Free The Snow Garden by Unknown Author

her nightshirt. She must have looked like, a bag lady who’d gone on a shoplifting spree at the mall.
         She held up her pack of Marlboro Lights. “It’s cold in the fire stairway,” she said, pointing to the exit door to their right. Randall shook his head no and gestured to the boys’ communal bathroom down the hall.
         “Great,” Kathryn said, as she followed him. “All dressed up for nothing.”
         Private shower stalls with soap scum-stained curtains lined one wall of the bathroom. A window at the far end was propped open, emitting cold gusts of wind that chilled the tiled floor. Whereas the girls on their floor never left their toiletry baskets behind, the boys had no qualms about it, and Kathryn chuckled when she saw Randall’s Aveda-stocked basket on the window ledge alongside more plebeian toiletry kits featuring labels like Gillette and Pert Plus. Contact lens solution was wedged between a bottle of Issey Miyake cologne and matching body wash. She was taken aback. Randall wore contacts? So there were some limits on the small life details they had shared, (And even more limits on the larger dramas she had kept from him.)
         Kathryn exhaled her first drag with her head tilted back, watching the cloud of smoke crawl toward the fluorescent light. She offered him one, but he held up his toothbrush in response. ‘You’d think someone would have done some work to make this place look less like a hospital.”
         Randall was brushing his teeth hard enough to bring white froth to the corners of his mouth. He bent at the waist and spat into the sink. “Try Princeton,” he said as he disappeared into a bathroom stall. He emerged, dabbing at his mouth with a compulsively folded triangle of toilet paper. “I hear they have fireplaces in the lounges there.”
         “Wait-listed,” Kathryn responded. Randall was flossing hard enough to draw blood, and she realized for the first time that he seemed on edge. “You?” she asked.
         Randall rolled his eyes. “This again?” He was bouncing on his heels.
         “I'm just curious,” she said, smiling solicitously.
         “Let’s not play this game.”
         “Why? You always win.”
         “Kathryn, you’re at the eleventh-ranked school in the country. Why do you need to keep mulling over your rejection letters?"
         “Thirteenth,” Kathryn corrected. “And who are you to talk? You were five minutes away from going to NYU to be near . .. what’s his name? Adolph!”
         “Alex,” Randall corrected, staring at his reflection, his blue eyes darkening at the mention of the ex-boyfriend Kathryn had heard so much about that he seemed practically mythical. “But I like how you can never remember his name. I’m trying to forget it too.”
         “You never told me the whole story.”
         “What’s to tell?”
         “Here!” she said, handing him a cigarette. He furrowed his brow. “It’ll chill you out.”
         “I don’t need to chill out.”
         Kathryn shoved the cigarette back into the pack. “Come on, Randall. You have a mad, passionate love affair with a marine five years older than you and he leaves you to go guard an embassy! I can see you running down the pier waving a hankie in the air as his ship pulls out of port."
         “Actually, I dropped him off at JFK and asked him not to write.”
         Randall reached over and removed the cigarette she had offered him only moments ago. “Careful. They’re not imported,” she said. He popped it into his mouth. “You turned me into a smoker, you know,” she added.
         “Liar,” Randall said.
         “It’s true,” Kathryn protested. “Before I met you, I would smoke maybe one or two when I was drinking. But then you made it look so ... sexy!” She squeezed his side and he leaped back, twisting her offending wrist. Kathryn held her grip and Randall, giggling, continued to try to pry it free.