But now I knew he didn’t even like baseball. I wondered what else he’d hidden behind his quick smile and infectious laughter. When we took our dogs to the park every weekend, and he liked to bring his stunt bike and head over to the skate park afterward, was that fake?
In the fall, when we walked on the bike path that ran all the way from Warm Creek Ranch, down south to the soccer fields outside of town, and then east and north all the way up to the Nature Preserve, was he in agony?
Josh came with us on that trek, and we’d done it the day before school started since the year I started sixth grade. I wasn’t sure whose idea it was, only that it wasn’t mine. Over the years, the tradition had morphed as Josh started hiding things along the trail before we were set to walk it. Things like an origami bird or a peacock feather. Whoever spotted the trinkets first would get to keep them, and Josh said whoever found the least items had to buy dinner for everyone.
Grayson bought dinner every year, and I’d suspected that he often spotted the items before me but let me find them first anyway. I thought of the brightly colored feather I had pinned to my bulletin board, the plastic gnome that sat on my nightstand, the picture of the three of us stuck to my lampshade with a paperclip.
A smile bloomed on my face with how much I loved Josh and Grayson. I could just be myself with them. On the next step I took, I realized how exposed I’d been with Grayson.
Maybe he’s right, I thought. Maybe I was judgmental. If anyone would know, it would be him.
My throat narrowed, which didn’t help with the wheezing I had going on. I couldn’t hear Grayson’s breathing, and I lifted my head. He wasn’t beside me. My heart hopped over one beat.
I glanced behind me and found him several paces back, his head bent against the slope of the mountain and the relentless wind. Relief calmed my pulse and I faced forward again, surprised at how horrified I’d felt at being out here alone.
Maybe just being alone in general.
I dismissed the thought. I’d chosen my near-solitary life, and I couldn’t start feeling sorry for myself now. As I tried to think of someone I’d name as a friend, I lifted my ski boot to take another step. Always another step. When I got back to the cabin, I was going to look up how long this run was. How tall this mountain stood. Then I’d know what I’d conquered.
And maybe when I got back to school, I’d make more of an effort to make some new friends. There were a couple of girls on the soccer team I could probably start hanging out with. And Ramona was in three of my classes. Maybe we could study together, start to tell each other secrets, sleep over at each other’s houses.
With my mind busy about what I could do when I got back to civilization, I didn’t have room to consider what Grayson thought of me. I wanted him to like me, find solace in me the way I had in him, but I barely liked myself. How could he possibly find anything to like about me?
I banished him from my thoughts again just as the lift came into view. It still wasn’t moving, but I turned back to Grayson anyway. He took a few more plodding steps, almost crashing into me before realizing I’d stopped.
“What?” he asked, glancing around.
“There’s the lift.” I looked up at it, thinking move, move, move!
It didn’t move.
“I think this is where we were the first time we stopped.”
Grayson took a few seconds to think about it. “You’re probably right.”
“We’d only skied for about ten minutes before we stopped here,” I said.
He pulled out his phone and checked it. “It’s almost two.”
“Any signal?” I tipped up on my toes to look at his phone, but he snatched it back and slid it into his pocket.
“Nothing.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, but he refused to look at me. “Grayson.”
“Yeah?”
“You don’t have a signal, right?”
He swung those dark eyes to me, and they hooked onto mine. The edge of a challenge rode in them and he settled all his weight on his back foot. “You think I’m lying to you?”
“Why won’t you let me see your phone?”
“I have private things on my phone.”
“I’m not going to read your texts.”
He emitted an exaggerated sigh as he retrieved his phone from his pocket. He slapped it into my palm, a fire now blazing in his expression.
I had difficulty releasing his gaze, but I finally tore my eyes from his long enough to check the screen.
No bars.
Desperation swarmed me, clogging my throat and making my heart slither down into my stomach. I handed the phone back, the dashed hope so debilitating, I decided right then and there not to ask about the signal again.
When we got to the top, we’d get the help we needed.
If we got to the top.
I shook my head as I imagined Darren at the bottom of the mountain, inside that tiny hut with Loretta and Ryan.
I faced the mountain, my determination rising over the hopelessness. I could become a mountain climber. It was just walking. Sure, walking uphill, but I’d been walking for just over sixteen years. The only way this mountain was going to win was if I gave up. Or, you know, if the snow decided to slide off the surface and bury me.
“Let’s go,” I said, mostly for myself, though I was glad when Grayson came with me.
If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.
~Fred DeVito poster in Grayson’s room
14
Grayson
I didn’t dare tell Eden that I’d hurt my knee when I’d fallen. Number one, I didn’t need to add the humiliation to my rap sheet of embarrassments. Number two, she hadn’t noticed when I’d started going a little slower and then fell behind. Number three, I wasn’t limping quite yet.
An ache radiated from my knee up my leg, and a wave of impatience washed over me. I just wanted to get to the top of the mountain already. We’d been climbing for over four hours now.
I couldn’t stand to think of my little brother in that hut. I hoped Loretta had been able to keep the two boys calm and entertained.
At least I hadn’t started to doubt that we’d make it back. I took a deep breath and reminded myself that I’d been enduring unfavorable circumstances for years now. I could keep climbing, climbing, climbing.
“What’s wrong with your leg?” she asked.
My step stuttered. “Nothing.”
“You’re limping.”
“I’ve been hiking in ski boots for four hours.”
“Didn’t you just say you don’t lie to me?”
“That was at least two hours ago.”
She half-laughed, half-scoffed. “I’m not blind. I can see something’s wrong.”
I cursed her soccer experience. She could probably see the slightest hiccup in someone’s stride. “Yeah, so I bruised my knee when I fell on that ice. It’s nothing.”
“Right, like my mom getting married and having a second family is nothing.”
“Right, exactly like that. Or my mom drinking herself to sleep by four in the afternoon. That’s nothing too.”
The silence following my statement suffocated me. Eden stopped walking, so we didn’t even have the sound of boots on snow. Even the wind seemed to die.
“Grayson.”
“It’s just that you don’t own all the stock in Having a Crappy Life.”
Her features, which had softened with compassion, iced over. “I never said I did.”
“Sometimes you don’t need to say things for me to know what you’re thinking.”
She seemed like she was going to lash out. Her chest rose and fell with deep inhalations. Then her anger melted away and she stepped into me. I had no choice but to put my arms around her.
“I’m sorry about your mom. You never said anything.”
I held her close and took a deep breath of her, trying to find the sudsy smell of her shampoo but only getting a noseful of cold air. “There’s too much silence out here,”
I whispered. “And I can’t turn off my mind.”
“How long has she…?”
I sighed, and Eden took the weight of my mom’s addiction, somehow able to shoulder it alongside me even after all we’d already been through today. “A few years now,” I said. “I told Josh a while ago. You may have noticed I’ve been bringing Darren to dinner at your place sometimes for the past several months.”
“What about Luke?”
“He’s dealing with it in his own way.” I didn’t say he’d also turned to a substance to help him escape his reality. That was his story to tell, and though a pin of worry pushed its way just far enough under my skin to be uncomfortable, I believed he hadn’t gone too far down the wrong road. He could still make it back.
Eden skated her lips across my cheek and every cell in my body blazed to life. “I’m sorry,” she said again, this time in a whisper and this time definitely more personal.
The need to kiss her roared through me, and I forgot about texting Josh, talking to Josh, okaying everything with Josh.
“I believe things have a way of working out,” I said, not sure if I meant my mom, or with Josh, or with Eden. I didn’t want to analyze it the way I did most things.
My mouth found hers. Finally, I thought, encouraged when she didn’t pull away, or slap me, or freak out.
In fact, Eden Scotson kissed me back. No one would’ve known she hadn’t been dating in over a year, because she kissed like she practiced every day.
A thrill traveled across my shoulders, and everything between us was finally aligned. All too soon, she put a breath of distance between us.
“You must think I’m a real jerk,” she said, her lips catching on mine as she stayed close.
“Obviously,” I said, my hands moving up her back and holding her in place beside me. I added a chuckle which contained little more than air so she’d hear the sarcasm in my statement.
“No, I mean me complaining about Mom and Terry all the time. I…” She tilted her head back so she could train those all-seeing eyes on me. “I suppose there are different levels of hard.”
“And what’s hard for one person might be easy for another. You don’t have to feel bad.”
She stepped out of my arms, and I let her go, the winter wind ten times colder now that she’d allowed it between us. “I don’t feel bad. I feel stupid.”
“Your challenges aren’t any less challenging.”
“I have a good job because of Terry. He takes good care of us.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself as much as me.
“I know he does. But you still had to move across town, and you hated that. It’s okay—”
“How did you know I hated moving?”
“I have eyes, Eden.” They’d moved three years ago, and I’d happened to be in one of my on-again stretches of pining after Eden. She’d spent weeks stomping around her old house, filling boxes, and throwing things away. On moving day, she’d disappeared. Josh found her at the park behind their house, skipping rocks in the pond where her dad had taught her to ice skate.
Despite me only being fifteen, it honestly hadn’t been hard to know she didn’t want to leave that house. It meant more to her than a place to live. But it was twice as small as the one they lived in now, and Josh had been sleeping on the couch. He shared with the twins now, but at least he had a bedroom, a place to put his clothes.
Eden had her own room, and I’d only allowed myself to glance at it as I went by to get to Josh’s. It was the smallest room in the house, but it had a window and a bed, and she seemed okay with it.
I had an entire suite to myself, bathroom and TV room included. I brought Josh over a lot, but Eden’s job and her soccer training kept her away. Thankfully.
“Terry said he was going to finish the basement,” she said. “But he hasn’t even put up one two-by-four, and I’ll be gone next year.”
“Right. Where are you going?”
“UNLV.” She flashed me a smile, and it lit up my whole world.
“I didn’t realize that.”
“Well, I hope I can join you and Josh down there. I’m hoping to get a soccer scholarship.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Why does that surprise you?” She turned and started walking again.
My knee protested so sharply that I actually groaned. Eden paused and slid her gaze down my leg. “Let me look at it.”
“It’s freezing,” I said. “And there’s nothing you can do anyway. It just got cold while we were standing there…talking.”
She yanked her eyes back to mine, and a delicious shade of red tinted her cheeks. I reached for her hand, glad when we touched even with the layers between us.
“Why does me getting a soccer scholarship surprise you?” she asked
“It doesn’t.”
“You are such a liar.”
“You’ve called me that three times today alone.”
“Well, stop doing it.”
I heaved an exaggerated sigh. “It’s just that you don’t seem to love soccer. Not the way some people do.”
“I like it.”
“Yeah, you like it. You’re really good at it. But you don’t love it. You don’t live to play.”
We stepped, climbed, hiked. Eden finally said, “You’re right. I don’t live to play soccer. But I don’t think I can get an academic scholarship.”
“I’m sorry. Can you repeat that first part? Did you say I was right?”
“Shut up.” She nudged me with her shoulder and stayed by my side. I liked her there. A sense of calm descended on me unlike any I’d felt before, a feeling I’d like to keep with me long after I went home, had to face my life, endure the next three months.
“So a soccer scholarship,” I said.
“You are so nosy,” she said with a little laugh that made the hair on the back of my neck stand at attention. Flirty and fun, her giggle sent tremors of excitement down my spine.
“All right,” I said, slightly stung. I just didn’t accept everything at face value, the way a lot of people did. Probably because I knew better than most that what someone showed on the outside was very rarely what was really going on. A pinch of pain started behind my right eye, the same way it did when I argued with my dad. He wanted me to accept everything he said as the gospel truth. But as I’d been telling him for five years, I was a person, not a product. And I had thoughts and feelings and opinions of my own. Some matched his. Most didn’t.
He’d stopped trying to get me to agree with him on every point. We did share one thing in common—we both believed Mom needed an intervention and fast, or we’d lose her. He was supposed to be talking to her this weekend while I had Darren and Luke with me. I hoped he hadn’t forgotten and stayed at the office, the way he had for Darren’s Christmas play and Luke’s winter orchestra recital. I’d gone to both. Darren had asked too many questions after both Mom and Dad didn’t show up to his play. I’d told them everything then. Promised I’d be there for them. I wasn’t sure how that was going to work after I moved six hundred miles away, and guilt filled my gut.
But I couldn’t stay. I wouldn’t. The only reason I could put one foot in front of the other, live one more day under the biggest roof in Collinworth, endure one more baseball game on the bench, was because I knew I had a way out. I knew this life would end and a new, better one could begin.
In Las Vegas.
“I play soccer because—” Eden got interrupted by a shrill chirping noise.
We both froze, and my heart leaped and hopped and skipped through my chest.
“Was that what I think it was?” Eden spoke in a reverent tone, like she’d jinx the cell phone towers if she talked too loud.
I yanked my phone out of my pocket, almost not daring to hope. I swiped and stared. “Two bars.”
Emergency phone call recording:
“9-1-1, state your emergency.”
“Hey, yeah, so we’re stuck on the mountain at Sun Valley Ski Resort.”
“Sir, Sun Valle
y Road is closed due to avalanche danger.”
“We came up last night, and skied down Forbidden Fruit this morning without knowing the resort was closed or about the avalanche danger. There are three people at the bottom of the mountain, and we need someone to start the Dollar lift.”
“Hello?”
“Hello?”
15
Eden
“I lost them.” Grayson lowered the phone, his face a mixture of hope and helplessness. “Do you think they heard me?”
I could only shrug. “We should keep going. We’re almost at the top anyway.” I took a step and my strength failed me. I fell to my knees, and Grayson lifted me back to my feet.
“Come on, Eden. Can’t stop now.”
I relied on his strength to keep standing. “You go on without me. Send the ski patrol down with one of those gurney things.”
“I am not going anywhere without you.”
“Lying again.” I smiled up at him, but he didn’t return the gesture. “You’re going to Las Vegas without me.”
“Eden.” He swept his fingers down the side of my face, and they were surprisingly warm for having been out of his gloves long enough to make a call and then pull me from the snow. The way he looked at me with such tenderness and compassion didn’t feel warranted.
Every defense I’d let down, everything that had softened with that kiss between us, hardened and snapped back into place. I didn’t how to deal with his soft look, with him leaving me behind in Idaho.
I stepped out of his embrace, finding my muscles and bones still operational and capable of holding me upright. I faced the top of the mountain again. I hated this thing, hated snow, hated winter. “Let’s go.”
Half an hour later, the sign announcing the name of the run came into view. The ground leveled. We rounded the bend and the shapes of condo buildings came into view. Relief like I’d never known washed through me.