Read The Snow Queen for Free Online

Barrett hasn’t told Tyler; which he continues not mentioning to Tyler. Barrett has never, since he was a kid, been alone with a secret.
    He has, of course, never kept a secret quite like this.
    He’ll tell Tyler, he will, but not now, not yet. Barrett isn’t ready for Tyler’s skepticism, or his valiant efforts at belief. He’s really and truly not ready for Tyler to be worried about him. He can’t bring himself to be another cause for concern, not with Beth getting neither better nor worse.
    A terrible thing: Barrett finds sometimes that he wants Beth either to recover or die.
    The endless waiting, the uncertainty (higher white-cell count last week, that’s good, but the tumors on her liver are neither growing nor shrinking, that’s not so good), may be worse than grieving.
    A surprise: There’s no one driving the bus. There are five different doctors now, none of them actually in charge, and sometimes their stories don’t match up. They make efforts, they’re not bad doctors (except for Scary Steve, the chemo guy), they’re not negligent, they try this and they try that, but Barrett (and Tyler, and probably Beth, though she’s never talked about it) had imagined a warrior, someone kind and august, someone who’d be
sure
. Barrett had not expected this disorganized squadron—all upsettingly young, except for Big Betty—who know the language of healing, who reel off seven-syllable terms (tending to forget, or to disregard, the fact that the words are incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t a doctor), who can operate the machinery, but who, purely and simply, don’t know what’s going to work, or what’s going to happen.
    Barrett can keep this one about the celestial light private, for a while. It’s not an announcement Tyler needs to receive.
    Barrett has, naturally enough, Googled every possible malady (torn retina, brain tumor, epilepsy, psychotic break) that’s presaged by a vision of light. Nothing quite fits.
    Although he’s seen something extraordinary, and hopes it isn’t the precursor of a mortal ailment he failed to find on the Internet, he has not been instructed, he has not been transformed, there’s been no message or command, he is exactly who he was last night.
    However. The question arises: Who was he last night? Has he in fact been altered in some subtle way, or has he simply been rendered more conscious of the particulars of his own ongoing condition? It’s a hard one to answer.
    An answer might account for how and why Barrett and Tyler have lived so randomly (they, the National Merit boys—well, Barrett; Tyler was a runner-up—club presidents, Tyler crowned king of the fucking prom); why they happened to meet Liz when he and Tyler went, as each other’s date, to what has lived on as the Worst Party in History; why the three of them escaped the party and passed midnight together in some divey Irish pub; why Liz would eventually introduce Beth, newly arrived from Chicago; Beth who in no way resembles any of Tyler’s previous girlfriends, and with whom he’d fallen so immediately in love that he resembled some captive animal, fed for years on what its keepers believed to be its natural diet and then suddenly, one day, by accident, given what it actually ate, in the wild.
    None of it has ever felt predetermined. It’s sequential, but not exactly orderly. It’s all been going to this party instead of that one, happening to meet someone who knew someone who by the evening’s end had fucked you in a doorway on Tenth Avenue or given you K for the first time or said something shockingly kind, out of nowhere, and then gone away forever, promising to call; or, with an equally haphazard aspect, happening to meet someone who’ll change everything, forever.
    And now it’s a Tuesday in November. Barrett has gone for his morning run, had his morning bath. He’s going to work. What is there to do but what he always does? He’ll sell the wares (it’ll be slow today, because of the