He knew both his mom and his dad would say how lucky he was to have the chance to live in two such different places. Most kids had the same house, same room, same neighborhood all the time. So living in two completely different places was lucky.

Of course, deep down inside, Charlie knew that was something parents said to their kids to help them get over Divorce.

And even deeper down inside, Charlie knew that lucky really meant he didn’t get any choice in the matter, so he might as well get used to it.

It meant waking up in the morning and missing his mom, and even his little sister, and knowing they were a zillion miles away. And it meant feeling the same way about his dad when he was with his mom. And it meant knowing things were never going to change, because this was his life whether he liked it or not.

But he felt even more sorry for André and Angelica. Their mom was away, and they had no family at all for Christmas. It must feel awful.

This morning, though, it was not so hard to feel a bubble of happiness about pretty much everything. He could look out the window and see nothing but deep snow and deep woods, the perfect picture for Christmas. And he could look across the room and see his best friend, André, just waking up and blinking in the snow-bright light.

“Psst,” whispered Charlie. “Hey.”

“Hey,” said André, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. His hair looked like a curly mop. André called it hair and said it was on account of him being mixed race. He wasn’t biracial like Charlie’s aunt Sonnet, but really mixed. He had a grandmother from French Haiti and a grandfather from Mexico, and his other grandma was black. He said he didn’t know anything about his other grandpa.

All André had ever said about his dad was that he was white. And mean.

“What’s that smell?” André inhaled, his eyes no longer sleepy.

Charlie inhaled, too. Coffee and bacon and something sweet. “That,” he said, “is the smell of good news for us. It’s the smell of epic breakfast.”

“Yeah? What’s an epic breakfast?”

“Every kind of good food in the whole world. My dad likes to make epic breakfast before a ski day. Let’s go down and I’ll show you.”

They were both wearing their ninja pajamas, so they fell into their roles as easily as donning their cloaks of invisibility. They sneaked out of their bunks, moving as stealthily as ninja warriors on a mission. The other kids didn’t stir, for André and Charlie were as silent as the wind itself. Out the door and down the hall they went, passing the closed doors of the other guestrooms.