But I hadn’t anticipated utter silence as my roommate’s response when I planned this conversation in my head, hadn’t visualized the bags under my own eyes staring back at me in the dark window. I couldn’t bear to turn around and see Jillian’s open mouth, or maybe she was laughing so hard that she couldn’t make a sound. I waited for the rustle of her turning a page, but there was nothing. Down the corridor from us, a rollicking song with a female singer started playing from someone’s stereo, but the stereo’s owner closed their door seconds after the first notes hit the hallway. From the kitchen came a peppery smell—someone cooking instant soup.
—You smell that? I tried. When Jillian didn’t answer, I decided to go back to snow and said, You know, there’s places in America where people can trick-or-treat without worrying about freezing to death.
She didn’t laugh, so I turned around to face her judgment only to see her nodding along to a song: at some point—I couldn’t tell when—she’d put her headphones back on.
The morning that snow finally came—a week into November—Jillian woke me by slapping two damp mittens on my back. I jumped, and before I could ask why her hat and coat were flecked with water (Had she showered while dressed? Got caught in a sprinkler?), she screamed: Liz! It snowed! All last night and this morning!
I rubbed my eyes and slurred, Class is canceled?
She barked just one Ha! and pulled my comforter all the way off me.
—Wake up, wake up, she said. Let’s go, before you have to get ready for class.
She ran from our room and left the door open, pounded her hands on the doors down from us and yelled, You guys! It’s Lizet’s first snow! Let’s do this! Tracy, get your camera. Is Caroline still – Shit, Caroline, finish drying your hair and come outside!
As her voice disappeared into the cave of the hall bathroom, I looked out the window. I’d seen snow on TV, had played in some soapy, manmade snow at the mall when I was little, but to see that now-familiar square of campus totally transformed: what was, as I’d fallen asleep, a brown swath of dead grass and trees suddenly cleaned up and covered. I couldn’t believe it was the same Outside. I would’ve bought that I’d been moved in the night to a different planet; I couldn’t believe the planet I’d lived on for eighteen years was capable of looking like this—and I couldn’t believe people lived in it, vacationed specifically to glide over it. More than anything, I needed to touch it—immediately—to know it like everyone else did as quickly as I could. I flung myself from the bed, slid my feet into my shower flip-flops, ran past Jillian and her Hey, wait! in the bathroom doorway, and charged down the stairwell at the end of the hall to the nearest exit—the dorm’s loading dock—throwing my whole weight against the metal double doors.
Those first fifteen seconds: down the loading dock steps, flip-flops slipping on ice, stepping on the snow—two feet high and still falling—and expecting to walk on top of it. Hearing a soft crunch, then one leg then the other crashing down, the snow reaching just past my knees, hugging my feet and calves. And I was stuck. And I laughed so hard I fell on my butt into more snow, soft but not soft enough, the white stuff packing into my armpits because I’d extended my arms to brace for the fall. Those first fifteen seconds, I got it: I got how people could love snow. But then, creeping in like the very real tingle I started to feel in my feet, was the fact that snow was frozen water—that snow was wet and not fluffy like cotton or like the mall’s soap-bubble snow. I’d locked myself out of the dorm by accident, and as I held a clump of snow in my hand for the first time and squeezed it hard, my skin turned red. It burned. My toes burned, too—I scrunched them to make sure I could still feel them, thinking of those stupid girls on Halloween—and I looked up to find Jillian next to Tracy, both waving from the other side of the door’s glass square. Then Tracy lifted her camera to her face.
Jillian pushed her way out and yelled, Oh my god, you are crazy! You’re practically naked! She pulled off her coat and twirled it over my shoulders.
Tracy took another shot from inside, this time of Jillian with her arm around me and giving a thumbs-up.
—Make sure you get her flip-flops, she yelled.