#emerquaid

I wake up to the sound of Jack’s heavy breathing.

He’s staring at me expectantly, waiting for me to stir to consciousness with a rather creepy smile on his face. Alexander’s hand resting on my leg feels like an anvil as I come to, trying not to jump in shock at the sight of Jack standing over me like the neighborhood terror.

“What are you doing?” I whisper, trying not to wake up Alexander. “Go away!”

“I’m not here to spy,” he quickly diffuses, the edges of his lips curling even farther into a smirk. “Although you two are really cute.”

“Get on with it,” I hiss, waving my hand around to shoo him off.

He glances behind me, to see if Alexander’s still asleep, before his eyes come back to me. “Jen says she’s gonna wake up everyone else in the next half hour or so for breakfast,” he informs me. “And I figure this is my one and only chance to get you alone before Jackie jumps down your throat.” For emphasis, his eyes dart back to the sleeping mass behind me.

I roll my eyes, shaking my head slightly. “What do you need?”

“I just…wanted to ask you if you think this will be okay,” he says, straightening out his knees as he pulls something out of his back pocket. The majority of my irritation with him having woken me up for the second time today dissipates almost instantly when I see what it is, some of the wind getting knocked out of me. He smiles hopefully, waiting for me to answer, even though I’m pretty sure that I’ve forgotten how to speak. “I’m taking that as a yes?”

Instead of trying to find words – the only thing that’s coming to my mind right now is an endless shriek, but that’ll only wake Alexander up and I’d hate to begin Christmas morning with us in the ER, tending to a baseball-bat-sized dent in Jack’s head – I nod feverishly.

Jack puts his hand on my head, ruffling the top of my head. “Thanks Belly,” he mouths. “I’ll see you in a few.” He gets ready to walk away, and I quickly grab him by the wrist before he can leave.

He stares at me, a little puzzled, but I motion for him to come closer. Once he’s within range, I sit the upper half of my body upright and wrap my arms around his neck. Jack laughs a little into my shoulder, hugging me back.

“I’ll see you in a few,” he repeats as he pulls away. “Merry Christmas.”

My lips pull up into a smile. “Merry Christmas.”

This time, I let him leave the room, my head falling down against the pillow as I watch him close the door back behind him. The smile lingers on my face even once he’s gone.

A few beats of silence pass, and I feel the weight under the mattress start to bend underneath me as Alexander turns back over. His hand on my leg slides back up to rest in the dip of my waist, arm draped over me as he rests his chin in the crook of my neck. “Did you tell Jack that we’re closed for photo ops until at least noon?” he mutters, his breath warm along my skin.

“Believe it or not, I don’t think we’ll be the photo op of the morning. Maybe later on tonight,” I add.

“I somehow do not believe you,” Alexander replies, lips brushing over my neck. “Then again, part of me doesn’t really believe that you’re laying here either, so I guess anything’s possible.”

I snort. “Oh what, do you keep mistaking me for another knockoff?”

“Will you ever let that go?”

Glancing over my shoulder at him, I wink. “Maybe in a couple of years. Or who knows? Maybe by then, you’ll have found a better knockoff me.”

His arm pulls me back closer against him, wrapping me up tightly as he hums contentedly. “I’m going to ignore your terrible sense of humor and focus only on the fact that you’ve apparently got it planned out that you’ll still be around me in a few years.”

“Assuming that the world doesn’t end before then,” I remind him.

“If we haven’t triggered it by now, I think we’ve got a way to go, Fuhrman.” His arms bind around my stomach as he kisses the side of my cheek. “But if it doesn’t, I’ll save you some room in my underground bunker.”

“Such a romantic, you are.”

“Practically my middle name.”

As Jack promises, Jen comes barreling through the door about twenty minutes later with a smile brighter than the LED lights on her Christmas tree draped on her lips. “Well well,” she sings delightedly, hands on her hips. “Looks like we got ourselves a Christmas miracle after all.”

I roll over, burying my face in the small place between my pillow and Alexander’s shoulder to avoid her gaze. “All I want for Christmas is for you people to stop caring so much about my love life,” I whine, only slightly teasing.

Jen’s following peal of laughter rings throughout the room. “Keep on dreaming, sweetheart.”

Alexander and I climb out of bed slowly, following after Jen downstairs where everyone else has congregated in the living room around the tree. She’s been strategic in waking and gathering up everyone else in the house before coming to fetch us, so they can all get a good glimpse of us together. Willow and Amandla smirk, the two of them high-fiving, and Josh purposefully leaves his stove duty to shoot me a wink.

We sit down in the floor in front of the couch, where Leven and Dayo are sprawled out, their legs underneath a shared blanket. Alexander takes the spot beside me, and I move over so I’m sitting in between his legs. “What?” I mutter quietly when he gives me a weird look. “Why waste any more of our time saving face for these lunatics?”

Leven is happy to lean down, backing me up. “She’s right,” she agrees cheerfully. “We’re part of your love story, after all, holding back in front of us would just be rude.”

Alexander rolls his eyes, but doesn’t say anything else. I know he wouldn’t want to have it any other way.

Josh makes us all cinnamon rolls that are the size of our heads for breakfast while Jen goes around out and hands out the presents she’s gotten us. All of the gifts we brought for our exchange are still sitting under the tree, waiting for us to get to them, but Jen insists that we all go ahead and unwrap what she’s gotten us. Evidently, she’s rather proud of her present-picking abilities and wants to revel in our reactions.

The boxes aren’t all that big and are poorly wrapped in their snowman wrapping paper, more tape than humanly necessary riddling every inch of the surface. Amandla breaks into hers first only because she always carries a pocket knife on her person, all of us pausing in our unwrapping endeavors to see what it is Jen’s gotten us all. She carefully pulls out a little snow globe, her hand cradling underneath the gold base. Little fake snowflakes come raining down on a giant cast picture that was taken all the way back in 2011 at some banquet dinner Gary had thrown for us, a picture that I’d almost forgotten existed. We all look like babies, holding onto each other in a lump of a group hug with our laughs frozen and eyes smiling, but it is undoubtedly us at our purest.

Amandla runs a thumb over the inscription that’s on the base. “’Reach for the top of the stars and if you don’t grab ‘em, at least you’ll fall on top of the world,’” she reads out loud.

“Wow, Jen,” Josh comments, looking over at a proudly smiling Jen that’s wearing a Santa hat. “That’s like, actually deep and somewhat beautiful.”

“It’s a lyric from Pitbull’s Give Me Everything.”

“Then I take all of that back.”

We all chorus our varying ‘awws’ and ‘thank yous’ towards Jen, who smiles in response. “You’re welcome, you’re welcome, children,” she says, sitting down on the leg of the recliner Josh has taken up. “Now let’s get on to this white elephant gift exchange so I can actually receive for the first time this whole damn trip.”

“Actually,” Jack interrupts, and already I can feel my heart taking off like a helicopter in my chest. The smile is impossible to suppress. “There’s a little gift of my own that I wanna give out before we get started, and unfortunately for you all, there is no trading for this one.” I have to bite back a laugh.

He turns to face Jackie, who’s currently on her third cinnamon roll and draped under a blanket. She looks at him, completely confused. “Jackie,” he says, and my hand immediately juts out to grab onto Alexander’s solely for squeezing purposes. He winces.

“Yes, Quaid?” she asks, mouth full of cinnamon roll.

Jack grabs the plate and plastic fork out of her hands, setting it aside on the coffee table. She frowns, reaching back out for it before Jack grabs her hand. “Stand up.”

“Why?”

“Just…trust me,” he says, and I squeeze Alexander’s hand harder.

Jackie isn’t too convinced by this. “Don’t push your luck, bud.” Jack rolls his eyes, sighing as he forcefully pulls Jackie up to her feet. I swear, she claims I’m so oblivious, but right now, there has to be the world’s biggest brick wall between her eyes and Jack. Blind. She is blind.

She’s still incredibly puzzled by what’s going on, but I think Leven’s ridiculously hopeless romantic self has already put two and two together judging by the sharp intake of breath she gives off behind me.

“Jackie,” Jack repeats, still holding tightly to her hand as he looks down at her. “We’ve been sneaking around behind these guys’ backs for the last four years now—”

“No, you haven’t!” Alexander calls out, and I start swatting at him, trying to silence him.

“—and I know the only reason we did it was because we wanted this to be a secret, but the more time that’s gone by, the more I realize I don’t want for you to be a secret. You’re the best part of my day, even when we’re berating and bickering with one another, and nothing about the way I feel for you should ever be kept secret.” The tears are already starting to well up in my eyes, and out of the corner of one of them, I can see Amandla and Willow both recording all of this. Everyone seems to be cluing in before Jackie herself.

Jack offers her one more smile before he drops down to one knee, and then all the knuckleheads, Jackie included, erupt into excitement as they realize what’s happening. Jen leaps up from the recliner, almost kicking Josh right in the balls as she begins screaming, Dayo and Alexander are both clapping and wolf-whistling, and Josh is laughing like a maniac. Jackie, on the other hand, is staring at Jack with wide eyes, completely frozen.

“Jack—” she utters out, the only word I think she knows anymore judging by the look on her face.  

The way that Jack looks up at her is the way a little kid watches a shooting star streak across the sky. “Please don’t be my secret anymore,” he asks in a wavering voice, pulling the box back out of his pocket with trembling hands. He just barely gets the lid popped open, revealing the ring inside. It’s an emerald, rounded out in a thin halo and yellow gold diamonds all the way around the band. Jackie’s jaw drops. “Be my wife.”

We’re all watching, waiting in burning anticipation for Jackie to remember how to talk and to give him an answer. It’s a miracle I haven’t crushed every bone in Alexander’s hand yet. She still can’t seem to find her voice in the now cleared-out abyss her mind has become, so instead, she just nods, nodding so hard I swear her neck might break.

Josh does the honors of yelling, “She said yes!” as the rest of us jump up and start rejoicing.

Jack’s hands are still shaking as he pulls the ring out of the velvet lining, carefully sliding it onto her ring finger. Jackie stares down at it for a moment, unsure that it’s actually real before she starts laughing. He picks her up, swinging her around in a few circles before they kiss, and I have to swipe away a few of my own tears just watching them. Leave it to Leven and I to cry on Jackie’s behalf, since I think her entire body might be in shock and on the verge of shutting down.

“This calls for champagne!” Jen announces loudly, leaping over empty paper plates and blankets as she beelines for the kitchen.

I scramble away from Alexander to fling my arms around both Jack and Jackie in one fell swoop, wordlessly shrieking in glee as I jump up and down excitedly.

“Is this real?” Jackie finally finds her voice somewhere as I pull away, one of her arms still around my waist. I can feel her entire body shaking.

I nod excitedly. “So real, babe.” I feel as though my lips might split from the smile that’s tugging my face in half, tears slipping down my face as I squeeze both of her arms. “Congratulations!”

Jackie and I had quite literally planned our weddings together when we were bored on set, swapping Pinterest boards for our future receptions back years and years ago, and I think I’m having just as much trouble believing this as she is. I, on the other hand, just happen to be much more emotional about it.

Jen returns with glasses and a bottle of champagne tucked underneath her arm, and she goes about passing them all out. She pours sloppily, mostly because she herself is buzzing with the same excitement. “Alright,” she says after she finally finishes going around, holding up the bottle in one hand and her glass in another high over her head. “To Jacquelack, and to all of us getting hella hammered at the Hunger Games wedding of the century!”

“Hear hear!” Alexander cries.

We all lift our glasses, clinking with whoever we can find. The champagne slides down my throat smoothly, and I barely get it swallowed before Alexander grabs my face, kissing me full on the lips.

“What was that for?” I ask after his lips leave mine, the tears still sparkling in my eyes.

He shrugs. “Just…sharing the love.”

I roll my eyes, throwing my empty champagne glass aside and stepping up onto his feet so I can kiss him properly. It elicits a reaction out of everyone, to no surprise, but my favorite by far is Jack’s.

“Quit stealing our moment!”

                                                           ... 

Josh wows all of us with his former Boy Scout skills by building a fire out in the firepit in the backyard after dinner, Jen finding the supplies necessary for us to all roast marshmallows while we sit around under super thick blankets and bundled up against each other for body heat. She’s unfolded quite a few wire clothes hangers to serve as our skewers for roasting marshmallows, graham crackers and Hershey’s chocolate bars going abandoned as we pass around the jumbo bag of marshmallows as though this is sleepaway camp in the seventh grade.

We’re all a little fuzzy from the copious amounts of champagne Jen insisted upon us consuming while at dinner to celebrate literally everything imaginable – Jackie and Jack’s engagement, mine and Alexander’s finally getting together, it being Christmas, the sun setting on another day, so on and so forth. It’s been a good day though, one of the best days I’ve had in a long time.  

Jackie, who’s sitting next to me, keeps turning her hand in the low light of the fire to admire the glint of her engagement ring. We’d Facetimed her family right before lunch to surprise them with the good news, Taylor and Hayley screaming so loudly that for a moment, I swore we’d actually broken the sound system on Jackie’s phone. Leven and I also got to fulfill a few lifelong dreams and tag-teamed on taking a shit ton of engagement pictures for Jack and Jackie out in the snow, despite Jackie still being in those godawful cat pajamas of hers. As sweet as the ring was, Jack could have taken it a step further and bought her some replacement pajamas.

It’s been a lowkey day otherwise, stuffing ourselves with food Josh has whipped up, watching stupid Christmas movies and taking a shit ton of naps in between. I don’t think I’ve left Alexander’s side any today, his hand always lingering on my back as if he’s scared that if he lets go of me, I’ll disappear.

He’s got an arm draped over my shoulders, the two of us underneath the same blanket as our little hangers continually clink together when we go to roast another marshmallow.

“You know,” Jen muses absentmindedly as she skips the marshmallow entirely and takes a giant bite out of a plain graham cracker. “I know it kinda bothered you guys there in the beginning, but I’d say this turned out to be a pretty successful get-together.”

“Yeah, why did you decide to invite us anyways?” Willow asks. “What about this was so important to you?”

Jen’s got an intent gaze on the fire, the flames crackling and licking at the empty night sky above it. “I don’t know,” she finally answers, her voice soft. “Something about you guys has always felt like home to me. Things have been so crazy lately that even with everything I’ve been lucky enough to have, there was still this…giant absence in my life. I guess I’m not really much without y’all.” Her shoulders fall in an awkward little shrug. “I just wanted to get a little bit of that complete feeling back, even if we are different people now and you guys were gonna be bitching the whole damn time. Better than nothing, and besides, I don’t think us being older has anything to do with whether or not we can still find our spark. We said friends for life, and I meant it, dammit.”

“Aw, Jenny,” Amandla says,

“I’m with her on that,” Alexander agrees, and I turn to look up at him. The fire is casting all sorts of shadows on his face – he’s even more mesmerizing to look at in this light. “After all these years, being with you guys feels like no time has passed at all. I don’t want to lose this again.”

“Okay, if I remember correctly, you were the one who pretty much dissed all of us and shut us out to move onto greener pastures,” Dayo reminds him.

“Can we not ruin my sentimental moment?” Jen snaps, quickly pushing the smile back onto her face. “Blondie makes a good point. You maniacs are the people I want in my life forever, and I don’t know about you, but I never want to have to pull another one of these again.”

Jackie is happy to chime in. “Now that I can agree with,” she says, jamming another marshmallow down onto the end of her unfolded hanger. “I don’t think I can tolerate another one of these surprise get togethers. I’d just prefer for us all to like each other and make plans together about when we meet up.”

Josh nods. “Yes, preferably somewhere that isn’t prone to getting two feet of snow when we do.”

Willow’s eyebrows raise. “What about Asheville?”

“Frosty might be cold in the winter, but he also melts in the summer,” I point out. “I say we find the happy medium.”

“So what, Kansas?” Jen snorts.

“We can work out details later,” Leven says, dismissing the conversation with the slight motion of her hand before reaching for the bag of marshmallows. “Right now, I’m pretty content just being with you guys in this moment.”

My head falls on Alexander’s shoulder as I watch the flames dance in front of me. Leven certainly makes a point – this is the first time on this trip where I’ve been wholeheartedly at ease.

“Can you guys believe that it’s been six years?” I mutter almost absentmindedly. “Six years of us.”

“Six years of something special,” Dayo agrees. “I still remember what the crew used to say about us. Don’t look for this again, you won’t find it anywhere else.”

Amandla raises her hand. “I definitely haven’t been able to find this anywhere else; there’s no group of people on the planet as balls-to-the-wall, slightly idiotic and yet lovable as you people.”

“I doubt we ever will,” Jackie ponders, pulling her marshmallow off the hanger and offering it up to Jack. “There are just some people that no matter what happens in this world or how far apart we differentiate from one another, there’s always going to be that existing bond that nothing will break. Time be damned.”

“Yeah, if Alexander’s tweet-pocalypses haven’t ruined us yet, I don’t think anything could.” Alexander makes a face at Jack, but I can see the cracks in the façade.

“My Fun-ger Games playlist didn’t lie – we really are family.”

The contented sigh rises from my throat without me realizing I’ve done so. “I sure do love you guys,” I say definitively. “No matter how much you annoy me.”

Dayo smiles, poking the marshmallow on the end of my hanger that’s on the verge of falling off, it’s so burnt. “Same,” he echoes.

Leven reaches over, tucking Willow under her arm in a side hug and grinning at all of us. “Same.”

“Same.”

“Ditto.”

Josh’s eyes scan around the circle at all of us, like he’s trying to peg us or find the meaning of life lingering behind the whites of our eyes if he looks closely enough. Finally, he shakes his head. “Alright,” he declares. “No more sappiness. If we keep going the way we are, I’m sure tears will be next, and it’s too cold out here to cry.”

“It’s probably all of this champagne in our systems,” Jack points out.

Jen and Josh then exchange glances. “Guess that means it’s time to bust out the tequila!”

And with that, Jen darts back off inside to fetch a new bottle and little Game of Thrones shot glasses she wound up with in white elephant. I smile lazily, my free hand squeezing Alexander’s thigh reassuringly. The world really could come falling apart tomorrow and I don’t think I’d have a single care towards it. This moment, right here surrounded by a fire and two feet deep in snow, is all my heart needs to stay warm.

Josh Hutcherson has perhaps risen past every imaginable evil on the top of my hit list within nine hours flat, solely for doing the one damn thing I’d hoped he hadn’t done – jinxing us.

Jackie, Jack and I all wound up sharing a room – the original setup was for Alexander and I to share one of the guest rooms, but the second that was announced, Jackie grabbed my wrist and told Jen, “Over my fucking bloody corpse” – which I wasn’t too enthused about, seeing as how I didn’t really want to third wheel any more than necessary. Fortunately, Jackie is an even better best friend than she is a girlfriend and banished Jack to the sleeping bag, her and I sharing the full-size bed. If Jack had a problem with it, he didn’t voice it. Truth be told, I think he was so mentally exhausted from his journey through the supposed underworld that Jackie could have given him a blanket and pointed to the closet and he wouldn’t have complained any.

I’d been rudely awakened somewhere around eight, mostly to the sound of Jackie tripping over Jack as she stumbled to look out the window. Apparently, she wasn’t playing around when it came to buying our plane tickets out of here – she was hellbent on getting out of Colorado before the sun set, even if it meant she flew the plane herself. I’m not sure why she’s got her foot on the gas pedal with this one; if anyone would have gone behind our backs and orchestrated the Hunger Games cast reunion of the decade, I would have pegged it to be Jackie. I just don’t think she appreciates being lied to, and she doesn’t want to have Alexander’s blood on her hands when Dayo goes in for the kill and she gets her fair share of swipes in.

No need to set an alarm clock when with Jackie, she makes a good enough one all on her own.

“Are you fucking kidding me?!”

“Can you fucking keep it down?!” Jack had moaned. “I’m trying to dream about sleeping on a mattress and not this godawful carpet.”

The sound of curtains violently moving around filled the room, along with Jackie’s mumbling to herself under her breath about how she was going to strangle Josh once she saw him at breakfast.

“Where’s the fire?” I’d mumbled, still half asleep as I sat up. Even through bleary eyes, I could see Jackie standing in the glow of the window, everything white around her and a halo of strawberry blonde hair.

She’d simply turned around, frown settled on her face and the creases on her forehead deep. “Oh, there’s no fire,” was her mocking reply. “There’s too much snow on the ground for that to ever fucking happen here!”

Breakfast was an interesting affair; Josh was waltzing around the table giving everyone pancakes the sizes of our heads while we all glared at him. I think he begged Jen to give him that job for two reasons: number one, so he wouldn’t have to worry about any of us poisoning him (accidentally or purposeful), and number two, so he was always just far enough out of reach that he didn’t wind up with a butter knife in his side.

“Eleven inches of snow,” Dayo had mumbled into his glass of milk to no one in particular. “That’s just enough snow to bury Josh in and no one will ever be able to recover the body.”

Jackie nearly spit her orange juice clear across the table at that one.

After breakfast, the unspoken consensus is that we are all going our separate ways in this gigantic house to do our own thing while we wait for the heavy and blowing snow to settle. Jen, however has other ideas.

“Whoa whoa whoa,” she says as soon as Leven and Willow start to get up. “Where are you guys going?”

“Back to bed,” Willow replies.

Leven juts her thumb out in Willow’s direction. “What she said.”

Jen looks appalled at this revelation. “No, I’ve got stuff for us to do!” she exclaims, sliding her chair back. “Go nowhere.” With that, she darts back off into the kitchen.

Jackie leans over in my direction. “What are the chances that I can go outside and not die of hypothermia or frostbite?”

“Very slim,” I inform her.

“Might be worth it.”

Jen returns almost as quickly as she vanished, and perhaps it’s because I’m still exhausted (Jackie is still a kicker when she sleeps) but I’m having trouble discerning what it is that Jen has gone to do. That is, until I realize she is now wearing a shirt that has my face on it.

I don’t even want to know how much it cost her to get it made, but Jen has made herself a giant sweatshirt with the giant cast picture we all took for Vanity Fair back in Concord. Willow wasn’t present for that shoot and Liam was, but since Liam is not here but Willow is, Jen has taken the creative liberty to photoshop Willow’s face over Liam’s body. As if the shirt couldn’t look any more ridiculous with that addition, Jen spins around to show off the back – in between the shoulder blades, exposed thanks to her sloppy bun and in giant, orange letters, reads, ‘DIRECTOR OF FUN.’ Out of the corner of my eye, Dayo’s hand twitches a little bit closer to his fork, presumably to gouge out his eyes.

“I’m almost scared to ask why you have that on and what ‘director of fun’ could possibly mean,” Jack starts warily.

“Then I’ll save you the trouble,” Jen finishes, a smile that no one who has only gotten a handful of hours of sleep should be able to don reappearing on her face. “Since we’re stuck inside until later tonight at least, and you guys are kinda right about us all having grown up and gone down our different paths, I figured we could do some fun stuff with each other today! We can rediscover our bond.” She flourishes her end statement with a set of jazz hands.

Everyone is deathly silent, until Amandla speaks up. “That is the most ridiculous, whitest shit I have ever heard of.”

“Thank you,” Jen replies, and either she doesn’t see the insult in it or just elects to ignore it. “We haven’t hung out all together in ages, and I feel like we need to learn who we are now in order to be as close of friends, so bond we shall!” She then protrudes her cell phone out of the pocket of her pajama pants. “Now, I may or may not have stolen all of these things from the Camp Hi-Ho counselor training, but I think they’ll be just as fun.”

“Fun?” Dayo repeats. “You know what would be fun? Going back to bed. That heating blanket was everything.”

“That’s not on the checklist of fun,” Jen shoots down. Jack groans.

“There’s a checklist of fun too?”

“What do you take me for, Quaid, an unorganized moron?” I can see his answer perched on his lips even with Jackie sitting in between the both of us.

“Alright,” Jen continues, clapping her hands together after she shoves her phone back in her pocket. “I’m giving you losers an hour to take showers, brush your teeth – especially you, Hutcherson – and to pull yourselves together however you so need. I expect all of you sitting down in my basement by eleven to have fun.”

“The basement?” Alexander whispers as he leans in closer to me – he’d happily swiped the seat next to mine the very second I sat down, thinking he had beaten Jackie out. He had been a little deflated ever since Jackie swept me away to room with her. “Is she planning to off us one by one where they can’t hear our screams?”

“If we disobey, yes,” I mutter back, never taking my eyes off of our self-proclaimed director of fun.

When none of us begin to move from the table, Jen starts clapping wildly. “Come on people, let’s look alive!” she yells. We startle forward, grumbling our way out of our seats and leaving everything for Josh to clean – again, to keep himself out of the line of fire from everyone else for jinxing us.

“I’m pretty sure Jen was a drill sergeant in a past life,” Amandla muses when I find myself standing next to her as we wait for Jack to shimmy on up the stairs.

“Maybe that’s what she’s been doing in her free time,” I say, shrugging.

“Jen a drill sergeant, you an athlete,” she points out. Our eyes meet, and I can see the glimmer in them as she looks up at me with a cheeky little smirk on her face.

“Don’t tell me you’re surprised by that too,” I warn. She quickly lifts one of her hands in mock arrest, the other settling on the banister as we start upstairs.

“All I’m saying is that I was the one who saved Alexander from going to prison when he tried to give you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after you fell off that platform.”

My eyes widen into a glare right about the time Alexander’s head pops in between us. “What’s this about me going to prison?” he asks.

Amandla simply reaches forward and pats him on the shoulder. “Nothing you need to worry about, bucko.”

Jackie exiles Jack from the bedroom after he offers to shower with her and save water – I want to crawl under the covers and die when he makes that suggestion, their coupledom can be a little disturbing to think about – leaving the two of us to get changed and pull ourselves together in peace. She asks that I braid her hair after we change out of our pajamas, perched on the edge of the bed while I sit on my knees, weaving strands of her hair together as delicately as I can.

“This is gonna be a fuckshow, I’m sure,” I say, and Jackie snorts.

“Ya think? Twenty bucks says Dayo tries to kill Alexander, Alexander hits on you, Jack manages to break a limb, Leven breaks a nail, Amandla escapes through the fucking air ducts, and Saturn falls out of orbit.” She then makes a circular gesturing motion. “All before lunch.” I simply hum my agreement, and Jackie continues talking.

“Speaking of Alexander, what the hell were you two talking about on the plane last night?” she asks. “I swear, you two liked to have never shut up.” It’s a very good thing we aren’t in front of a mirror and Jackie has no choice but to look straight ahead, because I can feel the heat beginning to rise into my cheeks.

Jackie and Jack had been diagonal to Alexander and I on the plane, Jackie’s need for the window seat overruling the need to monitor Alexander and I. “Hands to yourself,” she’d warned him before ushering on in, and he’d simply rolled his eyes.

“She’s not changed any,” he told me as we walked into our little row of seats, waiting for me to slide past him into the window seat – he’d been happy to offer it to me.

My reply was every bit explanation as it was remark. “It’s Jackie.”

Despite having a decently-sized arm rest in between our seats, Alexander had offered to share his USC blanket with me as an alternative to using the shitty one provided by the airline, as well as his earphones and jumbo bag of Sour Patch Kids. I think most of it was simply an excuse to talk to me, which ultimately worked in the long run.

Somewhere over Illinois and around the fifth Black Keys song that had come on shuffle thus far, Alexander had glanced over at me, smirk riddling his face. “You still only eat the red ones?” he’d observed, head tilting in the direction of the half-empty bag of Sour Patch kids.

I’d nodded. “The others still taste like medicine.”

“The green ones do not taste like medicine,” he countered, and I’d rolled my eyes.

“They’re lime flavored, which is a sin within itself.”

A quiet laugh had fallen past his lips as he looked right at me. “You haven’t changed any, either.”

“Oh, god, I don’t know about that,” I’d mumbled. “I mean, I can now drive a car, buy cigarettes, get tattoos, and buy lottery tickets – I’m a breath away from legally ordering shots at a bar. I’d say a lot has changed since our Hunger Games days.”

“Okay, well if you look at it like that, then yeah.” Alexander ran a hand over the top of his head, smoothing down his hair. “I’m just referring to…well, you, I guess. Your personality. You’re exactly how I remember you, maybe a just little bit feistier.”

“Coming from the grown man who has no qualms about exposing his bare ass for all of Instagram to see.”

“You saw that?” he asked, a slight guffaw slipping out. I merely shot him a look.

“How does one not see that?”

Underneath the blanket, his arm reached over the arm rest and he nudged my arm with his elbow. “Hey, you can’t say too much – there’s no way I’m ever gonna unsee that Joshua Tree picture you posted a little while ago.” My cheeks immediately started to burn; that picture had only come about from a dare courtesy of Madeline, and hadn’t bothered me any when she posted it. There was no shame or embarrassment to be had, up until then at least. All it seemed to do was amuse him. “Yep, still modest – I’m telling you Iz, you haven’t changed a bit.”

The conversation rolled on through how school had gone for each of us (we had fallen out of contact by the time I made it to my senior year) to recent projects, past what family vacation we’d last been on and crushing right through the political climate of America before touching on our individual meanings of life based on what the last few years had brought our way. Eventually, we just decided to be courteous to the majority of the cabin around us and shut up, the both of us pulling books out of our carry-ons and diving in. Part of me felt compelled to take a picture of it, since I knew Jackie couldn’t see it and she wouldn’t believe me when I told her Alexander was reading a book not entirely composed of giant words or pictures of naked girls. It had been nice just coexisting next to him for a little bit, the version of him that felt a little more subdued than the one I’d known back when I was fourteen. For god’s sake, the man wore reading glasses now. It was enough to make me overlook the revolving door of shitty girlfriends he had for just a little while and appreciate the human being next to me, skipping over all of the country songs because he knew how much I loathed them.

“Oh, nothing really,” I reply to Jackie quietly, voice a little squeaky.

She scoffs. “Yeah, I’ll bet it was.”

I finish off the braid, moving the hair tie up my wrist and tying it off. Patting her shoulders to signal I’m done, I fall back on my ankles. “Listen, I could have grilled you about your sex life now that Jack has finally fucking left us alone, but I didn’t, so count your blessings and hold your tongue.”

The whole way downstairs, Jackie drills holes into the back of my head for that comment.

Everyone save for Jack and Willow is already downstairs in the basement, which has been renovated to be a giant recreation room. Jen’s pushed the pool table against the back wall, the TV above it reflecting her Spotify account as she plays the aptly titled ‘Fun-ger Games’ playlist (it’s currently playing Sister Sledge’s We Are Family). A bunch of beanbag chairs, random storage chests, and stray couch cushions have been lined up against the long wall, where everyone else is sitting, looking less than pleased. Jackie and I exchange glances, both of which have a unanimous mood: death is nigh.

“Fuhrman, Emerson!” Jen chirps, meeting us at the doorway. “What, no Jack?”

“Why would Jack be with us?” Jackie replies, to which Jen’s face falls.

“You’re hilarious, Mrs. Quaid,” she teases, and Jackie’s eyes darken. “Go sit down, we’ll start in a minute.”

As we saunter past Jen, Jackie sidles up to me. “Don’t you dare tell him this, but Jack was right yesterday,” she hisses through my hair and into my ear. “That airport was the gate to hell, hell being this.” All I can do is nod in agreement.

She and I sit down on one of the trunks next to Dayo, who is watching the weather like it will suddenly reflect the very thing he wants to see – melted snow and free roadways. Jackie leans over my lap to try and get a look at what he’s scrolling through. “You looking at the website for a funeral home?” she asks, their eyes meeting knowingly after she flickers her gaze in Alexander’s direction.

Dayo scowls. “Nope, that was last night’s light reading.”

Her lips curl up in a thin smile. “How I’ve missed my kindred mind.”

Jack and Willow finally come traipsing down, Jack wearing the exact same outfit he was wearing last night on the plane. “Okie doke,” Jen announces, producing a little bucket out of nowhere. “Before we get started, fork over any and all cellular devices.”

“Have you lost your mind, woman?” Jack asks as she juts the bucket out in his direction first. She simply blinks, unfazed. The two of them engage in a little stare off, to which Jack finally caves in on. Her face brightens.

“Hand ‘em over, rest of you.”

Each of us puts our phone into the bucket begrudgingly, giving Jen a look as she makes her way down the line. After she’s collected the last phone, she pulls her own out of her pocket and sets it on top – at least she’s committing to it as well, I guess – before walking across the room. I hadn’t noticed the gigantic fucking safe sitting on top of the counter until she stops in front of it, putting the bucket inside and slamming the door shut.

Jackie leans a little closer to me as she whispers, “She really wants to incite the real-life Hunger Games, Iz, Jen has gone full-blown kamikaze.”

“Well, let’s get this show on the road, shall we?” Jen proclaims, turning away from the safe and back towards us.

“I’d like to get on the road to the airport,” Dayo mutters under his breath. Jen hears this, shooting him a glare in response.

“Anyways,” she draws out, cutting her eyes away from him. “Like I said, I swiped most of this from Camp Hi-Ho, but I think it’ll work just as well! Normally, we’d start off by introducing ourselves and sharing one fun fact with each other, but I think that’s a little bit uncalled for in this situation. I think we’ll just jump straight into the human knot.”

“The human what now?” Leven repeats.

Jen gestures for all of us to stand up, arranging us in a circle. I’m standing shoulder to shoulder with Amandla and Alexander, who all but shoves Jackie out of his way so he could stand beside me, Amandla and I exchanging pained glances and murder flickering in Jackie’s eyes. “Alright, so everyone has to grab hands with someone that isn’t standing next to you,” Jen explains. To make an example, she reaches across the way and grabs my left hand with her right, and Jack’s left hand with her left hand. “Commence the tangling.”

With my free hand, I grab onto Leven’s, while everyone else around us reaches over and tries to grab hands with the minimal amount of grumbling. At least the objective here is to tangle together, because that is exactly what happens. I think Alexander purposefully grabs onto one of Jackie’s hands, which, to her displeasure, only has the realization until after there’s a mass of arms above their intertwined hands.

“Now what?” Amandla asks after we’re all closer than we ever thought we’d be in 2017.

“Now we untangle ourselves before twenty minutes goes by,” Jen replies. “And you can’t let go of anyone’s hands, or we have to start over. All the way over.”

Already I see this not going well.

Instead of untangling ourselves any, I think we only make things that much more complicated. Jackie and Josh take the leads in dictating where each of us ought to go, and how we ought to move, which meets varied reception from all of us. Some of their ideas work, and others absolutely do not. Whatsoever.

“Isabelle is going to have to get out from between Jackie and Alexander somehow, they need to be beside one another.”

“That might not be a good idea, I value my life a little more than that.”

Josh looks across the circle at me. “Izzy, how good are your limbo skills?”

My eyes narrow. “Um, not very.”

“Y’know, it’s a very good thing we didn’t do this where some of you weren’t allowed to talk.”

“You want us to complete this before we ring in the New Year, right?”

“Okay, on what fucking solar system do you expect me to be able to dive between the tiny gap that yours and Dayo’s arms create?” Jack asks Josh after he makes the suggestion, his eyes narrowing.

“Well, we gotta get you through here somehow, dude.”

“We can just not and say we did, thank you very much.”

“Guys, time is running out!” Jen warns.

Willow rolls her eyes. “Jen, you’re deluded to think we can do this in under two hours, much less twenty minutes.”

“I believe in you guys,” she argues. Dayo snorts.

“Well that is some misplaced faith, sister.”

We don’t beat the twenty minutes, of course, but Jen insists we keep on going until we figure it out. After an extra twenty minutes of the human knot comes the hypothetical plane crash, where we have to work together to think of what twelve items within Jen’s basement we’d find most useful in the case we were all stranded on a desert island. After that comes the game of three truths and a lie, which is about as disastrous as one could expect – we spend a solid ten minutes debating on whether or not Alexander accidentally told two lies instead of just the one, and I lose my appetite upon learning much more about the sex lives of my former costars than I would ever care to know. Jen finally lets us break for lunch after that, which is subpar due to the fact that she wasn’t anticipating a blizzard to trap us here and prevent Dominos from delivering. The only bright spot is the Christmas cookies that are low in number and in high demand. I come close to breaking one of Jack’s fingers trying to get the last one.

As Josh goes around and collects our trash, Jen starts up with yet another prelude to what I can only imagine is an equally as horrific as the others we’ve been subjected to.

“Okay, I think the next thing on my list was the blindfolded maze—”

Alexander raises his hand. “Uh yeah, I can tell you right now that blindfolding me and sending me on a journey of disorient ain’t gonna end well, can we push that one back?”

“Or just not do it at all?” Jackie adds hopefully.

Jen’s face draws up into full-blown resting bitch mode. “We’re doing it, Emerson. But,” she concedes, her shoulders slouching. “I guess we could do something a little less action-y.”

“That would be splendid,” Dayo remarks.  

“Can we do nap time?” Josh asks, lifting his hand in question. “Because I think we’d all be in agreement that naptime is the perfect bonding experience – we’re all in one another’s presence while we sleep relatively peacefully.”

“Naps are for chumps.”

“Says the girl who fell asleep standing against a tree.”

Jen rolls her eyes, taking a sip from her water bottle. “Okay, so this next bit is called the purposeful mingle.”

The guys all groan at that. “Purposeful mingle?” Alexander whines.

“I already know all of you, why do I need to mingle and more importantly, why does it have to be purposeful? There’s nothing purposeful about mingling!” Dayo insists. “The two contradict one another entirely!”

Out from her back pocket – I’m really going to have to ask Jen where on earth she bought these sweatpants, because these pockets have to be bottomless pits – Jen withdraws two Camp Hi-Ho bandanas and holds them out. “I can always blindfold you,” she offers. Dayo shuts his mouth very quickly, and Jen smiles.

“Purposeful mingling,” she says. “Blaine told me he had to do this once at a leadership development thingy and that it was utter bullshit, but I figured out a way that we can make it fun.”

Under his breath, Jack mutters, “Heroin would be more fun.”

“I may or may not have stolen part of this from One Tree Hill, but basically I’m gonna pair all of you losers up with someone that you don’t see all the time—" Jen shoots a pointed look at Jackie and Jack, to which they both react with a frown “—and you’re gonna mingle. Purposefully. Anywhere in the house. Just talk about stuff, bond and shit! The person who I think has the most purposeful mingling is gonna win something spectacular,” she promises.

“And how are you gonna determine who mingles the most…purposefully?” Willow asks.

“Like I’m gonna tell you – you morons cheat the system enough as it is. I gotta keep some cards up my sleeve.” She begins to look around our little circle, cogs whirring as she tries to decide who to pair up. I can already kiss any hopes of being with Jackie a fond farewell.

“Okay,” she says slowly, lifting her pointer finger. “Dayo and Jack. Amandla and Josh. Willow and Jackie. Isabelle and Alexander.” Jackie begins to mutter something rather colorful under her breath. Alexander’s already got his eyes locked on me, a hopeful smile on his face when he catches my glance. “And then me and Levvy.”

“You said we can go anywhere in the house?” Josh repeats for clarification.

“Yes,” Jen replies, and then she backtracks a little. “Well, anywhere within reason.” Her eyes then drift over towards Alexander. “I don’t need to see the future youth of America in the contraception stage when I come to gather you all for the regroup.”

From beside me, Jackie’s face is fifty shades of murder as she gleefully assists Jen in shooting Alexander a warning glare. He merely rolls his eyes.

“For fuck’s sake, you people act like I don’t know how to keep it in my pants.”

“You don’t,” Amandla replies, masking it in a cough.

Jen claps her hands, breaking up the conversation. “Alright people, get to mingling. Purposefully! But not too purposefully, Isabelle-and-Alexander-in-particular!”

As I stand up, tugging down the hem of my shirt, I tell Jackie, “You know, maybe the whole hypothermia and frostbite situation won’t be that bad.”

She simply lifts both of her eyebrows, as if to say, ‘I told you.’

Alexander is quick to meet me halfway, rubbing at his chin sheepishly. “They’re insane,” he mutters quietly, what I suppose is his apology on the rest of our nutcase friends’ behalves.

“You’re just now figuring that out?”

His hands burrow down into the pockets of his jeans as he glances around the room, watching as everyone else scatters and Jen and Leven set up camp in the corner of the room. “Where do you wanna go to do this thing?” he asks me.

“I might have an idea or two.”

                                                              ...

“Okay, I don’t know anything about women’s fashion, but this cannot be Jen’s.”

“I don’t even think that could be her mother’s.”

Alexander looks down at the sweater he’s held up to his chest, another laugh falling from his lips. “I wonder if they’d notice if it went missing – this would win me every ugly sweater contest there ever was.”

“You mean ugly Christmas sweater?” I try to correct, my hands fiddling with the rogue lid of a shoebox.

“No, Isabelle, I mean ugly sweater. All of them. This is their king.” Alexander returns it back to the rack in the same place we pulled it from before sitting down cross legged in front of me. “What made you think of coming in here again?”

I shrug. “Tell me, if you were a rabid, anti-Alexbelle Jackie looking to keep an eye on the two of us, where’s the last place you’re gonna think to look?” He concedes, tilting his head towards me. “I dunno, I figured we’d get a little privacy in the master closet, no successful spying attempts occurring for the first few minutes anyways.”

To that, Alexander rolls his eyes. “I’m sure Amandla and Josh have already made it their personal mission to sniff us out.”

“Them or Dayo one.”

A shadow falls over Alexander’s face, and I instantly want to withdraw that statement. It’s so easy to forget that Dayo is a raw nerve for Alexander and vice versa – it’s incredibly easy seeing as how I don’t know the full story behind that. “Why do you think they’re so hung up on the thought of us being together?” I try to reroute the conversation, my voice a little higher than usual.

“They probably bought into that huge fucking fanfiction craze back in the day. Surely you remember that.” His voice is a little lighter, which I’m taking as a good sign.

“How can I forget? I’m the one who sent you links to them half the time,” I tease, cracking a half-smile.

“Will literally followed them for years,” he continues. “I caught her reading one when we went out to lunch one day.”

“Will and Mandla might as well have championed that craze,” I muse. “I still remember the texts I got from them when that Castro posted that stupid list.”

“You know I’m sorry about that, right?” Alexander says softly, and once again, I have singlehandedly managed to derail the conversation to a place I really wasn’t expecting to go to.

I wave my hand around in dismissal. “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, of course. It’s water under the bridge, Zander. That happened so long ago…”

“I know, but it doesn’t change the fact that that was super shitty of them and it changed things between us. They knew what they signed up for when Nic got involved with me, the whole fan thing – I told them that they had a thing for the two of us together and it never meant anything other than them just being passionate about something fictional. Still pissed her off though.”

“That wasn’t why you two broke up though, right?” I ask nervously.

He shakes his head, scoffing lightly. “Nah. Nic was an iceberg. We might have had a tiny problem on the surface, but it extended miles beneath it.” His shoulders fall as he sighs. “The relocation Vikings wanted out of me wasn’t something she wanted to commit to, amongst other things.”

My eyebrows furrow together. “Other things?”

When Alexander’s eyes meet mine, I start to feel little punches right to my diaphragm. The vulnerability reflecting in them is the same as if he was standing here in front of me naked – not the kind in which he frequents, but the kind where he’s entirely exposed. No little schticks to hide behind. “Life, I guess,” he admits. “Being the dudebro douchebag can’t last forever, y’know? I burned out with that act faster than I got started with it, it just…wasn’t really me. And that was what she wanted, the parties, the sex, the alcohol, all of that. But I wanted to mature up. Get serious with work, do something that gave me the leeway to get married and have kids.”

If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear my ears were deceiving me. I try not to let the shock color my face as I speak. “Is that still what you want?”

One of his hands drags down his jaw, and his eyes cast back down at the carpet. “Yeah, ‘course it is. I’m ready for that.”

“But?”

“But,” he sighs. “I just don’t feel like I’m…I don’t know. I still don’t feel like I’m in the right place for it, even after ditching all the dead weight I possibly could. Everything I do just feels like one misstep after the other.”

“Hey, that’s not true,” I insist, reaching out and resting my hand on the top of his knee. “As far as I’m concerned, the only missteps you ever took were Liv it Up and Grownups 2.”

Blue eyes flit back up at me. “I was an idiot, huh?”

“Please, this might as well be the cohort of idiots,” I reassure him. “We’ve all done stupid stuff.”

“Gimme a break – you’re perfect, Belle.”

“And you’re full of shit.” One of my eyebrows raises as I grin. “Wanna hear a secret?”

“Isabelle Fuhrman has secrets?” Alexander asks incredulously, and I roll my eyes.

“I’m gonna retract the offer,” I warn.

He shakes his head, sliding a little closer to me. “No, tell me. I’m all ears.”

“Airplane,” I tell him bluntly. He stares at me puzzled.

“Airplane?” It doesn’t seem to click with him as he repeats it out loud, and I give him a pointed look. Even if he didn’t want to, he took away more from the dudebro douchebag act than I think he realizes, seeing as how he can’t take a damn hint or comprehend loaded statements. It takes a second for what I’m actually saying to arrive on his doorstep, and the look on his face when it comes to him is priceless. His face lights up, a shocked laugh echoing through the closet. “Isabelle Gretchen Fuhrman,” he gasps.

“It wasn’t like...the whole shebang,” I clarify. “Just almost.”

“I don’t know who you are anymore,” he says in the midst of what I hope is feigned shock. “Never in a million years would I have ever thought—”

“Yeah, well, welcome to the year 3000,” I tease.

Alexander wallows in his surprise for a minute, the two of us just breaking out into laughs about it once he regains control over his ability to emote beyond wide eyes and jaw dropped. Our bubble is popped right about the time someone starts knocking on the door. “Go away, Jackie!” I call out.

It’s Jen who yells from the other side of the door. “Are your clothes on?”  

“Oh my god,” I groan. “Yes.”

“She’s lying!” Alexander yells out, and I swiftly deliver a punch to his shoulder. “Jesus, you can still pack a punch.”

“Magic, I guess.”

Jen cracks open the door, sliding in a tiny little polaroid camera before shutting it back. “You guys are the last ones to get it – take a cute little picture of each other however you best see fit to commemorate, and for the love of god, if you do nudes—”

“—we are not—“

--definitely gonna do nudes—”

“—then please retrieve them and hide them where I will never be able to see them. Ever. Just bring it with you when you come downstairs, we’re meeting back up in ten.”

I scoot back on the carpet, grabbing the camera as I hear Jen’s footsteps recede away from the closet door. “Take a polaroid to commemorate our time in this stupid walk-in closet,” I repeat, turning the camera over a few times in my hands.

“Oh, I’ve already got a great idea for yours,” Alexander insists, hand expectant as he reaches out for the camera. “Gimme, Fuhrman.”

I sit with my hands in my lap as I wait for him to take the picture, and he very quickly shakes his head. “No, no, no. You aren’t getting off that easy.” He stands up, perusing through the aisles of clothes around us, and all I can do is watch him confusedly. “Was Jen’s grandma a flight attendant in a past life?” he asks, eyes sparkling as he glances back at me.

“Alexander,” I hiss, eyes growing wide as I realize where he’s taking this. “Stop it.”

“Put this on,” he finally says, holding out a navy blazer, pencil skirt and a pair of black heels.

“You’re fucking insane.”

“It’s adorable when you swear,” he comments. “And it’s not like anyone’s ever gonna see this aside from me anyways. I’ll just lie and tell Jen that we did the nudes.”

“Alexander!”

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Seriously though. No one’s gonna see this. I might put it in my wallet or some shit though, just to…y’know. Commemorate.”

“You’re ridiculous,” I grumble as I slip off my jeans and switch it out for the pencil skirt. The blazer covers up my white sweater alright, and the heels are two sizes too big – I feel exactly how I look, like a little girl playing dress up in someone’s closet. Alexander also finds me a tie from the men’s side of the closet, helping me tie it around my neck before backing up a little.

“Oh yeah, definitely the flight attendant aesthetic. This is so going in my wallet.”

I frown, flipping him off.

“C’mon, Belle, lighten up. Strike a stupid pose or some shit,” he persuades.

I figure I have nothing to lose – if anything, Alexander will forget where he even puts this picture. So I force an overly cheerful smile onto my face, giving a little two fingered salute as I pop my hip out. He laughs as he takes the picture. “Gorgeous,” he compliments playfully.

“If that ends up on Instagram, I will bury you,” I threaten as I kick off the heels.

I shimmy out of Jen’s mom’s clothes, who I hope will never notice that they’ve been disturbed, Alexander putting them back up on their hangers while we wait for the picture to develop. “You gonna get your payback on me?” he asks.

My lips purse together as I sift through a few potential ideas, most of which involve just that. “Mm, nah,” I finally settle. “I’ll think of how to do that later.”

“Oh god,” he mutters. “That might be even worse.”

“Okay, shut up and do as I tell you.”

I position Alexander where I want him and he does so without complaint – a much better model than I will ever be – and I raise the camera up to my face. “Gorgeous,” I mimic him, lowering my voice as I press down on the button. He breaks into laughter right as I do so, and I already know that that’s exactly how the picture will develop.

When we leave the closet and start to head back downstairs to the basement, the polaroid of Alexander is tucked safely into the back pocket of my jeans, far away from Jackie’s prying eyes. She swoops in right next to me when she spots me walking past the kitchen, which is apparently where she and Willow stayed the entire time. “How was it?” she whispers.

“It was fine.”

“Any attempt of penetration?”

My jaw drops a little, and I shove her. “Jacqueline!”

“What?!” she protests. “I had to ask!”

The vibe in the room seems to have shifted a little, some of the edge deriving mostly from hostility having dissipated. We all go back to sitting against the wall, Jen leaning up against the pool table and messing with the cue ball while she waits for us to get settled and shut up.

“Alright Jen, I purposefully mingled my ass off,” Dayo tells her. “How are you picking the winner?”

“See?” she muses to no one in particular. “You guys are so much more motivated when there’s a tangible incentive involved – I should have done this three team building exercises ago.”

“Yeah, no kidding.”

Jen pushes a piece of hair out of her face, peeling her body off of the edge of the pool table. “Okay, kiddos. I want to see how much purpose you actually mingled with. Everyone’s going to go around and tell one fun fact that they learned about their partner. Person with the most interesting, not-surface level fact gets a check for a thousand dollars.”

Jack begins to choke on the very air he’s breathing.

“A thousand dollars?! For a fun fact?”

Jen looks like the cat that ate the singing canary as she nods. “Yep. So you better make it good, motherfuckers.”

“Do I get a thousand dollars if I pretend to like this whole team building shit?” Dayo asks, Jen’s face quickly falling.

“No. I only bust the checkbook out for worthwhile bribes.” She then wildly gestures towards all of us. “Somebody go!”

The thousand dollars on the table most definitely changes the vibe in the room – this is the first time since we realized we had the curtain pulled over our eyes that we’re actually on board with this whole get-together. Everyone is so excited about this, in fact, that we all start talking over one another.

“Dayo got drunk at a Shades of Blue wrap party and sang Jenny from the Block in front of J-Lo!”

“Dude!”

“Jackie’s on a first name basis with the president of Germany!”

“Amandla babysat Blue Ivy!”

“Josh was still sitting on a phone book to reach the gas pedal his senior year of high school!”

“Isabelle almost joined the mile-high club!”

I’m so prepared to spring everyone with the little tidbit that Ludwig, Manwhore Extraordinaire actually wants to settle down in the next year or two and have kids and watch that thousand-dollar check come my way that I almost miss Alexander’s voice shouting out the fun fact about me. Almost.

It’s Jackie’s turn to choke on the very air she’s breathing, her head whipping in my direction so fucking fast that I don’t know how her neck breaks. I, however, beat her to the punch.

“Excuse me!?” I screech, the room going deathly silent. The gravity of what sort of mistake this has been hits both Alexander and Jen square in the face the minute my voice rings out in the quiet, Jen slowly backing up into the pool table and making her way underneath it so it serves as cover. No number of zeroes is going to deliver us from this level of hell.

“Belle—”

“Dude, too far.” Jack says quietly, shaking his head. “The sex life is always off limits.”

Jackie is nearly purple in the face as she spits out the words at Alexander like they’re knives. “With who, you?”

“Jackie, get a fucking grip, of course not,” I snap, only letting my eyes stray from her for a second before I round back on Alexander. “That was personal, Ludwig.”

“I know, I know,” he starts to backtrack. “I’m sorry, Belle, it just…slipped.”

Everything that happened in the closet between us is beginning to slide down a very slippery slope, becoming more and more lackluster by the second. Leave it to Ludwig to ruin it. Should have seen it coming, really. “Just slipped,” I repeat dully. “That’s wonderful. Really.”

“I’ll give you the thousand dollars, I swear—”

“I will set fire to your bank account, Jennifer, if you pay him.”

“I like you better anyways, Belly,” Jen rushes to confirm. I nod, pulling myself off of the ground and dusting off my hands. I start walking around the room, rummaging through random trunks and drawers along the wall lined with cabinets.

“What are you looking for?” Leven asks me. “Ludwig’s sanity is nowhere to be found, babe.”

“I can hear you!” Alexander snaps.

“A knife,” I reply. “I’m curious to see how well my skills have held up after all this time.”

After the unexpected police presence on the doorstep, the rest of the day is uneventful in comparison.

Most of it comes from the fact that Josh, Jackie and I corral everyone else in the house to living on the trigger that the cops could reappear at any moment to whisk us all away in handcuffs after Josh’s terribly executed attempt of playing it cool. Jen’s also kept to her word that she wouldn’t meddle anymore, which has become our Walmart brand of Christmas miracles – after getting twenty-six inches of snow holding us hostage, knowing that Jen isn’t going to force us all into another come-as-close-to-Jesus-as-we-sinners-will-ever-get meeting against our will. The vibe in the house has shifted over to the more tolerable end of the spectrum, no more fears of Dayo wielding a butcher knife with Alexander as its target or Jackie flying off the handle altogether lingering out in the open. We just spend the day coexisting rather peacefully, which is all I can ask for, I guess. At this point, asking for anything has only backfired on us: we ask to leave, we’re entrapped in a predicament that probably won’t see us on the road until New Year’s. I ask for things to go over smoothly, things explode.

As ridiculous as the last few days have seemed, I understand the sentiment Jen had in wanting to see this through with some sort of success as the outcome. Nostalgia has never been something I’ve been able to escape, and being back with my old group of friends has reawakened all sorts of longings for how things used to be. That’s the sucker punch nostalgia always brings: it makes you miss the things you know you can never go back to, and down the black hole you’ll go either trying to get over it or bring it back with your bare hands.

Maybe Jen has done her job, effectively dragging me over to the dark side.

Christmas is tomorrow, and the most festive thing that we’ve done thus far is having a dinner where we were actually able to converse with one another without any underlying hostility on paper plates with little Christmas trees on them. Part of me is waiting for the other shoe to drop, Jen rounding up all of us to go caroling or do a dramatic reading of the Christmas story, but it never happens. I go to sleep still anticipating something to happen, even though nothing does.

And then I’m finding myself awakened.

“Isabelle,” a voice softly summons me, and the not-so-gentle shaking following after it. “Yo, Izzy.”

I stir, limbs slinging as I sit upright in bed. “What?” I grumble, the back of my hand colliding with what I assume is another body as I kick the sheets out of the tangle they’ve formed around my legs. Standing over me in the dark is Jackie, Jack, and Dayo, all of them fully dressed and staring at me expectantly.

“No,” I yawn, shaking my head. “I am not going to help you all prank Alexander. Go back to bed, Scooby Gang.”

“The time for fun and games is over,” Jackie whispers. “We’re blowing this popsicle stand, Fuhrman.”

“We’re doing what?”

“Leaving,” Jack repeats in a hushed voice as he does the honor of clarifying for me. “We’re leaving.”

I drag my hands down my face, heels of my hands rubbing at my eyes. “Did you people forget that there are like, two feet of snow on the ground? Are Santa’s reindeer going to pull us back to the Big Apple and wherever the hell Dayo’s planning to go?”

Jackie, who’s sitting on her knees on the bed, leans back onto her ankles and stares up at Dayo. “I told you she was gonna be grouchy.”

“He was what, expecting me to be a ray of sunshine?”

Dayo frowns, arms folding over his chest. “Okay, I don’t know what you did with baby Izzy, but I want her back.”

“Come back in about seven hours,” I tell him, pulling the blanket around my kneecaps up a little higher as I go to lay back down. Jackie catches me before I get nestled back under, a hand wrapping around my wrist.

“Oh no you don’t, Fuhrmie,” she whistles. “I told you I was gonna Prince Charming your ass and ride you out of here on a white horse as I saved you from Ludwig’s grubby little paws. I’m seeing this thing through.”

“You are ridiculous.”

“I’m simply trying to preserve your innocence.”

“My innocence left me a long time ago, Emerson.”

“Okay, can we please stop discussing sex and just hit the road already?” Dayo interjects, the irritation rising in his voice. “The more distance we put between us and this place before the ass-crack of dawn when Jennifer wakes up, the better off we are.”

I card a hand back through my hair, shoulders slouching. There are so many flaws in the logic they’re throwing my way that I’m beginning to wonder if this is all just another caffeine-induced dream, and that I’ll wake up any minute to the tune of Jackie telling me to get my leg off of her torso. “And again, I raise the question of how are we supposed to get out of here? There are two feet of snow on the ground. We didn’t exactly go for the snowmobile section at the rental car service.”

Jackie and Dayo both point to Jack, who raises his hand. “I’ve been outside for the last hour hauling a path down to the driveway and moving all the snow on our car over to Alexander’s.” My eyebrows furrow – for every one question I get answered, they raise about three more, and all of this trying to nail down what their plan actually is is draining. I finally decide to shut up and go along with it, before Jackie decides to haul me over her shoulder fireman-style and drag me away against my will.

“Fine,” I huff, kicking the covers out of my way. “But I’m going as is. We’re making a break for it, not heading to the long-lost Mockingjay premiere.”

Jackie smiles as she scoots away from my body. “Even better. We don’t have time for you to be your extra ass self.”

Scowling, I shoot her the middle finger and hop down off of the bed.

Dayo offers me a blanket to throw around my shoulders before we sneak out the back door – apparently, Jackie has packed my bag for me, already loaded up in the car. I don’t know when in the hell they had time to do all this, so I guess the saying still rings true: once you’re a member of the Hunger Games gang, you never sleep again.

We go tiptoeing out the front door, Jack bringing up the rear and making sure no one else’s eyes follow us out the door. It’s even colder outside than it was the night before, and I curl up to Dayo, forcing him to drag me along behind him since I don’t feel up to walking. He all but picks me up and throws me into the backseat of the car, sliding in beside me.

“Are we sure this is a good idea?” I say through a yawn, bundling my blanket tighter around me. “I mean, what’s the plan from here? So far, all I’m seeing is us making it out of the driveway and then meeting the very, very obvious roadblock.”

Jackie glares at me through the rearview mirror. “Since when do you need to know all the details?”

I stare back at her, bewildered. “Um, since the first day we met.”

She sighs. “What’s the harm in a little spontaneity, Belly? We might make it to the airport, we might make it to some sketchy Super 8—”

Dayo leans over the console, twisting his body around the seat as he interrupts Jackie. “Yeah, we’ll sleep at the Super 8 when I see Jesus descend down from heaven.”

“—we might sleep on the side of a road in a snow bank,” Jackie rectifies, her eyes cutting at Dayo. “Point is, live on the edge. Make that your New Year’s resolution for 2018 or something.”

I roll my eyes at her as Jack brings the car to life in the quietest way he knows how – which, of course, is loud enough to wake up the whole damn state of Colorado as he accidentally hits the alarm button while trying to turn the keys in the ignition. “You moron!” Jackie whisper-shouts, like that’s going to keep anyone from hearing us make our getaway, swatting at Jack’s arm. “Hit the damn button!”

“What button?” Jack responds.

“The one that shuts this thing up!”

I peel my back of the backseat, leaning forwards. “Oh yeah,” I say dryly, shooting Jackie a thumbs up. “Spontaneity really is fun.”

“Fuhrman, I will slice and dice you.”

“Jackie, help me!”

Jack and Jackie fumble for another minute to get the keys out of the ignition in the hopes that will stop it, then hitting the unlock button on both of their doors and the keys before finally the alarm stops on its own. They glance back at us, both of them flustered in the face and not because of the wind chill. “Okay,” Jack says after a pause, taking the moment to catch his breath. “Let’s try this again.”

Dayo visibly winces as Jack goes back in for the ignition, inching the key towards the slot with bated breath. He sticks it in, waiting for the alarms to sound once again, but nothing happens. “Hallelujah,” he sighs.

No sooner do the words roll off his lips does the alarm goes off again.

“Goddammit!”

This time, instead of rushing to find the magic button that will shut this vehicle up, Jack just leans back in the seat with both arms folded over his chest, glaring at the steering wheel as he waits it out. Jackie buries her head in her hands. Dayo and I exchange glances, and I simply draw my knees up to my chest. I get the feeling we’ll be here for a while.

The alarm stops blaring after what feels like an eternity, Jack moving to turn the key in the ignition. The third time must always be the charm, because this time it starts up without a hitch, engine purring to life. “Now we’re in business,” Jack declares smoothly.

“Yeah, only after we woke up the entire world.”

“They’ll mistake us for Santa,” he dismisses, taking off the brake and moving the gear shift into reverse. I snort.

“I think you meant Satan.”

Jack creeps down the edge of the driveway in the path he has quite literally shuffled out for himself to follow, Jackie serving as the eyes in the back of his head so he doesn’t accidentally hit Jen’s mailbox. Dayo’s on his phone, presumably looking up flights, and all I can do is shrink farther back into the upholstery of the seat. Where Jackie’s sixth sense is her intuition on whether something is right, mine is the intuition on whether something is bound to go horribly wrong. My spidey senses tingle the whole way down the sidewalk.

We get turned out at the bottom of the road, and sure enough, the snow returns to a height of two feet tall. For a moment, Jack sits there and stares at the road as he tries to decide what the best course of action is. I want to suggest that going back indoors is a grand idea, but I get the feeling Jackie is one step away from gagging me with the blanket, so I stay quiet.

“What are you waiting for?” Jackie asks, looking over at her boyfriend. “Step on the gas and let’s go!”

“Jackie,” he says very calmly, like he’s explaining all of this to a child. “There are two feet of snow on the ground, and we are in a rav4. I know you struggle to practice the virtue of patience, but I need you to at least pretend you can.”

She groans, slouching down a little farther in his seat. “Dayo, please tell me you’re having luck finding us plane tickets.”

We begin to inch forward little by little, the speedometer not even hitting five miles an hour as Jack starts plowing through the snow in the direction of the main road. Dayo gives the slight nod of his head as he looks back up.

“Yeah, I think so. There are still a few seats left on a layover flight to Dallas, it’s leaving from Denver though—"

In unison, Jack, Jackie and I all reply: “Keep looking.”

His eyebrows knit together, but he doesn’t question it any. He returns back down to the phone, scrolling mindlessly through the possible flight options.

My train of thought leads me to dozing off, my head falling on Dayo’s shoulder and him tolerating my curled-up body taking up almost the entire back seat because Dayo is still the best big brother any girl could ask for. It’s all too easy to nod off, especially since Jack has demanded not only patience from Jackie, but silence as well, so he can concentrate.

I stir back awake, hardly even realizing I’ve done so until I blink and see that we have stopped moving entirely, sitting in the pitch black of the middle of the road. Jack and Jackie are arguing in the front seat, and Dayo has taken to wrapping his leather jacket around his head in the hopes it will drown out their voices.

“What’s going on?” I mumble, stretching out my arms. Dayo might be a great big brother, but he is a terrible pillow.

Dayo does a double take when he hears my voice added to the mix, lifting up one of the arms of his jacket that has covered his face and rolling his eyes. “We’re stuck,” he catches me up to speed.

“We are not stuck!” Jackie quickly retaliates from the front seat. Jack groans.

“Yes, we are, Jackie! Unless you can suddenly will this car forward with your mind or the tornado comes to take us all to Oz, then we aren’t moving another fucking inch!”

I look over at Dayo for more explanation. “Where are we?”

“We’re about ten miles from Jen’s,” he says. “But it took us about forty minutes to get here. I don’t even think we hit the main road.”

“I don’t think we did, either,” Jack adds. “We’re still the only fools on the road.”

“We did not make it this far just to…quit!” Jackie snaps. Jack reaches over, resting a hand on her shoulder rather patronizingly.

“Jac, babe, we didn’t make it that far to start off.” She very quickly swats his hand away, wiggling away from it.

I sit up a little bit, adjusting the blanket around my shoulders. Somehow, we’ve also compromised heat all in the name of this little escape excursion as well – it is just as cold in this vehicle as it was when we got in. “Okay,” I begin. “So, just throw the car in reverse and head back to Jen’s. Problem solved.”

“We tried that,” Jack tells me. “And even if it had worked, Jackie all but pushed the gear shift back into drive against our will. It’s like she just wants to break the car and make me pay a fee for it.” As the words fall out of his mouth, dripping in sarcasm, he turns give Jackie a look. She shakes her head, waving her hand around in dismissal.

“We are not stopping now,” she repeats forcefully. “There is only forward. That’s the only option, other than wading our way through ten miles of snow on foot back to the house.”

“We cannot walk,” Dayo quickly insists.

Jack nods. “We don’t have anything to protect ourselves from any possible bears—”

“Jack, I swear to god—”

“I can just call somebody back at the house,” I offer up, reaching for Dayo’s cell phone. “And they can come get us.” Jack points back at me, our eyes meeting in the rearview mirror as he gives an affirmative nod.

“That. That is a great idea. I nominate we do that.”

Dayo, Jack and I all look at Jackie as we wait for her to give us some sort of sign that she won’t kill us if we go through with it. She stares blankly into space for a few moments, before throwing her hands up in exasperation. “Fine. FINE. Call one of the knuckleheads, but when we start the new year on literal house arrest, don’t say I didn’t try to save our asses.”

I go through all of Dayo’s contacts, stopping once I get to Josh’s number and hitting the call button. I bring it to my ear, hand violently motioning for Jackie to stop her under-her-breath mumbling so I can hear. It rings once, twice, three times, and then cuts straight to voicemail. “Asleep,” I deduce as I return to the list, trying Leven instead. Her phone doesn’t even ring, just gives me the same message that she’s had since 2011. I go for Amandla, only to get the ‘this number is out of service’ spiel. I shoot Dayo a look at that one – the least he can do is delete obsolete phone numbers, instead of planting false hope.

I sigh as I click out of the phone app, sifting back through the list of contacts to see if there’s anyone else I can call. I’m almost ready to lead our small parade on foot back to the house before the idea pops in my head. It’s a bad idea, an idea that I’m sure no one, including part of my conscience, will agree with, but it’s this or freeze to death. I will be damned if I go out like this, and on Christmas at that.

So, I dial the number that I still have memorized from years and years ago, waiting with bated breath for the line to click.

After the third ring, when my heart is beginning to drop into my stomach at the disappointment that we’ve really gone and done it, stranding ourselves here in the least imaginable condition ever, there’s the sound of the line connecting and a shuffling noise that follows. “Mm, hello?”

I can’t help but to exhale in relief. “Oh, thank god,” I breathe into the phone.

“Wait, Belle? Why are you on Dayo’s phone?” Alexander’s voice is scratchy – I’ve most definitely woken him up.

Jack and Jackie have spun around in their seats, staring at me, and Dayo’s looking at me expectantly. I make the very deliberate decision to drop no giveaway hints as to who it is I’ve gotten ahold of almost right away. “Um, long story,” I say, looking back at them. “Listen, I may or may not be in trouble.”

“Trouble?” he repeats, and there’s more shuffling that follows. “I’m on my way up to your room, gimme a second to get my baseball bat.”

My face falls, and I roll my eyes. “Yeah…about that. I’m not up in my room.”

“Wait, you aren’t?”

“No,” I answer.

“Then where are you?”

My fingers have locked onto a stray piece of hair, absentmindedly twirling it around. “Um,” I start, my voice rising an octave. “Just get in your car and follow the tire tracks?”

“Follow the ti—” He stops mid-sentence. “Let me guess, Jackie.”

“Ding ding ding.”

He sighs. “I’m heading outside now. I’ll be there in a few.”

“You’re a lifesaver.”

“Just for this, I’m going to ask that you save my life when Jackie realizes that I’m the one you’ve summoned to rescue you.” With that, the line goes dead. I pull the phone away from my ear, holding it back out to Dayo.

“Well?” Jackie asks. “Did you get ahold of someone?”

“Yeah,” I reply, purposefully avoiding all eye contact with her. “Yeah, they’re on their way to come get us.”

Jack lets out a long sigh of relief, slumping down in his seat with a hand resting over his heart in gratitude. Jackie, however, isn’t as pleased to learn this revelation – in fact, her eyes narrow into slits as she leans a little farther over the console.

“Isabelle,” she begins slowly. “Why are you suddenly being very vague and using rather non-descriptive pronouns? Who did you call?”

I start to shrink back into the seat, drawing my blanket a little closer around me as if it will save me from the inevitable hell that’s about to come raining down on me. “Let’s just remember that we are very blessed,” I squeak. “And that we should be grateful we got ahold of anyone to come rescue our stupid asses to begin with.”

“Isabelle…”

“So blessed, in fact, that it should not matter who comes to get us, but that we’re all together, that we have our health, and that’s all that matters on this fine holiday.”

“Did you call Ludwig?”

“Maybe?” I peep. Jackie groans loudly, spinning back around and slamming back into her seat. “He was the only one that would answer! It’s not my fault Dayo doesn’t keep his phone numbers updated.”

“I’m just gonna take my chances with the bears,” she announces dramatically, reaching for the door handle.

“Oh, come on, Jackie, get a grip.”

“Me? I’m not the one who he’s fucked over time and time again, Belly, that would be you.” Our eyes meet in the rearview mirror. “I know you don’t like hearing this, but you’re oblivious.”

“And I know you don’t like hearing this, but you’re more obsessed with Zander than I am,” I fire back. “He had shitty girlfriends who didn’t like me, big deal. He says stupid things – have you seen who you’re dating, no offense Jack.” His hands lift in mock arrest. “I’m just…being nice to him! I’m not dropping my panties for the man. And even if I was, I’m twenty, Jac. You don’t have to play mama bear anymore, you know that, right?”

Her face falls a little, settling into a genuine frown, and I instantly feel horrible. She’s about to cry. “I know I don’t,” she says in a small voice. “But you’re still fourteen and baby Izzy to me. I like protecting you and using Ludwig as my punching bag. It’s what I’m good at.”

I offer her a smile, leaning forward and resting a blanketed hand over hers on the console. “I know you do, but I can take care of myself, and you can use him as your punching bag without using my honor as your excuse for it.”

“He’s still in love with you, Jingle Bells,” Dayo pipes up. “Jackie wasn’t kidding when she said his type is the discount Isabelle – he’s not gonna dare breathe a hint of that in your direction, because all he wants to do is make sure you’re happy, and he thinks that that’s leaving you alone. Even when he wants otherwise. It’s why he goes for the lookalikes, and I can guarantee if you showed him half a sign, he’d drop all of that in a heartbeat. You’re what he wants, after all.”

I begin to lose a little bit of the sentiment of the moment, throwing my hands up. “Okay, when did my love life suddenly become an open conversation?”

“When you became too oblivious to see what the hell was happening in it,” Jack adds.

I sit up a little straighter, staring at him defiantly. “Let’s discuss the life and times of Jacquelack, shall we?”

Jackie glances back at me, a devilish smirk stretching over her lips. “Oh no,” she sings gleefully. “You’re getting defensive, which means this is about to get good. Let’s go back to Alexbelle.”

“Let’s not and say we did.”

She turns back around, her eyes widening a little when she finishes giving me a quick once-over, processing all of my body language and I guess connecting back onto our similar wavelength to read my mind. I can’t help but to feel a bit like a zoo animal, cowering back as the heat begins to rise in my cheeks. “Oh my god, Belly,” she breathes out incredulously. “You really like him, don’t you? Oh my god!”

“Please go back to slandering his very existence,” I beg, wincing. “I miss it already.”

“Why didn’t you say something to me?”

“When?” I retort dryly. “While you were trying to replace the Grim Reaper and put him six feet under yourself, or when he was sitting six inches away on the car ride to Jen’s?”

“Hey, I could have talked you up as I tried forcing snow down his esophagus. It was a prime opportunity.”

I roll my eyes. “Oh yeah, because that’s the time every girl wants to be brought up – when the guy is on his death bed.”

“Okay, can we please refrain on the girl talk?” Dayo requests.

“Dude, hell no,” Jack deters before Jackie or I get the chance. “I need all the details I can get so I can milk every last cent out of Amandla when I tell her I won the bet.”

“The bet?!” I screech.

Like magic, headlights begin to appear in the back window. Jack claps once, springing out of his seat. “What do you know!?” he announces all too enthusiastically. “Prince Charming has come to save us after all.”

Jack jumps out of the car before I can lunge over the console and thwack him, popping the trunk to retrieve all of our bags. Dayo gets out as well, leaving just me and Jackie to stare at one another. She hasn’t looked this excited since the announcement of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

“What are you gonna do?” she whispers.

“Nothing,” I hiss through gritted teeth.

“Like hell you will. I need something good to come out of this hellacious nightmare, Fuhrman.” She reaches over, resting a hand on my kneecap. “Just this once, you get a free pass – I’ll pretend that I can’t see Alexander’s tongue going down your throat. However, I draw the line at groping. Do that behind a closed door.”

My eyes widen, and I start swatting at her. “Insufferable.”

Her lips pucker as she blows me a kiss. “Don’t make me tell Jack to go pick some mistletoe.”

As she gets out of the car, I call after her, “He wouldn’t go find any anyways – he’s not venturing off this road without any bear repellent!” The majority of my statement falls on deaf ears as she slams the door, chuckling darkly the whole way.

I’m now beginning to remember the downsides of hanging out with my former costars, changing my mind entirely. Nostalgia be damned – if I never see these people again, it will be too soon.

Taking a deep breath and assuming it is now or never, seeing as how the chances of my audience disappearing is on the latter side of that, I push the door open, and kick it out so I can hop out and not compromise any of my blanket bundling. The snow comes up past my ankles as my feet sink into it, and I do my best to pick up my legs and move forward.

Jack grabs my bag out of the trunk before I get the chance to grab it, thus eliminating my only opportunity to get away from Alexander without talking to him. There’s a mischievous glint in his eyes as he walks past me, nudging me with his elbow. My face falls into a scowl as I move to punch him in the shoulder.

Alexander is leaning up against the side of our car, moving to push the trunk down once Jack slides out of the way. I stand there, feeling rather obsolete as I try to figure out what the hell to do with myself. The smart idea would be to just shuffle past him and hop in his truck, but I can feel Jackie’s eyes burning holes in me from the other side of the windshield. Knowing her, she’ll be more than happy to fill Blondie in if I don’t do it myself.

“So, why were you trying to make a break for it?” Alexander asks me.

“To be fair, I was dragged along against my will. Apparently, Jackie’s taking our whole package deal status to the next level these days.”

He nods slowly, arms folding across his chest. “Surely you had to know it wasn’t going to go well.”

I shrug. “I tried to tell them.”

A beat of awkward silence passes over us, the sound of the car door shutting as Jack clambers inside the cab, leaving me and Alexander as alone as we can be. “You weren’t trying to get away from anyone in particular then?” he asks, seeking some sort of clarification.

“No,” I answer soundly. “Besides, why would I want to leave when there’s heat at the house?”

His voice lowers a little, one of his hands coming up to scratch at his neck. “Good, ‘cause I just…I really hope you know how sorry I am about that thing the other day. Having your trust is worth so much more than a thousand dollars to me, Belle.” It’s a very good thing the wind has decided to pick back up again, giving me valid excuse for the redness rising in my cheeks.

“It’s okay,” I say quietly.

Alexander reaches into his back pocket, pulling out his wallet. He opens it, turning it around and showing it to me – for a minute, old habits die hard and I swear he’s about to show me a condom, but instead, it’s just the inside of his wallet. Credit cards, drivers license, the corner of a one-dollar bill peeking out of the top, a picture of me dressed in Jen’s mom’s clothes saluting the camera and the smile on my face hard to ignore—

Oh.

He smiles as my eyes land on it. “I told you I’d put it in my wallet,” he discloses. “I always wanna have that on hand when I need a good laugh.” I get the feeling that there’s something else he’d like to say in addition to that, but he doesn’t. He simply stops, folding his wallet back up and shoving it back in his pocket.

“Zander?” I say suddenly, his eyes lifting up to mine. “You, um…you know that thing Jackie said yesterday? About the knockoff Isabelles?”

It’s Alexander’s turn to go red in the face, and I can tell that he wants for the ground to swallow him whole. “I—look, about that,” he stammers out, doing his best to pull an excuse out of his ass.

“Yeah, about that,” I repeat teasingly, taking a step closer to him. “Are there any knockoff Isabelles currently in the picture?”

He chokes out his reply. “Uh…no, why?”

One of my shoulders falls in a nonchalant shrug. “Well, you know what they say; name brand wins every time over the generic one.”

With that, I pull myself up on my tiptoes, encasing him in my blanket and bring my lips to his. He’s happy to meet me halfway, hands clutching my hips like they’re a newfound lifeline as he hoists me up out of the snow, my legs wrapping around his waist. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t imagined this once or twice or a couple of dozen times back when I was fourteen, the heat fogging up all of my thoughts and Alexander being the most gorgeous thing I’d ever laid my eyes on – if only I could jump back in time, pat little Isabelle on the head, and tell her kissing him is just as magical as she’d imagined. Even if the surrounding environment is less than ideal, the both of us leaning against Jack’s rental car in below-freezing weather.

I don’t know how long we stand there like that, Alexander’s lips on mine (it wouldn’t surprise or bother me if the cold has frozen them together) and the upper half of him wrapped inside of the blanket with me, my arms tight around his neck. It comes to an abrupt end at the sound of the car horn echoing out in the night, the two of us pulling apart only to see Jackie hanging out of the driver side window, hand still firmly laying on the horn.

There’s a saying that exists – a tad obscure, but a rather accurate saying nonetheless: a true friend’s silence hurts more than an enemy’s rough words. I’m not quite sure who came up with that soundbite of wisdom, but they must have lived on the same wavelength as me for a short period of time. Silence coming from the people that at one point, meant the most to you, stings more than digging out bullets that came from the gun of someone who hates your guts. It’s a bitter pill that’s hard to swallow down, and the only cure that I’ve ever found is to dilute the hollow ache into overall numbness is to just fill yourself with endless other things and people as best you can, and leave absolutely no time to dwell on other thoughts. It’s relatively foolproof.

Relatively is the operative phrase, of course; somehow, I got tripped up in a few loose wires in my oh-so-easy, rock-solid method in avoiding the aftermath of radio signals going quiet. The push that triggered my fall was unlocking my phone to see a new text message waiting for me on the lockscreen.

Jennifer Lawrence is the type of person that swears they don’t need a cell phone, regardless of the situation they find themselves in. She could be out in the middle of the Nevada desert, stranded, on the verge of dehydration, and her chances of survival would be better without the aid of a phone to call for help. She’s attained the level of fame that having only one cell phone no longer cuts it; there’s a work cell phone, a celebrity-personal cell phone, a personal personal cell phone, the whole nine yards and then some. Jen never even liked being the owner of a laptop, so the fact that I’m supposed to believe she has actually picked up a phone for a reason other than being within an inch of her life, much less having used emojis (Jennifer Lawrence is not an emoji person) doesn’t fly. In fact, all it does is signal the arrival of the body snatchers to Planet Earth.

So, there I was, staring down at the glowing screen of my phone with a well-written, proper grammar and punctuation included, paragraph long text message from none other than my former costar whom I haven’t heard from since I turned seventeen looking back up at me, the three emojis tacked on at the end a downright mockery. I briefly contemplated on checking the Internet to see if any news had broken on Jennifer Lawrence’s phone falling into the possession of hackers, and when I tried sending a response to debunk the ridiculousness once and for all (asking if it was really her, if she was sure she had the right number, and the request of a picture of her holding up three fingers for solid proof) all I got was evidence that it really was her and she was as serious as a heart attack. I very quickly decided that the body snatching alien theory was the soundest – I’d give them credit too; these body snatchers were outrageously convincing.

Most of the feeling of having the rug ripped out from underneath my ass came from a place of solitude that I’ve somewhat cocooned myself into over the last few years. Isolating myself away from my former core group of friends just…happened, really. It wasn’t like it took that much work. We were all on different paths, and we still are – just because we all avowed to be friends for life doesn’t mean that life isn’t going to have a few surprises up its sleeve. I’m not fourteen anymore, and I tried not to take too much offense when the numbers started dropping. Most, if not all of us have grown up substantially. It’s completely normal to grow apart and go our separate ways without being the wiser, it’s simply a part of life that occurs. And it didn’t bother me any either, until I’d catch a glimpse of the picture on my night table of myself, Jackie, Dayo, Alexander, and Amandla that I for some reason cannot bring myself to change out and get the overwhelming urge to call all of them at once or cry. I’d usually go with the third option, which was stuffing myself up underneath the covers and sleeping it off.

But now, morning has arrived and Jennifer’s got both hands on the curtains as she yanks them open to wake me up and almost blind me in the process. I’m slightly disoriented, trying my best to remember how in the hell I got to this point. Once upon a time, I had the hard reputation of being the most optimistic in the group – which is a hard lie, seeing as how for as long as I have known him, nothing has been able to sway Dayo of his belief that Tupac is still alive on an island somewhere – and yet here I am, triple-checking the truth value of a text from Jen because I’m simply finding it all that hard to believe.

I took Jen’s long, emoji-filled invitation and ran with it regardless, all the way past my frowning mother to JFK where I’m now waiting on a red-eye flight to Aspen, Colorado. Spending the holidays with Jen was something that didn’t even make the list of things that would ever possibly cross my mind, but I didn’t have anything else to do. It seemed like it’d be fun, much more so than trying to help carry the last-minute Christmas tree up the stairs in the high-rise apartment complex my mother lives in.

Airports are less than pleasant, especially late at night and when alone. I don’t like them much to begin with, but usually I have Madeline or Elina to keep me company – my mom being the preferred choice, as Madeline is on one of two wavelengths at an airport: talk to no one, or bitch at everyone. It’s just me this go ‘round, my only companion the steady flow of noise as surrounding gates are called to board, televisions playing the news, and people around me engage in actual conversations with one another. This is the last place on Earth I want to be, and my face conveys that plain as day.

I’m halfway towards a cat nap, the only plausible option as of what to do with myself before they call my flight to board, when my ears pick up the sound of one particular voice over all the rest.

“Excuse the hell out of me, I didn’t realize that I would be boarding Air Force One this evening!”

On instinct, I sit up a little straighter in this ridiculous chair that is designed to give its occupants a future of poor posture. There’s only one voice that I’ve ever heard in that strangled of a tone, and there’s only one person that would string such words together in the most inappropriate location possible. Spoiler alert: they belong to each other.

Turning around in my seat, I wish I could say that I’m surprised to see Jack Quaid huffing and puffing his way towards the same empty gate I’ve stationed myself at, but I’m not. Surprise is no longer an emotion I feel whenever I come into the vicinity of Jack Quaid.

“Honestly, you’ve been to enough airports in your measly lifetime, why are you acting as though the world has ended over TSA confiscating your bear repellent?” Another voice is added into the mix over the commotion, and the options of who could possibly be with Jack and discussing bear repellent like it’s the daily weather report quickly dwindle down to one. I ask myself if there will ever come a day when I don’t accidentally run into these people. “And why the hell did you have bear repellent in your bag to begin with?”

“We’re going to fucking Colorado, Jacqueline, why would I not pack bear repellent?”

“We’ll be in Colorado, not the middle of fucking nowhere!” she barks in retaliation. I don’t see how they haven’t drawn anyone else’s attention – they’re not exactly good at keeping things at a volume that is to themselves. Jack lets out a long, agitated groan, before puffing out his chest and his voice lifts an octave, all matter-of-fact.

“You just remember this when a bear comes along and you need me to save you.”

Judging by the look on Jackie’s face, she’s considering taking her suitcase and using it to run Jack over. “We are not going to be attacked by bears, and like you would ever be able to hold your own against a bear that wasn’t Winnie the Pooh!”

“I genuinely do not know why I bother spending any time with you,” Jack declares dramatically. The two of them go strolling right past me without giving me so much as a second glance – really feeling the love – when I decide to make my own grand entrance into their conversation.

“It’s because you two are lowkey lovers; you just don’t bother admitting it to anyone even though we’ve all known that you’ve had this little fling going on since the Catching Fire premiere.” Jackie’s head is the first to whip around, fast enough to break her neck and her eyes feral as they land on me. Jack drops his suitcase handle, it clattering onto the floor. It looks as though he may have suffered a minor heart attack from my little intrusion.

They’re burning holes in me as they gape, not a single word to be had between the two of them – which, really, is a feat – and I shrug. “What?” I ask, my lips already beginning to curl up into a smirk. “Did I get it wrong or something?”

It seems as though I have shorted the circuit in Jackie’s brain as she blinks at me in a rapid secession. “Yes, hi Isabelle, it’s so lovely to see you too!” I mimic her, standing up with my arms outstretched for a hug.

Jack seems to shake free of his dumbstruck state before Jackie does, claiming the hug meant for her as his own. “Are you sure you’re actually Isabelle?” he questions. “I mean, the whole evil genius bit is still true to character, but last time I checked, Isabelle was much scrawnier. Had real chicken-y legs and bony elbows.”

To prove a point, I ram one of my elbows into his chest. He winces, nodding. “Yep,” he mutters. “Still bony.”

I turn to face Jackie, holding my arms open once again for her. The look of shock has somewhat dissolved from her features as her eyes meet mine. One of my eyebrows quirks. “Going off on a honeymoon?” I tease.

Jackie’s voice is back from wherever it vanished off to for a few moments. “Nope, try Jen’s.” She folds into my hug at an angle, tucking herself underneath my arm. Those last few inches of my growth spurt, as well as Jackie’s barely-there sandals finally set me taller than her, even though it’s not a hard thing to do to start. Jackie’s always been the shortest out of us Hunger Games kids.  

Jackie has also been the only one out of the bunch I’ve bothered to keep in touch with over the years. There was no trial or tribulation life could hurtle in the way of our friendship that could scratch the surface – she and I had become instant best friends meeting all those years ago and nothing really had an effect on that. She and I liked to think that we were platonic soulmates, and nothing as pesky as distance could dent that. Jack was sort of part of the package deal that came along with Jackie. Just like her mood swings, impromptu Harry Potter marathons, and week-long vegan stints, Jack was something that you got when you signed up for a friendship with Jackie. I saw him less than I saw Jackie, but much more than anyone else out of our little Hunger Games cult.

“Am I wrong to assume you’re here for that very reason as well?”

“Nope, because you’d be very correct.”

“Then I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you got the exact same text message as us,” Jackie continues, glancing up at me.

“What, the one with perfect grammar and more emojis than we thought Jen knew how to use?”

“That’d be the one.”

Jack sidles up beside me, draping one of his arms around my shoulders. “Isabelle,” he begins, channeling his inner car salesperson. “You’d agree with me that because we’re going to be out in the wilderness for the next few days, it’s only sane that we arm ourselves with necessities such as bear repellent—"

“Give it a fucking rest already!”

After only just barely serving as the wall between Jack’s throat and Jackie’s claws, the two of them join me in my little corner of our flight’s gate. Not only has Jen apparently decided to play the ever so gracious host over the holidays by extending her vacation home to us, but she’s posted the three of us up with first class plane tickets. Here I’d thought it was just Jen trying to make up for the missed birthdays by at least letting me fly in style halfway across the country.

It’s easy to fall back into a routine of sorts with Jackie and Jack, like no time has passed at all. Jack’s telling me all about the alcoholic beverages I ought to try in February (I hate to crush even more of his dreams and tell him that I’ve spent my fair share of time in Europe over the last few years and for my nineteenth birthday, Madeline got me a fake ID as a present) and Jackie’s giving me the full synopsis of her musical, practically trying to sell the lead role to me. For a moment, I almost feel like I’m fifteen once again and time hasn’t passed me by at all. There’s a part of me that’s tempted to check my phone’s background and see if it’s reverted back to me on Dayo’s back with a giant sparkler held over his head from my birthday party.

“Can I ask you a question, Izzy?” Jack asks for permission, the arm that isn’t draped around Jackie’s shoulders lifting in mock arrest. “And you have to promise me that you won’t get offended or throw the knife in your underwear at my head when I do.”

I roll my eyes. “I haven’t thrown a knife in years, Jack,” I tell him. “And besides, TSA would have swiped it just like they did your precious bear repellent.”

Jack slouches a little, the sulking expression returning to his face. “Do you know how much that bear repellent cost?” he groans. From beside him, Jackie’s shooting me daggers for even bringing the subject back up.

“Just ask the question already, Quaid,” she prompts him.

“Right, yeah – okay, so why in the world did you start running for Nike? I love you and support you and all that other bullshit, but you are not the athlete type. You could barely walk on the hotel carpet barefoot without having a near emergency-room-worthy disaster.” He then reaches up to cover his face, most likely a protective gesture.

“I’m not gonna kill you, Jack, Jesus,” I bark. He slowly lowers his arm, still housing a great deal of hesitation. “Besides, you’re not the first person to ask me that, Madeline tried to declare me incompetent when I told her about the gig. One of my hands begins to mess with the ends of my hair absentmindedly. “It was just something different. Nothing wrong with getting outside of your comfort zone.”

“You know what’s outside of my comfort zone?” Jackie pipes back up. “Seeing Ludwig on the History channel. I didn’t even know he knew what history was, aside from that of his browser’s.”

“Ha, ha. Become a comedian, why don’t you?” A new voice enters our conversation, and as if right on cue, I can feel all the blood in my body turn to ice water.

Scratch that – I now feel like I’m fourteen again.

I turn around, and sure enough, there stands Alexander Ludwig. Or at least, who I think is Alexander. I haven’t seen him in person in nearly four years, only going by the guide that Instagram has given me, and even that was a recent development. Somewhere up above, I can hear God laughing at me, because this has to be the doing of his need for quality entertainment.

Alexander is somehow able to avert from the death stare Jackie’s giving him, his eyes finding me. “Hey, Isabelle,” he says, face softening ever so slightly.

From the seat across from me, I hear Jack give a strangled cough, one that sounds oddly similar to, “Just fuck already.” It’s followed by the sound of Jackie slapping Jack in the shoulder.

“Uh…hi?” I now know how the happy couple felt when I materialized out of thin air – at a complete loss for words. Alexander offers me a hopeful smile and still relatively unsure of what I’m supposed to do with myself, I stand up and go in for the hug. It’s awkward, and I’m sure Jackie is snickering behind my back as we attempt to figure our hug out. We both move in the same direction as we extend our arms, stopping almost halfway before we wordlessly try to determine who’s coming in from the left and who isn’t. If there was an award for it, this would win for the most awkward reunion hug ever, hands down.

It takes a second, but we get there – Alexander folds me up underneath his arms, both of them encircling around my shoulders as my hands slip around his waist. It’s been four years since I’ve so much as seen him in the flesh, so I’m sure this sort of hug is too far of a leap forward back into anything resembling the relationship we once had. Throwing caution to the wind just so happened to always be Alexander’s trademark. We stay like that for much too long, but help myself I cannot. I’ve already fallen down the rabbit hole of the familiar, might as well set up shop there.

“Good to see ya,” he mumbles as we pull away. Right back to the formalities, I suppose.

“Yeah, you too.”

Jackie is burning holes in me when I turn back around, tugging down on the hem of my shirt as I head back to my seat. Alexander has never really been Jackie’s favorite person, and I don’t think time and distance has made her heart grow any fonder.

“I suppose that you being on a flight that isn’t to Aspen is too much for me to wish for?” Jackie sighs as she quickly redirects her attention to Alexander, one of her eyebrows kinking in question.

“It’s nice to see you too, Jackie,” Alexander says, the beginnings of a smirk forming on his lips. “If I didn’t already know any better, I’d cross my fingers and hope my seat was next to you.” He then shifts his gaze to Jack, winking.

Both of Jackie’s hands fly out of her lap in exasperation. “How do you people know about this?!”

My reply is simultaneous with Alexander’s.

“You two are about as subtle as a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.”

“Because I have eyes.”

She frowns. “Whatever.”

Alexander sets his backpack down in an empty seat and sits down in the one next to it, which happens to conveniently be right next to mine. He’s glancing right in my lap, and I’m about to beat Jackie to the punch of telling him to fuck off before I realize what he’s looking at. “6A,” he notes, referring to the seat number on the boarding pass that I’ve had sitting underneath my leg – not the most responsible way to keep up with it, but I really hadn’t planned on moving from this chair unless it was to board the plane itself. “I think we’re sitting next to each other.”

For emphasis, he holds up his own boarding pass for me to see. Sure enough, his seat number is the one right next to mine. Even across the way, I can hear Jackie growl under her breath, and Jack moves his arm from around her shoulder to rest on her thigh. I can’t fight my grin – not because of the thought that I get to spend the next few hours next to Alexander, but at how fucking adorable Jack and Jackie are. The only thing more adorable than that, perhaps, is how oblivious they’ve been towards how oblivious they think we are.

Yep, my mind flashes. Welcome back to 2013.

                                                              …

I don’t know why we decide to bestow the job of chauffer from the airport to Jen’s onto Jack, seeing as how Jackie and I concluded that Jack only ever got his driver’s license by bribing the DMV with signed headshots of his father’s, but we do it. The three of us are much too lazy to be behind the wheel on foreign terrain, and Jack’s never one to turn down a challenge. All Alexander has to do is volunteer to drive since he’s used to driving in the wintry weather and Jack all but pushes him out of the way. Reverse psychology is real.

It’s late when we land, almost the same time now as it was when our plane took off from JFK. Jackie fortunately gives up her shotgun seat to Alexander, the two of us sprawling out in the backseat as we try to get in a few hours of sleep. Jen might have gotten us first class seats on the plane, but she certainly didn’t take note of where the hell the plane was going to be landing in regards to her location.

The plane landed at Denver International, roughly three hours from Jen’s place in Aspen and a small detail that apparently Jack didn’t take into account until our captain was announcing our arrival. Along with his fellow wolf pack buddy Dayo, Jack is an avid conspiracy theorist in the most aggravating way – he doesn’t believe in any of the plausible conspiracies, only the off-the-wall ones. One of those conspiracies that he does opt to buy in on just so happens to be the one about the Denver airport being the gateway to hell.

As we were trekking off the plane, half-dead, Jack was the only one who seemed apprehensive about disembarking. In fact, I had to ram him along using my suitcase, threatening to run over his ankles if he didn’t pick up the pace.

“What’s your deal?” Jackie grumbled sleepily, tugging him along through the terminals only for him to put up quite the deal of resistance as they moved along.

“Hell, Jackie, we’re in hell,” Jack hissed.

Jackie stopped in her tracks, turning around to give him a few love pats to the face. “Are you okay? Did you smuggle more fucking bear repellent onto the plane and accidentally detonate it on yourself?”

The way Jack looked at her, one would have assumed he thought she had three heads. “No!” he demanded, his voice lowering as he pulled me, Jackie, and Alexander closer to him as though we were about to begin trading government secrets. “Look, you cannot tell me that this is not the sketchiest place you’ve ever been in your life.”

“Untrue,” Jackie dismissed almost immediately. “I grew up in a neighborhood of second-rate politicians.”

Jack had glared at her, before turning to look at me and Alexander for some sort of backup. Alexander merely shrugged. “Don’t look at me dude, I’ve been to the red-light district four times.”

“Yeah, of course you have,” Jack muttered under his breath, rolling his eyes. “Have none of you seen pictures of this airport? Been here before? This is literally the entrance to hell – for Christ’s sake, there’s a giant fucking Satanic horse guarding this place like it’s Lucifer’s lapdog!”

“Pretty sure Isabelle and I flew through here for the mall tour stop in Aurora, and we weren’t chased through the concourses by Beelzebub and his horde of demon friends,” Jackie pointed out dryly.

“Jackie, there are goddamn Nazis with rainbows behind them on the murals here, nothing about that strikes you as terrifying?”

“Racism is alive in America, you know.”

“If we’re going to have a riveting discussion on what modern airport art means, can we at least go to Starbucks first?” Alexander asked, raising his hand.

Both Jackie and Jack looked at him, shooting him a resounding, “No!” before going right back to their debate as to whether or not we were standing at the flaming gates. It was at that point that I had to intervene, wedging between them and pulling Jackie away from the conversation and towards the baggage claim. Jack, of course, wasn’t done with his running commentary about how he was convinced Satan was going to pop out from behind a kiosk at any second, mumbling under his breath the whole way through the airport.

“You’ll agree with me and my being right on this,” he avowed as we made our way to our rental car, after swearing that someone was breathing down his neck despite bringing up the rear.

“Yeah, when hell freezes over,” Jackie retorted.

“Well, the weather app says the temperature outside is below freezing, so we’re not too far off.”

I’m not too entirely worried about Jack falling asleep behind the wheel, since his close brush with hell and getting a good look at Blucifer shook him wide awake.

All four of us are running on fumes by the time we make it to Jen’s place. Jackie and I have our noses pressed to the glass of our opposite windows, watching as the snow falls down on the four cars out in the driveway. Snow is no longer uncommon now that I’ve been living in New York City for the last few years, but out here it isn’t interfered with by large construction sites and millions of people. It’s pure, untouched, lazily floating down from the sky and covering the ground in a pristine white blanket.

“God, has she invited us to her family’s Christmas?” Alexander asks quietly. “I didn’t know Jen knew this many people.”

“Oh yeah,” Jackie snorts. “Because being an Oscar winner means you lead a lonely, lonely life.”

Swiveling around in his seat, he turns around and feigns cheerfulness as he smiles at Jackie. “You haven’t changed a bit, Emerson.”

“Right back at ‘ya, Ludwig.”

“Alright,” Jack announces as the engine stops running. “I’m not running the risk of getting trapped in by any other Lawrences in case we need to run for the hills, so the curb it is.”

Jackie leans forward, snaking her upper body around the edge of the driver’s seat to look at Jack. “You know how to overnight park?” she asks cheekily, and I have to turn the rising laugh in my throat into a strangled sort of cough.

“Well, duh,” Jack replies, pulling the keys out of the ignition. “Don’t you have to know how to do that in order to pass your driver’s test?”

“You do.” Jackie falls back in her seat, winking at me as she does.

While I’m almost positive that unloading our luggage would have been a struggle regardless of the weather around us, the snow and steadily picking up wind makes things that much more complicated. Jackie’s doing her best to balance her bags on her back so she doesn’t have to stick them in the snow, which is already up to her ankles, but Jackie isn’t Supergirl – she doesn’t have super strength, and her kryptonite happens to be her inability to pack lightly. Jack and Alexander are currently debating over whose generic black suitcase belongs to whom, preventing me from reaching my last duffel bag and going inside where there’s heat.

I’m about to tell them to either move out of the way or help the short person out, when a new voice rings out over all of us.

“Hey guys!”

Peering around the edge of our car, I see Jen standing on the porch wrapped up in a blanket that looks incredibly toasty, smile stretching from ear to ear at the sight of us. She must be really deprived of quality company.

Taking the opportunity of Jack and Alexander being temporarily distracted from the luggage, I dart back around and all but dive into the trunk to get my last duffel bag. It accidentally hits Jack in the gut as I scramble back out, maneuvering around them to make a break for the stairs up to Jen’s porch.

“Damn, Isabelle!”

“It’s cold and I have thin blood, sue me!” I yell over my shoulder.

Jack is happy to yell right back, “You’re a fake New Yorker!”

Jackie is right on my heels as we climb up the stairs to greet an open-armed Jen. The house is massive, as to be expected, and perhaps it’s the sleep-deprived part of me controlling my brain, but I have never been more thankful for Jen and her vast net-worth, being able to afford a vacation home where even with many guests I will still have a large probability of getting my own bed. I barrel right into Jen, mostly because she’s warm and everything else outside is not.

“Aw, Belly,” she croons playfully. “Didja really miss me that much?”

“You have body heat,” I inform her, wrapping my arms tighter around her.

Jen laughs, prying me off of her and away from the thick blanket that I’d been tucked underneath for a few seconds. “So now I fall second to my temperature?” she asks as she gives Jackie a hug, and I simply shrug.

“Hey, next time invite us to the Caribbean.”

“I’ll put it on the list.” Her eyes avert away from me, most likely landing on the boys that are still trudging their way up the stairs. “You guys are late, I thought your flight landed earlier than this?”

“Yeah, you shipped us right through Satan’s abode, which happens to be three hours from here,” Jack informs her. Jackie, Alexander and I all roll our eyes. “And I’m pretty sure the snow has picked up ever since Blucifer and I locked eyes, which I’m sure is some sort of sign.”

“Late?” Alexander asks before Jack can continue his Denver spiel. Jen nods, gesturing towards the front door.

“C’mon in.”

Everything is all warm and glowing inside, the smell of sandalwood and vanilla embracing me in a comforting hug. We walk right in to what I’m guessing is the living room, a large sectional and a few lounge chairs littered around a crackling fireplace, the TV overhead playing A Charlie Brown Christmas on mute.

Jen wiggles her way up to the front of our lineup, pointing towards the spiral staircase behind the fireplace. “You guys are gonna be in the guest rooms upstairs if that’s okay,” she begins, tugging her blanket around her neck tighter like it’s a cape. “It better be okay, seeing as how I had to ward the hellions away from them.”

“Does this place have an elevator?” Jack asks. “Because my soul has already been compromised once today, I’m too tired to climb up some stairs.”

Jackie’s eyebrows furrow together, still hung up on Jen’s words. “Wait, what do you mean by hellions?”

A shadow falls over Jen’s face almost instantly, quickly diverting any and all eye contact with us. “Well,” she starts, her voice rising an octave. My mind is racing much faster than she can speak. Four other cars out in the driveway, the use of the word hellions, the convenient fact that I just so happened to bump into Jackie, Jack, and Alexander at the airport, all of whom had the same destination as me…

“Wait,” I say slowly as the realization starts to crash over me, and already Jen is beginning to cower into the back of her couch. “You don’t mean—"

“Oh hell to the nah.”

The one and only Dayo Okeniyi comes strolling in from god only knows where – probably the kitchen, seeing as how he has an entire pie in one hand and a fork in the other – stopping dead in his tracks the minute he sees us. Or, rather, Alexander.

“What the hell?” Alexander says, equally as stunned.

Jackie, like myself, seems to have put all the pieces together quickly. “Jen,” she utters out. “Have you done what I think you’ve done?”

“Maybe?” she squeaks.

Right on cue, a leggy blonde comes up behind Dayo. “Dayo, are you talking to yourself again, I thought—” Leven’s voice falls off the deep end the second she lays eyes on the five of us, her face falling. “Oh.”

“Oh is right,” Dayo grumbles.

“What is this, the Hunger Games reunion?” Jackie asks, her eyes still on a hoping-to-disappear Jen.

Ever the wise one, Alexander takes it upon himself to answer that question. “I mean, we’re missing a few people, Josh and ‘Mandla aren’t—”

Alexander, apparently, has spoken too soon, because as soon as the names slip off his lips, out emerge Josh, Amandla, and Willow from the kitchen. The three of them may as well be mythical creatures strolling past the way my eyes bug out of my head. It’s been so long since I’ve heard from any of them to the point I began referring to them in the past tense, like they’ve gone on to greener pastures or some shit.  

Josh seems to be the only person who doesn’t seem to be bothered in the slightest by our arrival. He moves past a frozen Amandla and Willow, making his way to one of the recliners in the living room. Something tells me that a) the Charlie Brown Christmas was his idea, and b) he was absolutely in on whatever this is. “Hey Belle, Xander, happy couple!” he greets to each of us individually, a warm smile on his face.  

“Alright Liam, come on out!” Jack calls mockingly, in reference to the only person missing from this shebang aside from Gary Ross himself.

Jen’s face falls a little. “Oh no, Liam’s not here,” she confirms as she shakes her head. “He’s in Australia.”  

“Well he’s about the only one,” Jackie mumbles.

“Okay, seriously Jen,” Leven pipes up. “What is this?”

“What is what?”

“This,” Dayo repeats, motioning his fork in a circle.

“What?” Jen cries out, holding her arms up as she does her best to feign innocence we all know she doesn’t have in this situation. “I can’t want to have a little holiday get together with old friends, all of whom just so happen to be you guys?”

If looks could kill, Dayo would have Alexander’s blood on his hands and this get together would become a burial service. I never did get the full story as to how the great wolf pack fell apart the way it did, but just going out on a limb, my guess is that it wasn’t pretty and left a little bit of bad blood. Their demise, I think, was the other reason aside from life itself that lead all of us to going our own ways – no one wants to break up a fight between men large enough to have their own area code, and most of us wouldn’t have been able to do so just based on physical means alone. “Yeah, no; sorry, Jenny,” Dayo quickly apologizes, breaking his steely glare off of Alexander for only a split second.

“I mean, no offense to you guys, but isn’t this a bit…y’know, outdated?” Leven says, gesturing around the group as she leans up against the wall. “It’s been years since we all hung out together.”

“Yes, which means we’re overdue,” Jen tries to persuade us, her selling smile not very convincing. “No time like the present to remedy that, right?”

My arms fold over my chest. “Why wouldn’t you just tell us the truth, that this is what our ‘holiday extravaganza’ was gonna be?”

“Hey, I didn’t lie to you guys,” Jen protests, and Jackie is quick to counter that.

“You just left out the whole truth.”

We’re all turning on Jen at a rate she didn’t foresee and doesn’t appreciate, because her fuse is beginning to shorten on us. “Look,” she huffs. “I’m sorry I lied by omission, or whatever; I knew if I told you guys that I was inviting the whole gang, I wouldn’t have even gotten some of you to reply to my text. Hell, some of you didn’t anyways.” Her eyes cut over to Alexander, who takes a step behind me. I don’t know what he’s expecting, if I’m going to service as a shield or what. Our hug at the airport and the several-hour conversation we’d wound up in the air might have been nice, but I’m not standing in the line of fire for him.

“Jen, I get the sentiment of wanting to do this…kinda, I guess,” Jackie says, unable to sell even herself on what she’s saying. “But Leven’s right. We haven’t all hung out together in years, you ever think that maybe that was for a reason?”

Jen’s face quickly falls into a deadpan. “I don’t know why all of you are suddenly bitching, you didn’t complain any when I flew you out first class and let you eat my whole fucking chocolate pie.” From behind her, Dayo guiltily lowers the fork from his mouth. “And to be fair, Jackie, you had the chance to make a run for it the minute you realized Alexander was on the same flight as you, but you didn’t.”

“I mean, I certainly thought about it—”

“Really?!”

“Okay, can we just sort this mess out in the morning? I have had to quite literally go through hell this evening,” Jack whines, and Jackie and I both groan. I’m suddenly missing his griping about the bear repellent right about now, and I’d bet serious money Jackie feels the same. “We just all go to sleep for now, and if anyone wants to bow out, they can do it in the morning.”

Never in my life have we all been on the same page as Jack Quaid, and on the same page as a fairly decent idea that came from him at that. Leven nods, Dayo gives him a three-fingered salute before going right back into the pie, and if my eyes aren’t deceiving me, I think Jackie’s already looking for flights back home for three people – either she and Jack have packed a kid in that suitcase, or they’re sweeping me under their wing and providing me with my get out of jail free card.

Jen doesn’t seem too pleased with this, and I can tell she’s about to argue it. Before she even opens her mouth, a shrill alarm goes off without any warning. It scares all of us but really gets me (what can I say, the skittishness never went away) and causes me to jump nearly ten feet in the air. I stumble back against Alexander, who seems more than pleased to catch and steady me. Jackie is less than thrilled by this, her eyes making Alexander’s hands on my shoulders even hotter than before as she tries to set them ablaze.

“What the fuck was that?” Dayo spits, hand resting over his heart as he tries to regulate its beat back to normal.

“Is that your way of punishing us for not liking this little plan of yours?”

“No, it’s my phone,” Jen replies, rolling her eyes. “Although if it’s working, then yes.” She pulls her phone out from her pocket and her eyes quickly begin flitting over the screen. The expression on her face changes as she reads, and already I can tell something is wrong by the time she lifts her head. “Um, so, the whole leaving here tomorrow morning thing you guys have come up with might not be happening.”

“Why not?” Dayo asks. “Are you going to hold us hostage?”

Jen holds up her phone as an explanation. “That was my dear friend the National Weather Service. We’re currently under a winter storm warning for…heavy snow and blowing snow,” she reads off, before looking back up at the rest of us.

“So a blizzard?” Alexander repeats.

“Near blizzard,” Jen corrects. Alexander looks at her, befuddled.

“It’s the same thing as a blizzard, why not just…call it what it is?”

“Because it’s not!”

“Okay,” Leven sings disarmingly. “We can discuss the National Weather Service’s classification criteria later, let’s just go back to the real issue for a second. Are you saying that we’re stuck here?”

Jen nods. “Says that this is in effect until tomorrow night, maybe later—"

“Tomorrow night? Maybe later?!” Jackie splutters.

“Yes, your hearing is as on point as ever, Jackie. There’s no telling how much more snow it’s gonna bring our way.” I can tell that Jen is trying her best not to look too overly pleased at this development fate has seemed to deliver her, while everyone else is in their varying states of shocked, irritated, or flat out tired – I happen fall into the third category, along with Amandla, who is about two steps away from knocking out in Willow’s lap and not moving until morning.  

Josh leans back a little farther in the recliner, both of his hands folded behind his head. “Well, let’s just hope that we don’t get trapped in here or something. That sure would suck.” Everyone immediately turns from wherever they’re standing in the room to glower at him.

Jen gives up on trying to induce bonding, so the rest of the evening is spent in relative peace. We’re free to do whatever our hearts desire, so long as we aren’t booking ourselves a one-way ticket to a jail cell and we don’t choose anything for dinner that has a Christmas tree sticky note with Jen’s name on it. I opt to sit downstairs in the living room with Jackie, Jack and Leven, Jack channel surfing to find something other than the ‘ridiculous Hallmark movies with budgets of twelve dollars’.

Leven’s doing her nails on one end of the sectional, legs stretched out as she paints her toes an alarming shade of yellow with concentrated precision. After she finishes a toe, she’ll stop, turn to face me and open her mouth so I can feed her a piece of trail mix – specifically, the cashews or the M&Ms. God forbid she eat a dried cherry.

I’m sitting under a heating blanket, which only adds to my heated demeanor still lingering from earlier. Alexander has stayed far out of my sight for the remainder of the day, so at least it’s nice to know he’s able to tell when he’s not wanted and isn’t going to push an apology like he might have years and years ago. Dayo has been rather suspiciously unaccounted for as well. I’ve tried asking Jackie on three separate occasions throughout the evening to go to Dayo’s room and make sure he doesn’t have Alexander hogtied in the closet, but she pretends that she’s either enthralled with the channel surfing or that I’m speaking a language she doesn’t understand.

Jackie sure did make one hell of a point yesterday. Perhaps there was a reason we’d all grown apart, whenever it happened and whether it was a gradual thing or the after effects of a sledgehammer coming down. Sure, Alexander’s girlfriends and their possessive nature played a pretty big part in us falling out, but maybe there had been a little bit more to it than just that.

“Jack, can you pick a movie already?” Leven mumbles after I toss an M&M into her expecting mouth.

He shifts his head in Jackie’s lap so he’s looking up at her. “When I find one that isn’t deserving of a fucking Razzie. Seriously, who makes these disasters, and what studio puts forth the money to produce them?”

“I thought you’d already decided their overall budget was a ten-dollar bill,” I point out. Jack simply points at me with the remote for emphasis as he keeps flipping. “Jackie, I am begging you—”

“—I am not going to see if Dayo is committing a felony!” she finishes for me. “Let him for all I care. Maybe that’ll teach ol’ Blondie up there a lesson.”

“I’ll be sure to remember this for when we’re all sitting at Dayo’s murder trial in two weeks.”

“Why do you care so much, Belly?” Leven asks, beating Jackie to the punch. “I mean, you were all but ready to decapitate him earlier.”

“Yeah, Belly,” Jackie echoes. “If anything, Dayo’d be doing you a favor.”

“What’s this about favors?” Jen asks as she passes through the living room, presumably making her way from the kitchen. She has inadvertently become my savior, keeping me from delivering an explanation that I’m not even sure I have. It’s only a few threads of my good conscious that are on board with saving Alexander’s life from a certain death – the more I try to find a reason, the more reasons I come up with as to why I’m perfectly justified in turning a blind eye.

“Nothing, we’re just discussing the one Dayo’s doing for all of us by getting rid of Alexander.” Jen’s mouth forms a slight ‘O’ as she nods. She then jabs a thumb over her shoulder, pointing behind her.

“Well, I could use one from you guys, if you don’t mind. The wind’s finally stopped, and I need some help unloading presents from my car.”

“You actually bought us shit?” Jack asks, resting a hand over his heart. “Jenny, I’m touched.”

“There’s still time to take it back.”

“Don’t be crazy.” The four of us slowly pull ourselves off of the couch, wrapping blankets or jackets around our shoulders and pursuing a pair of shoes as we start to make our way to the door. The snow is still falling down lazily in thick white clumps when I get a brief glimpse out the window, the sky behind it an odd shade of black.

“I’ll be out there in a second,” Jen calls. “I’ve gotta go find my keys.”

Jack goes ahead with opening up the door, a rush of cold air hitting me square in the chest. I instinctively pull the blanket a little tighter around my chest as I step outside. Everything has morphed into even more of a winter wonderland, the snow already a thick blanket on the ground and only growing by the second.

“Which car is Jen’s, you think?” Jack asks as he leads the way down the stairs, the snow crunching underneath his feet. I try to step in his footprints, cutting down the chances of slipping and falling.

“The nicest one, duh,” Jackie replies. “You know she didn’t roll up in a fucking Prius.”

“You drove a Prius for like, three years,” Leven reminds her. Jackie stops as she turns back around, making a face.

“Yes, because I was a high school sophomore, not an Academy Award winner.”

Leven nods in refutation, and I all but push Jackie down the next step so we keep moving. The less time I spend on these stairs, the higher the probability of me leaving here in one piece increases.

My feet start to sink into the snow by the time I reach the ground, the hems of my sweatpants brushing up against it. “I’m actually terrified to see the final total of how much snow this place has accumulated,” I mutter.

Jackie shudders at the thought. “We might never leave.”

“Which I’m sure would be right up Jen’s alley,” Leven adds.

The sound of the door up on the porch closing catches our attention. “Yo, Jenny!” Jack calls out. “Hit the button on your car already so I can grab some gifts and head back inside! It’s cold!”

“Yeah, no kidding.” Jen sounds an awful lot like Dayo.

Sure enough, Dayo’s bounding down the stairs as he shrugs on his ridiculous wintergreen flannel. He’s had it for ages, and I know this because I tried to sneak it into a donation box and a trash can on many different occasions when I’d stop by his place in LA. “You guys helping with presents?” he asks. I simply nod.

“Was Jennifer behind you?” Jack questions, peeking around from behind the trunk of what I think he’s established as Jen’s car.

“No,” he replies, coming to stand down next to me. “She said she had to go find her keys.”

“So,” Jackie says as she sidles up next to Dayo. “What’d you do with Alexander’s body?”

Dayo scoffs, rolling his eyes. “You really think I did something to him?”

Leven, Jackie, Jack, and I all respond in unison. “Yes.”

I hear the sound of the door to the house open up again. The porch lights are off, so we aren’t able to see who it is until they’re a few steps away from being on the ground. I figure out that it isn’t Jen this time again either before they even come into view – Amandla and Willow don’t exactly whisper at the quietest of volumes.

By the time Alexander, Jen, and Josh all come sauntering down the steps in two different intervals, I can’t do anything but roll my eyes at how gullible all of us are. I doubt Jen even bought us anything; the first class tickets probably cost enough to suffice as our Christmas. Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas, I think. Your present is a one-way trip to hell.

“Jen…” Jackie drags out warily. It’s a very good thing that Jen never got into gambling, because her poker face is absolute garbage. “Why are we all out here?”

“Is this Alexander’s funeral?” Willow asks. Alexander rolls his eyes, arms folded tightly over his chest as he leans up against the hood of one of the cars.

Somewhere inside her, Jen finds her gall and glares at all of us with steely eyes. “No,” she responds defiantly. “You guys – namely Alexander – screwed up my bonding exercises, that’s one thing. I wasn’t really taking that seriously.”

“You weren’t?” Jack repeats.

Jen’s face falls in a deadpan. “Jack, I flee from any and all organized activities. It’s why I left public school faster than you could say extracurricular,” she says. “But I thought if it was gonna get you asshats to talk again, then I’d suffer through it. And we were doing so well up until Ludwig over there opened his freakishly big mouth and went right for the fucking glue of the group.” I don’t know whether I should feel a small inch of contentment or offense towards that.

“So now you’ve forced my hand, resulting in my having to get creative.” Her arms cross as she pops out her hip, staring at us expectantly. “We aren’t going back inside until you idiots love each other again.”

Josh instantly bursts out into laughter. “Oh god, that’s a good one,” he says, wiping at his eyes. Jen however, doesn’t lighten up any. “Wait…are you serious?”

“Do I look like I’m messing around?”

“Jen, I thought we agreed we were partners in crime on this!” Josh whines.

“And you were a terrible partner in crime,” she retorts. “The only crime you’ve committed since showing up here is wearing that tacky ass shirt.” Josh looks down at his Charlie Brown Christmas sweater, frowning.

“This is ridiculous,” Amandla states, the mouthpiece of all our thoughts. “Seriously, Jen, let’s stop doing laps through the Nile.” With that, she brushes past me and heads right back up the stairs towards the front door. Jen doesn’t try to stop her, just stares blankly into the empty space as she waits for something.

I move to follow after Amandla once she’s made it up to the door, stopping only once I realize Amandla hasn’t actually made it inside yet. She’s tugging on the door just to meet resistance. It will not budge, no matter how hard she pulls. My eyes snap over to Jen, who’s got the beginnings of a rather smug smirk curling along the corners of her lips.

“What the hell?” Amandla yells out, echoing out into the night. “Why is this thing locked?”

“I told you!” Jen shouts back. “No one is going inside until I’m seeing a group hug so genuine it brings a frozen fucking tear to my eye!”

“Jen,” Leven says slowly. “You do realize it’s nearly midnight, there’s still snow coming down to add on the foot-and-a-half on the ground, and it’s, oh I don’t know, below freezing?”

“Well Levvy, maybe that’ll motivate all of you to get to singing Kumbaya a little bit faster.”

Amandla comes bounding back down the stairs, searching for a way to get up underneath the blanket I have draped around my shoulders. “This isn’t gonna go well,” she says to me quietly. All I do is nod.

Alexander sighs, dragging a hand down his chin. “Look, Belle, I’m sorry about earlier,” he says begrudgingly, as though the apology will cleanse him of all his sins and wrongdoing. “I spoke before I thought—”

“—not uncommon for you—”

“—stay out of it, Jackie,” Alexander growls.

“I mean, I tried, and look where that got us,” she defends herself. “You went airing out the details of Isabelle’s sex life, which I didn’t really care to know that much about.”

“Like you haven’t had a five-year subscription to mine, the way you run commentary on it!” Alexander fires back. Jackie’s hands only rise higher.

“Hey, I’m not the one who’s type is ‘how close of a knockoff Isabelle girlfriend can I find?’ She’s oblivious as it is, someone’s gotta look out for her, Douchewig.”

“God, why haven’t you let that nickname die yet?”

“We’re talking, we’re talking…” Jen muses in observation. “This is good.”

Dayo rolls his eyes. “Jenny, this is the exact opposite of good. You should have known that the minute you invited Ludwig we’d all go postal. He is the root of all our problems.”

“Excuse me!”

“You heard me, Ludwig!”

Already, I find myself starting to cower a little farther into the blanket huddle Amandla and I have created. I’ve never witnessed Dayo and Alexander get genuinely angry with one another – annoyance, yes, that was more common than anything, but nothing near this. Any second now, I’m waiting for Dayo to punch Alexander. Apparently, Jen senses this too as the tension begins escalating at a trajectory far beyond our control.

“Boys—”

Alexander seems to lose what little tact he has left, swiping a handful of snow off the hood of the car behind him and lobbing it right at Dayo. It hits the flannel, knocking him square in the chest. Dayo glares at him, and Alexander simply gives him a look that’s meant to challenge him.

Dayo takes it, happily retaliating with the biggest piece of snow he can pick up off Jen’s car and heave Alexander’s way.

“Words!” Jen screeches. “Use your words!”

“Gladly!” Dayo says, his voice dripping in feigned cheer. He scoops more snow off of Jen’s car, and with every handful he sends hurtling Alexander’s way, he emphasizes with a single word. “Would. It. Kill you. To. Not. Be. An asshole?”

“Would it kill you to let shit go, damn!?” Alexander yells as he ducks behind Jack’s rental car for cover.

“Dayo I swear to god if you dent the rental that is in my name, you are paying for it!” Jack shouts. Dayo pauses his snow assault on Alexander, flames dancing in his eyes.

“Is that just the wolf pack motto? Make Dayo pay for everything? Why wasn’t I informed of this before I signed my life away to the cult?”

“Ladies and gentlemen, the cheapest person on Earth,” Amandla groans, her arms wrapping around my waist so we optimize our body heat.

“What are you talking about, Dayo?” Jackie asks, shaking her head.

Dayo points an accusatory index finger at Alexander. “The real cheapskate over here loves to just rack up all the bills and then put my fucking name on them, and it got old! I drew the line when he parked my car in a ‘no park’ zone at that supermodel’s birthday party we crashed, and I had to pay for the ticket plus the tow truck’s drop on-site fee!”

Jen’s voice is dangerously quiet. “You mean to tell me that we have all been dancing around each other’s necks all awkwardly and shit because the two of you were fighting over a motherfucking parking ticket?!”

“IT WAS THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS!” Dayo roars.

Jen has finally reached her breaking point, lunging directly for the two of them with a handful of snow that she arms herself with. She chases them through the front yard, throwing snow at the both of them while Alexander and Dayo resume throwing it at each other. The rest of us stand there on what’s left of the sidewalk, watching the scene unfold. The winter wonderland has quickly evolved into a winter warfront.

“A parking ticket,” Jack repeats dully. “I had to play the middle man for six months because of a parking ticket.”

Saying it out loud seems to help him process, because no sooner do the words roll off his lips does he go running off into the snow to catch up with them, his war cry echoing out into the quiet nighttime.

“Dear god,” Jackie groans as she goes taking off after him. Secretly, I think she’s using Jack’s involvement in this whole mess as an excuse to throw a couple of balls of ice right at Alexander’s head. And maybe Jen’s, if the opportunity presents itself.

Amandla, Josh, Leven, Willow and I all look at one another, unsure of what to do from here. None of us have any dogs in this fight – up until Jackie tackles Alexander a few minutes later, attempting to literally bury him in the snow, and then we have to intervene.

Amandla and I decide it will at least take the two of us to pry Jackie off of Alexander, each of us grabbing a side and attempting to pull her away while still keeping the blanket remotely around us. Jack is bathing Dayo in snow, which Leven and Willow are trying to break up, and Josh is holding Jen by the waist to usher her away while she struggles to get back in the ring.

We acted more mature six years ago.

“Jackie, give it up!” Amandla spits, nearly pulling Jackie’s arm out of socket. I must not be on the same wavelength with Amandla in the way I usually am with Jackie, because I missed the transmission that left me to deal with Alexander, or at least, be the wall that keeps Jackie from going back for the vocal cords. At least I got the blanket.

One of Alexander’s hands come to rest on my shoulder, and I instantly whip around. I don’t even have to verbalize my confusion, the daggers whirling from my eyes as I glare at him send him back a step or two, hands lifted slightly in mock arrest.

“Hopeless!” Jen yowls as Josh drags her up the side staircase towards the porch. “You morons are hopeless! Not even Dr. Phil could save us!”

Josh finally lets go of her, Jen stomping towards one of the hanging plants on the porch. My guess is, she’s rummaging for the spare house key, since keeping it on her person would have been too obvious a hiding spot. She runs her hand through the pot, a small look of puzzlement washing over her face as she slides to the one next to it. She does the same thing, rummaging around for the key. Her eyes then start to grow wider and wider, moving to each individual hanging plant and performing the same thing. Her expression gives me no reassurance.

“Jen…” I say cautiously.

“Belly…” she calls down just as nervously.

“Why do you have that look on your face?”

“I don’t have a look on my face?” Her voice is squeakier than ever.

Amandla frowns. “You have a look on your face that says you’ve fucked something up.”

“Me? Moi? Psh,” Jen says, voice getting higher and higher each time as she deflects with the wave of her hand. “Naw. No. Never.”

“Jen?” Josh asks quietly.

“The fucking house key isn’t here!” she wails.

“The what isn’t where?!” Dayo repeats, voice strained. Poor Dayo. He’s come to the brink of his sanity being unraveled one too many times today – it wouldn’t surprise me if we had to go to the hospital tomorrow because he’s somehow managed to develop an ulcer in record time.

“I swear it was right here!” Jen shuffles back over to the hanging plant she started at, digging around inside of it in search for the key. “That was the whole reason I even went through with something as dumb as locking us out – it’s always a foolproof idea when you’ve got a spare key!”

“Nothing, I repeat, nothing is foolproof when it comes to us,” Willow states. “We defy the way of the natural universe. Foolproof plus us? Automatically cancelled out. We are the fools foolproof doesn’t work on.”

“Not helping, Wills,” Jen whines.

“So are we stuck out here?” Jack says as he dusts snow off of his jeans.

“No,” Dayo answers before Jen gets the opportunity to. “No, I refuse. This is not happening. We are not stuck out here. Over my dead body.”

“Frostbite is a silent killer,” I mutter.

Jen comes thundering back down the stairs, Josh right on her heels like the lost puppy he is. “Okay,” she starts, thinking out loud. “Alright. How the hell are we gonna get back inside?”

“Is there a back door?” Leven tries. “Every house has to have a back door.”

Amandla nods eagerly. “Yeah, and if you’re anything like Dayo, you leave it unlocked.”

“This one doesn’t,” Jen answers. “But there is a garage door down on the side of the house, it goes through the basement. We’ve got more than enough muscle to get it pried open.”

“So basically, we’re going to break back into your house,” Alexander reiterates.

“Do you have any other ideas?” Jen snaps. He immediately withdraws, quiet. She nods. “What I thought.” Pointing ahead, she begins marching around the side of the house. “Roll out, gang!”

We all amble along behind her, wading through the snow that’s brushing up against our ankles. Jack is still trying to shake snow out from inside his t-shirt, Dayo keeps grumbling about how we’ve gotten his flannel wet – he was going to grace us with its presence again by wearing it tomorrow – and Willow has given up on walking, hitching a ride on Josh’s back.

When we reach the garage door, which Jen neglected to tell us was in the pitch-black shadow of the house and down a fucking hill, she’s standing next to it expectantly. “Muscle,” she summons.

“What?” Dayo asks, hands settling on his hips. “You aren’t gonna give it a whirl?”

“I have the upper body strength of a linguine noodle.”

Alexander slides past me (he apparently decided to bring up the rear so no one could get any fun ideas and try to kickstart round two by jumping him) as he joins Dayo in front of the garage door. Manually opening one shouldn’t be rocket science, of course, but that is exactly what it will become knowing the two of them.

They start at the bottom, trying to at least get some separation between the door and the concrete. The rest of us stand back, remaining as quiet as possible while we watch them work. After a few minutes of trying and failing with that tactic, Alexander stands up. “Let’s try you down there and me up here, see if evening out the force works.”

Dayo stares up at him. “Dude, what kind of made up physics is that?”

“Well clearly your version wasn’t working out too well, I’m just trying to offer a fresh perspective!”

“Jenny, you sure we can’t just heave-ho Ludwig through a window?” Dayo asks innocently. “Pray for jagged glass?”

Willow rolls her eyes. “You two need more manpower,” she insists, taking up the spot in between Dayo and Alexander. “Alexander, get back down here, and on my count, push it upwards.”

“What?”

“Do what now?”

“Do you want to stand out here and freeze or do you want to make progress?”

Jackie interrupts them before they get a chance to answer. “Listen to her, knuckleheads.”

Dayo and Alexander both fall silent, and Alexander does as he’s told, kneeling back down. Willow counts them off. “One…two…three.”

There’s a loud groaning noise, metal screeching as the garage door lifts slightly off the ground. I have to admit I’m slightly amazed, if not at the fact that it actually worked but at the fact that Willow, the baby of the bunch was the one thing that made the significant difference.

Dayo and Alexander are both also astounded by this that they become entirely obsolete, staring at her in such amazement that they leave her to push the garage door up to a height we can all squeeze under all by herself. When she finishes it, she dusts off her hands and turns around to face us.

“What?” she asks when she sees how we’re looking at her.

“You might be tiny,” Josh finally says. “But out of all of us, you’re the biggest.”

The garage is dusty, pitch-black, and a safety hazard if I’ve ever halfway seen one. With every step, there’s something else to trip over – I nearly bite the dust on four different occasions, stumbling into bikes, skis, and a leaf blower that Jen claims belongs to her nephew. Amandla has to catch and steady me each time.

We all huddle around the door, each of us looking at it expectantly. Josh is closest to the door itself, his hand finding the handle. “C’mon miracle, c’mon Christmas miracle…” he mumbles, as if he’s getting ready to roll a dice. He then jiggles it, attempting to force it open.

Nothing.

“It’s locked,” Josh announces, and we all groan.

“Move out of the way, Hutcherson.” Leven pushes through our little clump, pulling a bobby pin out of her hair. “If this trick worked on a trailer unit, a Parisian hotel room, and the sketchy alleyway entrance to my apartment, it’ll work on anything.”

“Leven Rambin, my hero,” Jackie whispers.

It takes her a second, and I can hear the click of the lock even over the sound of Jack’s heavy breathing – he must be shutting down and going into hibernation mode. “Voila,” she says, pumping her fist in victory.

It’s a stampede to get inside, each one of us eager to be the first one to get in the presence of insulation, heat, and a dry ground.  

“Ah, heat,” Jack sighs contentedly as we all spread out in the hallway, taking off his t-shirt and a fair amount of snow falling to the floor when he does. My face scrunches up in contempt. “What, Izzy?”

“Not all of us are Jackie – we don’t appreciate seeing you shirtless.”

“Okay,” Jen sighs, resting her hands on her knees. “I am officially done trying to mediate with you fuckers. Done.” At that, we all breathe giant sighs of relief. She frowns. “You guys are awful.”

“Sorry, Jenny,” Josh says, reaching up to ruffle her hair. “Can’t fix something that’s not broken.”

“That’s a damn lie; we’re as broken as broken gets, and that’s on a good day.”

Jen hits the button to the garage door to close it back up, turning the lock back on the door. “If you guys want to be Grinches, then be my guest. You’re stuck here anyways, I think that satisfaction alone will suffice.”

“It ought to, you selfish, selfish woman,” Jackie mumbles.

“All I want for Christmas is for you to stop asking too much of us,” Dayo adds. “We’re the bare minimum kind of people. Not a single one of us is an overachiever.”

“Hey,” I protest, to which everyone glares at me.

Jack rests a hand on his hip as he pats my shoulder patronizingly. “Try as you might, Belly, but how well does that work out for you?”

Good point.

                                                          ...

I wake up the next morning to blue and red lights and the sound of someone using their fist as a miniature battering ram.

I don’t remember crashing on the couch downstairs in the living room with Jackie, Jack, and Amandla, but I can feel the after effects of it as I sit up slowly, my spine aching in ways I didn’t know possible. The Netflix home screen is glaring up at as from where we apparently forgot to turn the TV off last night, my eyes bleary.

“Mm…Jackie,” I mumble quietly, leaning over and shaking her. “Jackie.”

“Go away, Taylor,” she groans almost incoherently, her voice muffled by the blanket she’s got pulled up around her nose. I frown, pushing some of my hair out of my face as I glance back over at the door. The blue and red lights are a dancing blur through the frosted glass, and I can see the shadows of someone standing on the porch. Two and two very quickly equals four.

That wakes me up pretty quickly, and I duck down behind the couch. My shaking gets a lot more violent. “Jackie, wake the fuck up,” I hiss. “There are cops at the door.”

Both of her eyes fly open, staring up at me like a deer in headlights.

I stay hunched down as Jackie takes a tentative glance over the edge of the couch, almost instantly snapping back down. “Why the hell are the cops here?” she asks me.

“Like I know!” I whisper.

“Maybe they’ve come to collect Alexander,” she tries.

“For what?”

“Tax evasion? Underage drinking? Possession? Perpetuating incompetency via social media? Bad acting?”

I roll my eyes. “Be serious, Jackie.”

“I am – did you not see Grownups 2?”

I glance around the living room; Jack and Amandla are still sleeping peacefully, and no one else seems to be downstairs with us. The house, for the first time this entire vacation, is quiet. “What do we do?”

Jackie begins patting down her lap, searching for something. She spots her phone on the floor, bending in ways that would bring the circus scouts calling to get it. “What are you doing?” I ask as she starts typing furiously.

“Texting Jen,” she replies, and I stare at her like she’s lost her mind. “What?! We are bound to this couch – if they see someone moving around in here, they’ll call for backup or some shit, and the last thing I need this Christmas is to be apart of some accidental police standoff all because we started strolling around like nothing’s fucking happening!”

“Okay, first of all, you need to lay off the procedural dramas,” I tell her. “Second of all, what makes you think Jen is gonna hear her phone go off if she hasn’t heard the cops banging on the door?!”

Suddenly, we hear sounds on the footsteps, our heads snapping in the direction of the staircase. Down strolls Josh Hutcherson in a plaid robe, like he doesn’t have a single care in the world.

“Get down!” Jackie whisper-shouts through gritted teeth, catching Josh’s attention. He immediately hits the deck, the action so rapid that he slips and falls down at least three steps before grabbing ahold of the banister. The noise is somewhat loud, and I wince.

“What the fuck?!” he says, and Jackie and I both put our fingers to our lips. He starts again, this time quieter. “What the hell is wrong with you two?”

“There are cops outside,” I inform him.

“How the hell did you not see the lightshow?!”

“Cops?” Josh whispers. “Why are the police here?”

“You tell us!”

“Okay, there is no need to cop a ‘tude with me, Fuhrman.” He lifts himself up a little bit to see if he can get a glimpse out the window. “How did they even get here?” he asks. “There’s like, two feet of snow on the ground.”

“Maybe they attached their little lights onto a horse’s head,” Jackie says, turning to me for some sort of affirmation.

“Can we worry about their means of transportation later and focus on the real problem here? What are we gonna do?!”

Jackie sits up a little bit. “I nominate we send Josh to the door. He’s easily the most likable.”

Josh’s jaw drops in offense. “Why me? We could just send Isabelle, her cleavage in that tank top could get us out of any kinda warning we’ve bestowed upon ourselves.” It’s my turn to lose control of my jaw, it falling a little as I glare at him.

“Sexist much?”

“It’s not my fault you own very, very revealing clothing! I mean, you wonder why Ludwig’s so into you, have you looked in your closet lately?”

“Focus!” Jackie snaps her fingers. “Josh, you’re…the most decent out of all of us, you go to the door.”

“It’s not my house! I don’t think I’m gonna pass as a very convincing Jennifer, Jacqueline.”

The knocking returns, much more intense this time around. Jackie’s eyes forcefully shoot in the direction of the door before she looks back expectantly at Josh. “Go,” she mouths. He huffs, running a hand over the top of his head to fix his hair before he straightens back up, walking down the rest of the stairs with purpose. Nervously, but with purpose.

As he passes by the couch, he shoots Jackie a look. She rolls her eyes, waving him along.

“Remember, if all else fails, just say we’ve got Alexander Ludwig upstairs and we’ll happily hand him over,” she throws out last minute, before ducking back down.

Jackie and I do our best to lay as flat against the couch without waking up Jack or Amandla but still have a gauge on the unfolding situation of what’s happening as the door. It creaks open, Josh greeting both of the officers. Suddenly, breathing doesn’t seem so necessary.

“Are you the owner of this house?” a voice much deeper than Josh’s asks, and I feel my heart stop. Jackie has taken to squeezing my hand to alleviate some of her anxiety, and it takes everything in me not to slap her or yelp in pain. Her grip is like a vice.

“Um, I’m her…husband,” Josh replies slowly, and Jackie clamps a hand over her mouth to force the laugh back in. I roll my eyes at his response – Josh might be the most likable, but he’s also the worst liar. “Is everything alright?”

“We’re sorry to bother you this morning, Mister Lawrence,” an even deeper voice than the first says. Jackie’s eyes are closed as she uses every ounce of concentration she has to keep quiet. “We’re here on behalf of the alarm company.”

“Alarm company?” Josh repeats, and Jackie and I look at each other confusedly.

“Yes sir. Last night after midnight, your alarm system was tripped and the company reported a break-in to our district.” Jackie’s eyes widen – apparently, we’d had all the right ideas in trying to get back inside, but Jen had forgotten to disarm the fucking alarm system. That, or it just went straight ahead and alerted the cops, not even bothering to send out the warning shot. “The snow prevented an officer from getting here any sooner; we wanted to stop by and make sure everything was alright.”

“Oh, yeah,” Josh says after a beat of painful silence, false laugh falling from his mouth. “Yeah, silly me – the wife wanted me to get another box of ornaments out of the garage, and we never go out that door. I guess I forgot to disarm the system, too busy trying to please the missus. You know how that is, right fellas?”

Again, silence follows, and if I could, I’d melt into the couch cushions.

“Well, as long as everything’s alright here,” one of the officers finally concedes.

“It is,” Josh rushes to answer. “Really. Thank you, officers, for stopping by. You have a Merry Christmas now!”

Josh all but shoos the police from the doorway, and as I peer over the edge, I catch a glimpse of him delivering one convincing wave before he slams the door back shut. He keeps his nose pressed to the glass, waiting until they presumably leave. When they’re either far enough out of sight or gone, Josh spins back around, slumping up against the door.

Jackie and I pop back up from behind the couch, Jackie draping her arms over the top. “Any horses with little lights on their head?” she asks.

Josh ignores her entirely. “Jesus Christ,” he mumbles. “That went horribly.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Jackie responds. “How the hell did we just…not realize we set off the fucking alarm?”

“Because we’re us, Jacqueline,” is Josh’s weary reply. “The better question is, why did we think that any of last night’s escapade would just go over scot-free?”

“Because we’re idiots,” I offer.

Josh simply nods, combing a hand back through his hair. Jackie perks up a little after a beat of silence has passed.

“Box of ornaments?” she asks.

A sly grin slips onto my face. “Mister Lawrence?”

“The missus?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Josh growls.

“You better go wake the missus up,” Jackie says. “Because you know the cops are gonna be back in a few hours, demanding to talk to the real owner of the house.”

“And don’t worry, Joshie,” I add. “We won’t tell Jen how you’re dying to be her husband.”