Jackson Pearce - Cold Spell

Now it’s my turn to laugh, and as I do I lift up, feel his breath warm my still-freezing nose. We pause for a moment, just a tiny moment, and then our lips meet. This time, it feels like the kissing in movies looks, long and powerful and sweet and as if it’s melting me. He smells like cinnamon and soap, same as he always has—

“Whoa,” he says, pulling back.

I freeze. “What?” I ask, wondering if I should be embarrassed. What happened?

“Look,” he says, pulling one hand away to motion at the world around us. “It’s starting to snow.”

It’s tiny snow, sharp and icy, the sort that you don’t want to play in. I see people running to the windows of the glass-and-steel buildings to stare at it whirling around the city. It’s gotten colder almost instantly, a fact I don’t notice so much as I notice how hard I’m pressing against Kai to combat the new chill. His arms are still around my waist, the unzipped army jacket he always wears open on either side of me. It’s a silly jacket, oversize and at odds with the name-brand clothes Kai wears, but it’s incredibly warm and can almost wrap around both of us.

“It’s early for snow,” I say, mumbling the words into his shirt.

“Way early,” he agrees. “The roses aren’t going to last if we’re already getting snow in October.”

He’s right—I look around at the tiny specks of snow that cling to the flowers. They make the roses look sick with something akin to chicken pox, tiny spots covering bright red flesh. The wind rattles them around a bit. Is it snowing harder?

“Let’s go inside,” he suggests.

“We aren’t technically out of school yet,” I remind him. “We could build a fire?”

“Yeah…” Kai says, glancing to the metal barrel on a corner of the roof. We hauled it up here ages ago. Probably not the safest thing in the world, but it’s pretty glorious for roasting marshmallows over.

“We could go to my apartment,” I say, “if we’re quiet. Mom’s still sleeping, I think.” Truthfully, I’m not sure she knows what time school gets out anyway, though I’ve never told Kai this. The magic of us sneaking around would be lost if my mother made it easy by way of indifference.

“Nah, I don’t want to risk it,” Kai says as the snowfall undeniably intensifies. “We can just wait by the roof door till we’re out of school. I don’t want to be out in this.”

“All right,” I agree, and he steps away from me; the icy air sweeps around my body. I hug my own coat closer, but it’s nothing compared with Kai’s chest against me. He lets his fingers pause on mine for a moment, but then releases them, too—the path out of the roses is too narrow to walk side by side. We weave through the flowers, listening to the traffic below slow down to a crawl, drivers inching through the snow as if it’s feet thick instead of barely coating the ground. As we reach the access door, the wind picks up, blowing so hard that Kai struggles to open it. He yanks and tugs, and the wind grows stronger.

Are we trapped up here? Kai finds my eyes, and his are full of matching worry. He turns back to the door, leaving room on the handle for me to grab hold, too. Together we wrest the door open, sliding into the stairwell. We’re barely on the top step when the door slams shut. The wind howls behind it, as if it’s angry.

“I wonder if Grandma has noticed the weather yet,” he says, sitting down on the top step. He checks his watch—thirty minutes until we’d be out of school. Is she ranting about the Snow Queen already? Winter’s royalty, the ruler of the beasts Grandma Dalia fears. We’ve heard about the other beasts in somewhat disgusting detail—how they turn from men into monsters with fur and fangs, that they rip you limb from limb, eat you from the inside out. But the Snow Queen… we know little of her, other than that the thought of her makes Grandma Dalia’s face go white.

There are no windows in the stairwell, but we can still hear the storm outside. How much is on the ground now? Is it sticking, or just melting away like most Southern snow? It’s only October, surely it isn’t accumulating…. The wind howls again. Kai grows quiet—though he’d never admit it, sometimes I think he’s inherited Grandma Dalia’s fear of snow and the cold. Only fifteen more minutes till we can go downstairs, pretend as if we ran home. Seconds tick by slowly, then minutes, ten more to go—

There’s a crash downstairs, a bang. Voices shouting, someone running. We’re on Kai’s side of the building; he rises and walks down a few steps. The noise continues, muffled voices… Kai glances back at me and in a split second, we’ve decided to ignore the fact that we’re ten minutes early. We bolt down the stairs together, drowning the sound of the wind with our heavy footsteps. Down to the eighth floor: nothing but closed doors and piled-up newspapers. The seventh, all’s quiet. I swallow. The sixth. The floor Kai and I live on. Is someone being robbed? Arrested? We round the corner.

The hall is packed with people.

Doors are open, neighbors in graying robes and boxer shorts leaning out to see what’s happening. Kai speeds up, we run, which one is it— oh .

Paramedics are running in and out of Kai’s apartment; the floor is wet with snow, making their boots squeak on the dirty tile. Kai skids to a stop at his door, eyes wide; we reach for each other’s hands automatically.

Inside the apartment, it is dark. Stained-glass shades on lamps, blinds on windows, clouds outside. It smells like baking and scented candles, things that have always contributed to it feeling more like home to me than my own apartment. Perhaps that’s why it stabs at me to see the paramedics inside, bunching up rugs and knocking around furniture. They’re using flashlights, moving them so quickly that it’s almost like watching lightning flicker across the room. The paramedics surround a white thing in a sea of darkness—a gurney, with an old woman in a nightgown on it.

Grandma Dalia probably once had Kai’s olive-toned skin, but now it’s pale with age and illness. Her eyes are cloudy, her hair wispy, and an oxygen mask is pressed against her face, fogging up the tiniest bit with each exhale. They push her toward us, running over the remains of a broken mirror that’s fallen from the wall. Kai steps away from me to meet her at the door frame.

“Grandma?” he says weakly, like a child. She looks at him, stretching her fingers out like she wants to reach for him.

“You must be Kai. She was asking for you,” a thick, strong-looking paramedic says, capturing Kai’s attention. He stops in the door frame for a beat as the others move the gurney to the stairs.

Kai and the paramedic talk, but I don’t hear most of it—I’m too busy watching his grandmother’s chest rise and fall, so shaky that it looks like it might shatter on the way down.

“She was stabilizing fine, but then she got scared when the wind cracked a window. Do you have a preference where we take her?”

“A preference?”

“Which hospital?” the paramedic says.

“I…” Kai looks from his grandmother to the paramedic and back again, as if he’s being asked something in a foreign language.

“Piedmont,” I cut in. “She went to Piedmont last year when she fell, right, Kai?”

“Right,” he says, staring as the gurney disappears at the top of the stairs. The paramedic nods and jogs after his fellows.

“I’ll go get the station wagon so we can follow,” I say quickly, grabbing the keys to his grandmother’s car off the counter. Kai looks at me blankly. “Maybe you should bring her medicines, so you can show the doctors what she’s on?” I suggest. He half nods and disappears deeper into the apartment.