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2011-08-02 - 12:47 p.m.

In the middle of my junior year, at the coldest point of the winter, a giant blizzard struck. It snowed for two days. Dad dug out his car and drove himself and Mom to work, but Ryan and I slept and watched TV for hours. The snow would melt a little during the day but then freeze the roads at night. They kept cancelling school. Two days in, Ryan and I hiked up a cleared power line as far as we could and then sledded down, avoiding the massive telephone poles, rocketing over bumps that sent us flying. We did this three or four times, our ribs sore, faces burnt by the cold wind. Back at home, we shoveled a path for the mailman. We shoveled a second path so that we could walk the dog. They kept canceling school, a week straight, and then six days, eight days, a full two weeks. We slept late. We ate all the food in the house. I watched TV, taped movies. I read issues of Sports Illustrated. I read National Geographic. I read Dad�s hunting-and-fishing catalogues, the descriptions of expensive binoculars, boots, undershirts made of synthetic fabrics, rifles, shotguns, compound bows, simple bows, crossbows. When there was nothing else, I read Reader�s Digest, consuming whole issues in an hour.

I was staying up very late. After everyone went to bed, I took whatever I was reading into my bedroom, turned on the small lamp next to the bed, closed the door, and turned on the radio. There were two FM stations. Q94, out of Keyser, played only hard rock�Van Halen, Metallica, the Allman Brothers. GO 106, out of Cumberland, wasn�t any good at all during the day, because it played only light pop. But late at night, GO 106 got better. They mixed in bands that I liked. Every now and then, they�d play the Smashing Pumpkins, or Jimi Hendrix. It wasn�t a great station but it came in clearly.

By the beginning of the second week of that cold January, I was re-reading Ken Follett novels. I looked for the sex scenes that I�d nearly memorized, but I always read more. They were easy, the stories all courage and camaraderie, sex and crying and guns and hunger and bitter Russian cold, all of them big, fat emotions I could recognize.

Then I found a book I hadn�t yet read. It was a worn paperback, thick but light, the cover torn. The county library often dropped off books at the health department, where Mom worked. They were books that people had stopped checking out. This was called Wolf Winter, by Clare Francis. On the cover was a frozen-white Arctic landscape, a big Soviet flag behind it all. It was ominous. Outside my window, the wind howled. The bare dogwoods in the front yard clattered into each other. I got under the big comforter, a wool blanket on top of that, our Brittany spaniel Abby curled up beside me, and I read. Radio on, I�d prop the pillows against the headboard and pull the covers up to my chest. It was warm underneath the blanket and cold outside of it. I read and I listened, the music turned down low but still there, like the wind. Every night for those two weeks, around midnight, the DJ said that school was closed for the next day and then I�d know that I could stay up as late as I wanted. And that knowledge opened something up for me, a freedom, and as soon as I heard there�d be no school, I felt even better.

So I read. I�d read a few chapters of Wolf Winter and then read a Ken Follett novel again. Then I�d pick up Wolf Winter. It wasn�t literature. It was spying and skiing and murder and sex beneath fur blankets. But I liked being contained in a world, blankets tight around my ribs, heater on high, window shut tight against the wind, radio playing softly. I wasn�t lonely. School could go away forever and I wouldn�t have minded. I didn�t even miss my friends. I went out into the blinding whiteness during the day or I watched TV with Ryan. I ate dinner. Dad and I watched basketball games and Mom and I watched movies. At night, when everyone else was asleep, I listened to the radio, some voices recorded and some live, and read. I was fine. There were no girls around. Somehow, miraculously, I almost forgot about them.

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