“Lost it,” I said. “Whoops.”

This was the first time in all of this that Stuart actually looked up at me. I had dropped the horrible grimace by this point. He stepped forward, lifted my chin, and kissed me. Kissed me, kissed me. And I didn’t notice the cold, or care that the girls who now had my phone came up behind us and started going, “OoooOOOoooOOoooh.”

“One thing,” I said, when we had broken apart and the swirling feeling in my head subsided. “Maybe . . . don’t tell your mom too much about this. I think she has ideas.”

“What?” he asked, all innocence, as he put an arm around my shoulders and led me back toward his house. “Don’t your parents cheer and stare when you make out with someone? Is that weird where you come from? I guess they don’t get to see it much, though. From jail, I mean.”

“Shut it, Weintraub. If I knock you down in the snow, these kids will swarm and eat you.”

A lone truck puttered past, and Tinfoil Guy gave us a stiff salute as he drove farther into Gracetown. We all moved to make way for him—Stuart, me, the little girls. Stuart zipped open his coat and invited me to tuck myself under his arm, and then we made our way through the snow.

“You want to go back to my house the long way?” he asked. “Or the shortcut? You have to be cold.”

“Long way,” I replied. “The long way, for sure.”

a cheertastic christmas miracle

john green

To Ilene Cooper, who has guided me through so many blizzards

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—”

“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?”