Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances (10 page)

“Todd, the
Cougar
?”

“It’s not a nickname. He’s
literally
the Cougar. He’s our mascot. He wears the cougar costume and does the cougar dances and everything. For a minute, my brain was trying to put it all together . . . trying to figure out why Chloe and Todd the Cougar were in a Starbucks bathroom. I guess my first hope was that it couldn’t be anything bad because everyone seemed to know they were in there. But from the look on Addie’s face, and the look on Chloe’s face—I didn’t look at Todd—it finally clicked. I still don’t know if they went in there because they saw me coming, or if they’d been in there for a while. If you’re hiding from your boyfriend in the bathroom with the Cougar . . . the details kind of don’t matter.”

I momentarily forgot all about my phone call. I was in that Starbucks with Stuart, seeing a cheerleader I didn’t know emerge from a bathroom with Todd the Cougar. Except in my vision, he was wearing the cougar outfit, which probably wasn’t how it really went down.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing. I just stood there, thinking I was going to be sick on the spot. But Chloe got furious. With me.”

“How does
that
work?” I said, furious on his behalf.

“I think she was freaked out by the fact that she’d been caught, and it was the only way she could think to react. She accused me of spying on her. She called me possessive. She said I put too much pressure on her. I think she meant emotionally—I guess—but it came out sounding
so bad
. So on top of it all, she made me sound like a letch in front of everyone in Starbucks, which might as well be everyone in town because nothing stays quiet here. I wanted to say, ‘You’re making out with the Cougar in the Starbucks bathroom.
I am not the villain of this story.
’ Only I didn’t say that because I literally couldn’t talk. So it must have looked like I
agreed
with her. Like I was admitting that I was a possessive, grabby, sex-freak stalker . . . and not the guy who was in love with her, who had been in love with her for more than a year, who would have done anything she asked. . . . ”

There probably was a point after the breakup when Stuart told this story all the time, but he clearly hadn’t done it in a while. He was out of practice. His expression didn’t change a lot—all of his emotion seemed to come out of his hands. He had stopped wringing them, and now they shook, just ever so slightly.

“Addie finally walked her outside to talk her down,” he said. “That’s how it all ended. And I got a latte, on the house. So it wasn’t a total loss. I became the guy who was famously dumped in public when his girlfriend cheated with the Cougar. Anyway . . . I had a point in saying all of that. My point is, that guy . . . ”

He pointed accusingly at the phone.

“ . . . is a dick. Although that probably doesn’t mean much to you right now.”

My memories of the last year were playing back through my mind at super-speed, but I was looking at them all from a different camera angle. There I was, Noah holding my hand, one step ahead of me, pulling me through the hall, talking to everyone else but me along the way. I sat with him in the front row at school basketball games, even though he knew that ever since I’d gotten hit in the face with a wayward ball I was scared of those seats. But still, we sat there, me frozen in terror, watching a game that never interested me to begin with. Yes, I sat with the upper-echelon seniors at lunch, but the conversations were repetitive. All they ever talked about was how busy they all were, how they were building their résumés for their college applications. How they were meeting with recruiters. How they were organizing their calendars online. Who was recommending them.

God . . . I’d been bored for a year. I hadn’t talked about
myself
in ages. Stuart was talking about me. He was paying attention. It felt foreign, a little embarrassingly intimate, but kind of great. My eyes filled up.

Seeing this, Stuart braced himself and opened his arms a little, as if inviting me to give up my efforts to contain myself. We had inched marginally closer together at some point, and there was an expectant energy. Something was about to give. I felt myself gearing up to start bawling. This made me angry. Noah didn’t deserve it. I was
not going to start crying.

So I kissed him.

I mean, really kissed him. I knocked him backward. He kissed me back. A good kiss, too. Not too dry, not too wet. It was a bit on the frantic side, maybe because neither one of us had done the mental preparation, so we were both thinking,
Oh, right! Kissing! Quickly! Quickly! More movement! Deploy tongue!

It took us about a minute to recover and settle into a slightly slower pattern. I felt myself kind of floating away, when there was a huge stomping and crashing and yelling from downstairs. Apparently, Debbie and Rachel had chosen this moment to tie up the sled dogs and return from their personal Iditarod through the streets of Gracetown. They tromped back inside in that ridiculously loud way you do when you come out of snow or rain. (Why does wet weather make you louder?)

“Stuart! Jubilee! I have special cupcakes from Santa!” Debbie was screaming.

Neither of us moved. I was still leaning on top of Stuart, essentially pinning him down. We heard her come halfway up the stairs, where she must have seen the bedroom light on.

Again, the normal parent reaction would have been to say something like, “You had better come out here this moment or I am releasing the tiger!” But Debbie was not a normal parent, so we heard her giggle and creep away, saying, “Shhh! Rachel! Come with Mommy! Stuart is busy!”

Debbie’s sudden appearance in this scene made my stomach turn. Stuart rolled his eyes back in his head in agony. I released him, and he jumped up.

“I should go down,” he said. “You okay? Need anything or—”

“I’m great!” I said, with sudden, insane enthusiasm. But Stuart was by now well used to my tactics, my attempts to make myself look sane.

Quite sensibly, he bolted from the room.

Chapter Twelve

W
ant to know how long it took me to break up with my “perfect” boyfriend and make out with a new guy? It had taken . . . wait for it . . .
twenty-three minutes
. (I noticed Stuart’s clock when I first picked up the phone. It wasn’t like I had a stopwatch.)

Much as I would have liked to, I couldn’t hide upstairs forever. Sooner or later, I was going to have to come down and face the world. I sat on the floor in the doorway and listened as closely as I could to what was happening downstairs. Mostly, all I could hear was Rachel banging on some toys, and then I heard someone go outside. That seemed as good a cue as any. I quietly hit the stairs. In the living room, Rachel was noodling around with the Mouse Trap, which still sat out on the table. She gave me a big, toothy smile.

“Were you playing with Stuart?” she asked.

The question was loaded. I was a filthy, filthy woman, and even the five-year-old knew it.

“Yes,” I said, trying to keep some dignity. “We were playing Mouse Trap. How was the snow, Rachel?”

“Mommy says that Stuart likes you. I can stick a marble in my nose. Wanna see?”

“No, you probably shouldn’t—”

Rachel stuck one of the Mouse Trap marbles right up her nose. She extracted it and held it up for examination. “See?” she said.

Oh, I saw all right.

“Jubilee? Is that you?”

Debbie appeared at the kitchen door, looking flushed and well exercised and very damp.

“Stuart just went across the street to help Mrs. Addler shovel her path,” she said. “He saw her struggling. She has a glass eye and a bad back, you see. You two have a . . . nice afternoon?”

“It was fine,” I said stiffly. “We played Mouse Trap.”

“Is that what they’re calling it these days?” she asked, throwing me a terrible grin. “I have to go give Rachel a quick bath. Feel free to make yourself some cocoa or whatever you like!”

She stopped short of adding “ . . . future child-bride of my only son.”

She rounded up Rachel with a pointed, “Come on, we can go upstairs
now
,” leaving me to the hot chocolate and my shame and misery. I went to the living room window and looked out. Sure enough, Stuart was out there, lending a glad hand to his neighbor in her moment of need. He was just getting away from me, of course. It only made sense. I would have done the same thing. It was perfectly reasonable to deduce that I was only going to get worse. I would keep spiraling down, sinking deeper and deeper into a mire of rash and largely inexplicable behaviors. Like my jailed parents before me, I was a live wire. Best to go and shovel a few tons of snow for a glass-eyed neighbor and hope I went away.

Which was precisely what I had to do. Go away. Get out of this house and his life while I still had a shred of dignity left. I would go and find my train, which was probably leaving town soon, anyway.

I moved quickly as soon as I made this decision, running to the kitchen. I picked up my phone from the counter, smacked it around a little, and poked at the on/off button. I didn’t expect this to work, but there was some mercy. After a moment or two, it struggled back into existence. The screen was off center and the words were scrambled, but there was some life in the thing.

My clothes, coat, shoes, and bag were all in the laundry room off of the kitchen, in various stages of dryness. I threw them on, leaving the sweat clothes on the washer. They had a container of plastic bags in the corner, so I took about ten of them. I felt bad taking something without asking, but plastic bags don’t really count as “something.” They’re like tissues, except less expensive. As a last gesture, I reached over and nabbed one of their holiday return address labels from an organizer on the counter. I would send them a note when I got home. I may have been a complete lunatic, but I was a complete lunatic with
manners
.

Obviously, I had to take the back door, the one we had come in the night before. If I went out the front, Stuart would see me. The snow had piled up against this door, at least two feet of it—and it was no longer the slushy, wet snow of the night before. It had hardened in the cold. But I was fueled by the power of confusion and panic, which, like I said, is always ready and waiting to get to work. I threw all my weight against the door, feeling it wobble and strain. I was worried that I might break it from the force, which would have put an entirely different complexion on my departure. I could envision it all too clearly: Stuart or Debbbie finding the dented door off its hinges, lying in the snow. “She came in, ravaged the boy, stole plastic bags, and ripped off the door in her escape,” the police would say in the APB. “Probably making her way to bust her parents out of jail.”

I managed to get it open just enough to force myself through, ripping my bags and scraping my arm in the process. Once I was out, it jammed in position, so I had to spend another two or three minutes pushing it shut. That accomplished, I faced another problem. I couldn’t return the way we had come, because I didn’t want to take another dip in the frozen stream. Not that I could have worked out that path anyway. All of our tracks were gone. I was on a slight rise, facing an unfamiliar cluster of scruffy bare trees and the backs of dozens of identical-looking houses. The only thing I knew for sure was that the stream was below me, probably somewhere in those trees. The safest bet was to stick close to the houses and weave my way through a few backyards. Then I could get back on a road, and from there, I assumed, it would be easy to find my way back to the interstate, the Waffle House, and my train.

See my previous note about me and my assumptions.

Stuart’s subdivision didn’t follow the lovely, neat logic of the streets of the Flobie Santa Village. These houses had been plunked down with an alarming randomness—unevenly spaced, on crooked lines, like whoever had designed the place had said, “We’ll just follow this cat, and wherever he sits down, we’ll build something.” The disorientation was so bad that I couldn’t even figure out where the road was supposed to be. Nothing had been plowed, and the streetlights of the night before were off. The sky was white instead of the crazy pink of the night before. It was the bleakest horizon I’ve ever seen, and there was no obvious route out.

As I trudged through the development, I had plenty of time to consider what I had just done to my life. How was I going to explain the breakup to my family? They
loved
Noah. Not as much as me, obviously, but a lot. My parents were clearly proud that I had such an impressive boyfriend. Then again, my parents were in jail over a Flobie Elf Hotel, so maybe they needed to get their priorities in order. Besides, if I said I was happier this way, they would accept it.

My friends, people at school . . . that was a different story. I hadn’t dated Noah for the perks—they were just part of the service.

And there was Stuart, of course.

Stuart, who had just witnessed me go through an entire rainbow of emotions and experiences. There was parents-have-just-been-jailed me, stuck-in-a-strange-town me, insane-and-can’t-shut-up me, kind-of-snarky-to-the-strange-guy-trying-to-be-helpful me, breakup me, and the extremely popular jump-on-top-of-you-unexpectedly me.

I had messed this up so very, very badly. All of it. The regret and humiliation hurt much more than the cold. It took me a few streets to realize that it wasn’t Noah I was really regretting . . . it was Stuart. Stuart who rescued me. Stuart who actually seemed to want to spend his time with me. Stuart who talked to me straight and told me not to sell myself short.

This was the Stuart who would be so relieved to find me gone, for all of the reasons I just listed. As long as the news stories about my parents’ arrest weren’t too detailed, I would be untraceable. Well, untraceable-ish. Maybe he could find me online somewhere, but he would never look. Not after the freak show I had just put on.

Unless I just wound up at his door again. Which, after an hour of wandering the development, I realized was a real danger. I was looking at the same stupid houses, getting stuck in cul-de-sacs. I occasionally stopped and asked for directions from people who were shoveling their driveways, but they all seemed really concerned that I was trying to walk that far and didn’t want to tell me how to go. At least half of them asked me to come inside and get warm, which sounded good, but I wasn’t taking any more chances. I had gone into one house in Gracetown, and look where it had gotten me.