Let it Snow

by John Green

Before the Smorgasbord, Noah Price was just a star in my sky . . . constant, familiar, bright, and far above me. I’d known Noah since the fourth grade, but it felt like I knew him in the same way that I know people on television. I knew the name. I watched the show. Sure, Noah was a bit closer than that . . . but somehow when it’s real, when it’s your life . . . that person can feel even farther off and more unobtainable than an actual celebrity. Proximity doesn’t breed familiarity.

knowing something is beautiful and caring about it are two very different things, and I didn’t care.

“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?

Something about me has always liked the drama and inconvenience of bad weather. The worse the better, really.

“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.’”

Cheesy waffles, I was thinking, taste like love without the fear of love’s dissolution,

It’s such a disaster, whenever, in the course of human relationships, someone begins to chisel away at the wall of separation between friendship and kissing. Breaking down that wall is the kind of story that might have a happy middle—oh, look, we broke down this wall, I’m going to look at you like a girl and you’re going to look at me like a boy and we’re going to play a fun game called Can I Put My Hand There What About There What About There. And sometimes that happy middle looks so great that you can convince yourself that it’s not the middle but will last forever.

And I did not want to have a happy middle with the Duke at the expense of an Inevitably Disastrous Forever.

But then again (and here is one of my main complaints about human consciousness): once you think a thought, it is extremely difficult to unthink it. And I had thought the thought

“Not in a castle nor in a mansion but in a Waffle House shall we find our salvation!”

“I always had this idea that you should never give up a happy middle in the hopes of a happy ending, because there is no such thing as a happy ending. Do you know what I mean? There is so much to lose.”