“They won’t reopen today.” My throat closed, and swallowing was so, so hard. “We have to hike to the top and tell someone. Get them to turn on the lift so we can get everyone else out.”
“Eden,” he said again. Nothing more.
“Why didn’t I see you at my soccer games?” I asked.
“That’s what you want to talk about?”
“Seems like we have time.” I shivered despite my coat and snow pants and he tucked me tighter against him. I didn’t exactly hate being this close to him.
“I—” He took a deep breath and stepped away from me. The loss of his body heat wasn’t the only reason I didn’t like to see him go. “I sat up high and never cheered. I didn’t want you to know I was there.” He gave a chuckle but it was heavier than any I’d heard from him before. “That’s not really true. I didn’t want Josh to know I was there.”
“Josh?”
“Yeah.”
Pieces clicked around in my head, but I didn’t say anything. Josh had already said it all. He likes you, you know.
I didn’t quite know how to deal with this new piece of information. Grayson wasn’t saying anything else, so I asked, “ So when should we get hiking?”
He twisted back to me. “We?” His eyebrows rose, crinkling his forehead.
“Yes, we.”
“I should—”
“You can’t go alone.”
“I’ll take Darren then.”
“He’s eleven years old.” I cocked my hip. “You’re kidding, right?”
He held my gaze, his jaw working.
“Grayson.”
His expression stormed, his internal war difficult to watch.
“The two boys should stay with Loretta,” I said, my voice even. “You and I should go together.” My composure and confidence wavered as I glanced up the mountain, the snow angry and alienating the surroundings. “We’re the strongest, and we’ll make it the fastest.”
I returned my gaze to his, daring him to contradict me. Tell me I wasn’t strong enough to climb a mountain currently shrouded in snow, with the strong possibility of an avalanche.
Instead, he said, “Fine, let me talk to everyone,” and yanked open the door to the hut.
Stamped in the snow just outside the hut:
H-E-L-P
6
Grayson
Anger and defiance sat well on Eden’s face. I shouldn’t be so attracted to her when she gave me attitude, but man, my blood felt like lava. Maybe climbing a mountain would subdue my hormones, remind me that I was leaving Collinworth for good very soon, and clear my head of this girl who’d haunted me for so long.
Josh would not be happy about me even thinking about starting something with Eden. I’d told him last summer I’d forget about her, that senior year was just about passing time until we could go to UNLV.
Only one other person knew everything about me, and that was Josh. And he liked me anyway, the real me. The one no one else got to see. I couldn’t screw that up because his sister was pretty, because she didn’t act like I was a god floating through the halls, because she somehow saw through the masks I’d spent years building.
“Darren,” I said. “I’ve got to go for help. Eden and I are going to hike up the mountain.”
“In ski boots?” Loretta asked.
“We can’t stay here,” Eden said from over my shoulder. “That lift isn’t starting, and this place has no heat and no food. We can’t even sit down.”
I glanced at my ski boots, already dreading walking more than a few feet. The mountain we’d just skied down would probably take three or four hours to climb in the summer, with a discernable trail. In ski boots, during a storm, with drifts of untouched snow, and Eden and I would be lucky to make it before dark.
An urgency to leave struck me. “I have a phone,” I said. “We don’t even have to get all the way up. Just enough to get service.” I had no idea if that meant all the way up or not, but it sounded good enough to make Darren relax.
“Loretta, can you watch him?” I squeezed my brother’s shoulder. “She has a phone too, bud. We’ll get the lift going and get you guys out of here before you know it.” I tried to flash one of my famous smiles but it didn’t quite stick. I let it fall from my lips before it could reveal my fears.
Everything happened quickly after that. Loretta gave me her number. I grabbed one of the extra coats and handed it to Eden. I zipped my phone in my pocket. Eden looked at me, and I nodded toward the ski run. “Ready?”
“Ready.” She exhaled heavily and tucked her hair inside her hat.
We walked in silence except for the crunching sounds of our boots against the snow. “I think we should stick to the run,” I said. “It’ll be the most solid, and provide us a direct path back to the village.”
“There’s nothing direct about it,” Eden said beside me. “That run weaves all over the mountain.”
It did. But I couldn’t see a better option. “We can’t walk through the unpacked snow,” I said. “It could be ten feet deep and we could sink right into it. And if there’s an avalanche…” I cleared my throat, not wanting to even imagine the quantity of snow this mountain held. “The groomed trail is our best bet.”
“Yeah.” Eden kept putting one foot in front of the other, her head bent against the wind. I followed her lead, bottled my thoughts, and stored them on the back shelf of my mind.
My breath started to come unevenly and though the air entering my lungs was cold, sweat broke out along my collar and under the edge of my hat. It only stayed hot for a moment, and then turned icy and clammy. I wiped it away, my gloves scratching along my skin.
“Maybe I’ll come watch you play baseball this spring,” Eden said into the eerie quiet surrounding us.
I almost fell down, a choke lodging itself in my throat for several terrifying heartbeats. I found my feet beneath me and sucked at the air, the snow that landed on my face melting on contact.
“You don’t need to come,” I said.
Eden stopped up the mountain a step or two from me. The extra elevation put her more at my eye level and she looked right at me. Right into me. “I want to.”
“Please don’t.” I bit the words out, thinking we still had a very long way to go to get to the top of this mountain.
“Why not?”
My mind raced around the bases I never ran around. If she came, she’d find out all I could do was hit and run the bases. I didn’t make it on the roster for every game, and I didn’t have a position on the field. If I didn’t hit a home run, a designated runner would take over for me, because I was too tall and too broad to run bases well. That was it. I was out of the game. One hit. One ninety-foot run to first. Go sit on the bench.
I tried really hard to hit home runs, because at least then I felt like I had a valuable position on the team.
Might as well tell her, I thought. If there was one person who I wouldn’t mind knowing, could maybe talk things through with, I’d want it to be Eden.
“Grayson, why can’t I come watch you play baseball?”
“Can’t you just accept that I don’t want you to?”
She cocked her head in that adorable way she had. “Don’t most athletes want crowds of adoring fans?”
I scoffed. “You’re not a fan of mine.” I started walking again, much faster than before. At first, I’d thought being trapped in a microscopic hut with Eden Scotson would be great. Romantic, even.
That was when I thought it would be fifteen minutes and then we’d all ride the lift back to the top, head over to the cabin for some of Melissa’s delicious hazelnut hot chocolate, and warm up in front of the fire with a movie on the TV.
But as soon as I’d thought the word avalanche, the seriousness of the matter had hit me. Everything had changed then—for Eden too. The way she’d burst out of the hut, started stomping letters in the snow, the pure desperation in her voice when she suggested we hike the mountain.
“Is grape gum still your favorite?” I aske
d.
“Yes.”
I thought of another half-dozen equally lame questions and decided to keep them under my tongue. We stepped and stepped and stepped, and Eden’s anger floated on the frosted air between us.
“I don’t want you to come watch me play, Eden, because…” The words stuck, but I forced them out. “Because I don’t actually play.”
“What?”
I stopped and stared at her. “I don’t actually play much baseball.” I enunciated each word. “I’m only the designated hitter. I don’t actually have a position on the field or anything.”
Surprise mixed with confusion on her face. “I’ve heard you’re a good hitter.”
“Sometimes,” I said. “It helps that my dad makes a sizeable donation to the team.”
Amount of Eden’s last paycheck from the Collinworth Medical Center:
$158.47
7
Eden
What Grayson said made no sense. I’d seen him strutting around the school wearing his baseball jersey. He couldn’t seem to leave his house without wearing an Ivy Hall baseball cap. At one point last year, I thought sure it had been glued to his head in some sick prank.
He made baseball announcements. Led the pack of jersey-wearing guys as they made their way to their lockers in Jock Row across from the student center. He was everything I disliked about athletes. Everything I didn’t want in my life. The exact kind of guy that had turned me off to dating twelve months ago.
“You think less of me.” Grayson folded his arms, his bulky coat bunching up on the elbows. It wasn’t even a question.
“I do not.”
“You look disgusted.”
I tried to make my face blank, but I couldn’t see it so I wasn’t sure. “I’m not disgusted.”
“Yeah? Well, I am.” He took off again, and it took considerable effort for me to keep up, just like last time. The guy had really long legs and a lot more experience walking in ski boots. My bones complained that I was trying to make them bend when they couldn’t.
I dug the toes into the snow and pushed off like I was trying to catch a ball before it went out of bounds. “Can you slow down?”
“Only if we don’t talk about baseball.”
“Fine.” I caught up to him. “Why do you care about being on the baseball team if you don’t have a position?”
“That’s obvious.” He threw me a dirty look.
“Is it?”
“Why do you play soccer?” His breathing came as labored as mine, thankfully. My calf muscles felt like fire from the lactic acid, but I kept making them operate to keep up with Grayson.
“I like soccer,” I panted. “I’m a starter on the varsity team as a junior.”
Some of the fire seemed to leave his fight. “You’re really great.”
“Do you even like baseball?”
He stopped climbing as abruptly as he’d started. His chest heaved and so did mine. His expression stormed so violently I wanted to calm him immediately. He reminded me so much of Aaron when he’d looked at me all those months ago.
“Well?” I pressed. “Do you?”
“I like hitting the ball really hard,” he whispered.
“Is that all?”
He nodded.
“Why do you do it then? The countless hours of practice? All those games.” The baseball season was the longest of all the sports, even going into summer. “The show of pretending to like it?”
“Is that why you stopped dating? You were just pretending to like it?”
Coldness spread through my core, but it had nothing to do with the storm beating down on us. “This isn’t about me.”
“It isn’t?” He cocked that eyebrow, making his handsome face asymmetrical. He glanced up the mountain and I followed his gaze. I couldn’t see more than fifty feet, and the top of the mountain was nowhere in sight.
“I think this is about both of us,” he said, gesturing for me to get going. “Shall we?”
I started the climb again, a question about what he meant on the tip of my tongue. But my brain put the pieces in place before I needed to speak. Climbing this mountain was going to be more than physical, especially if I wanted an answer to why he’d spent four years parading himself up and down the halls wearing a jersey for a sport where he hit the ball a couple of times.
And if I didn’t want to tell him why I’d given up dating, the summit better be just over the next rise.
But it wasn’t.
* * *
I wasn’t sure how long we hiked. I put one foot in front of the other over and over and over again. The snow fell and fell and fell.
Finally, Grayson said, “We should rest.” He paused next to a tree on the fringes of the groomed run, his breath steaming in the air in front of him.
I wanted to collapse to the ground at his feet, but I stayed standing. My legs wobbled a little, and I was grateful for the bulky ski pants that hid the tremor. “How long have we been going?”
“Just over an hour.” Grayson pulled off his hat and tucked it under his arm. He wiped a glove through his hair and it stuck up at odd angles from the snow and sweat. He unzipped his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. “Still no signal.”
The heaviness in his sigh tugged at my heart before I could tell it not to. So Grayson Young was handsome. Charming. Smart. Kind. Funny. Cared about his brothers. Didn’t mean I wanted to hold his hand or go out with him.
“Eden, we still have at least three…maybe more hours of climbing.”
I sank to my knees and cupped a handful of snow, but before I could lift it to my lips, Grayson knelt next to me and knocked my hands apart. “You should melt it before drinking it,” he said. “If you just eat snow, it can actually make you colder.”
A smile lifted my lips. “Did you learn that in the Boy Scouts?”
“As a matter of fact, I did.” He flashed me a smile, and I basked in the warmth of it for the second it stayed on his face. “We probably could take off our gloves and melt it in our hands, but then they’d be cold.”
I brushed my mittens on my jacket. “I’m not that thirsty.” I tried to stand up but couldn’t. “Can we rest for a just a few more minutes?” I lay on my back and swished my arms over my head and back, creating half a snow angel. “I’m not normally this tired.”
“It’s the altitude,” he said, joining me on the ground and slipping one arm around me and pulling me into his side. He fanned his legs in and out, in and out, creating the bottom half of a snow angel.
I let him support my head, let my eyes drift closed. I imagined for one brief moment that this was normal for us. That he held me like this on Friday nights when we watched movies together. I dreamt that he kissed me against those lockers in Jock Row no matter who was watching, and that he waited for me after soccer practice so we could take our dogs to the park together.
Then the wind shrieked, reminding me that everything in my life was hell right now.
The snow burned my cheeks.
The mountain beneath me rumbled.
Text received by Lucas Young, 5:17 PM, Saturday:
Luke the lift isn’t running. We’re stuck at the bottom of the mountain. Can you find out what’s going on? Send some help too. There are 5 of us and we’re in trouble.
8
Grayson
I held very still. Next to me, Eden seemed frozen to the earth. I didn’t even dare breathe, like maybe that miniscule movement would be the tipping point for the tons of snow about to thunder down on us.
The tremor subsided, and I held very, very still. Eden did too.
“Should we—a?” I cut off when the shaking started again, a horrible cracking sound renting the air.
“What is that?” Eden asked.
I didn’t know, but I said, “Maybe a tree trunk cracking?” It sounded like the sky itself was falling, severing the force of gravity and rumbling the earth, the snow, the very air around us.
Nothing shifted around us, and the sound faded as the earth stab
ilized. I thought of Darren at the bottom, and how scared he must be. Seconds passed; we stayed still. I wasn’t sure why, but I didn’t want to move and send thousands of pounds of snow down to the hut where it would bury my brother.
After several pained, shallow breaths, I released Eden. “Time to go.”
She got up without argument, the fear evident on her face and the swiftness of her movements. I joined her and we took several steps away from our deformed snow angels. Almost like we’d both thought of them at the same time, we turned back and looked at them.
I thought they were almost symbolic. How she had some things in her life put together, and I had other things working fine in mine. Together, we could be two halves of a whole. I cut her a glance out of the corner of my eye, but she kept staring at the imprints.
“I used to love making snow angels,” she said, her voice hushed, almost reverent. “Josh and I would go out into the woods, looking for that perfect patch of untouched snow.”
I wanted to get moving, but I also could listen to Eden tell childhood stories for a long time. She had a way with words, and her voice had a quality that could paint pictures. Her relationship with her brother was as close as any brother and sister could get, and I’d spent a year or two envious of it. Then I’d decided that if I wanted that kind of closeness with my brothers, I could have it.
I’d just have to work at it. Take time for them. Trust them. And I’d done exactly that, which was why I knew Luke had started sneaking out just before Halloween, that he’d started smoking weed, and that he thought he was still in control.