Read The Snow Garden for Free Online

it!” Kathryn made a sharp turn, leading them back toward the sidewalk.
         “Where are you going?” Randall called after her. She turned and saw Randall gesture toward the Elms. “Oh, you’re kidding,” she moaned.
         “Come on. I’ll protect you.” He put an arm around her shoulders. Kathryn let out a defeated groan and allowed herself to be led into the dark woods.
         To her surprise, the Elms were easily navigated. There was no underbrush and the only obstructions were shoulder-height branches that were hard to make out in the darkness. Randall kept tight against the left side of her chest, pressing her head down and pushing branches out of their way as they went.
         “You don’t even want to know what I saw your roommate doing tonight.”
         “Now I do.”
         Randall came to a sudden halt. Kathryn thudded into him and saw they were standing at the edge of a five-foot drop down into a stream swollen with melting snow.
         “Pamela Milford,” she muttered.
         “What?” Randall asked.
         She looked up and saw she had his full attention. “Nothing. April was telling me the story earlier. The woman who drowned.”
         Randall nodded and his eyes returned to the flow of water below.
         “Maybe she drowned,” he whispered.
         “You know something else?”
         “No one really knows what happened. Why do you think everyone here still talks about it like it’s some urban legend?”
         “Well, she was real, wasn’t she? That means it’s not an urban legend.”
         His eyes still on the five-foot drop, he curled his mouth into a weak smile, then took her hand and held it tight. “I didn’t know it was so wide down here. Come on.”
         As they traveled up the bank, the trees thinned out, revealing houses beyond. “So? What happened?” Randall asked, seeming to have recovered from the fact that they had come within inches of falling five feet into near-freezing water.
         “Your roommate and this girl were on the dance floor. You would have thought he was her ob-gyn.”
         “Is there any reason you can’t refer to him by his first name? He’s always your roommate’ or ‘that asshole.’ ”
         “He’s both,” Kathryn said. They came to a sidewalk with a stone banister, which crossed over the top of a large drainage pipe emitting crystalline black water amid ice extending from the bottom lip of the opening like white teeth. Kathryn’s breaths were more steady now that they were on the solid ground of the sidewalk. The halos of Brookline Avenue’s streetlights beckoned them.
         “I think it’s interesting how some people make concessions for the beautiful, but you hold them to a higher standard,” Randall remarked.
         “He’s not beautiful, Randall. He’s hot. There’s a big difference,” Kathryn said, thinking of the magazine ads of shirtless, buff male models Randall used to bridge the gaps between posters on the cinderblock wall of his room. Did all gay men worship perfectly proportioned men who wore inscrutable, distant, facial expressions that suggested they were not just inaccessible but physically indestructible? Men who bore a striking resemblance to Jesse Lowry? She didn’t know enough homosexuals to be sure.
         “You might want to sleep with him. Just once,” Randall said.
         “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”
         “Why, Kathryn? It might take away his mystique.”
         “He doesn’t have any mystique.”
         “That must be why we’re talking about him, then.”
         They had arrived at the stoplight across the street from Madeline’s. Brookline Avenue’s only hip restaurant had already accomplished its ten o’clock transformation into a nightclub. Its front door trailed a long and impatient line of the university’s best dressed, shivering in the cold as they waited to pretend they were in