The Tragedy Paper (4 page)

Duncan knew he should go to dinner. By now everyone had probably had a chance to talk about their treasures. He didn’t want to miss that entirely. But Tim and Vanessa were actually in the hotel room. Alone. That was surprising, and seriously hard to imagine. He was dying to know what happened there. He’d listen just a little longer, he decided. Maybe just ten more minutes.

Something changed between the time she called out to me in the hall and the time I came into the room. She had been pretty nice getting there. Maybe it was part of her plan, but I actually don’t think so. Maybe she suddenly felt as uncomfortable as I did. Who knows? We never really talked about that later; it wasn’t one of the things that came up.

Vanessa had already claimed the bed closest to the window, and was unrolling the wire of her iPod and placing an earbud in each ear. I walked by her to the window and looked out. The view of incoming planes would have been amazing if the snow wasn’t so heavy and if there were any incoming planes. The wind had died down. A flag across the way was barely blowing anymore, but the snow looked pretty deep—probably five or six inches already, and it was still coming down.

“Are you hungry?” I asked, turning back toward the room. How was I going to make it through the night so close to her? I would never be able to relax, let alone sleep. I should have stayed in the hall.

She didn’t respond. I tapped her foot and she jumped a bit. She reluctantly lowered the volume on her iPod and looked at me expectantly—I had the distinct feeling I was bothering her.

“Are you hungry? We could order room service.”

“Okay,” she said, turning off her iPod but leaving the earbuds in. “Is there a menu?”

I found one on the desk and handed it to her. She smelled like lemon mixed with Tide. I wasn’t really that hungry, but I felt the urge to keep busy.

“How about a club sandwich and fries?” she asked.

“Okay,” I said. “Do they have steak—filet mignon, maybe? That seems like a good room service thing to order.”

She looked. “Yep.”

I picked up the phone and dialed the operator. She went back to her music.

“Hey, no,” she called before anyone answered, pulling out her earbuds. “I have a better idea.”

“Hello? Room service,” someone said in my ear. I felt like a deer trapped in a car’s headlights. What should I do? Hang up? Stick to our original plan?

“Hi, we’re in room 956, and we wanted to order room service, please,” I somehow said. “Can you hold on one minute?”

I put my hand over the mouthpiece of the heavy phone.

“What’s your idea?”

“Let’s order breakfast for dinner, I love doing that,” she said. “Pancakes, bacon, sausage—all of it. Oh, and do they have any cinnamon buns?”

I smiled to myself because it fit in with the fantasy that was quickly developing in my mind: the normal rules didn’t apply—checking into a hotel with a beautiful girl, breakfast for dinner. What else could it mean?

I cleared my throat and ordered everything from the breakfast menu.

“Would you like a pot of coffee with that, sir?” the voice asked me.

“Sure, why not,” I said.

“Give us about half an hour, then, sir,” the voice said.

“Okay, thanks.”

I turned on the TV and waited. When the knock finally came, I almost jumped three feet into the air.

“What is it?” Vanessa asked, looking up.

“Just room service,” I said, embarrassed.

Once everything was inside the room, Vanessa got up and pulled off all the silver domes. There was a large stack of steaming pancakes dripping with butter and white powdered sugar, bacon and sausage and a loaflike meat I couldn’t identify, an omelet with miniwaffles, and a small plate of cinnamon buns.

“What do you want?” she asked. I took a few steps toward
the movable table. I could smell all the food, but I tried to catch her scent over it. I pretended to look at the choices, but I imagined I could feel energy coming off her arm, like she was electric or something. I took it in for a minute and then moved back.

“You choose,” I said, trying to breathe normally.

“How about we share?” she said, smiling at me.

She took the plate with the pancakes and cut the stack in half. With her perfect hands, she made two perfect plates with a little bit of everything. What would it feel like to be touched by one of those hands? When she thrust a plate at me, I was sure I was blushing, which, as you might imagine, looks a little like a brush fire on my face.

“Yum!” she called out as she sat on the edge of her bed and ate hungrily, dripping syrup on the blanket and her shirt. I was in awe of her lack of self-consciousness.

I sat at the desk. Everything was delicious, and once I started eating, I couldn’t stop.

“So, what do you like to do? I mean, what are your hobbies?” she asked. I couldn’t help but laugh. She was trying to make dinner conversation.

“I like to read,” I said, realizing immediately that it sounded dorky. “And I like to run. Cross-country.” I didn’t tell her how running was one of the best ways for me to escape and be alone. But I did tell her it made me happy.

“Me too! I’m on the track team at school,” she said, looking up. She dripped some maple syrup on her leg. She
saw me watching and used her finger to wipe it off, then stuck her finger in her mouth.

“Oh, sorry, I am such a pig. I love this stuff,” she said. “At school they do this once a week—have breakfast for dinner. Waffles, omelets, frittatas, quiche, cinnamon buns. Some people hate it, but I love it.”

“Where do you—” I started to say, realizing I had no idea where she was traveling to, but she cut me off.

“You know what this makes me want to do?” she said, looking the happiest I’d seen her. “This makes me want to play in the snow!”

“You’re kidding me, right?” I said. “I book the last hotel room within twenty miles and all you want to do is go outside?”

“Well, yes, actually,” she said, smiling. “But I’ll be happy to come back in after.”

“That’s a relief,” I said. “For a minute I thought I did all this for nothing. And can I mention how nasty it is out there?”

She jumped up and went to the window.

“It doesn’t look so bad,” she said. “There’s a parking lot right down there that looks empty. We could build a snowman!”

I joined her at the window and looked down. Our hands were dangling next to each other. Again, the energy.

“Maybe we could make a snow statue of that man who got sick on the plane,” I suggested.

She looked at me like I was crazy.

“Like a voodoo snowman,” I explained. “Maybe we could make him better that way.”

We laughed for a minute, and it felt really good.

“I wonder what was wrong with him,” I said.

“Brain aneurysm is what I was thinking,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Oh, I was hoping he was just dehydrated or something,” I said seriously.

Again, she laughed. I hadn’t meant that to be funny, but I would take her laughter any way I could get it. I stood there trying to think of what else she might find funny.

“So, what is it about eating pancakes that makes you want to play in the snow?” I finally asked, desperate to break the silence.

“Every winter when I’m home, my mother makes us pancakes on a snowy morning—just like this with bacon and syrup—and then my brothers and I spend the rest of the day in the yard playing. It’s usually one of my favorite days of break.”

“How many brothers do you have?” I asked, stalling. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go out there.

“Stop stalling,” she said, reading my mind. “And I have three brothers. Are you ready?”

“Yes,” I said.

We started pulling stuff out of our backpacks. I decided to keep on my jeans and put my sweats on when I got back
inside. Did they have holes? Please, don’t let them have holes!

She was already wrapping a green scarf around her neck and pulling on her coat. When I didn’t move, she stopped and looked at me.

“I’m not going to give up,” she said. “If you don’t come, I guess I’ll just go alone. You know that book
If You Give a Moose a Muffin
? Well, in this case,
If You Give a Girl a Pancake in a Snowstorm
 … I am unstoppable.”

Vanessa tossed me my jacket and I put it on, watching as she continued to twist her green scarf around her neck so that her braids were stuck underneath it. I had an urge to walk over and free them from their captivity—but I didn’t.

We stood for a minute and then walked to the door at the same time, almost knocking each other down like a comedy routine, and she giggled. I stepped back, letting her get to the door first, and followed her through.

“So, what do you think, snowman or snowball fight?” she asked as we stood in the elevator. For a second I had almost forgotten where we were going, I was so focused on her. “If you choose snowball fight, we have to agree on an amount of time each of us is allowed to build a fort and compile ammunition. I always think seven or eight minutes are enough; my brothers usually fight for ten.”

“Wow, you’re really serious about this,” I said. “But I have a better idea.”

“What?” she asked just as the doors opened and we saw
the crowded lobby. For a minute the spell was broken. I was quiet as I followed Vanessa out of the elevator. All the faces turned toward us, and it didn’t seem like they were looking at my strangeness or Vanessa’s beauty. Their looks were calculating and a bit desperate.

“Why do I feel like someone is going to jump us for our room key?” I whispered to Vanessa as we walked quickly toward the door. It whooshed open and we both breathed a sigh of relief.

“So, what’s your idea?” she asked again.

“How about we build an igloo?” I offered. Even now I don’t know where that came from. I was never allowed to build them when I was a kid because my mother thought they were dangerous (and sand tunnels too, for that matter). I never understood that. You could always push your way out, right? Besides, at that moment, the idea of being buried in the snow with Vanessa sounded pretty good.

Vanessa surveyed the snow, judging how deep it was, and then leaned over to pick up a handful and consider its texture.

“Good packing snow,” she concluded. “I’ve never made an igloo. How do you do it?”

I really had no idea, but there was no turning back now.

“Allow me to demonstrate the fine art of igloo assembly, Vanessa Sheller,” I said confidently. “Let’s push the snow into a big pile, maybe over there, and hollow it out. Then we can pack down the back and it should hold.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” she said, but didn’t make a move to start building. “Wow, it’s beautiful out here.” I watched as she lifted her head to the sky and then caught a few snowflakes on her tongue. But for some reason what I was really mesmerized by was the way the snow collected at the top of her boots. I wondered if it dropped down at all to her ankles, making them cold. And then I imagined her socks. I hadn’t noticed them up in the room, but now I wished I had. Were they striped? Maybe they were green and yellow—that seemed to be her color combination. And what about her toenails—were they painted? And then I realized that standing out there in all the snow made me feel, amazingly, like I blended in instead of sticking out.

“What are you waiting for?” I asked, starting to kick snow over to one corner of the empty parking lot just off to the side of the hotel. Vanessa joined in, picking up armfuls of the wet snow and adding to my pile. We worked like that for a long time, and eventually I gave up trying to stay dry. My jeans got soaking wet and my jacket was snow-covered. I didn’t have a hat with me so my hair was wet, but I liked it because I knew when my hair was wet, it could, especially in the dark, look almost brown.

A snowball hit me from the side and I looked up to see Vanessa smiling at me.

“Very funny,” I said, trying to act normal, not wanting to let on that I could barely breathe and that I knew I would
remember that smile, and the feel of that snowball, for a long time.

“Hey, you didn’t finish your side of the igloo,” I said.

“You’re a real taskmaster,” she said, but she said it nicely.

“You’re the one who wanted to come out and play in the snow,” I said. She had gone to the other side of the structure we were making and couldn’t see me, so I had time to make six snowballs.

“The operative word there would be
play
,” she said.

I put the snowballs inside my jacket and walked around the front of the igloo, pretending to survey our progress. And then I whacked her with one snowball after another. By the time I threw the sixth one at her, she was laughing so hard she had to sit down in the snow. That laughter … it was like a drug. The more I got, the more I wanted.

By then our pile had grown into a minimountain, so I got down on my stomach in the snow and started scooping out the inside. My hands were frozen, but I kept scooping anyway. Before I knew it, I had a little room carved out. I backed into the space.

“Hey,” I called from inside. “It worked.”

Vanessa came around and peered in skeptically. Then she turned and shimmied in beside me. It was a tiny space, so she was practically on top of me. The left half of her body was right up against the right half of mine. Her wet
hair gave off a lavender or rosemary scent that I hadn’t smelled before. I closed my eyes and breathed in.

Dare I kiss her?

Five hours before, it was the last place in the world I thought I would be—like if, when I had walked into the airport, someone had said to me that in five hours I would be on a sandy pink beach in the Bahamas swinging on a hammock with a piña colada, it was that unbelievable. I moved my hand on top of her mitten.

“Is your hand warm?” I asked.

“Yeah, these are great mittens,” she said, looking down at her hands and, I guess, my bare hand. “They’re my brother Joey’s, actually. I stuck them in my bag at the last minute—he is going to be so mad.”

“Can you take one off?” I heard myself saying. “My hand is frozen.”