"Okay," he said. "So that's what we're doing."
He was faster than she expected. He crouched, came up with a snowball already in his hand as if he had been holding it in reserve all his life, and let it fly. Lena dropped behind the hood of the station wagon and it whistled over her head and exploded against the Rourkes' mailbox. She heard the boys shriek with joy. She grabbed snow off the bumper, packed it, popped up, and threw. It clipped his shoulder. He laughed, a short surprised sound, and she laughed too, and the sound of her own laughter startled her so much that she nearly forgot to duck again. She could not remember the last time she had heard it. It sounded like someone else's, a girl she used to know.
The next snowball caught the wood paneling beside her ear. She scooped and threw blind. Then the boys entered the war, which ended any hope of strategy, because the boys had no allegiance to anyone but chaos. Snowballs came from the hedge and from behind the Sheas' birdbath and from the low branches of the Rourkes' blue spruce. One smacked the windshield of the station wagon. Another went down the back of somebody's collar, and a boy howled. Lena broke from cover and ran across the lawn with her hair flying and her boots punching holes in the snow, dodging the boy in the silver jacket, who threw wide, and the boy in the blue jacket, who threw nothing at all because he had fallen down laughing, and the boy in the red jacket, who threw directly at her face and missed by a mile.
She came around the spruce at full speed with a snowball cocked behind her ear and ran straight into him.
They hit chest to chest. The breath went out of both of them. His free hand came up and caught her elbow so she wouldn't fall, and hers caught a fistful of wet black wool, and for a moment they stood exactly like that in the middle of the yard, snowballs raised beside their heads like two duelists who had forgotten the count. She was breathing hard. So was he. This close she could see the snow caught in his eyelashes and the faint white scar through his left eyebrow and the color of his eyes, which were not dark at all, as she had assumed, but a gray-green, like the lake in March. He was looking at her as if he had been trying to remember a word and had just remembered it.
Neither of them threw.
The street went quiet. The radio down the block had finished its song and not yet started another. The snow kept falling in that slow, enormous way, settling on her hair and on his shoulders, and the colored lights along the Rourkes' gutter hummed faintly, and she could feel his heart going under the coat, or perhaps it was her own.