The Beginning of After

the forehead with a fist. “I’m an idiot, even mentioning that.”
    I felt a phew flow out of me.
    But now David was somehow here, and Joe and I were so far apart, not even our breath was mingling anymore.
    “It’s okay,” I told Joe. “There’s time. Can you just take me home now?”

Chapter Thirty-three

    S now was coming, everyone said. And they were making a gigantic deal out of it too. First snow of the season, a White Christmas, and all that.
    “They say eight to ten inches,” announced Nana over the buzz of the TV as I was leaving for school.
    “Maybe we’ll get a snow day tomorrow and I won’t have to take Ms. Pryzwara’s physics test,” murmured Meg at her locker. She was just saying it to anyone, although I was the only person there.
    snoball fight n d parking lot, pass it on , read the text from Joe. I answered him back (cool) but didn’t pass it on.
    Suzie called me that afternoon to cancel our session that day. “Just to be safe, with the roads,” she said.
    We went home and the sky was still that teasing gray color, and everyone was bummed out. Even at night, I kept peering at the streetlamp at the end of our driveway, to see if there were flakes twirling in its little spotlight, but there was nothing but black night air. Oh well , I thought as I climbed into bed. It’ll probably just be a little showering of rain and everyone will shut up about snow for Christmas.
    But when I woke up the next morning, I knew instantly that it had happened. It was the quality of sound that gave it away—everything was just muffled . Tires passing on the road, birds chirping, and maybe somewhere off in the distance, a snowplow. I bolted up in bed and peeked through the blinds, and there were my woods, my trees and my rocks and my sloping ground, blanketed in bright, glaring white.
    I heard Nana turn on the television news downstairs, the sound that Toby and I used to get all excited about on days like this. He’d come in and scramble onto my bed and we’d cross our fingers in as many ways we could think of, and perk up our ears for Mom to shout the official snow day announcement.
    The thought of Toby on my bed in his dinosaur pajamas sent me all the way under the covers, where it was dark and sweaty and tears didn’t count, until a minute later when Nana poked her head in to say, “No school today, sweetie. Stay in bed as long as you like.”
    But even deep in the bed, the memories came to me, and when Masher barreled past Nana and did a flying leap onto my stomach, I took that as a cue to get the hell out.
    In my boots and ski pants and big puffy parka, I left the day’s first set of footprints up the middle of our unplowed street, alongside Masher’s as he bounded from one little snow pile to the other. Suddenly, none of the rules of the world applied. I didn’t have to make way for cars and I didn’t have to go to school, and all the neighbors in these houses with the smoke piping out of the chimneys didn’t have to go to work. And maybe I didn’t have to think about Mom and Dad and Toby, like I could get a snow day for that, too. And for worrying about Meg and Nana and college and what happened in Joe’s truck and of course, David’s emails.
    I thought about my canceled Suzie appointment and felt so very grateful that I’d already gotten my snow day for that. I knew she was going on vacation for a couple of weeks, and I wouldn’t see her until after the holidays.
    The crystals of the snow glistened in the sunlight. It was light, powdery stuff. Not good for snowballs or sledding, but prettier and sweeter, like sugar. I walked a big loop up and down our street and then past Meg’s house. I wanted desperately to go in. To pull her out of bed and pile into the family room to watch DVDs by their fireplace, drinking hot cocoa. But that was on the other side of a line I felt too wimpy to cross, so I kept walking, hoping Meg had been watching me from her window.
    Once back inside, I went into Toby’s room to see what was up with the foster cats.
    I crouched down to peer into the big dog crate. Lucky, who’d been curled up with her babies, got up and stretched, then walked out of the carrier without them. They were getting big now and wanted to move, move, move, so they followed their mother out of the carrier and into the room.
    One, two, three fluffy bodies, all striped, bounded past me. But there were four kittens in the litter.
    I poked my head into the crate. One kitten, the white