Archive of Our Own ^beta

The snow fell the night before New Years’ Eve, blanketing the bushes and trees with thick, unbreachable oceans of snow. Max stood at his window to watch it fall. His father tilted his head forward to rest it on Max's head and said, “Guess you and the club aren’t going out tomorrow, huh, kiddo?”

“Guess not,” Max said, and after his father left, he watched the snow drape Mayview in layers and layers of soft, glittering quiet. At the bottom of the valley, someone was having a party, and the lights started to blink away as the moon leapt higher in the sky.

He crept into Zoey’s room before midnight. Yawning, she sat up in bed as he perched next to her, and they watched the clock tick toward 12:00. “Last day of the year,” he whispered when it did, and pressed a kiss to the side of her head. Laughing under her breath, she squirmed, but when Max stood to leave, she smiled up at him, eyes hazy and happy.

His father was fast asleep when he peeked into the master bedroom, tucked in on the left side of the bed, clutching his pillow tightly. Max slipped in beside him and stared up at the ceiling as his father snored and settled a little. The snow dampened everything outside. Even in Baxborough, where cars would run and dogs would bark for all hours of the night, the snow silenced the world, just a tad.

Here in Mayview, where it was usually quiet, Max felt like he was trapped in a pale imitation of a real world.

He tiptoed back into his own room at closer to one in the morning. PJ and Lefty were on the ground, reading, and just watched when Max climbed back between his own blankets. “Goodnight,” PJ said when Max was nearly asleep, and Max grunted a reply.

---

The next morning, bright and early, the Puckett household was surprised with a gang of preteens on their front stoop. Max, barefooted and still rubbing sleep from his eyes, threw open his window and was bombarded with shouts.

“Where were you?” =broke through Max’s fuzzy thoughts, and he tried to groan a response before just giving up, throwing on a couple more layers, and tumbling out his window onto a shocked Isaac O’Connor. Breath freezing in the air, Ed whooped, and Isabel threw back her head to laugh.

“What the hell?” Isaac asked, probably a little bruised, and Max unlocked his door to grab shoes and a coat.

“Dad, Zoey, I’m going out!” he shouted up the stairs, and someone yelled something back at him, and Max slammed the door shut, and pulled his boots on, and then they headed to the high school’s field.

“This started, like, ten years ago,” Isabel told him, “when two kids got into a huge fight and everyone in the school took sides and some of them met here to have a snowball fight. Nobody actually knows who started now, or why, but now you do it through middle school and end it when you get to high school.”

“Some kids tried to start one with the high school vs the Mayview Academy kids, but it didn’t really work out,” Ed chimed in, and Isaac grimaced.

“Yeah,” he said. “I think the principal banned all projectiles made of precipitation, so like, it’s technically illegal for it to hail there?”

“Anyway,” Isabel said, catching Isaac on the shoulder and shoving him a little, “you can form teams and alliances and stuff, and usually you stick with your grade or club.”

Ed’s brow darkened, and he muttered, “The football team is always ruthless.”

They reached the top of the hill a few minutes later. While Max was expecting to see maybe thirty other kids there, the entirety of Mayview Middle School was on the school’s front field, along with a few kids that might not even go there. Clustered in one corner of the track field were the sixth graders, quiet and probably a little afraid, and the eighth graders had control of most of the baseball diamonds, so the clubs and the seventh graders had gotten the parking lot and the open grassy area, both of which were now ankle deep in snow.

Max could honestly say he didn’t expect to see Suzy yelling at the president of the film club at the top of her lungs, but he could believe it.

“You can’t just say you want to join a team the day of!” Suzy yelled, probably scaring some birds off of nearby trees. “WE HAVE BEEN PLANNING THIS FOR MONTHS!”

“Hey, Suzy,” Max called across the parking lot, just to see the response. “Can the Activity Club join your team?”

“Yeah, sure thing,” Suzy called back without looking, and then screamed, “THEY AT LEAST WILL HAVE PEOPLE TO HELP US!”

Unimpressed, Isaac stared at Max for a hard second, and sighed. “Well,” he said, tipping his head back to look at the great deity in the sky that he sometimes talked to. “I guess we’re teamed up with the Newspaper for the annual snowball fight.”

Ed grabbed his arm and pulled him to the rest of the team -- Lisa, Violet, Cody and Jeff, a few rebellious eighth graders, and, surprisingly, Johnny Jhonny and his friends. Isabel and Max were left to watch the proceedings, as the untidy mess of kids arranged themselves into something resembling an army. Lisa, unsurprisingly, rose to the top, despite Suzy and Johnny’s attempts to usurp her, and Cody Jones made an excellent second in command.

Max sighed. “Guess we’d better head over there,” he said.

“Yeah,” Isabel replied. “It’ll be starting at ten.”

Neither made any move towards the disaster, not until Ed and Jeff bodily dragged them to their hideout. Someone, Max had no clue who, had brought a little pop up tent, and there was a table with full on war maps taped to it.

“Wow,” Max said, stunned, and Isabel nodded sagely.

The world outside the tent was cold and damp, but inside, there were fold up chairs and thermoses of hot chocolate. When others were sent outside to make ammunition, Max was kept inside for a little to focus on strategy, and it was there that he got to really appreciate the crazy that was Mayview. For maybe a half hour, they fattened him up with hot chocolate and war plans and those little figures to move around the map, and then, like the cold, conniving leaders they were, Lisa and Cody shoved him out the tent flaps with smiles and a promise that, if they won, he’d have his share of the glory.

Outside, the wind whistled in his ear, and the snow seeped past the tops of his boots, but he had RJ whispering jokes in his other ear, and Suzy lending him a pair of leg warmers, so he supposed it wasn’t all that bad.

They fought valiantly, holding up their barricades and launching attacks at the other armies, but in the end, their defenses were not enough. A bold group of sixth graders attacked their flanks as the football team launched their forces to the front, and one by one the soldiers fell. First it was Dimitri, snow melting across his shoulders as he fell asleep, and then it was one of the eighth graders. Max hadn’t met them before, but as they threw one last snowball at a football player, a single tear froze to his eyelash. Isaac was bawling.

The band kids won, although Isabel complained playing bad music to wear down the other teams was bad form and shouldn’t be allowed in the future. The student council collectively stroked their chins and murmured to each other, and Isaac offered Max a hand up.

“So how was it?” Max asked as they walked home. “That was your last one, right?”

“Yeah,” Isaac said, looking up to the pale gray sky. “It was good, but I don’t think any year would measure up to your first one.”

“Really,” Max said, not as a question.

“Yup.”

Isaac deposited Max at his door, the both of them cold and damp and red with chill, and smiled at him in the fading light. “Y’know,” he said, conversationally, “Spender once said he and Mina Zarei were in the first snowball fight here.”

“Really?” Max asks. This time it is definitely, for sure a question, and, again, Isaac smiled at him.

“Yeah.” He leaned himself against the doorway for a few seconds, watching Max unlock his door, then picked himself up and started to turn away. “Actually,” he said, “Spender told me that he and Mina Zarei were the ones who started it.”

This time, Max smiled, at Isaac’s damp, fading back in the afternoon sun, and headed to his kitchen, where Zoey was perched on a stool and his father was taking a tray out of the oven. His father heard him coming and straightened, smiling. “Hey, kiddo,” he said. “I made jalapeno poppers!”

Max smiled, and nudged Zoey away from his stool, and stole a popper before his father even put them on a plate. The clock struck 2:00 in the afternoon, and it was the last day of the year. The snow was melting.