want to watch.
I text Lily to see if she wants to go to the mall, but she’s rehearsing for her studio’s winter recital. I try Shaun, but of course he doesn’t text back. I call Darbs, but her mom is making her watch the twins while she goes Christmas shopping. She invites me over, and I politely decline. The last time I helped Darbs with the twins, we took our eyes off them for ten minutes and they pulled all the sheets off her parents’ bed. By the time we realized what was going on, they had tied the bedding into a long rope and one twin was being lowered out the upstairs bedroom window. Those kids stress me out. And it’s not like I have a way to get to their house, anyway.
Crap. The first day of break and I’m already bored.
I know I should take some time to figure out what I’m going to do about Itch, but I have a full two weeks until he’s back. Maybe I’ll feel differently when we’ve been apart for a little while. Maybe I’ll miss him.
My phone buzzes, and I’m basically a ninja, I grab it so fast. My brain reflexes, however, are a little slower. It takes me a moment of staring at it to realize who the text is from.
Oliver.
Apparently he was telling Marley—his mom—about our shared playlist, and there was something he didn’t know how to explain.
what’s the diff between punk & alt?
I flop down across my bed to message him back, but I’m not even halfway through when I realize it’s complicated enough to warrant a phone call. Oliver picks up immediately. “You must miss me.”
“Not even close,” I tell him. “But I’m hardly going to type the history of music to you on a phone. It would devalue the importance of the lesson you so sorely require.”
“You’re impossible,” he says, but his voice sounds like he’s smiling. “What are you doing?”
“Not much,” I admit, and the phone shivers in my hand.
“Click on the link.” He hangs up.
“Wait,” I say into empty air. “I still haven’t educated you.”
And he calls me impossible.
I pull up the new message from Oliver. It’s a link to…
A game?
Oliver has sent me an invite to play a game—a really geeky one—through our phones. When I accept the invitation, I find that it’s a strategy game that is (loosely) based on Greek mythology. It’s peopled by little animated figures who wear winged sandals or carry lyres or wield thunderbolts. They stand around on a battlefield and make moves that the players assign them. Oliver’s opening gambit involves a long-haired demigoddess eating a “Pomegranate of Power” before leaping astride a Pegasus and galloping in the direction of my little huddle of figures.
Despite this possibly being the actual dorkiest thing I’ve ever done, I touch the screen to deploy an “Army of Angry Muses” toward Oliver’s Pegasus. He responds with a “Whirlwind Gorgon Attack” followed by a “Trident to the Face”…
And the battle is on.
“Yes!” I shout with a fist pump. It startles my mother, who drops the scissors she’s using to snip mint leaves. She leans down to pick them up off the floor.
“June,” she says. “I could have taken off a toe.”
“Sorry.”
“What are you doing, anyway?”
“It’s just this stupid game Oliver sent me. I finally beat him.”
My mother shakes her head. “It can’t be that stupid if you’ve been playing it since yesterday.”
“Oh, you know,” I tell her. “It’s something to do.”
It’s a day after Christmas, a week before we go back to school. Our tree is still up in the family room and small white lights still outline the front windows. The ripped dark-dyed jeans my dad sent me from New York (all the rage among the stage actresses, he says) are folded carefully in a drawer, waiting for the perfect time to be worn. The array of books and sweaters and earrings my mother gave me are heaped on my dresser. The funky upcycled case Itch gave me is already wrapped around my phone.
Mom and I shoveled the driveway this morning. I thought it was pointless, since there’s a snowstorm coming, but Mom said we should at least start with a clean slate. She’s had the Weather Channel on the television since she woke up, and she keeps checking the generator in her studio.
The first fat snowflakes are falling when Cash’s truck pulls up in front of the house. “Dammit, I told him not to come,” Mom says before she bolts outside. I look out the front window and watch her run down the porch steps toward Cash’s pickup. Despite her words, the minute he opens his door, she flies into his arms and kisses him on the mouth.
A minute later, they’re stamping their feet on the rug in the entryway, setting bags of groceries on the floor. “You don’t listen,” Mom says to Cash.
“I listen to your wishes, not your words.” He grins at me. “Hey, want to give us a hand with these?”
“Sure.” I carry one of the bags to the kitchen.
“Stay here,” I hear Mom tell Cash, and then she’s in the kitchen with me. “I have to talk to you. Cash and I have known each other for a long time. We have several mutual friends and…He’ll sleep downstairs.”
“He doesn’t have to do that.”
“Thanks, but that’s the best place for him to…” Mom wraps her arms around me. “Even though we have an evolved and enlightened mother-daughter relationship, it doesn’t mean you want my sex life in your face.”
“You are really making it weird,” I tell her.
“Sorry.”
“Can I have a boy spend the night, too?”
“No way.”
“It was worth a shot.”
Mom pulls back and gazes at me. She pushes a strand of hair away from my face. “You are still the most important person in the whole world,” she says. “He’s just a guy with a bag of groceries.”
“I’m not calling him Dad,” I say, and she flicks me in the head.
“Now who’s making it weird?”
It snowed hard—big, fluffy flakes—for hours. It was still coming down when I went to bed last night after an evening of games with Mom and Cash. If they get married, I wonder if Dad will be invited to their wedding.
Now that it’s Wednesday afternoon and it stopped snowing hours ago, I’m well into the realm of stir-crazy. It’s not only that I’m stuck in our house; it’s that I’m stuck with a pair of lovebirds. They’re not all over each other or anything—in fact, I feel like they’re going out of their way not to touch each other—but I can tell. There’s an energy in the air.
My mom wants to be alone with her new boyfriend, and I’m the cock blocker.
Gross.
I’m on the couch, huddled under a blanket with my phone, and have just sent a “Fiery Chariot of Doom” at Oliver when a tiny star pops up in the corner of my screen: a notice of an in-game message. I click on it.
snowed in?
Oliver’s obviously in the same boat as me…well, minus the thing where the two adults in his house are dying to get in each other’s pants.
Or maybe they are; what do I know about the Flagg family?
I send Oliver a message in return:
y. sux.
A nanosecond later, my phone rings. I pick it up. “I think you’re the one who misses me,” I tell Oliver.
“All I’m saying is you’ve played a lot of Mythteries.”
“Which you only know because you’ve been playing. Hold on.” I squiggle out of the blanket and off the couch. “Going upstairs!” I call to Mom and Cash.
I get a muffled “Okay” in return and opt not to go see what they’re doing. Once in my room, I leap onto my bed and set the phone against my ear again. “You still there?”
“I’m housebound. Where else would I be?”
“This snowstorm is killing me,” I confide. “Cash stayed over last night—”
“What?”
“—and now he’s stuck here. I’m the world’s most awkward third wheel.”
Oliver’s amusement comes through the phone and makes me smile. “Are they actively doing it?” he asks through laughter.
“They want to and that’s even worse!”
Silence. Just when I think maybe Oliver has hung up, I hear his voice again. “Do you want to come over here?”
I’m startled. No, more than startled. I’m shocked. And also…pleased.
I’m inordinately pleased that Oliver has extended an invitation to his house. Except: “I’m snowed in, remember? We’re all snowed in.”
“Hold on.” I hear some bustling around and then Oliver’s voice again. “The snowplow’s been by. Walk over.”
“Walk? Seriously?”
“It’s less than a mile. I’ll meet you in the middle.”
I hesitate.
And then I assess my reason for hesitating.
It’s not that I don’t want to hang out with Oliver. It’s that I do want to, which is exactly why I’m not sure if I should do it. We finally have this friendship thing down. It’s easy. It’s not awkward anymore. I get him and I think he gets me. Yes, his music and philosophy are still cheesy, but they’re not unbearable.
All that being said, it’s a friendship that lies squarely within a set of very specific parameters. We are friends in the car. We are friends in school hallways. Occasionally, we’re friends at lunch. Yes, there was that one time Oliver had dinner at my house, but Mom and Cash were right there, which meant that it was safe.
“Hello? Did you hang up?” Oliver asks into my ear.
“No, I’m here. I’m just…” I stop, because I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m inexplicably nervous about being alone with Oliver, which is silly, which is crazy, which is—
“My parents are here,” he says, like he can hear my thoughts. It works, because I feel myself nodding even though he can’t see me.
“Okay. I’ll come over.”
“Give me half an hour before you leave.”
Exactly thirty minutes later, after trying on several combos of clothing and settling on faded jeans with a slouchy cable-knit sweater, I assure Mom I will be careful and step outside. I pause on the porch to look around, and I realize that maybe I didn’t need quite as much bundling up as I thought. The day is cold, but not bitterly so. In fact, it feels refreshing after having been stuck in the house for so long (with lovebirds). The sky is bright blue, scattered with big, fluffy clouds, and sunlight bounces off the white ground.
Floundering down off the porch and across the driveway takes a while, because the snow comes up to my knees, but once I’ve struggled over the big drift to reach the road, it’s smooth sailing. The plow has packed the snow hard and my boots have good treads, so walking is easy. I peer down Callaway Lane, trying to guess where I will meet up with Oliver.
But Oliver is already in sight. Only a few houses away, he’s trudging in my direction, and when he sees me, he waves an arm in greeting. He’s wearing a twill hooded jacket, plus dark cherry mittens and a scarf that stand out against the white of the road. My heart swells in my chest and I cannot deny that I am happy to see him.
Really happy.
“How’d you get here so fast?” I ask him. “Did you run?”
He grins down at me, and his teeth are the same white as the snow. I want to touch them with the tip of my finger, to stroke their shiny surface, but of course that would be shockingly strange and I do not. “I left when we hung up.”
“But you told me—”
“I may have bent the truth. I didn’t think your mom would like it if you walked all that way alone.”
There’s my heart again.
“Besides,” says Oliver, “if I waited, I wouldn’t have the entire walk back to do this.” He bends over and scoops up a handful of snow. It takes several seconds longer than it should for me to understand that he’s packing a snowball.
“Don’t even think about it.”
“Or what?”
“Or…I’ll be forced to retaliate.”
Oliver gives me a look of wide-eyed terror. Or rather a look of mock wide-eyed terror. “I’m supposed to be scared of a person who thinks climbing into my car is a great and challenging task?”
“Your car is ridiculous.” I reach down to grab my own handful of snow.
“You don’t think so when it’s transporting you to school.”
“No, I think so then, too.” I’m having trouble being intimidating, because I’m smiling so hard. My face feels like it’s been taken over by one of those little wooden hoops that Mom’s friends use to stretch canvas when they’re embroidering.
Maybe it’s the reprieve from classes and schoolwork. Maybe it’s that I’ve been cooped up with Mom and Cash for too long. Maybe it’s Itch’s departure. Whatever the reason, being with Oliver today is filling me with radiant joy—
—even when his snowball whaps me in the abdomen. I squawk and Oliver throws his hands up over his head. “Retreat! Retreat!” he yells, springing backward. I wind up to throw my ball but of course I miss him by miles, so I take off running after him instead. Or at least what counts as running when I’m wearing all this clothing and heavy boots.
Oliver bolts away (or what counts as bolting) and starts climbing one of the drifts that the plow has kicked up by the side of the road. It’s taller than Oliver and he’s only halfway to the top when I finally reach the drift. I grab him by the ankle and pull. He fumbles forward and falls, sliding back down to catch me. I squeal and flail as we roll into the drift, but he’s holding me down by the shoulders and my heels are on a slippery patch, so I can’t get any traction to push back.
“Truce,” he says firmly, his dark brown eyes on mine.
I stare back, and in that moment, there’s a rip in the fabric of the universe. Everything I know—the laws of high school and hierarchies and history—they shimmer away into nothingness, and all I can register is that Oliver’s body is settled over mine and his face is very, very close.
Abruptly, Oliver jerks himself to his feet. He reaches a hand down and I allow him to take mine, to pull me up. “Truce,” he repeats. This time, he doesn’t look at me.
“Truce,” I tell him.
Oliver’s mother, Marley, sets two mugs of hot cocoa on the table. When I thank her, she tells me, “Wait a second, honey,” then flutters away and back. She drops a large marshmallow into each cup. “They didn’t have the small ones.”
Oliver bumps his mug gently into mine. “Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
After running and climbing and sliding and screaming our whole way to Oliver’s house, we arrived sweaty and wet. Marley took one look and sent me off to change, then threw my clothes into the dryer. That’s why I’m wearing Oliver’s mother’s yoga pants—more formfitting than I’m accustomed to—and her lavender thermal shirt embellished with white lace appliqués. My thumbs are poked through the holes at the edges of the sleeves, which I’m finding surprisingly comfortable. When I put it on, Marley winked at me. “It’s like your thumbs are getting a daylong hug,” she said.
Now I’m seated at the Flagg family breakfast table across from the younger Flagg family son, who is wearing a dry pair of jeans and a plain white T-shirt. Unlike me, he was able to choose his outfit on his own.
Oliver’s mom has the same white-blond hair as he does, but hers falls long and straight down her back. Her blue eyes are big and round, and so are her boobs. Her fingernails are perfectly manicured and painted a bright red. My mom is pretty in an earthy, no-makeup kinda way, but you can totally see how a horny college senior would pick Marley first.
It’s the same way a horny high school senior would pick Ainsley first.
“How are you?” Marley asks me. “You’ve gotten so tall.” Oliver and I make eye contact and we both crack up, because she sounds exactly like my mom did when Oliver came over.
“Please don’t mention changing her diaper,” Oliver tells his mother.
“What? What did I say?” Marley asks, but we’re both laughing too hard to explain. “You kids. So silly.”
Oliver’s father, Bryant, wanders in while we’re still calming down. He greets me before swinging an arm around Marley’s waist, pulling her in for a kiss. “Have you ever seen such a woman? Oliver, you should be so lucky.”
“Dad,” says Oliver.
“Stop it, Bryant.” But Marley doesn’t sound like she means it.
“Here, if you want to be more traditional about it.” Bryant pulls her to the foyer archway and points to the mistletoe hanging overhead before sweeping her into an even lower, more prolonged kiss.
I wonder if it’s generational, all this PDA.
When the moment of marital bliss is over, Bryant turns his attention back to Oliver. “I talked to Alex this morning.”
“Cool,” Oliver mumbles.
“He says he can push your application to the top of the pile.” Oliver nods and Bryant claps him on the shoulder. “Family connections, right?”
“Sure.” Oliver turns to me. “Let’s go down to the basement. Bring your cocoa.”
“We have chips and salsa,” Marley calls after us as we head out.
Oliver’s house is big and made out of bricks, and everything is new. There are no piles of unfinished projects lying around, no exposed beams. Every interior surface is painted a muted hue, and I’ve already seen two chandeliers and a built-in wine fridge. He leads me down a set of thickly carpeted stairs to something that I would never refer to as a basement. At the very least, it’s a “lower level.” The large room features a Ping-Pong table, a wet bar, and a seriously big-ass TV.
Oliver rummages around behind the wet bar and comes up with the chips and salsa his mom mentioned. “I’m going to make an executive decision that we don’t need a bowl.” He rips the bag open and sets it on the counter.
“I second. Hey, are your parents like that together all the time?”
“They act out for company.”
“Lucky you.”
“They do everything together. Finish each other’s sentences, all that stuff that’s cliché but really kind of amazing.”
“And rare.” I’m thinking of my own parents, separated since before my memories begin. I’m also thinking of Itch and me. “Most couples don’t work like that.”
“True.” Oliver gestures to the barstools and I perch on one, reaching for a chip. I’m not sure what we’re going to do for entertainment, but I know I couldn’t take off even if I wanted to, because my clothes are still in the dryer.
“Do you want to watch TV?” Oliver asks.
“No.” It comes out sharper than I intended. Watching TV is what I do with Itch. Or rather what I don’t do with Itch. I soften my tone. “I mean…it’s not like I don’t have a television at home.”
“Table tennis?”
“The mere fact that you call it table tennis instead of Ping-Pong kinda makes me think that you would clobber me.”
“I’ll play left-handed,” says Oliver, and I groan. “Okay, what, then?”
I honestly don’t know. This is new territory—this being alone outside a car—even for the already new territory that is my friendship with Oliver. I’m not sure how to navigate this version of us.
Not that we’re an “us.”
We’re definitely not.
Oliver waits and there’s an awkward silence that is reminiscent of our very first carpool mornings. I don’t know what to do when I’m hanging out with a guy who isn’t Itch or Shaun. Or maybe just when I’m hanging out with a guy who is Oliver Flagg.
“I got it,” says Oliver. “Jump up.”
“Pardon?”
“Off.” He gestures to the high-backed barstool I’m perched on. I give him a perplexed look but do as he asks. He lifts the stool and turns it around so the back is against the bar, then does the same with the one next to it. He hops onto my stool and pats the other, to his right. “Here.”
“You prefer the view of the Ping-Pong table?”
“Trust me,” he says, and—because, oddly enough, I do—I clamber onto the stool beside him. “Now what?”
“Hold on.” He pulls out his cell phone and stabs at the screen. Before I can figure out what he’s doing, some old-school Iggy Pop starts playing. My old-school Iggy.
Oliver sets the phone on the bar behind us and settles back on his stool, staring straight ahead. “Look.” He points straight in front of us.
“At the Ping-Pong table?”
“At the road.”
Oliver stretches out his hands to grip an imaginary steering wheel, and I get it. He’s pretending we’re in his car, listening to our playlist, driving to school. He understands what I’m feeling, that we’re in uncharted friendship territory. Maybe he’s even feeling the same way. He’s trying to make me comfortable. It’s really nice and also really…
“Cute,” I say.
“I try.”
We “drive” in silence, and I know I should be the one to start the conversation, since he came up with the idea and all. I go with what I think is a safe topic. “Did you apply early decision anywhere?”
“A couple places,” Oliver says. “State. Central.”
“Not U of M?” The second it’s out of my mouth, I regret the question. University of Michigan is competitive. Even for me, it’s not a definite slam dunk. Oliver mumbles something under his breath, and I tilt my head toward him. “What?”
“Yeah, U of M, too,” he says. “I just got the early acceptance letter.”
Again, he manages to surprise me.
“I only applied because it’s Dad’s alma mater and all,” he continues. “I didn’t think they’d actually let me in, and I’m definitely not going there.”
“Why?” It seems like a no-brainer. Prestige plus football. If you’re Oliver, what’s not to love? “It’s a great school.”
“All that pressure about being part of a legacy.” Oliver shakes his head. “I don’t even know what I want to do yet. Starting somewhere close by makes so much more sense. I could try things out. Experiment. But my dad—” He sighs. “He says if I don’t go to Michigan, I should expand my horizons. He’s got this list—Carnegie Mellon, USC, Chapel Hill—and I guess I should do what he says, because of his whole self-made-man thing. If anyone knows how to win at life, it’s him. But going far away when I don’t have it figured out yet…” I must have made a sound because Oliver glances at me. “What?”
“All I want is to go far away.”
“Where?”
“New York. Maybe NYU or Columbia. I’m applying local in the next round, but only because Mom is making me.” I watch Oliver slide his hands to the left, steering our mimed car. “Where are we?”
“Just turned onto Plymouth. I had to wait at the corner for a phalanx of Harley riders.”
Once again, I am impressed and surprised by Oliver’s vocabulary. “Hey, your dad was talking about the uncle at the bank?”
“Yeah, Uncle Alex. You may have seen his name in the main lobby’s trophy case.” I shake my head and Oliver laughs. “Let me guess. You’ve never looked at those trophies, have you?”
“Not even once.”
“Star quarterback twenty years ago.” Oliver’s smile vanishes. “Now he’s a branch manager in Ypsilanti. Drinks a lot of beer. Two kids and a wife. I think he loves them, but he never looks happy. You can read it all over him, how he thinks he settled. I don’t want that. I don’t want to settle and I don’t want to make someone feel like I settled for her. Dad’s all over me about the bank internship. He wants me to wear a maroon tie during the interview because it’s a ‘power color.’ He’s got it all figured out for me and he’s probably right, because he’s right about everything, but…” His voice trails off. “Sorry, that was weird.”
I don’t think it was weird. I think it was brave.
“You’re a good listener or something,” Oliver says, mime-driving us toward our imaginary school.
Because it was a lot to say, because it was brave, I think carefully before I speak again. “In case you didn’t know, you’re pulling it off,” I tell him. “You seem like nothing bothers you and everyone’s your friend and the world is your oyster, so you’re totally pulling it off.”
“Thanks,” says Oliver. “I don’t know if I believe you, but thanks.”
“Hey, I think being perceived as a rock of teenage solidity must be nice, especially considering my own personal angst is pretty much broadcast loud and freaking clear twenty-four/seven—”
“What are you talking about?”
“Life. College and whatever.”
“No, I mean about your own personal angst.” Oliver drops his hands and turns to face me.
“Careful,” I tell him. “You’re going to run us into a ditch.”
“I parked by the side of the road.”
“In the snow?”
“There was a conveniently located parking lot.” He leans toward me. “June, for the record, you don’t broadcast any of that. To all onlookers, you’re stable. You’re the most stable….You’re like…a castle of stability.”
“You’re a liar.” I know damn well I’m much more like a crowd of rowdy peasants rioting in the streets outside a castle.
“I’m not.” Oliver tilts his head, and now that we’re this close and alone, I can again see the charcoal lines circling his brown irises, and the enlargement of his pupils as he peers at me, and the faintest scatter shot of freckles across his cheekbones. I know—I’ve known for years—that Oliver is gorgeous. I know because he’s popular and all the girls want him, and because he has a fancy car and a letter jacket and muscles. But I never liked that kind of boy. I liked boys with messy hair, boys who played guitar or who refused to wear leather or who didn’t believe in God. Boys who wouldn’t conform. Oliver’s particular brand of all-American never did anything for me.
Until now.
Now I’m struck by how good-looking he is—and not just objectively, but how good-looking he has become to me. And how nice and complicated and interesting. And I’m reminded that although Oliver hasn’t defied society’s expectations, he has defied mine, and maybe that’s a thousand times more compelling.
And a million times more dangerous.
Because I’m already there, and because this moment is fleeting and fragile, I take a tiny step further into the danger. “You know my castle of supposed stability?” I ask him. “It’s surrounded by a moat.”
“What’s in your moat?” Oliver asks.
Insecurity. Self-doubt. Fear.
But I’ve already said too much. I look at my wrist like I’m checking a watch and then gesture toward the Ping-Pong table. “We’re going to be late for school.”
Oliver gazes at me, his eyes roving over my face, before he pulls away and turns forward. “Let’s get moving,” he says, and swings our imaginary car back onto our imaginary road.
We’re in the kitchen again, completing the re-bundling so Oliver can walk me home. “Ready?” he asks.
“Almost.” I pull my jacket sleeves over the cuffs of my mittens.
We’re heading toward the foyer when we hear Marley calling for us to hold on. She scurries into the kitchen and sees us stopped under the arch. “Oh, good. You’re still here. June, I have something for your mom. Wait just a second, okay?” She darts off before I can answer.
I look up at Oliver. “It’s not going to be a sewing machine or a pair of heavy bookends or something, is it?”
“If so, I will carry your burden,” he says in a (bad) British accent and then he bows, which I think is intended to be gallant. I laugh, and when I do, I catch sight of what’s hanging above us.
Mistletoe.
Oliver sees two things: my glance and also the way my laughter cuts off abruptly. I start to step backward, out of the minefield, but he takes hold of my upper arms and I allow it. I let him keep me there, under the mistletoe, looking down into my eyes while my boyfriend is in Florida and Oliver’s girlfriend is…
Actually, I have no idea where Ainsley is.
Oliver must see the turmoil on my face, because he gives me the gentlest of smiles. “It’s okay, June.” He leans over and grazes my cheek with his lips. They’re softer than I would have guessed. Warmer. Sweeter.
I suddenly realize I’ve closed my eyes, and I pop them back open. Oliver’s smile morphs into a grin. “Nailed it.” My eyebrows rise in a question, which he answers. “Tradition.”
He’s turned it into our playlist. Lightened the mood. Changed the meaning of the moment.
It’s the right thing to do.
“Mistletoe is an American cultural tradition,” I inform him, playing along. “Not a high school one.”
“Still,” he says, and I relent.
“Fine. You can have a song.”
“Cutting Crew or Heart?” Oliver taps his chin in mock consideration, and I give an overly dramatic sigh. “I’m torn. What do you think?”
“I found it!” Marley rushes back in, waving a paper at me. “It’s the gift certificate for a massage that I traded your mom.”
I tuck it into a pocket. Apparently Oliver’s mother also dabbles in the gypsy ways. “Thank you for having me over,” I tell her, and then I follow Oliver away from the mistletoe and out into the snow.