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.

Being a bit of a lemming, I did. But this time, it worked out, because that’s when I noticed that Noah was watching me. He said, “I’m so glad you took some.” I asked him why, because I really think I suspected it was all a bet. (“Okay, I’ll ask her to come, but you guys have to give me twenty bucks if I can make her eat pickled fish.”) And he said, “Because I’ve been eating it.” I was still standing there with what I assume was a very enchanting expression of total stupidity etched on my face, so he added, “And I couldn’t kiss you unless you’d had some, too.”

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

“Make sure she knows where everything is, Stuart. If you want anything during the night, you just get it. You make yourself at home. You’re one of ours now, Julie.”

“I just had to look at two hundred photos on a digital picture frame,” he said. “Two hundred. Mrs. Henderson really wanted me to know just how amazing it was that it could hold two hundred photos. Did I mention that there were two hundred of them? Anyway.”

By the time Debbie bum-rushed the mummy-wrapped Rachel out into the wild, I had calmed myself. I

“I followed your footsteps,” he said, in answer to the unspoken question. “Snow makes it easy.” I had been tracked, like a bear. “Sorry to make you go to all that trouble,” I said. “I didn’t have to go that far, really. You’re about three streets over. You just kept going in loops.” A really inept bear.

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.’”

“Merry Christmas, asshats.”

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

“You do not like cheerleaders. You think they are lame. You like cute, funny, emo girls who I will enjoy hanging out with.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Yeah, that didn’t work,” I said. “Damn it.” She smiled.