Snow falls softly outside the window. If not for the yellow glow of the street lights I would not have seen the stream of white flakes dropping through the sky onto car windshields and trash can lids. I would not have seen the wind blow gusts of snow across roofs and salt-strewn streets. I would have only seen the darkness. In the morning the window would be ringed with frost and the entire city would be coated in a white sheet.   

It would not be enough. There would still be school tomorrow. I would still have to wait at the corner for the bus that would take me to the train that would take me to the gray building known as school. 

The heating would barely work and I would sit near the clanking steam trying to stay awake. Come recess we would try to build a snow fort but there wouldn’t be enough snow so we would throw snowballs at each other until someone got hit in the face and started bleeding. Come dismissal I would trudge across piles of unshoveled snow to the train station. It was already dark and if not for the warm glow of the street lights I would not have seen the last few flakes wending their way down from the starless sky joining their brethren in a belated pilgrimage from above to the streets of Brooklyn. I would have seen only the darkness and the dim lamp of the subways.

I don’t remember the first time I played hooky but I imagine it was on a day such as that. I assume that must’ve been the case. It was a long time ago and I can’t remember clearly but then again who does…

My inspiration was likely a cross between the stories of Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, and all the truant boy protagonists I idolized along with my older brothers. None of them would have any scruples in feigning sickness in order to avoid a cold winter school day. None at all. 

It is no simple matter to play hooky. As with everything else, there is an art to it, a delicate balancing act. The “symptoms” should begin the night before. Maybe with some coughing, a sniffle or two, and if you’re feeling bold, a fever. The hardest part is finding the sweet spot of sickness between needing to go to the doctor and being able to still go to school. It’s not easy, but I got the hang of it soon enough. Necessity is the mother of invention.   

Winters are brutal. Relentless. The nights become longer, the days shorter, the leaves die, and the birds flee south. But we stay. I don’t know why but we do. Hibernating at home was only a survival mechanism, a struggle for an escape. 

There was nothing like that sensation of staying in bed late. Waiting with bated breath until the door closed downstairs with a definitive thump and my father left for work. Me and my brother would race around the house, scarcely believing our luck. We had fooled them. We were free for an entire day. The hours stretched out before us and we drank the sweet draught of freedom with the giddy relief of those in desperate need of it.

We would go into our parents’ room and rifle through my mother’s draw of VCR tapes and fight over which movie to watch. I must have watched the first Lord of the Rings a thousand times on that VCR, sitting on that warm carpet as the last flakes of snow lazily fell outside. 

The years crept by as they tend to do and the nature of “playing hooky” changed into something else entirely. I no longer needed to pretend to be sick and convince my parents of a sore throat or some other fabricated malady. I simply had to skulk out of the school’s door an hour earlier and walk to the train station. It was too easy. 

The teachers were lax and the principals practically non-existent. It was a veritable free-for-all, a madhouse. When I escaped on my own the solitary walk home was oddly therapeutic. There was something about those dark winter evenings, with all the houses lit up in a hazy glow, with my hands stuffed in my coat pockets as I waited on a street corner for the light to change.  

  In my final year of school, I was unceremoniously carted off to the frozen wastes of Rochester, New York and everything changed. It was impossible to leave the ivy-encased confines of the dormitory without permission from one of the school’s duly appointed authorities. Winter came and it was rougher than any I had ever experienced before. It snowed every day. The temperatures plummeted to near zero. The dorms had no heat and the walk from shower to bed was akin to a Jack London trek across ice and tundra. Cold wind was a constant whisper in my window, breathing and gasping through the cracks. At night I would lie awake, shivering under my covers listening to the cry of passing freight trains. They did not stop calling to each other for the entire night. 

Something had to be done. An escape had to be planned. First, we started taking the bus. It wasn’t like in Brooklyn. They came about once an hour up there. It started purely by chance, a spur-of-the-moment decision. I was walking with a friend in the cold and a bus pulled into a stop. No one was getting on or off. It looked completely empty.   

We hopped on for no particular reason and took it to the last stop in the middle of nowhere. We had no idea where we were and it took us hours to get back. We returned long past curfew and had to sneak into our rooms. That was the beginning of it all. 

The beginning of everything. Of the bus rides to the movies, of the long nightly excursions to unexplored quarters of the unfamiliar city. We biked, walked, and took bus to every inch of the snow-capped streets. There were downtown waterfalls, abandoned subway tracks, and frozen lakes. There were desolate parks and grimy 7/11s. There was nothing remarkable to the city and everything I ever could have wanted. I couldn’t wait for the monthly train home although when I left for the last time I couldn’t help but feel… I don’t know…

School is a mixed bag. There was the fair share of misery, boredom, loneliness, and all-out debasement of spirit and soul. But there was the thrill of rule-breaking, absconding, and life-long bonds of fellowship. Nothing inspires camaraderie as shared pain and suffering. On its face, the whole ordeal was a nightmare through and through and yet we managed to salvage some nostalgia out of it all. I never thought I would be one for nostalgia, I thought I was too smart for it. I wasn’t. Not by a long shot. When I look at the old pictures it kinda takes something out of me. I don’t know what exactly. I can’t put my finger on it. Memory is strange. Nothing makes you feel like memory does. Nothing at all.    

Snow was falling softly outside my window and in the morning I knew that every trash can and every car windshield would be coated in a smooth white sheet…