The Snow Day War

Snow Day

Lola woke up to a sound she had never heard before.

Nothing.

No alarm clock. No mom saying "five more minutes and I mean it." No brother banging on the bathroom door. Just... quiet. The kind of quiet that made her ears feel fuzzy.

She pressed her face against the cold window, and her breath made a little cloud on the glass. She wiped it away with her pajama sleeve, and that's when she saw it.

Everything — everything — was white.

The mailbox was just a white lump. The car was a white whale. Mr. Henderson's garden gnome, the one that always looked grumpy, had a perfect hat of snow that made him look like he was finally having a good time.

"SNOW DAY!" Lola screamed, so loud that her voice cracked right in the middle.

She heard her mom's footsteps in the hallway — not the fast, rushing, we're-late-for-school footsteps, but the slow, shuffling, still-holding-coffee ones.

"School's cancelled," Mom said, leaning against the doorframe. And then Mom did something unusual. She smiled in a way that made her look like she was six years old too. "Bundle up. I'm making cocoa for when you get back."

Lola was dressed in four minutes flat, which was a new world record because on school days it took her approximately one thousand years. She wore two pairs of socks. She wore snow pants over her jeans. She wore her puffy coat that made her arms stick out like a penguin. She wore her brother Marcus's old boots because hers had a hole, and they were two sizes too big, which made her walk like a duck.

A penguin-duck. That was fine. Penguin-ducks were excellent snow animals.

She burst out the front door, and the cold hit her face like a splash of water, except it was made of tiny sparkling pieces of sky. She opened her mouth and caught a snowflake on her tongue. It tasted like absolutely nothing, which was somehow the best flavor in the world.

The street was transformed. No cars moving. No buses. The usual rules — stay on the sidewalk, watch for traffic, don't go past the Hendersons' — felt like they belonged to some other day. Today the whole street was hers.

Lola flopped backward into the yard and made a snow angel so big it looked like it could actually fly. She made another one next to it — a family of snow angels. She gave the littlest one extra-long wings.

"LOLA!"

She lifted her head. Across the street, her friend Jayden was standing on his porch in a coat that was zipped up so high only his eyes poked out.

"JAYDEN!" she yelled back.

"I'm building a fort!" he shouted through his zipper.

"I'm building a BIGGER fort!" she shouted.

"GOOD! Then we can have a WAR!"

This was the best idea anyone had ever had in the history of ideas.

Lola started packing snow against the big oak tree in her front yard. She packed and packed and stacked and stacked. Her gloves were soaked in about three minutes, and her fingers inside them felt like cold little fish sticks, and she did not care even a tiny bit.

Jayden's fort was taking shape across the street — a lumpy wall about as tall as his knees. Lola's was slightly taller because she'd figured out that if you packed the snow into balls first and then smooshed them together, they stuck better. She felt like an architect. She felt like a genius. She felt like her nose might fall off.

That's when Marcus came outside.

Marcus was eleven and usually acted like everything Lola did was the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened on planet Earth. But today Marcus looked at the forts, looked at the snow, looked at the perfect white battlefield between them, and said: "I'm on Lola's team."

Lola stared at him. "Really?"

"You've got the better fort," he said, like it was obvious. Like it was a military decision and not the single greatest compliment he had ever given her.

They worked together. Marcus could pack snowballs fast — really fast — and he stacked them behind the fort in a perfect pyramid. Lola kept building the wall higher. Across the street, Jayden had recruited his older sister Amara, and the two of them were whispering and pointing, which meant they were planning something sneaky.

"Ready?" Jayden called out.

"READY!" Lola shouted.

The first snowball sailed through the air in a beautiful arc and exploded against the oak tree. Lola grabbed one from the pyramid and threw it with everything she had. It went sideways and hit Mr. Henderson's gnome and knocked off his snow hat.

"Sorry!" she yelled to the gnome.

Marcus threw one that actually reached Jayden's fort. Amara threw one that got Marcus right in the shoulder. Jayden threw one straight up in the air by accident and it landed on his own head, and everybody — even Jayden — laughed so hard they had to sit down in the snow.

For a while, nobody even threw snowballs. They just laughed. Lola laughed until her stomach hurt and her eyes watered and the tears were cold on her cheeks. Every time they almost stopped, someone would say "right on his own HEAD" and it would start all over again.

Then they all ended up in the middle of the street and decided to build something together instead of fighting. They started with a snowman. But the snowman got bigger and bigger, and then Amara said "let's give it four legs," and then Marcus said "and a tail," and somehow it turned into a snow-dragon.

It was the ugliest, most beautiful thing Lola had ever seen. Its body was a massive lopsided ball. Its legs were four stumpy lumps. Marcus found two sticks for horns. Jayden donated his scarf for its neck, and Amara used her finger to draw scales all along its side. Lola made the eyes out of two perfect round snowballs and gave it a mouth that curved up in a smile.

"It needs a name," Lola said.

"Snowzilla," said Marcus.

"Princess Snowzilla," said Lola.

"Princess Snowzilla the Magnificent," said Amara.

Everyone agreed. You couldn't argue with magnificent.

They stood back and admired Princess Snowzilla the Magnificent, all four of them in a row, breathing hard, mittens soaked, noses running, cheeks so red they looked painted. The snow was still falling in fat lazy flakes, landing on their shoulders, landing on the dragon, landing on everything, making the world softer and quieter and closer.

Lola's mom appeared on the porch. "Cocoa's ready! There's enough for everyone!"

They stomped inside — all four of them — leaving puddles on the hallway floor, peeling off wet gloves and boots and scarves and coats until there was a mountain of soggy winter clothes by the door. Mom didn't say one word about the puddles. She just handed out mugs with marshmallows.

Lola wrapped both hands around her mug. The warmth crept into her frozen fingers and it hurt a little and felt amazing at the same time. She looked out the kitchen window. She could see Princess Snowzilla the Magnificent standing guard in the yard, already collecting a new layer of white on her horns.

Marcus sat next to her on the kitchen floor — right next to her, close enough that their shoulders touched — and didn't move away.

Jayden slurped his cocoa so loud that Amara said "you sound like a bathtub drain," and everyone laughed again, not as hard as before, but warmer. A tired, happy, marshmallow kind of laugh.

Outside, the snow kept falling.

Lola took a long sip and closed her eyes. Her cheeks were still tingling. Her socks were wet. There was snow melting in her hair and dripping down behind her ear.

She thought about how there was no school today. No spelling test. No sitting still. No watching the clock.

Just this. Cocoa and puddles and a dragon in the yard and her brother's shoulder against hers and the whole white world outside, waiting.

She set down her mug.

"Five more minutes," she said, "and then we go back out."

Everyone agreed.