Skinny(12)

“Principal Brown, members of the School Board, teachers, parents, friends, and fellow classmates, it is an honor to speak to all of you today. Go Hornets!”

I slowly stretch my feet out in front of me, trying to make myself longer. Leaner. It isn’t working. Kristen makes a big huffy noise.

“God. You are a cow!” Skinny fills in her thoughts.

I tune out a couple of sentences into Tracey’s speech. I watch Jackson.

Back when we were ten we’d never seen snow before. So when the weatherman announced the possibility, it was like Christmas came early. There was a buzz every where. Grocery stores, sidewalks, libraries, and, most of all, school. Everyone wanted to talk about the weather and the possibility of snow. When it actually happened, I was stunned. I opened my upstairs bedroom curtain to see every thing coated in white. I hardly slept the night before, wishing for the possibility. My mom came in and told me the even better news: School had been canceled. I did a snow dance in my bedroom. It was perfect. I thought it couldn’t be a more perfect day. I was wrong.

Jackson knocked on the door around ten that morning. I dug up every piece of winter clothes I could find and met him at the door with rubber rain boots and two gloves that didn’t match. I had on two sweaters, a coat a size too small, and three pairs of socks. I walked like a mummy rising from the dead. Jackson had a hooded sweatshirt on over several layers that >made him look like a pillow-top mattress. His eyes were bright with excitement, and he clapped his red-gloved hands together and stomped off his boots on my porch.

The sun sparkled off the white piles of snow on the bare branches of the trees, making starlike shimmers of ice. The few orange leaves left on the tree limbs drooped off the brown sticks in surrender. Every once in a while a big plop of snow fell out of the tops, reminding us both that the melting had already started. We had to enjoy it fast.

“This is your opportunity to make a difference in the world . . . blah blah blah,” Tracey drones from the podium.

The air was visible every where. Puffs from our mouths, from cars, from the tops of houses. Little white clouds of excitement. The cold made our cheeks pink, and I had to blink the dryness out of my eyes. A flake landed, like a frozen moment in time, on Jackson’s thick, black lashes. He blinked, but it stayed stubbornly in place. I reached up to brush it off. My throat ached from breathing in the air, but I didn’t mind.

I remember crunching down the sidewalk toward the soccer field, delighted with the double trail of boot prints left behind. No one had been there before us. Not even a rabbit or a squirrel. It was a white stretch of untouched fun. We stomped out into the field, laughing and slip-sliding on an icy undercoat of grass. Jackson scooped up a big pile of powder and plopped it down on my head. I squealed and rolled away, reaching for my revenge scoop to push down the back of his sweatshirt. The fight was on. I ducked behind a park bench and just missed a flying snowball that broke up into a fine mist of powder as it hit a tree trunk behind my head. I waggled my fingers beside my face and stuck my tongue out at him.

“You’re going to get it now!” he yelled.

“You couldn’t hit the side of a barn,” I yelled back.

I ran, and he chased me. Catching me by the soccer goals, he grabbed me around the waist, and we rolled onto the field. Lying on our backs, the cold seeping beneath our layers of clothes, we gasped for breath. I opened my mouth at the sky and stretched out my tongue. A perfectly aimed snowflake drifted down and landed on its outstretched tip. I glanced over at Jackson. He was watching me so intently, so strangely. He rolled over suddenly, heavy with all his layers of clothes on top of me, his hands outstretched to clasp mine in the snow. He looked down at me.

“How did it taste?” he asked.

I could hardly breathe, but it had nothing to do with the cold now. “Wet,” I said.

The sun shining over the top of his head left a shimmer behind like a halo. I narrowed my eyes to see him better. His face was so close. His cheeks so red with the cold, his eyelashes wet and spiky. I wanted to push his hair out of his eyes, but he held my hands down into the snow on each side of my body. And I didn’t want him to move. I didn’t want to do anything to make him move.

“My nose is cold,” I said, because I needed to say something. I thought he would laugh and roll off of me. I thought that would be the end of things. Instead, he leaned in even closer. Closer. And then he kissed the tip of my nose. Very softly. I blinked up at him in amazement. He kissed me again. This time on the lips. Soft at first and then a little more urgent. Our cold lips melded together in a frozen moment of absolute perfection.