Snowbound

“Um,” Fiona agreed, looking after the petite girl.

She and John followed her, Fiona keeping her voice low.

“What I can’t figure out is whether she’s really that

together. The sad part is, I’ll probably never know. One

of the frustrations of teaching. You see what they might

become, then most of the time, you never find out if they

did. If that makes sense.”

“Surely in a private school you’ll hear.”

“Maybe. Yeah, you’re right. In Portland it was different.”

The kitchen door swung shut behind Erin, leaving

the two of them alone.

John gripped Fiona and turned her to face him, his

easy manner gone. “We didn’t get a chance to talk.”

“No. It’s okay.” What “it” was, she couldn’t have said.

Her heart? If so, she was once again lying. It wasn’t okay.

His hand tightened. “Later?”

The door swung open again, releasing a burst of

voices. Hopper started to say, “Where’s the…” then

stopped. “Oh. Sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about,” Fiona said. “We were just

talking about how we’d get the van back on the road.”

She was a little bit appalled at how readily she’d

taken to telling lies, one after another.

“Muscle,” John said, putting a hand on the door and

gesturing for her to precede him. “Good thing you have

the boys with you.”

“We can do anything boys can do,” Kelli insisted.

“Um…what are we going to do?”

Fiona laughed, the pressure in her chest easing.

“Hoist the van back onto the road.”

“Oh. We can do that. Right?” She looked around the

table. “Girl power? And I guess guy power, too?”

Fiona cast John a grateful glance and sat down as he

went into the pantry and brought out a container of

cookies he must have whipped up during the day. The

kids excitedly talked about getting the van on the lane,

how they’d turn it around, how weird it would be to go

home.

“It’s like, anything could have happened in the world

while we were up here,” Dieter said. “I mean, the school

could have burned down, and we wouldn’t know.”

They were all briefly silent, contemplating the possibility with awe.

“I’ll try to call Mr. Schneider again,” Fiona said.

“If I get him, I’ll be sure to ask whether the school is

still standing.”

“Maybe it snowed so much, the gym roof collapsed.”

Kelli sounded hopeful. “No more P.E.”

“The gym roof is kind of flat,” Troy said. “Hey, you

never know.”

They launched into an entertaining litany of other

possibilities: the principal had quit, parents had moved

and left no forwarding address, colleges had gotten

together and announced that henceforth SAT results

would no longer be required for admission decisions

and the quarterback of the football team had heard that

Kelli was missing, perhaps dead, and realized he was

forever, tragically in love with her.

“Of course, he’d have to know who I am for that to

work,” she admitted practically.

“He does know, he’s just suppressed the knowledge,”

Tabitha contributed.

“Who is the quarterback?” Dieter the nerd asked.

Even John was smiling as they razzed Dieter.

When only crumbs remained in the cookie container,

the kids wandered back to the living room and their

various games and books. Erin had found a book of

Sudoku puzzles on the shelf, many unattempted, and

she and Troy huddled over it. While eating cookies,

he’d grumbled about the battery on his iPod being gone.

History. No charger. No music. Evidently he was consoling himself with number puzzles.

Fiona pretended to read. It seemed an eternity before,

in twos and threes, the teenagers headed upstairs. Fiona

had quit worrying about what configurations of gender

disappeared into rooms together. Now that the budding

romance between Hopper and Amy had cooled, Dieter

and Willow were the only potential pair, and they were

far too inexperienced with the opposite sex and too

awkward with each other to do more than sneak a first,