The snow was up to our shins now and the wind had started slanting its fall, blowing it in our direction so that snowflakes pelted into our eyes and stuck our eyelashes together. I nuzzled my nose against my scarf and trudged forward. Some of the boys in our grade had decided to stay in the playground, whipping snowballs at each other, their screams and laughter too stubborn to be drowned out by the wind.
“Let’s get fries from New Orleans Donuts,” said Aishani. “I’m starving.”
“It’s too cold to walk around. We can order pizza at my place,” said Rochelle.
“With what money? You’ve got, like, two dollars to your name,” said Jordan.
“That’s two dollars more than you. And anyway, my mom left me money for an emergency. We’re good.”
“But I feel for fries,” said Aishani.
No one had said anything about stopping anywhere. I turned to them but tried to keep my face buried in my hood — more as a way to hide my panicked expression than to shield myself from the cold. “Can’t we just go to Chelle’s house? That’s what we said we’d do.”
“If you’re going to be this way, you should just go back to school,” said Anita.
“Well, I actually don’t care where we go,” said Rochelle, “as long as we go Vaughan way.”
“What’s so special about Vaughan way?” said Jordan. “You always want to walk that way.”
“I just like it,” said Rochelle.
“Yeah, but why?”
The high school was on Vaughan Road, and Rochelle was seeing a guy who went there: Chris Richardson, grade ten. Every girl knew Chris; every mother, too. He never kept himself out of trouble: trespassing, tagging buildings, mouthing off to cops who spot-checked him and his crew at the park or in front of the McDonald’s or by the bus stop. But he was always quick to carry your mother’s grocery bags to the door or help your grandmother find a seat in church, and he did it all with sly silences and toothy smiles and, if you were lucky, a wink behind your mother’s back.
“Be careful of boys like him,” they’d tell us. “Yuh need fi stay clear from bright-eye boys like that.”
“Your dad was like that,” my mother would add. “And look how I turned out.”
The day Chris and Rochelle first said “hey” to each other, we were at Vaughan Road Academy for a tour, trying to see if that was the school we wanted to spend the next four years at, me pretending like I had a say in where I ended up. He’d stopped her in the hallway, took her by the hand and guided her to him, putting his hands around her waist as she stood in the space between his spread-out legs; it was a move she was used to. Rochelle had that really fair rose-brown complexion, that kind of red skin and shapely heaviness that made cars slow down and girls up-down, and she’d been dealing with hungry-eyed boys since she was ten.
While they were talking I’d pretended to flip through the notes my mother had told me to write down, far enough behind Rochelle that I wasn’t interrupting but close enough that if she wanted out she could just turn to me and we’d walk away together, our arms linked. Chris had thought she was a transfer student, a sophomore like him, and only when he took down her number did Rochelle tell him she’d just turned fourteen and was in grade eight. First he got quiet. Then he left without even saying bye. But later on that night, she called me and said that he’d rung her up and they’d just finished a three-hour conversation.
“Just don’t tell anyone,” she’d said. “It’s a secret, okay?”
Sometimes we both pictured the licks she’d get if her mom ever found out about Chris — and Rochelle’s mom didn’t play around: she used the belt. My mother didn’t like to use objects; she always said her hands were sharp enough. I tried to imagine keeping something like a boy from her — if a boy ever showed any interest in me — and I felt my body turn in on itself. Even the backs of my eyeballs throbbed as if they’d grown strained from searching for her open-palmed hand. It was how I felt when I let myself think that a storefront boy might be smirking at me; a panic would creep up on my body like a slow-moving fever and then for a brief moment I’d feel glad that I wasn’t sexy enough to keep a secret like Rochelle’s.
* * *
We crossed the street to New Orleans Donuts and stumbled over ourselves to get inside and out of the snow. The warmth of the shop was heavy with the smell of frying batter and loud with the sounds of chatter mixed with the pew pews of the two arcade games by the washroom. It was packed. Each of the four corner tables had been seized by a school, from high-school kids from Vaughan Road Academy (they took up two tables) to other students from our school to the kids from St. Thomas Aquinas, another Catholic school just up the street from ours.
Rochelle scanned the store, her eyes slowly sweeping over the boys in oversized coats and fur trapper hats. When she found Chris over by the window, in the corner across from the entrance, sprawled out and laughing with three of his friends, she took off her hood, shook her hair back and looked the other way in a display of nonchalance. I was the only one who noticed the move and I couldn’t tell if her plan was working.
Chris was focused on his friends still, all of them bumping fists and shoving shoulders and shouting, “That’s respect, man. That’s respect!” but his attention seemed to have shifted somehow; even though he never looked away from his group, it was like he knew ours had arrived. But maybe he did that with all the girls; maybe he was just weighing his options. His friends appeared oblivious. I recognized all three of them; they didn’t have reputations like Chris’s, but they were the boys you went after if Chris wasn’t into you. They were the boys Anita, Aishani, and Jordan got.
Aishani bought a large poutine and found us a deserted table in the middle of the store. We all started digging in with our plastic forks, the fries nice and crunchy beneath the hot gravy and melting cheese curds.
“I’m just saying,” said Jordan, “I find snow romantic.”
“What’s romantic about this? We’re in a fucking storm.”
“I’m with Anita on this one,” said Aishani. “Nothing romantic about freezing your ass off.”
“Well obviously not this kind of snow. Like the snow in that movie. You know, the one with that white dude.”
“Oh yeah. The movie with that white dude.”
“You guys know what I’m talking about. They meet at a store and spend an amazing night together or whatever, but she’s white-girl flaky so she writes her number in a book that’s going to be sold the next day and, like, five years later, he’s still trying to find that number? Searching in bookstores and shit? Chelle, you were with me when I saw it with Jackie.”