Peppermint

Chapter 32 - Calm Snow

***ALEX***

"Do you know where Josh is?" I ask Ahmad as we finally find a space large enough for all of us to gather and regroup. It's a break room with several small tables on one side and, on the other, a cubby lined with two vending machines.

"Hold on," Ahmad says. "Let me plug his DNA into the system again, see how many more doors he's gone through."

"You're kidding, right?"

"I eat kid for breakfast," Ahmad fires back. "Just kidding. I only eat fully-grown goat meat. You should try it sometime."

"I have. It's delicious."

"Well, there you go. But don't talk to me about meaty meat goodness again till you've had lamb saag."

"There's a place at Stanford that sells them in spinach wraps," Michael says in an undertone. "That's the place to go. But the wraps always fall apart and that's a promise."

Gideon suddenly pounds one of the vending machines in frustration. "Dammit, for a guy who doesn't follow a lot of San Francisco values, this Kristoff sure likes to feed his people with quinoa and wheatgrass juice."

I stand by his side and silently point to one tasty-looking treat. It's a granola bar infused with café mocha, a popular choice of snack at Smythe and Darknell's. So much so, in fact, that Lana Smythe makes it a point of only putting it up for sale on Fridays. "Otherwise," she told me one day while I helped clean grubs out of her sink after Coldfire Creek flooded, "my customers would demand them all the time and riot whenever I ran out."

"A riot? In this town?" I threw some grubs into the large bucket which I was filling up alongside Aron and Kelly.

To this day, I'm still surprised that I managed to get Kelly to say one of my favorite phrases: "Perish the thought."

"I just wanna get it over with," Gideon growls as he feeds the machine money for the coffee bar. "Can Mr. G just do his little Godly body-surf already? Or is he too busy schmoozing the shit out of Kristoff?"

"Literally, I bet."

Gideon scowls at me while picking the bar up from the machine and unwrapping it. "There's no call for that kind of crudity while I'm eating. And I say this as a guy who once saw Russell Aspen pissing on a bunch of bad guys." He tears off a huge chunk of coffee bar with his teeth and chews on it for a bit before adding, "Them's were the days, Alejandro de la Nieve."

He hands me the other half of the bar. Or, more accurately, other 45 percent. Whatever, I'll take it. "Thanks," I mutter as I cram my bit of bar into my mouth just like he did.

"You have an impressive mouth capacity," he tells me.

"Trained myself eating Costco hot dogs all the time as a kid," I say.

"Would that you were gay or bi or otherwise inclined to put that training to some real use."

I feel almost robotic as I reach out to hug him and ruffle his hair, but that's better than being frustrated as fuck like I've been since we left Joey's. "Wrong Snow Bro, sweetheart. Though I'm not gonna lie. Sirius Black? Man-crush goals."

"Should've said Lupin, man. I gotta break the mutual over this."

"I'm surprised. You seem more like a Sirius fanboy than I do."

"I don't need a little edge in my life the way you do yours."

I point to my ears. "Remind me, who had whose pierced again?"

"Do yours after Christmas like you promised and then we'll talk."

"Why is this the first I'm hearing of this?" Mom asks. But then she winks, just like when she told me how Josh had accidentally sexposed the way I Snapchat. Another thing I need to protect for myself - living with the mellowest Mom I can. If Kristoff triggers some sort of apocalypse, she's probably going to really get strict with the rules. In the name of survival or something. And then she'd probably claim that I shouldn't pierce my ears lest they make me too distinguishable, too noticeable. Or too vulnerable to getting my ears torn to shreds. Or maybe not, given she's had next to no objections to my tats. I was afraid she would when Gabe and I first got them, but by the time she saw them a month later, on spring break, she'd made no big deal out of it. "Just gotta let my boys grow up as they grow up," she said. "Even if you have terrible, terrible taste in ink. No Maltese crosses? Seriously?" She's always been so hung up on that, because she's said that design is the only tattoo she'd ever get herself.