I sat in the living room, my friends and family all scattered around on the chairs and the floor. No matter how many sofas we bought, it would never be enough for everyone. All three of my brothers were here, so was Jacob, and all of my close friends. All of us turned our heads to Phoebe as she coughed. It vibrated in her chest and crackled, and once she started coughing, she couldn’t stop. It was loud and stopped every conversation when she had coughing fits like this. Phoebe, Emma, Malachi, and Breelyn had all been here for two days. We were all snowed in together. The roads were getting better, though, since today was day three. Still, we had been stuck out here, and desirable food was running low. Phoebe finally stopped coughing and lay down on the ground, trying to catch a full breath. “My inhaler,” she reached her arm up, gripping the air. Emma got up and grabbed it for her from the kitchen, but as she was walking, she slipped on a marker on the ground. We had poured the marks out earlier and forgot to put them away. She fell to the ground, landing on her hands and knees.

  “Gosh, are you okay?” Malachi got up. He was laughing, despite his efforts to suppress it. He felt bad for laughing at his girlfriend's pain.

  “Yeah, I'm fine,” She went to stand all the way up and slammed her head on the corner of the counter overhanging above her. She fell back and put a hand on her head, laughing and wincing. “Oh my gosh,” It started to burn. She had slammed the counter so hard that it made the glass cups in the cabinet rattle. She felt something warm trickling down her face. Malachi stood there, his laughter fading. All of us in the living room were laughing, not paying much attention to it until we caught sight of her face. I stood up from the couch, staring at the blood running down her forehead. She looked up at us, a smile still on her face. She didn't know what she looked like, but that didn't last very long. She took her hand off her head and looked at the red painted across her fingers. “Oh my gosh!”

  “Oh, Shit!” Conner stood up. That got most people's attention by now. Blood was sprayed all over the ground and the cabinet. She must have scraped her head perfectly to cause something like that.

  “Oh Gosh, okay, uh,” I looked around. “Towel! Grab a towel!” I bent down and grabbed Phoebe’s inhaler and threw it to her, then ran to grab the kitchen towel. I handed it to Malachi, but he just stood there in shock. I bent down instead and put it in her hand so she could press it against the wound. “Uh, Barrett, go get Mom!” I yelled.

  “Why?” he leaned forward, looking over the edge of his guitar when he noticed the scene. “Oh shit. What happened? Is that what that noise was?"

  “Barrett!” He got up and fled into her bedroom. “Lift it,” I lightly grabbed her wrist. She took the towel off, and all I could see was a small portion of her head that was skinned. She really must have perfectly scraped it. That was crazy.

  “Is this a bad time to tell you the pizza man is almost here? He called, saying he was turning onto the road.” Jacob stood there, his phone in his hand. He was still on call with the pizza guy. I looked back at Emma’s head. It was bleeding profusely. We needed the shallow wound to clot, then she'd be fine.

  “Yeah, uh, that’s fine,” I had her press the towel back onto her head. I got up and got a wet dishrag to wipe off the cabinet and floor. I ended up wiping off her hands and blood-covered legs, too. “How hard did you hit it?” I couldn’t help but crack a smile.

  “Not hard, really. I seriously just scraped it, there’s not even a bump,” I squinted to look, and she was right. She grazed her scalp. Malachi sat across from her, staring at the ground. I snapped my fingers.

  “Dude, it’s okay,” I said. He finally looked up. All of the blood was gone now. We could hear Phoebe starting to cough in the living room. Breelyn was standing behind us, her hands behind her head as she watched. “Dude, your DNA is in my fingernails,” I took the washcloth and walked over to the sink to scrub my hands off. My mom came walking out with a bandage. She insisted on getting a look at the wound and took Emma to the bathroom to clean up. She reappeared in the kitchen minutes later, Emma bandaged up like a sad dog with a cone, but looking good as new with a fresh change of clothes.

  “Hey, I think you missed a spot,” Breelyn pointed underneath the counter. We all walked up to it and looked underneath. There was a big splatter droplet left behind, stained bright red against the white paint.

  “I’m gonna be fucking sick,” Conner left the kitchen. Jacob passed by him, laughing at Conner’s paleness.

  “My phone’s dead. Take the pizza man’s number, he should have been here by now,” I grabbed my phone from my pocket and exchanged numbers with him. I called the pizza man, and he answered on the first ring. We all sat in the living room, Phoebe still coughing in the background.

  “Hey, I think I might have made it to the end of the road, and there are no houses here. The rest of the road looks kind of tiny. Should I keep going? or...” The pizza man’s voice came through the phone.

  “Uh, no. We can, uh,” I looked around. “We’re going to walk to you, okay? Just keep going. Everyone thinks the road ends when they try to come back here, but it doesn’t. Trust me,” I could hear his questioning voice from the other end.

  “Are you sure about that? It really looks like the road ends here…”

  “Yes. Keep going, we’re on the way. You’ll pass by us eventually,” He reluctantly agreed and hung up the phone. We all walked out to the mudroom and threw on overalls and coats as quickly as we could. Breelyn still had her big fuzzy robe on over everything to keep warm. Phoebe clutched her inhaler as if her life depended on it, and Malachi towered over Emma like she would drop dead from a brain bleed any minute. I turned the door handle and walked outside into the brisk cold weather, coughing as soon as the cold air hit my lungs. Phoebe had pneumonia, and I felt like I had something similar to it. Phoebe, Malachi, Emm, and Breelyn filed out behind me. My brothers and Jacob all stayed behind. We started to walk down the driveway, interlocking arms to keep from slipping on the ice and singing a song to get us through the terrifying darkness that engulfed the whole forest.

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  After ten minutes of walking and making it most of the way down the road, we realized that the pizza man was definitely not on our road. I slowly stopped in the snow and grabbed Breelyn's hand, dragging her to the ground with me. We both lay down in the snow, staring at the pitch-black sky. “I would bleed out here,” She whispered. I laughed, then started coughing a crunchy, chest-wall vibrating cough.

  “Dude, I cannot survive that walk again. Pizzaman is never getting found," I couldn’t stop coughing.

  “No way the pizza man is missing,” Malachi put his hands behind his head and started pacing around.

  “Malachi, stop pacing, you’re stressing me out.” Emma crossed her arms around her body to conserve her heat. She was trembling. With her anemia, the cold affected her more. “Gang, what do we do?”

  “My phone’s dying,” I pulled it out of my pocket. I opened the phone app. “I’m calling the pizzaman.” I couldn’t tap the screen with my gloved finger. I used my nose instead. The phone started to ring, and I put it on speaker.

  “Mucho Frio,” Phoebe slowly sank to her feet, curling up like a perched bird. Emma gave her a questioning look. “Very cold,” she translated for her.

  “Hello?” I spoke into the phone.

  “Hey, I kept going as you said, and I think I'm stuck,” He started to describe the roads he took, and I started to realize that he may have been right when he said he thought the road ended, and I told him to keep going. It was my fault we were in this mess, but nobody needed to know that.

  “Okay, Ben, on what side of the road was the last house you saw?” He was quiet for a second. I could hear him whispering like he was retracing his steps, and my heart sank when he said the left side. I held the phone down, my jaw gaped open. “Dude, I think he went past the neighbor's house and onto their dirtbike trail,” I released a sigh. “Ben,” I brought the phone back up to my face. “You stay put, alright?”

  “I’m stuck, I can’t go anywhere. I'm on a very steep hill. Do you think you could pull me out of here?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Just hang in there, alright? We’ll be there soon with a tow rope.” I hung up the phone and called Jacob. “Hey Jacob, we need you guys to grab the truck and come and get us up the road. Ben is stuck in the woods way behind the neighbor's house." He was quiet for a second, then I heard him yell.

  “No fucking way. Behind the neighbor's house? Way back there by the lake?”

  “Yeah. We’re freezing out here, Jacob, hurry!” I hung up the phone. We all stepped off the road and sat in a huddle, shivering in the darkness and exchanging our chattering teeth sounds.

  “What are the chances that Jacob and your brothers get stuck and we’re all stranded out here?” Malachi asked. Phoebe coughed as a reply and sucked in her inhaler. She was going to overdose on albuterol sulfate. My lungs were cold and burning. I think I had a fever, too.

  “Dude, don’t speak it into existence,” Breelyn snapped at him.

  “Yeah, Malachi,” Emma laughed.

  “You guys are so mean to me-” His gaze trailed off onto something coming down the road. We all could hear it over the wind and the rattling branches, and then we saw the light. We stood up and ran out into the road, stopping the truck, only it wasn’t the truck. It was a car. My mom's car. We stepped off to the side, and she rolled her window down.

  “Mom, help us. It’s cold. We’re stranded out here,” I hung half of my body inside the window.

  “I can’t, I have to go meet a friend in town. Did you call your brothers?” We all stood there, staring at her like lost children in the snow. Mostly because we were.

  “Yeah, we did. We’re going to die, Mom. How could you leave us here?”

  “Yeah, Mom. Why?" Malachi sank back to the ground and curled up into a ball.

  “You children will be fine, gotta go!” She rolled up the window and drove off. I turned around, awestruck that she left us here. It was ten minutes until my brothers pulled up, Jacob sitting in the truck bed. We all climbed into the bed too, getting cozy with the loose firewood scattered everywhere. They turned the truck around and started to drive back into the woods. We followed the neighbor's bike path and saw the pizza man’s tire tracks leading way back into the woods. We carefully followed, but soon it got too narrow for the truck to continue. I hopped out of the back with Jacob and met up with Gunner, who got out of the back of the cab.

  “We gotta go in on foot,” Gunner took out his flashlight. Barrett rolled down the driver's window.

  “Call me when you find him. I'm gonna try to maneuver through, but I don't know how far I'll make it.” We nodded and took off into the dark. Gunner ran ahead, Jacob searched thoroughly behind, and I took off into the forest. I was only walking for two minutes when I lost sight of Gunner and Jacob. All I had was my flashlight, my burning coughs, and the cold darkness around me. I took out my phone and started to record everything I saw with my low percent flashing back at me.

  I was yelling the pizzaman's name for what felt like eternity when I came across a huge, slippery, and steep hill. The pizzaman's faint tire tracks were clearly skidding the whole way down, and that’s when I saw him at the bottom of the hill, his car slammed against a tree. He was sitting inside it, and it was still running. I started to yell his name even louder, and I saw Gunner and Jacob coming out of the woods. Jacob was on the phone with Barrett. I ran down the hill, almost slipping and falling a couple of times. Ben got out of the truck to talk to Gunner while Jacob and I assessed the damage, both of us laughing quietly as we saw the minivan's tires had dug holes into the ground. He really had gotten himself stuck. All of a sudden, we looked to the top of the hill, all of my friends standing there with flashlights like some sort of superhero posse. They ran down, yelling our names, and then the truck appeared behind them. I felt relief all of a sudden, realizing I wouldn’t have to take that long journey all the way back if they didn't bring the truck this far.

  “Holy shit, pizzaman's in a tree,” Breelyn whispered as she came to a stop beside me.

  “Dude, where’s the pizza? I’m starving after that long ass trip.” All of them were out of breath. I looked at the pizzaman. I couldn’t imagine what this middle-aged man was thinking, seeing a bunch of teenagers coming to save him. We ended up making an assembly line all the way up the hill to transport the sodas, cold pizzas, and breadsticks back up to the truck. Breelyn was at the top of the line, putting them in the truck. She grabbed the liter of rootbeer and was walking it back when she slipped, dropping the root beer and watching it soar down the hill. It flew past all of us as we watched, confused and laughing through our cold, burning lungs. Once we got everything out of the minivan, we walked up the hill behind the pizzaman. He climbed into the truck while we got into the bed, stifling our laughter all the way back home. My friends and I hopped out with Jacob while my brothers took Ben back into town to the pizza place. We handed the pizzaman a thank-you card we had made before all of this happened, with a ten-dollar tip in it. We felt terrible, but it was the highlight of our week.

  We got to enjoy our cold pizza and some drinks for a while until someone knocked on the door. Jacob and I got up and opened it. In the kitchen, my friends were sitting on the counter and the floor, and in front of us was the neighbor. I couldn’t imagine what was running through his head, seeing a whole frat house of teenagers sitting around. “What the hell was going on behind my house?” We stood there, in shock, blood running down my legs from the blisters my boots gave me.

  “Uh,” I glanced over to Jacob. “So… the pizza driver’s van is stuck on your property a couple of miles back.”