House Under Snow Read Online Free PDF

from the living room speakers. I quickly downed the rest of my beer and moved outside toward the keg. As I filled my cup again, I looked for Austin in the hazy blackness. The beer, the color of urine, was warm and came back up my throat after I pounded back the full glass.
    I watched the moon slip over the tops of the trees. Danny Keller took the empty cup from my hand and filled it once more. In that brief pause, bass throbbing through the open windows, I felt for one moment the courage I had been waiting for.
    I marched confidently through the crowd, looking for Austin. He had invited me to his party, and now I was going to cash in on it. I followed a path of people, peering through bare legs, hands crossed on hips, a girl’s arm around another boy’s back, groups huddled in twos and threes, laughing and talking loudly, until all I could hear was a rumbling of voices.
    Brian Horrigan cornered me before I had a chance to get to Austin. He was the first boy I had ever let kiss me. Once, during a hockey game, I had gone back behind the bleachers and made out with him, until his hand went down my shirt and cupped around my breast like a claw. But as soon as the lights went on, after the game was over, and I looked at him, the spell was over. Even though I used to think about him sometimes in class, wondering what it would feel like to be kissed by him, in the bright lights of the skating rink that night, all
I could focus on was the zit that had appeared on his chin. He was from the other side of town, lived in an old mansion, went to Aruba for winter vacation, drove a BMW. At one time he had gone to private boarding school, where he learned Latin and French. I was completely enthralled with the interpretation of
King Lear
he presented in a paper in our English class. But in spite of the fine polish and education his money offered, and the look he wore in his eyes that said
you just say the word
, there was no intersection on our emotional maps. Or if there was I hadn’t discovered it yet.
    After I ditched Brian, I looked for Austin. He was leaning against the rail of the porch with his arm around Rita Fox. He was whispering something in her ear. Rita had long legs and dark brown hair straight as the mane on a horse’s back. She was the first girl we knew about that had let a boy go all the way. The first to get her period, to wear a miniskirt. Over the sound of
they Stone you when you don’t come home
, I heard Rita’s high-pitched laugh. Austin lifted a strand of hair that had fallen in her eyes and pulled it behind her ear. It looked as if he kissed her.
    I turned around and walked into a crowd, into the lawn littered with empty plastic cups, hoping Austin wouldn’t catch me wandering alone. I had thought, during those weeks leading up to his party—when Austin walked me home from school, flirted with me in the cafeteria, tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear and kissed me on the neck and close to my breastbone up in the attic room, where there were no sounds save the sound of his pounding heart underneath the dampness of his shirt—that I had meant something to him.
    Throughout my mother’s dating career, I often stumbled upon her kissing a man on the couch, or worse. Watching Austin with Rita I felt the same way I had as a child, as if I had
wandered into someone else’s dream, a world filled with dim ceilings, dark windows. I remembered my mother with her pumps kicked off. And then she was taken from us, into the arms of a stranger, a man who could do anything to us because she had given up her power.
    I looked back to the porch, where Austin stood with his arm propped over the banister, cornering Rita. They were still laughing. Sharing a cigarette. Only, by then, my eyes were blurry from the beer, my head floating like the fuzzy tip of a dandelion into the air. I told myself that I would be as strong and resilient and self-sufficient as the thick roots dug into the earth belonging to an ancient tree, that