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to make six snowballs.
    “The operative word there would be
play
,” she said.
    I put the snowballs inside my jacket and walked around the front of the igloo, pretending to survey our progress. And then I whacked her with one snowball after another. By the time I threw the sixth one at her, she was laughing so hard she had to sit down in the snow. That laughter … it was like a drug. The more I got, the more I wanted.
    By then our pile had grown into a minimountain, so I got down on my stomach in the snow and started scooping out the inside. My hands were frozen, but I kept scooping anyway. Before I knew it, I had a little room carved out. I backed into the space.
    “Hey,” I called from inside. “It worked.”
    Vanessa came around and peered in skeptically. Then she turned and shimmied in beside me. It was a tiny space, so she was practically on top of me. The left half of her body was right up against the right half of mine. Her wethair gave off a lavender or rosemary scent that I hadn’t smelled before. I closed my eyes and breathed in.
    Dare I kiss her?
    Five hours before, it was the last place in the world I thought I would be—like if, when I had walked into the airport, someone had said to me that in five hours I would be on a sandy pink beach in the Bahamas swinging on a hammock with a piña colada, it was that unbelievable. I moved my hand on top of her mitten.
    “Is your hand warm?” I asked.
    “Yeah, these are great mittens,” she said, looking down at her hands and, I guess, my bare hand. “They’re my brother Joey’s, actually. I stuck them in my bag at the last minute—he is going to be so mad.”
    “Can you take one off?” I heard myself saying. “My hand is frozen.”
    “Oh—sure,” she said, pulling it off. “Here, put it on for a minute.” She handed me her mitten, but I shook my head.
    “No, I just meant, if I could put my cold hand next to your warm hand, it would warm me up,” I said, smiling. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do if you’re freezing, body-to-body contact?”
    She rolled her eyes, but there was the trace of a smile there too. She held out her hand, and I grabbed it. Those must have been amazing mittens, because that was the warmest hand I’ve ever felt. We sat like that for a while; it could have been two minutes, maybe three. When I startedto squeeze a little harder, I felt her pulling away and moving out of the igloo. I stayed put for a second longer and then I followed her.
    “We should go back to the room,” she said. “But thanks for doing this with me. It was really fun.”
    “Do we have to?” I said.
    She stopped. “You’re the one who didn’t want to come out in the first place,” she said nicely. “But I’m ready to go in. My feet are freezing.”
    I didn’t want her feet to be freezing.
    “Okay, let’s go back in, then,” I said. “For the record, and I don’t usually admit being wrong to people I have known for less than half a day, you were right. This was really fun.” What I didn’t say was that I worried it might possibly be the most fun I was ever going to have.

CHAPTER SIX
DUNCAN
THAT WAS THEN AND THIS WAS NOW
    Duncan looked around his tiny room and was shocked to see it was beginning to get dark out. He checked his watch and it was just after six p.m. Dinner had been going on for half an hour already. He wanted to kick himself for being so drawn into the albino’s story. He wanted to be done with all that and not even think about last year’s senior class. He had promised himself that he wouldn’t let any of that affect this year. This year was going to be better. Great, even. It had to be. He thought of how Tim said his going to Irving was his last chance to have a good time in high school. He didn’t want to compare himself to Tim, but he realized this was
his
last chance at doing high school right too. He wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of that.
    But Duncan couldn’t help himself, and he was