The Secret Year by Jennifer R. Hubbard Page A

real-world, girlfriend-boyfriend stuff, something she shared with Austin but not with me. For the most part, Julia and I made up the rules of our relationship without talking about them; we both seemed to just know them. Not this time.
    I didn’t know how to fix it, either, because anything I got her now would seem forced. “I’m sorry,” I said.
    She turned and looked me in the eyes as best she could in the dimness. The streetlight on the bridge gave us no true colors; she was silver and black. I felt the heat of her under the blanket. I wasn’t sure whether the space between us had been warmed by her or me or both of us; I couldn’t tell where the dividing line was.
    “It doesn’t matter,” she said, and the thing was, I could tell she meant it. She let it go. Even in her notebook, in the entries after that night, she didn’t mention it. It was something she could’ve held against me but didn’t.
     
    The week before Christmas, this first Christmas without Julia, we got eight inches of snow. I went out and shoveled it off the driveway. The sun was setting as I finished, streaking the sky with purple. The snow muffled everything. All I could hear was the scrape of my shovel. The bushes looked like they’d been dipped in cream frosting. It was so good to be outside that I didn’t even mind the shoveling.
    Kirby Matthews came walking down the plowed street. I stopped shoveling when I saw her. Her hair was black and her coat was black, so she stood out against all that white.
    “Colt,” she said. “Out playing in the snow?”
    “If you want to call it that.” I hefted the shovel.
    “Don’t you have a snowblower?”
    “My father broke it last winter.” He’d actually rammed it into the side of the house while drunk, but I didn’t feel like sharing that particular family story with her. “What are you doing all the way down here?”
    “Walking.” She came to stand near me, out of the road. “I like to walk in the snow.”
    “And Michael doesn’t, I guess.”
    “Not really.” She wrinkled her nose. “He’d rather be inside. But I’d suffocate if I was in the house all day.”
    “Me, too.”
    “We watched a whole marathon of movies today—you know, the old black-and-white kind where everyone smokes and they’re all wearing hats, and every time something dramatic happens, the background music goes crazy?”
    “Yeah.”
    “We love those movies. Michael has half the lines memorized. But after a while, I just had to get outside.”
    We stood there looking at each other. Then she said, “Sorry about you and Syd.”
    “Oh . . .” I didn’t know what to say about that. “Thanks.”
    We got quiet again. For some reason, these silences weren’t awkward. Maybe it was the snow lying everywhere, making stillness seem okay. Then she said, “You going out somewhere?”
    “No, why?”
    “You’re shoveling out the car.”
    “Oh—no, my mother’s working tonight. I told her I’d get the car out for her. But I don’t work until tomorrow.”
    “Where?”
    “Barney’s Steakhouse.”
    “I know that place. . . . My parents took us when we were little. I used to love it.” She laughed. “Does it still have the crayons and the kiddie place mats to draw on?”
    “Yeah. Only the kids draw on everything else, too.”
    She laughed again. “Well, I’d better get going. It’s getting dark.”
    “I could drive you. I’m almost done here.”
    “What about your mother?”
    “I’ll be back before she has to go.”
    “Oh. Well, okay.”
    She stood there while I finished. I told her she should go in the house, but she said she wasn’t cold. She liked looking at the world while the snow was still fresh, she said.
    Mom was glad to let me warm up the car for her, so I took Kirby home. We didn’t talk on the ride to her house, but again that was okay. I was very aware of her in the seat next to me. I almost thought I could hear her breathing, even over the grinding
chug
of the engine and the