Chapter 2
December 18
Boulan Middle School, Troy, MI
The first class of the day, Art with Mr. Striders, went well enough. They were supposed to be working on their clay figures to be fired during the holidays while the kids were out of school, but Josh had spent more than half of the forty-five minutes doodling variations of the two sizes of Yeti as he could remember them. The large version was chilling enough it gave him shivers. Suzanna had leaned over at one point, setting aside her letter ‘S’ she was making for her figurine and commented, “What is that? Something from one of your video games?”
Josh thought he was being mocked, even if Suzanna was the only girl in school that ever talked to him, but then realized she was just being conversational. He toyed with the idea of telling her what it really was. And then he thought of it again.
“Uh…No,” he replied, bashfully. “It’s actually an abominable snowman. You know? Like, for Christmas and stuff?”
Suzanna smiled awkwardly. “Oh. I’m not sure abominable snowmen are part of Christmas, Josh.”
“I thought your family didn’t celebrate Christmas, Suz,” he said and started shuffling his doodles around and placing them back into his writing pad.
“We don’t. Chanukah is already done this year actually. But I know what Christmas is, and I’m pretty sure there’s no abominable snowmen,” she retorted with a more comfortable smile. “Maybe a magic flying deer or fat guy in a red suit or something, but no abominable snowman, as far as I’ve ever heard of.”
“Well, yeah,” Josh answered unhappily. He always seemed to say the wrong thing to the one girl who might actually be willing to “go” with him some day. But at least he managed to get her off the Yeti topic. Or at least he thought.
“Well, anyway,” she said sticking her fingers back into the clay, “I think the little ones are cute. You should draw more of those.”
“Mmmm. Yeah, I guess so. They are more cute aren’t they?”
“Are they baby abominable snowmen? Or something else?” She asked, half paying attention, half focusing on her letter “S”.
Josh considered the question for a moment. “I don’t know. I…think they’re the same thing.”
Suzanna just nodded, but Josh had a hard time focusing on starting his clay project while toying with a variety of theories on how the little fuzz ball he’d seen made itself so big.