Chapter Text
Amy Santiago has always kept her head down and done her job. And her job has always been being the best. In Kindergarten, she sat in the front row on the colorful rug and shushed the girls who whispered at nap time (those girls made her life a living hell in middle school, but that didn’t matter so much). In high school, she fought her teachers tooth and nail for a 100 instead of a 99 on tests, and she spent her Saturday nights studying for the SAT. She arrived to college with MCAT prep books in her backpack and worked nights and weekends to save up money for the further education she knew her parents couldn’t afford. When she received her acceptance letter to the prestigious NYU School of Medicine, she could barely contain her excitement. This was the moment she had been waiting for since she had been given a toy doctor’s kit for her third birthday.
Amy’s college roommate Kylie frequently described her as “clinically insane”, a bemused smile gracing her (much prettier, in Amy’s opinion) face. Amy wasn’t in a position to dispute that.
And so, on Monday, August 15, Amy Santiago found herself sitting in a classroom alone, nearly 45 minutes early for her first class on her first day of medical school, a USMLE review book in front of her. It would be another two years before she had to take the exam, but starting early never hurt anyone.
There was one other boy in the room, sitting in the back, fidgeting and looking confused. He cleared his throat a few times, but Amy refused to look up. If he was in the wrong place, he could determine that on his own. The boy was in a plaid flannel and a zip-up hoody, clearly not ready for class – a stark contrast to Amy’s professional black pants and blouse.
Fifteen minutes before the class was set to start, others began to trickle in, talking loudly. With a sigh, Amy closed her book and looked up for the first time since entering the room. There was Rosa, her new roommate, surly and glaring at the other students as though they’d already personally offended her. Amy was used to that look – she’d experienced it for the first time when she turned her key in the latch and walked into her new living room, duffel bag in hand. In the week since she moved her belongings into their tiny apartment, she’d grown used to ignoring the death-glare. It helped that she caught Rosa engrossed in Dance Moms while walking to the bathroom at 2 AM on the second night.
Amy is drawn out of her reverie by one voice that somehow rises over the chatter and fills every corner of the room.
“Chaaaaaaaaaaaaarles,” it whines. She doesn’t even need to turn around to know that it’s the boy in the flannel.
“You lied to me! I’ve never been betrayed like this! A knife straight into my heart – nay, into my spine!”
Already rolling her eyes, she succumbs to her curiosity and turns to stare at the boy. A second, smaller, slightly tubbier boy – his name must be Charles – is pleading with the flannel boy. It’s nearly comical, like a scene out of a Monty Python sketch, except for the real shine in Charles’ eyes. Is he crying? Amy wonders. How real is this fight?
Meanwhile, flannel boy is continuing. “I mean, this is worse than when Major Grant betrayed John McClane in Die Hard 2 ! Worse than when Caesar Salad was betrayed on the Ideas of March!”
“Caesar, and Ides,” Amy mutters to herself. She hadn’t realized she’d said it out loud, but from a few desks away, Rosa catches her eyes, and unless Amy’s mistaken, the smallest possible smile is gracing her roommate’s lips.
Meanwhile, Charles, gasps. “ Jake! I’m so sorry! I just switched your phone clock an hour early so you’d get to school on time! It’s just the first day! I didn’t know! Of course I should have known. You need your sleep – you were obviously up late on a lucky Die Hard marathon. How could I do this to you?” Charles is nearly inconsolable now, and he seems to be talking to himself, rather than flannel boy. Amy has never been more confused in her life.
Flannel boy – Jake, apparently – sighs and draws his friend into a hug. What is clearly intended to last for the duration of a quick squeeze and a clap on the back quickly morphs into a 30 second ordeal. Amy can read the discomfort on Jake’s face as Charles burrows into his chest, and frankly, she relishes it. This is far more entertaining than teaching herself the material on the USMLE, even if she does resent the boy for interrupting her studying.
At that moment, a tall man opens the door and silently marches to the front of the room. At the sound of his voice, Amy turns around with a start, a blush already creeping up her neck. She’d been caught turned around when her first medical school professor, her future mentor , the man who would one day hold her future in his hands like a small bird, had walked in for the first time. What kind of impression was that?
Seeming not to have noticed the student in the middle seat of the front row nearly fall out of her desk in her haste to turn around and open her notebook simultaneously, Dr. Holt opened his mouth to speak. In the most monotonous, least excited voice Amy Santiago had ever heard, he said, “Welcome to your first day at NYU School of Medicine. I, Raymond J. Holt, M.D., am thrilled to personally welcome you to your first class here.”
Amy is so immersed in her textbook that she doesn’t notice her sandwich slowly falling apart until Rosa looks up from her own book, literally reaches across the table, and hits her on the head. With a start, Amy is pulled out of the intricacies of the human circulatory system to notice mayonnaise dripping down her hand while turkey slides out of the sourdough she is clenching. Fortunately, none of the stray sandwich toppings that litter the table had landed on the notes she took this morning. Rosa grunts – if Amy didn’t know better, she’d almost call it a laugh – and hands her a few napkins from the dispenser.
“Y’know, you don’t have to study this much,” Rosa states matter-of-factly, closing her book. “We aren’t being tested on that stuff for another month.”
“But I’m already a week behind!”
“Amy, that’s the pulmonary vascular system. We haven’t even covered that in class. Eat your lunch like a normal person.”
“The schedule, Rosa! The schedule!” Amy reminds her, a little desperately. Rosa sees the color-coded schedule hung in their small shared living space every day. It outlines both the material covered in class that Amy reviews each day and the material she covers on her own in anticipation of the content of classes still two years away. Rosa never comments on just how crazy Amy is. In return, Amy doesn’t acknowledge that under the book jacket that reads The Art of War is a copy of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice .
Just then, the two boys Amy noticed earlier that morning – Charles and…John, maybe? Jack? she remembers – drop their lunches with a rattle on their table.
“S-s-sorry,” squeaks Charles, cowering under Rosa’s glare. “We’ll go find somewhere else!”
Flannel-boy – James? – is already rolling his eyes. “Sorry about him. Can we sit here? All the other tables are full.”
Amy defers to Rosa, who shrugs in response. The boys sit, and flannel-boy adds, “I’m Jake, by the way, and that’s Charles.” Charles has already opened his Tupperware, and is gleefully inhaling the steam that wafts out. For the life of her, Amy can’t tell what’s in the container – it appears to be some kind of green-brown gravy, containing misshapen lumps that might be meat. Amy catches a whiff and makes a face.
“Yeah, sorry about that. He’s a foodie. ” Jake leans in at the last bit, conspiratorially, inviting Amy and Rosa to share in his incredulity at Charles’ taste in food. Amy looks at Jake’s lunch, though, and sees only some dry Frosted Flakes, in the bag they came in, and an orange soda.
“I’m Amy, that’s Rosa, and you need more protein.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Ames.” Jake winks, and puts in his headphones.
Jake and Charles sit with Amy and Rosa the next day. And the day after that. They don’t talk much – Amy prefers to study, Rosa to read, and Jake to listen to music. Amy caught him mouthing words to a song once, and thanks to the lip-reading class she took in high school, she was able to discern with a fair degree of confidence that he was either singing, “She wears short skirts, I wear t-shirts,” or “Cheese hairs port curds, and my pee hurts.” Her system isn’t perfect.
Charles, they all prefer to ignore. His moans of delight or disappointment punctuate the end of nearly every sentence Amy reads. He has struggled a great deal with the idea of bringing a lunch to eat in between classes – Amy has gathered that he would vastly prefer access to a full kitchen to make his meal fresh, and that in fact, he scheduled himself a five-hour lunch break every semester in college to allow for just that. But he makes do with elaborate meal preparation plans and a dirty microwave, and they learn to ignore the nearly sexual moans coming from their new tablemate.
This is the extent of Amy Santiago’s interaction with Jake Peralta (she learns his name from the roster that they were all given as part of their orientation material) until the morning of their fourth day.
“Now, can anyone tell me what this appears to be?” To commence their anatomy lecture, Professor Holt has placed a CT scan on the board.
Amy nearly falls out of her seat in her efforts to ensure that her hand is in the air first. Holt observes the student in front of him, who has already visited his office twice and is currently wiggling with excitement, and gives a slight nod, allowing her to respond.
“That is a CT, or Computized Axial Tomography Scan, displaying an inguinal hernia in a male patient. Inguinal hernias are 25 times more likely than men than in women, and—”
Dr. Holt then cuts her off. “Thank you, Miss Santiago. Clearly one of you did the reading last night.”
Amy resists the urge to correct him – she had, in fact, completed this reading two months ago.
Holt continues: “Now, can anyone in here tell me why inguinal hernias are so much more common in men, as Miss Santiago so kindly pointed out for us?”
Amy is shell-shocked. She attempts to maintain a calm façade, but inside her head, she is rummaging frantically through years of readings in increasing distress. The information isn’t there. Panic is beginning to set in when she sees Holt – Dr. Holt – nod at a hand in the back of the room.
Amy turns with the rest of the class, and her jaw drops when she sees the owner of the hand that is hovering tentatively above the heads of her classmates. Jake Peralta, suspected Taylor Swift fanatic, wearer of sweatpants , knows the answer.
He clears his throat and says, “Both ovaries and testicles are derived from fetal gonads, which form in the chest cavity, not at the base of the abdominal cavity. Ovaries descend, but stay within the abdominal wall. Testicles descend outside of it, creating weaknesses in the abdominal muscles that can result in a predisposition for hernias later in life.”
Dr. Holt looks truly impressed for the first time since he’s entered the classroom. “Correct, Mr. Peralta. On that note, let’s begin discussing fetal anatomy and development.”
Dr. Holt changes the slide and begins lecturing, but Amy is still staring at that CT in her mind’s eye. How did she not know that answer? And more importantly, how on earth did Jake Peralta get it right?
No one has ever beaten Amy before. Actually, that’s a lie. In first grade, stupid Sarah Schneider beat her on a Mad Minute – Amy got 29 subtraction problems right in a minute, and Sarah got all 30. Amy proceeded to cry in the bathroom, go home that night and study flashcards until bedtime, and get all 30 correct on every Mad Minute from that day through the end of fourth grade. Amy didn’t like getting second, and she had vowed never to let it happen again.
And Jake didn’t even look happy about it! Sure, a little smug grin sat on his face during the rest of the lecture, as Amy could see from her frequent, seething glares towards the back of the room, but there was no celebratory fist pumping or in-your-seat dancing – not even a grin with teeth! Dr. Holt had smiled at him!
When their lunch break finally comes, Amy is both starving and positively boiling over with repressed rage. She storms up to the table – today, she is the last to arrive – shouting, “PERALTA!”
“Oh, so it’s Peralta now? Geez, Amy, I thought we were friends!” He hadn’t even bothered to swallow his cereal before speaking – did this boy have no manners?
“You embarrassed me in there! I was supposed to know the answer! I always know the answer!” She can hear her voice growing shrill, but she proceeds anyway. “And by the way, Peralta , before you talk, you should swallow.”
A grin leaps onto his face and he nearly shouts with glee, “You should swallow! Title of Santiago’s sex tape!” This gets the attention of their tablemates for the first time. Rosa snickers – out loud – and Charles brings his hand up for a high five so quickly that he nearly drops his lunch and slaps Jake in the face simultaneously. Amy wants to be furious – she really does. But somehow, she can’t quite muster the indignation she knows the comment deserved. So she settles for an exaggerated eye roll and let him continue.
“Anyway, Santiago, we’re all allowed to know the answer, too. And it’s not really like I’m beating you. You’ve answered, like, 20 questions to my one. Don’t worry – you’re still going to run circles around the rest of us plebs on your way to greatness. Or second greatness – because I’m going answer 21 questions tomorrow. Screw being a doctor – now I just want to beat Santiago!”
Amy gives in, puts her food down, slides into her usual chair, right next to Jake Peralta, and turns to face her newest adversary. “You can try, but it’s not gonna happen. I wear real pants to class. Also, ‘second greatness’ isn’t even correct English.”
“Meh, who cares what I call it when I’m the best? And sweatpants are awesome! They mean I’ll be comfortable while I crush you with my mad question-answering skillz – with a z.” He’s no longer trying to hide his smile – his grin reaches from ear to ear. If Amy didn’t know any better, she would have said he was flirting. And if she wasn’t so irritated with his determination to beat her, she would have said he was cute.
“Don’t worry – tomorrow everything will be back to normal and I’ll be kicking your ass again. This was an isolated event, Peralta.” She pauses and stares at him for a few seconds, using a power glare she learned from a seminar in college to make sure he understands her. “Now, how did you know that thing about gonad descent relating to adult hernias?”
“I’ll tell you, Santiago. But first, you have to tell me: was that a power glare ?”
From that conversation on, the dynamic at their lunch table changes noticeably. Things are more fun, as though someone had blown a layer of dust off the group, leaving nothing but Technicolor and heated debate. Charles grows more relaxed, then visibly nervous again, around Rosa. Amy suspects that he’s developed a crush, but it’s innocent and a little cute, and she knows that the little doctor-in-training who eats more raw food than can possibly be safe has wormed his way into her surly roommate’s heart. Rosa, meanwhile, has begun to openly tolerate Jake, who is a literal human disaster.
Jake has ditched the headphones entirely. He’d much rather be speaking to Amy.
Amy is perpetually angry at Jake for something. She hasn’t had a chance to return to calling him Jake since the day of their argument – he’s always done something to deserve “Peralta”. He earns it for two days for spilling milk on her lap. He loses a day when he brings her coffee, but promptly gains it back when she realizes he bought her a double-chocolate cookie dough caramel Frappuccino, a concoction he designed specially during the year he worked as a barista. It is cloyingly sweet and she can feel the cavities forming as she works to swallow. He just laughs. Three more days for each “title of your sex tape!” joke. Amy may have formed a system, not that she’d ever admit it (she keeps it in the back of her notebook. Jake already has another month of Peralta before she returns to calling him Jake, and they’ve only had this tentative friendship for three days.)
Amy has stopped studying at lunch. She’s a few weeks ahead of the calendar, and as Kylie keeps reminding her when they talk, Amy’s only close friend is currently living across the country in Portland, so she’d better find someone. This misfit group seems better than most.
Rosa wishes she knew how this argument started. It has been years, centuries, maybe even millennia since she experienced the peace that enters her life when she can’t hear Jake Peralta’s voice. She is being submerged in a sea of misused metaphors and subtle Taylor Swift quotes. She is drowning in the deluge of obscure statistics and stories that Amy Santiago counters with.
In reality, the argument began only a few hours ago, at lunch. Jake had started a conversation about superhero mythology and the importance of their origin stories, a conversation that Amy was surprisingly invested in. It began well. They shared mutual knowledge and different perspectives. Rosa drifted away for a few minutes, watching Charles watch the duo banter. A sharp rise in Amy’s voice brought her back to reality.
“Of course Clark Kent doesn’t wear a cape under his clothes! Have you seen how easily clothes wrinkle, Peralta? There’s no way that he could maintain a semblance of professionalism with a cape bunched under his suit!”
“Are you kidding me? Telephone booths are tiny! How on earth would he go about clipping that on if he can barely get his elbows out?”
“ Clipping a cape on? That thing’s gotta be sewn, probably reinforced! With the velocities Superman gets up to while flying—”
Rosa wonders with a sigh how on earth they got here. She shouldn’t be surprised – nearly every conversation between Jake and Amy ends in a similar fashion. They all start with sane small talk, move into a phase of interesting conversation, and end with an argument that feels far more like flirting to Rosa (not that she ever flirts. It’s beneath her).
The difference is that this one isn’t ending. It continued on the walk from lunch to their next class, and then between classes (and possibly even during classes – she definitely caught Amy using her phone during one lecture) for the rest of the day. Now, they’re walking out of the building and towards the subway station to head home, and Jake and Amy have picked up as though they were never interrupted.
They hop on their train, headed back to Amy and Rosa’s apartment. Rosa realizes that she has no idea where Jake and Charles live, and she’s almost certain that they never take the same train out. Jake and Charles hop on, though, as though it were entirely normal for them to follow the girls home.
The argument continues, growing ever more nonsensical, as Rosa pulls out the key to their apartment. Jake and Amy walk in without so much as a glance in their direction, now debating the physics of Tony Starks’ Iron Man suit and the feasibility of actually having it on hand at a black tie event.
Rosa is starving, so she pulls out the pile of delivery menus that have been slowly accumulating on their kitchen table for the past six weeks. Charles must have had a similar thought because he opens their fridge, stifling a sharp cry when he sees that its only contents are a few beers, a half-drunk bottle of wine, and some string cheese. This distracts Jake – he looks up and sees the menus in Rosa’s hand.
“Great! I was getting hungry!”
Amy adds, “Great idea, Rosa! Polish?”
With that, they move to the couch, sitting down and continuing with the assumption that Rosa will take care of the food. She throws the Polish menu down on the table – she keeps meaning to get rid of it – and decides on Chinese. Charles has turned on the TV to the Food Network – how did he find the remote? she wonders – and Jake and Amy are dead to all but the theory of superhero costume design, leaving Rosa to pick a few random items off the menu and order, wondering all the while how the hell she got here.
The argument finally ends with the arrival of food, but Jake and Charles don’t leave. They pull out their backpacks, as though it was already agreed upon that they would be studying here tonight. Jake grabs a beer, promising he’ll pay her back “sometime”. Books are opened, shoes are removed, and blankets are pulled out. It’s nearly midnight when Jake looks up from his illegible notes on biochemistry and suggests that he and Charles call it a night.
Rosa would sigh with relief as the door closes behind them, but somehow, she knows that this wasn’t an isolated event.
“You like her! Like, like her, like her!” Charles squeals as soon as the door closes behind them in his and Jake’s apartment. He’s clearly been holding it in for a while
“What?” Jake isn’t even in a position to deny it – he’s too busy trying to follow Charles’ train of thought. “Who do I like? If you’re talking about the woman by the turnstiles at the subway, no I don’t. She always gives me a dirty look, and I don’t know why – I only got stuck once!”
“No! Amy! You like Amy!” Charles replies, exasperated.
Jake finally catches up. “What? No! Literally not at all! She’s like a sister – way more than that! No, not that I like her way more than a sister, just that she’s even more sisterly than a sister!”
Charles crosses his arms and shifts his weight to one hip. “Mhmmm,” he replies in a voice so high-pitched Jake almost doesn’t believe it came from him.
“Seriously, Charles. Nothing there. She’s annoying and judgy – no way I’d ever like her.”
“Then what was all that playful banter today? You two talked for hours !”
“That was the fact that she was entirely wrong about the basics of superhero dress codes! That isn’t on me!”
Charles just sighs and mutters, “Young love…you’ll see soon enough.” as he turns towards the door to his room.
“I’m not in love with her!” Jake shouts at his back. “At best I tolerate her occasionally charming insane tendencies!” But it’s too late. Charles’ door has shut.
As Rosa predicted, unannounced visits from Jake and Charles didn’t end. In fact, they became near-constant presences in the tiny studio apartment. By November, the boys were near-constant fixtures. Jake blamed the smell that emanated from Charles’ specialty food products in their fridge. Charles said it was a relief to sit on a couch not covered in half-dirty clothes. Amy beamed with pride that the boys appreciated their spotless home. Rosa resisted pointing out that their fridge was spotless because the only time Amy tried to cook they had accidentally set off the fire alarm and evacuated the building (this was great for Rosa – some of the neighbors had been getting too friendly).
Meanwhile, classes got harder. Very quickly. It was all Amy could do to keep up with her schedule, and while Rosa would never admit it, she had begun to check it subtly on their way out in the mornings to keep on top of the mounds of material that had piled up while she wasn’t looking. Only an idiot wouldn’t think med school was hard, but this was exhausting.
As the sun set earlier and fall stretched into early winter, their nights got later. Midterms had come and gone, but finals were approaching far faster than any of them cared to think about.
The night of the first snow was a particularly grim one. It was a Saturday, reminding them all of happier times spent on the quads of their colleges, playing hacky-sack, perfecting an angry glare, or studying (Amy hasn’t changed much). It was a testament to how bone-tired Amy was that she wanted to sleep in in the morning. She had never slept past nine in her life, but for some reason, waking up with half her day gone and noon light slanting through her window sounded heavenly.
Jake and Charles arrived early that morning, a fact Amy was secretly thankful for. For Rosa’s benefit, she complained vocally and frequently about the constant presence of Jake and Charles whenever they weren’t around. But neither Rosa nor Amy ever kicked them out – for better or worse they were here to stay.
Even Jake, who usually required attention at least four times an hour, had been silent for four hours. Rosa became so frustrated with her inability to remember the names of various nerves in the leg that she grabbed a gym bag and stormed out – Jake quietly commented she was probably going to go beat up a punching bag until it exploded. Amy nodded, not letting on that there was a yoga mat rolled up under Rosa’s bed (what can she say? Under-beds need dusting, too!)
Amy had been sitting cross-legged with a lap desk and her 64-set of colored pens for hours when Jake looked up to ask a question and caught a glimpse of a perfectly drawn diagram of the cranial nerves and the muscles they controlled.
“What the hell, Santiago? You’re a freaking artist!”
Amy blushed a little, drawing her papers closer to her chest.
“What, this? It’s nothing. Literally any of you could do the same!”
Charles chimes in. “No, Amy! That’s art! It’s beautiful! ”
Jake holds up his diagram of the same system for comparison. It’s largely indecipherable, a series of scribbles on a misshapen circle with so many eraser marks the paper is worn in a few places. “See? Yours is different! Where’d you learn to do that?”
Amy shrugs. “I was an art history major in college, with all the premed classes. I took a few studio classes to go with that, and I’ve always been kind of into it.”
Jake’s mouth is agape. “You were an art history major?”
“I mean, yeah. You don’t have to be a bio major to be premed, you kno—” Amy’s voice is speeding up in the way that it does when she’s about to enter a long, educational tangent – if Jake had to guess, this one would be about the benefits of a liberal arts education for a future career in medicine. Jake heads this rant off before she can pick up any steam.
“No, I know. Just means you’re a nerd, not that it’s new information.” He grins and pokes her in the side. She leans away, laughing.
“Fine, then what did you major in?”
“Bio, like a normal person!”
“Ugh, bio majors are the worst. Always so stuck up, talking about how much smarter they are…They couldn’t write an essay if they tried.” She rolls her eyes dramatically. Jake suspects she’s being entirely serious, but he can’t resist laughing. Her face is remarkably expressive, he’s noticed over the past few months, so that even this small grievance registers as comically cartoonish.
Jake’s laughter swells, and Amy finds it impossible to maintain her mask of annoyance, and a laugh bubbles out of the pit of her stomach. Jake’s laugh is more contagious than any disease they’ve learned about so far (in the back of her head, she wonders if they’ll ever cover a disease more contagious than this laugh. Somehow, she doubts it).
Charles has been laughing since a smile first cracked Jake’s face – ever the supportive best friend – and the three of them feed off of one another until tears are streaming down their faces. Charles has fallen to the floor, and Jake is clutching his stomach. Amy can’t remember the last time she laughed this hard, and she’s not even sure what was funny.
Finally, as they catch their breath, Jake’s eyes open wide enough to see the snow falling thickly outside. It’s only 8, but it’s dark as midnight, and the snow is catching the light so that it almost twinkles. On a whim, Jake says, “Hey, guys,” and as they look at him, he sings, “do you wanna build a snowman?”
Amy’s smile is blinding, and she sounds almost surprised at herself when she replies, “Yes, actually, I’d love to!”
“Oh, I’m sorry, buddy,” Charles says. “These boots aren’t made for snow.”
Jake and Amy follow his pointing finger to the door, where a pair of what appear to be snow boots are resting. They share a look of befuddlement before Jake asks, “Aren’t those snow boots?”
“No! Those are very expensive boots made out of the skin of a rare type of chicken that my father and I ate on our culinary tour of Central Europe! Even small splashes of water could disintegrate the detailed craftsmanship!”
“Alllright.” Jake draws out the word, trying to follow Charles’ concern. Instead, he settles on, “Well, that doesn’t seem very practical. Come on, Santiago, it’s time to birth a snowman!” He reaches out an arm in false gallantry. Amy is too giddy to care – the prospect of closing her books and playing outside have driven any potential eye rolls at her most infuriating study partner from her mind.
They throw on their parkas, scarves, hats, and boots and sprint out the door, letting it slam behind them. As they run down the stairs, Jake says, “Wow, Charles is a weirdo.”
Amy laughs. “Yeah, but he’s our weirdo.”
They walk through the lobby of the building – there are a few neighbors coming in and out, and Amy does her best to look like a respectable adult. When they make it to the small park down the block, though, all semblance of maturity falls away. Jake has already bent down and started rolling the base of their snowman. Amy knows she should do the same for the middle section, but instead, she sees an opportunity.
The snowball hits Jake in the back of his head with a dull thump. He screeches and straightens instantly, shouting her name and shaking his fist dramatically. She has another one ready, and this move gets him a mouthful of wet powder.
“What? That was devious!” he sputters when he finally spits it out.
“Seven brothers, remember?” she replies smugly, and ducks as he throws one back.
Snowballs fly as they frantically dodge in the most intense snowball fight Amy’s taken part in since the famous Santiago Showdown of ’98.
Finally, as she struggles to catch her breath through the laughter, she sees her opportunity. Jake is taking advantage of her temporary incapacitation to stockpile snowballs for an onslaught. But his back is turned.
With a shout, she dives and tackles him into the snow drift behind him. Before he knows what’s happening, they’re on the ground in a tangle of limbs. She is temporarily victorious, but as she relishes her victory, he turns her over and pins her.
He has both of her hands pinned above her head, and he’s boxing her in – there’s no chance for escape. He won. She looks up into his face. His eyes are shining, his cheeks are rosy, and his hair is a mess. All of a sudden, she remembers the first few days she knew him, when she might have even said he was cute, and her heart starts to flutter.
She can feel his grip relax on her hands as he looks back. Is he thinking the same thing? All of this must only take a second, two at most, the rational part of her mind tells her, but it feels much longer. It’s that same sane little voice in the back of her head that reminds her why they’re in this position. With a triumphant laugh, she throws him off, into the snow, and bolts for the street.
“I won!” she shouts at him as he catches up, breathless.
“How’d…you…do…that?” he pants.
“Self-defense classes in high school. But damn, Peralta, you need to get in shape.”
“But then I couldn’t have my breakfast burritos anymore!”
“Those are just gummies wrapped in a fruit roll-up.”
“And I wouldn’t give them up for the world.”
They start to walk back to Amy’s apartment – they’re both soaked, and it’s time to get back to studying. As they walk, Jake notices that Amy’s shivering. He reaches out and tentatively puts an arm around her shoulders as they walk back through the still-falling snow towards a warm apartment and the anatomy notes that await their return.