"Cocoa tribunal," he said. "You in, Coming Through?"
"Elena," she said, and the name felt like setting something down carefully on a table. "And only if the cocoa is terrible in a nostalgic way."
"Jake. And it is. That's the point."
They clomped off the floor toward the snack counter, skates loud on the carpeted strip that protected the wood. Outside the glass doors, snow fell in fat, unhurried flakes over Mansfield's quiet streets, coating the parked cars and the bent basketball hoop in the lot next door and the church steeple two blocks over that always looked slightly surprised to still be standing. Inside, the DJ played a Motown Christmas track and somebody's dad shouted that his lace was broken as if it were national news. Teenagers carved clumsy hearts into the air with their arms. A woman in a Santa hat sold raffle tickets for a turkey that had already, according to rumor, been won by the same man three years running.
Elena ordered cocoa. Jake ordered two. Mikey ordered one and then negotiated for whipped cream with the moral intensity of a union organizer. The woman behind the counter, whose name tag said DOT and whose expression said she had seen every kind of Christmas Eve loneliness and every kind of Christmas Eve hope and had decided both deserved sugar, complied without commentary. She did glance once at Jake's satin and Elena's fur and Mikey's orange and file them under a category that might have been called interesting if Dot had been the sort of person who narrated her own life.
They sat on a bench sticky with decades of spilled soda. Mikey drank like a man on a mission. Jake watched Elena without quite staring, which was its own kind of staring. She watched the floor, where a girl in pink leg warmers was teaching a boy to stop without inventing new vocabulary for pain.
"You come here a lot?" Elena asked.
"Used to," Jake said. "Then life got forward and I got backward. You?"