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I can’t believe I’m actually writing a romance story. Normally I’m not at all like this. I write humor. Not romance, not much drama either, but you wouldn’t be able to tell by my writing file here. Anyway, this is a celebratory story of the rare happening that just occurred in my town: it snowed. It wouldn’t plan as anything but fluffy romance, wouldn’t write as anything but friendship with a possible romance. Interpret it how you will.
Anywho, happy wishes for your snow or your love life, or your life in general. Or all three.
He has been staring at a girl across the room when he hears the question. He glances away guiltily before realizing that it isn’t directed at him, it is directed at the girl he’d been watching. Another girl, the new kid, leans across her desk to ask the question. The first girl looks up.
“What, are you going to stalk me?” she teases. The new girl laughs.
“Ma-aybe,” she drawls, trying and failing to hide a grin.
“Well, then, you can hardly expect me to tell you,” comes the reply as she flips her hair and looks back down at the paper. After a moment, she looks back up, laughing.
“Jade Street, it’s off of 48th.”
The questioner shakes her head and admits that she has no idea where that is. The girl he had been watching tries to explain, but her extravagant hand gestures smack the passing teacher. Laughing and apologies ensue as the teacher pretends offense and the girl turns sarcastic.
Jade Street? he wonders.
Winter break is about to begin, and his family has something very special planned: they’re going to move. Before Christmas, he should be living in his new house at 781 Jade Street.
He’s been to the house before, obviously, even spent a night there in sleeping bags to ‘get used to it’. He’s never noticed her. He knows there are other kids around. There’s a dollhouse in the window of the house next door to him, and two doors down there’s a kiddie basketball hoop and a bigger one across the street from that. Across the street from the house with the dollhouse, there’s often a skateboard in the yard.
He wonders which house she lives in, or if she lives in any of them. She seems too old for dolls, and she acts like a girl who never actually played with them. Does she skateboard or play basketball? Does she live in a house with no sign of her presence? Maybe she has siblings.
It’s about then that he realizes how little you can know about someone, no matter how long you’ve gone to school with them. It’s just not enough.
His little sister breaks a wishbone and asks for a miracle. Asked what she meant, all she can say is that she doesn’t know what she wants.
They aren’t moving back, and she hated their old neighborhood. She loves her friends, her classes. She knows there’s something to wish for, but she just can’t think of it.
“You know you should be more specific,” he reminds her. “A lot of things could count as a miracle. Just about anything unusual or marvelous. It doesn’t even have to happen to you.”
“So?” she asks. “I guess the wish kinda interprets it the way it should be interpreted. Doesn’t matter who it happens to, just whoever needs it.”
He smiles affectionately and points out that she may never know if her wish came true.
“That way I can always assume it did,” she replies practically, and goes about her way.
The next morning, they wake up to a fresh coating of snow in their dry little valley.
The little girl down the street has never built a snowman before. Gleefully, the three go out into the backyard to teach her, rolling up the bottom and making snow angels. She takes a watering can and writes their initials on the patio, hoping it’ll freeze over.
From up the street, she can hear someone singing ‘Let it Snow’ at the top of his lungs.
She laughs and keeps tracing the water, over and over.
After a few minutes, the singer stops, and they put the torso onto their snowman. They have no coal at hand, but she finds a few pinecones and sticks them on for buttons, wondering all the while if they can find a top hat somewhere for it or if they’ll have to use a baseball cap.
But then something amazing happens. The singer’s magical powers over the weather were revealed. At least, that’s how she’d tell the story later. Her friends would laugh at her but agree playfully.
It started snowing.
The little girl shrieks with joy and tries to catch a snowflake on her tongue. If she was amazed by the presence of snow, then the falling of it is a downright miracle.
It seems the entire neighborhood has come alive. A couple comes out of the house across the street and watches the snow, leaning into each other’s arms. The scooter/skateboard boys are already outside, tossing clumsily built snowballs at one another and convincing a few others from different houses to join in.
Two adults are standing outside of the house next door, talking to a woman from the house on the other side of them. From that house, suddenly, three figures burst around the corner. A cry of “It’s snowing, it’s snowing!” comes up as the smallest runs towards the couple next door and the other two run out into the cul-da-sac.
By now his boots are on and he’s outside, shouting to his sister to “Wait up” as the snow keeps falling.
The people next door to the boys, a newly married, couple is throwing snowballs at each other. Parents are egged on by their children, missing the younger ones on purpose. The game goes on, joined by people she doesn’t even recognize, until finally everyone goes indoors except a few.
Her brother and the two boys are bored with the snowball fight and have set about charging up and down the road with no apparent purpose except to get as much out of the snow as they possibly can. She joins them, laughing.
Right now, the snow is in her eyes and in her hair and she knows she’ll have to take a shower as soon as she gets in. She’ll probably catch a cold, too. But she doesn’t care.
Well, he does too and if he wants to run up and down the street like crazy because it’s snowing, then he will.
The strangers who had joined into her snowball fight weren’t strangers after all, not all of them. She knew him. Blinking the snow away, she stops and waits for him to reach the top.
“Hey, I know you,” she says.
“Yeah,” he replies. “We go to school together.”
She avoids rolling her eyes at that, but she can’t avoid commenting. “Of course, that’s why I said I know you.”
He grins. “It’s snowing,” he informs her teasingly.
Now there’s nothing to do but laugh and tell him he has snow in his hair.
Somehow his family comes too, and they all end up clustered around counters and making bets on how long the snow will stick.
His sister is dragged downstairs to meet a pet and the parents are deep in conversation. She taps him on the shoulder.
“The snow’s still there,” she tells him, and he grins.
“Really,” he replies, “I hadn’t noticed.
She smiles at him. “Do you want to help me finish a snowman?"
He nods. "I wouldn't like anything more," he tells her.