Pending major, unforeseen developments, Ada had a well-informed estimate of how many students would walk with her at graduation. There were 29 of them altogether in her sophomore class. Carmen H.'s parents were getting divorced, and Carmen would probably move away with her mother. Clay E. would drop out in his junior year. One of the Dolls—Jordan, Libby, or Tanya—would get pregnant and opt for a GED.

Ada calculated it one afternoon in her Algebra II class. She would graduate from Lark Hollow High School with 25 other students, 17 of whom she'd known since she was five years old.

Fresh snow built up in small mounds on the classroom windowsill, the dunes growing under her watchful eye. Jake S., who was slouched four seats ahead of her, counted as her only kiss, and it had happened on a dare back in the seventh grade. A glance around the room confirmed she didn't have many more prospects within the boundaries of Lark Hollow. She would consider going to prom with Ian M. or Jake S., whom she hadn't ruled out as a once and future suitor. With the exception of Christopher K. two grades above, no one else came close to interesting her, and she knew the feeling was mutual.

Familiarity bred contempt. Just as Ada could remember when Kevin S. threw up on himself in the sixth grade, her classmates could remember when the skirt of her Halloween costume got stuck in her tights in the eighth grade. Her relationships were a series of small embarrassments and misunderstandings that approximated a person but never truly reflected one.

No one in Lark Hollow knew her. This was, she gathered, the universal experience of being sixteen. Her classmates understood her as a series of cliff-notes. And the one thing she wished they didn't know was the first thing anyone would have told you.

Ada got dark every other Christmas. They didn't know why. They didn't really care. But they had noticed.

** ** **

This wasn't a dark Christmas. Ada was grateful for the pattern, because she knew in advance she'd be happy the Christmas of her senior year. She was grateful that her good years coincided with the one constant yet interesting aspect of her life—the appearance of Marcus Radley in Lark Hollow, population 1,003. The Radleys had escaped when she was a toddler, moving to a bigger city a five-hour-drive away. Marcus's grandparents, however, still lived two blocks from Ada's house, and the Radley family returned to the town of Lark Hollow every other Christmas.

Ada waited. She sat on the window-seat of her bedroom and pretended to count pine needles on distant trees. There weren't many cars on the snow-covered street, just like there weren't many houses. The world outside her window consisted of the ranch house on the other side of the road, and their horse pen, which was occupied by two roan mares in plaid turnout jackets. Ada had yet to figure out when the horses would be out or not. She thought it had something to do with how lazy her neighbors were feeling.

The horses huddled in the snow and Ada felt sorry for them. She loved being in the snow, and while the horses didn't seem bothered, they didn't seem thrilled, either. Horses were a mystery to her. They didn't seem to enjoy the expansive white views of their rural corner of the world, the way the hills on the horizon outlined the uneven edges of the bowl in which Lark Hollow was nestled.

Ada wasn't sure how a place that was this beautiful could be so boring. She knew that geography and ecology and even the layout of the stars changed on a different timespan than she would ever live. She just wondered how it was possible that nature had dragged everyone in Lark Hollow into its slow, steady pace. Some days there seemed to change only in name.

But then there were those winters that Marcus Radley came home. His parents were friends with Ada's, and they liked to get together and play board games and drink beer and set their kids in front of the television to watch holiday movies. Marcus and Ada had watched a Christmas movie together every other year since they were four. They had started turning the volume down and talking when they were eight.

There was something about a person that you saw only once every other year, who knew nothing about your life, your friends, your school, that made it possible for them to say anything and everything. Their conversations seemed picked out of thin air, inspired by the way the carpet looked after being vacuumed or the pictures on the supermarket mailer. They said what they wanted and they didn't lie.

Every other year something new had changed, something big had happened. She broke her arm falling off her bicycle, and Marcus got a black eye in his first and only fistfight. Ada kissed Jake, and Marcus dated Carla. Marcus decided he wanted to be a doctor and Ada drove her parents' car to the grocery store without a license, to be followed home by a bored sheriff who wanted to scare her.

In between visits Ada started to realize that the Christmases without Marcus were terrible, and that she couldn't get out of bed, and she couldn't remember how to think. She wondered if it was because he wasn't around, but he felt like an answer to a different problem altogether. Try as she might to pretend that Marcus was a protective talisman against all her ailments, Ada had begun to understand that her dark times had neither rhyme nor reason. The only schedule they obeyed was the planet's inexorable revolution around the sun.

Maybe during good years her dark times were as lazy as her neighbors. Whatever the reason for their intermittent absence, Ada was grateful.

The last time she had seen Marcus he had decided he would move to the coast when he was older. They talked about going to the same college, although high school seemed challenging enough. They talked about their parents and being only children and their best friends, and that's when Ada realized she did lie to Marcus sometimes. It didn't feel like lying not to tell Marcus about the dark winters. It didn't feel like lying when she said that Becca R. was her best friend, and not him. It didn't feel like lying when she didn't say she missed him.

None of that seemed to matter during the good years. She sat in her window, and waited for the forest green hatchback that would carry Marcus and his parents down the gravel road she lived on, and past her house, and to his grandparents. And then she waited again, for the day they would journey in reverse, down her gravel road, into her driveway, and into her house.

** ** **

The change in the last two years was vertical. Ada had grown five inches since she had last seen Marcus. She had been the taller one then. He had made up for it since and stood at least a few inches above her now. The gains of her growth spurt paled in comparison to the way Marcus wore puberty so that it blended and faded into his frame. Ada felt ill at ease in her new body, separate from it and beginning more and more to associate it with all kinds of betrayal. Marcus stood in the passageway from the living room to the kitchen, looking lanky and as awkward as Ada, but this seemed to be a social condition rather than a physical one.

There were other changes, like the funny looks their parents exchanged. Ada's mother pulled chips from the cupboard and appetizers from the fridge and smiled a crescent moon at Marcus's mother.

"I'm so glad we have all afternoon to catch up," she said, her smile turning toothy, her raised eyebrows and quick glance at Ada and Marcus about as subtle as a child struggling to wink.

Ada felt a sudden urge to knock a serving platter off the kitchen counter and to the floor. Her father saved her by pulling Marcus's father into the adjacent garage, wanting to show off the new pickup he adamantly insisted was not the product of a mid-life crisis.

Ada's mother rolled her eyes but that fingernail smile never left her face, and she suggested that Marcus's mother check out the car, too.

"You should see the color," she said, her words thick with meaning, like a waterlogged book with translucent pages. Ada wondered at their way of speaking without the right words, at friendships that spanned decades and the way this curious bond defied the usual weathering of time. How could a handful of phone calls and visits every other year sustain two people?

Their mothers exited with a choreographed casualness, and Ada flicked a finger at the serving platter. It wouldn't do to send it flying, but there was something about the feigned ignorance between their parents that set her teeth on edge.

Her mother had been trying to tease Ada's feelings on Marcus's upcoming visit out of her for weeks. Ada had replied with a constant shrug. Her friendship was hers, and her mother's voyeurism and vicarious interest rankled her. She had overheard a phone conversation in which her mother whispered and giggled with Marcus's.

"Just think of the good things. Like Marcus and Ada—they're so cute," she had said. "Can you imagine it? Now doesn't that just make your day?"

Ada wanted their mothers to bleach whatever they were imagining out of their brains. The thought of pretending to watch a movie in the family room seemed unbearable. Her parents would be poking their heads in—they'd made it clear that, for no reason they would say, she and Marcus weren't allowed to watch TV in the basement alone anymore.

"My mom wants me to date you," Ada said, glaring at a cheese platter. It beat 'hello' any day of the week. She and Marcus didn't do small-talk, because that wasn't something eight-year-olds knew how to do. It had seemed pointless to incorporate it into their friendship as they got older.

Marcus chortled and she glanced up to see him relax against the doorway. Besides being taller, he had finally decided that his sandy blonde hair should grow out past the bowl haircut his mother had demanded ever since Ada had known him. His bangs hung in an unruly mess over his forehead, grazing the thick brows that framed his blue eyes.

Marcus's wide mouth spread into a smile, revealing teeth newly freed from braces. Another change. "I think they've been planning this for a while. Check it out." Marcus walked up to his mother's purse, which she'd left on the kitchen counter. He rifled through it and removed a DVD, holding it up for Ada's inspection.

The cover was all fuzzy snowflakes and a couple embracing. Fated, it read in wobbly, uneven letters.

Ada sighed in disgust. "A romantic Christmas movie? That is a pathetic plan. I'm pretty sure the DVD player doesn't even work anymore."

Marcus stuffed the case back in his mother's purse and frowned, removing a rectangular object from its depths. The flask in his hand looked like the kind you'd find behind the counter at a corner store, about the size of a deck of cards and made of clear glass. The label was striped red and white and proclaimed its contents to be Peppermint Schnapps.

Marcus tapped the glass, the sound sparking a mischievous grin, the light of a question in his eyes as he looked at her. "I think I have a better plan."

** ** **

Ada led the way through the snowy field. They had snuck out of the house with the flask stuffed into Marcus's coat pocket, hollering into the garage that they were going to feed the horses. They had carried the requisite carrots and apples and lingered with the roans across the way long enough not to be caught in a lie.

Marcus had laughed that the horses tickled his palm. Ada had pretended to be astonished by the ignorance of a city boy, which had earned her a playful smack on the arm from Marcus, and a reminder that of the two of them he was the only one who could actually ride a horse.

Winter had descended on Lark Hollow earlier and heavier than usual, and snow worked its way into Ada's boots as she broke a path through the foot-deep powder. The snow seemed to soak up all sound, and the day was bright and still. They stumbled their way toward the old Decker farm, which stood out on the flat landscape as a wall of decaying baled hay and decrepit buildings in the distance.

Marcus breathed heavily, coughing in the cold and complaining as they walked. "The elevation out here makes everything harder."

Ada kicked the snow out ahead of her. "You could crack open that bottle," she suggested. "I hear it makes you warmer. Maybe it'll make you faster, too." She turned back to stick her tongue out at Marcus and took off at a sprint through the thick snow, lifting her knees to try and clear her way through it. She heard him yelping behind her, but she kept her eyes focused ahead, pulling the farm closer as she moved.

Last year's Christmas card had showcased Marcus in a football uniform. Ada's mother had sent out a letter with a picture of her doubled-over, sweaty, having just placed second in hurdles at the state finals.

The tip of her foot caught on a divot hidden beneath the snow, and she tumbled forward, burning her palms on the icy snow as she blindly broke her fall with her hands. Snow flew up the sleeves of her coat. Ada exhaled into the powder, dropping her face into the rough crystals and groaning.

Marcus caught up and plopped down in the snow next to her. Ada flipped over to look into the sky, squinting against the bright light, the blue winter canvas that reminded her of Marcus's eyes. She loved days like this, and they came every year.

How could one day fill her with so much hope she felt she would have to fall apart, dissolve entirely, to really feel it, when another day that was exactly the same felt like nothing, echoing like a hollow knock on the clapboard door of an empty house?

Marcus's coat rustled as he lay down into the snow, the sleeve of his thick coat pressing against hers like an errant thought. His hand, warm and wet with melted snow, found her own, and they lay there catching their breath, hands clasped in a single, unsaid prayer both foreign and familiar.

Ada's heart beat a staccato rhythm inside her chest, and she closed her eyes, erasing herself from her body until she was nothing but a constant breath. The cold around her started to seep into her jeans, the snow melting so that when she decided to move, a minute or a lifetime later, her pants felt damp and she was chilled.

A glance at Marcus confirmed that his jeans were likely also damp, but the sun would keep them both warm until they got back to her house. Ada clambered up to her feet, letting go of Marcus's hand but carrying his warmth with her. She pointed toward the Decker farm and started off again in its direction, less cautious than before, sure she had already found the one place in the field where she would stumble.

The farm was deserted, since the Deckers had sold all their livestock years earlier, keeping the land, Ada's parents said, as some kind of investment. The truth was that no one wanted it, and if it had been on the east side of town the buildings that were still standing would be the preferred hangout for Lark Hollow's students. As it was, hardly anyone but Ada ever ventured out there. She had known the Deckers's daughter, Charity, when they were kids, and their farm had the familiarity of a half-remembered story.

Marcus shaped a snowball and flung it toward one of the farm's old storage buildings. The rotting wood rattled under the ball's impact, producing the only sound other than the crunch of snow under their boots.

"We definitely won't be found here," Marcus said. "For better or for worse," he added with a chuckle.

Ada walked deeper onto the property, past the buildings that had still been in use in the last decade. Marcus followed and stepped on her heels when she stopped to point at the lone shed in the open, snowy field.

"That's my church," she said. They broke a new path through the snow to the tumble-down building, half of its roof and siding having given in to the demands of time. Drifts of snow half-buried the dried remains of the year's crop of weeds growing within, but Ada thought that was part of the shed's charm. It was open to anything and anyone. For a while Ada shared the space with a fox, although it had been years since she'd last seen it.

Marcus stood outside the shed's skeleton, tapping on the wooden beams and furrowing his brows as he studied the frame.

"Is this safe?"

Ada nodded. "Charity's dad shored it up when we were kids because she liked to play here. I took it over after they moved." When Marcus remained frozen outside the shed, Ada shrugged. "My dad came here last summer and said it was still safe. This is where I come and read when it's nice out."

Marcus crossed the threshold and inspected the ceiling, his look of doubt fighting with a look of wonder. Ada smiled when she saw wonder win out, his eyes shining with a fierce new light. She had thought long and hard about what she would tell Marcus this year. She didn't want to talk about the dark times, or her Biology class, or Becca R.'s new habit of not talking to her unless she happened to be single at the time. Ada wanted to show him the shed, which she'd taken to calling her church.

It had looked so weak her whole life, and now to top it off it looked abandoned, but it was secretly strong. It had good bones, she liked to think, and the kind of roof that left her wondering about the world. The church was a place that felt safe and protected even though it was open to everything around it. Thinking about her church was the only thing that made the dark times go by faster. Every other year the color seemed to go out of things, and Ada tried so hard to remember what feelings felt like. There were only two things in her life she had never tainted with the dark times: the church, and Marcus. And here they were, together.

Marcus cracked open the flask of Peppermint Schnapps, and Ada watched with curiosity, her cold hands jammed into her coat pockets, as he poured the whole thing out onto the snow, the powder melting as it met the drink. It felt like a christening of sorts, like they were in a ship preparing for its maiden voyage.

"Was that your plan?" she asked.

Marcus nodded and gave her a stiff grin, toasting the empty bottle to the shed's open sky.

"She can find more if she wants it," he said, shrugging and tossing the bottle out the shed's fully symbolic window, a wooden rectangle that revealed as much of the world as the building's absent door, roof and walls.

Ada processed his words slowly. The sadness in his face held the weight of two wordless years. Time dripped like molasses in Lark Hollow, but past the city boundaries life moved at its same relentless pace. People loved and lost and broke and put themselves back together. Marcus's lost gaze drew her in. It had the same quality of falling snow and uncounted pine needles, of an unbroken field of powder waiting for new footprints. Ada could never pull herself away from these things that felt timeless.

The silence grew around them, pulsing and billowing like a fog until Ada felt like there was no air around her, nothing but the heavy weight of the things they were too afraid to say. Was this how friendships lasted, she wondered—letting things remain wordless, pretending that time was a fate meant for others, so that when you reunited nothing at all had changed?

No, her thoughts didn't seem true. And despite the small lies she had once told, the better part of Ada wanted to remain true to Marcus. She remembered her mother's words, that half-heard telephone conversation, and Marcus's actions gave it a different tint, the dirty shade of a fading bruise.

Her mother was prone to repeating her advice, and it seemed she had told Marcus's mother the same thing she said to Ada during the dark times. Just think of the good things.

As though Ada didn't want to be better. As though she wouldn't be different if she could. Maybe Marcus's mother wanted to be different, too.

She walked up to Marcus and pulled him to the window, holding his hand and watching the world. He squeezed her fingers and she started to speak. There was more to share this Christmas than her church. There was more to be said than could fill the silence, even if she had two more years to do so.

Ada had never before put it into words. She had let people say that she was moody, and sad, and emotional, even when the dark times felt beyond words, beyond emotion. She told Marcus about when she first noticed it, and the heaviness of winter's longest nights. She told him about spring, and the days getting longer, and the way that each minute of light brought her closer to the surface. She kicked her way from the depths towards the sun, but then again, she didn't. She didn't do anything.

There was nothing she could do. The dark times never felt like anything she could control. They felt as inevitable as the earth continuing to hurl itself around the sun. Every other October, Ada would start to disappear. Every other March, Ada would start to come back.

Marcus didn't say anything. He took her hands and held them against his chest, and Ada stepped closer, trying to share in his warmth as the world around them grew colder.

"Are you back now?" Marcus asked.

Ada nodded, looking up at Marcus, and beyond him, to the open sky, the lines of the building's strong, good beams. Things around them fell apart, but they were still standing.

"Good." Marcus let go of one of her hands. "They might be wondering where we are," he said.

"Probably," Ada agreed.

They walked off the Decker property in silence, still holding hands. When they hit the open field again, Marcus started talking. They walked twice as slowly back to the house as they did on their way to the church. Marcus told her about his mother, and her one-year sobriety chip, which she kept in her pocket at all times.

"But she wanted this bottle anyway," he said, shrugging as though the world's weight on his shoulders was already so familiar it would budge under the slightest motion. "She said Christmas is her favorite thing and she would never ruin it, so this was like a loaded gun to keep her promise, the ultimate challenge for her. Everyone at her meetings says that it isn't about challenges, or ever being fixed, you know? But she wanted this, and she bought it at the convenience store when my dad was on the phone. She made me promise not to tell." Marcus kicked at the snow, sending a cloud of powder whispering around them.

"We don't always know how to be better," Ada said.

Marcus just clenched his jaw and kept walking, although his hand remained tightly wrapped around Ada's.

"I don't know how to be better." Ada heard the words as though she hadn't said them. They didn't feel like hers. They belonged to the air and the snow, somehow.

"Yeah, but that isn't your fault," Marcus said. He turned to her, his blue eyes tinged with raw, red sadness.

"It isn't your mother's, either," Ada said, and for a moment, she believed it all. It wasn't Marcus's mother's fault. It wasn't Ada's fault.

They were made like this. There was a part of her that went dark. There was a part of Marcus's mother that wanted to drink. She didn't want to carry liquor around like a loaded gun because she wanted to drink. She wanted it to prove she could be better, that she was stronger than herself. To prove she wasn't made like this—but she was. They all were.

"Look, Marcus," Ada said. She let go of his hand and stepped back, trying to build her words so that they would stand without her. "You're good at football, and I'm good at running—at hurdles, right?" Ada didn't stop, her question serving as a pause for her own thoughts. "Your mom is good at painting. You showed me pictures a couple of years ago."

Marcus nodded without saying anything, letting her go on.

"And my mother," Ada continued, "she's good at meddling."

Marcus laughed, an improbable, perfect sound. Ada couldn't help but smile.

"But she's also good at playing the piano. And my dad is good at fixing cars. And your dad—"

"He's good at snoring," Marcus said. Ada traded laughter with him, and Marcus added that his father was good with his garden.

"Where are you going with this?" he asked, not unkindly.

Ada took a deep breath and visualized it. "We're all those things, right, but your mom has a problem. And I have a problem. And I'm not just hurdles or dark times and she isn't just painting or drinking and you're not just football and—and—"

"Talking," Marcus said.

Ada stammered, Marcus's interruption nonsensical. "What?"

"I hate talking. I hate words."

Ada slumped in place, watching Marcus as though waiting for him to crack a smile, reveal it was a joke. "You're fine with words."

Marcus cleared his throat and shook his head, looking shyly at Ada for the first time in perhaps their entire friendship. "I'm good with words with you. I save them. For you." He shuffled in the snow. "But I don't like them, and I don't like to talk."

"Okay," Ada said. "So, my point is that doesn't make you..." she searched her mind for the right word. "Taciturn."

"Nice." Marcus smiled. "Did you forget to tell me you were going to ace your standardized exams?"

Ada sighed and shook her hands in front of her, fidgeting to keep away the cold. Everything seemed so clear in a good year. It seemed so easy with Marcus around. She had him, and she had a safe space in her church. His mother needed something like that, but she couldn't run away to a rotting building every time she felt out of sorts.

Ada's head snapped up and she met Marcus's eyes, glancing back in the direction of the Decker farm.

"I have a plan," she said. She glanced at her watch, and then at the sun. "But we have to be fast."

** ** **

Marcus and Ada were sweaty and out of breath by the time they returned to the house. Ada peered through the dining room window and spotted all of their parents through the glass, so she snuck herself and Marcus into the kitchen through the side door. They ditched their snow-sodden coats and boots at the breakfast table.

Marcus walked up to the kitchen counter to slip the Peppermint Schnapps back into the depths of his mother's purse. They had run back to the Decker farm to find the bottle, and filled it with pine needles as they walked back to the house. It was a reminder of Christmas for his mother, every day, and everywhere. A safe place she could carry with her.

Marcus wasn't sure it would work. Ada wasn't sure, either. But being in a good year gave her hope. Maybe the next time, her safe place would help her, too.

"Check it out," Marcus said, having tucked the bottle away. He pulled the DVD case out of the purse. "We have a tradition to maintain."

"Seriously?" Ada rolled her eyes. "That movie looks really corny. And like I said, it might not even play."

Marcus shrugged. "Worth trying."

They piled plates full of snacks and grabbed sodas from the fridge, then removed themselves to the living room, away from their parents' bursts of intermittent laughter. When they laughed it sounded like nothing had ever been wrong, and maybe between them all it never had. Every other year they came to the same place and did the same things, to feel like, in some way, they were still the same people.

In the living room, Marcus rapped on the DVD player and called it names until it started working. Ada curled up on one end of the sofa with a blanket and her food and laughed, offering useless advice along the way. She opened and closed her hands to bring feeling and warmth back into them, the movements familiar and un-thought.

As the movie's opening credits started to roll, Marcus joined Ada, sliding under the blanket until he was right next to her. He reached across her to the end table and grabbed his own plate of food.

"Ew, cooties," Ada said, staring at the anti-piracy ad on the TV, feeling a pleased blush color her cheeks.

"Shut up," Marcus said. He bumped his shoulder against hers. "You know our parents were right. We should date."

Ada let out a disgusted groan, but leaned her head on Marcus's shoulder anyway.

"Ada," Marcus said. "Do you think it will work?"

She straightened up and placed her snack plate on the end table, taking a moment to rest her hands on her knees. During the first bad year, she had prayed a lot. There had been no answers, and no one to talk to. She had no talismans, and a series of blizzards that piled snow around the house meant that her family went almost nowhere for a few weeks. Some mornings her bed had seemed nearly liquid, a place she could lie for hours until she was slowly pulled under, until she didn't have to move or think ever again. The things she had loved and cared for were all around her, and they meant nothing.

How much would it have meant to her to find something that—even if it still felt like nothing—reminded her that the things she loved were still loved by someone else? That the feeling was out there, still possible, and she might find it again?

"I think it might," she said, afraid to give him too much hope, afraid to take any away. "I think it would have for me."

Marcus didn't say anything back. He just stayed next to her, warm, safe, and solid.

Twenty minutes in, Ada realized she was falling asleep. She shook herself awake and tried to focus on the movie, which had something to do with magical elves interceding in a couple's romance to more and more disastrous consequences.

"This is terrible," Ada said. "This is the corniest thing I've ever seen."

"Mm-hmm," Marcus agreed, stretching and yawning, his arm finding its way around Ada's shoulders.

"Corny," she warned.

"I'm not good with words," Marcus reminded her. "Let me be corny if I want."

Ada sighed but leaned further into Marcus, relishing the way she fit against him, how comfortably warm they were together. She wanted every Christmas to be like this one. She wanted Marcus's mother to stay strong. She wanted to be different next year. She wanted to forgive herself if she wasn't.

Ada watched the Christmas tree's colorful lights play off of Marcus's skin. They had always been like this, until now, suddenly, they were something more.

"I wonder what happens now," she said, more to herself than to him. On the screen, another minor catastrophe brought the two lovers closer together.

"Hmm," Marcus answered, and she watched his brow as he drew it together in concentration. "We'll just have to find out the Christmas after next. But I bet it will be great."

Ada felt a surge of brightness within her. She leaned over to Marcus and planted a kiss on his cheek. For once, he had no words for her, just a pleased, bashful smile.

"Maybe every Christmas can be," she said.

For a moment, nothing seemed as set in stone as it once did, everything feeling both comfortable and unfamiliar. Change in Lark Hollow was never large. It built up in the details, adding up slowly to a different world, one that you could only ever notice after the fact. After it had already become your old world. Your whole world. But change that was hard to perceive was change nonetheless, and it meant that Ada could change. She couldn't predict everything. Not even the patterns she knew well—not even the ones about herself.