Sunlight flooded our suite on Saturday morning. I was up early, anxious to get out on a board for a little while. The night with Bren seemed like a dream on this new day, and I wanted to do something to feel connected to him, to his world. I was sitting at the kitchen table in my snow pants and sweater and munching a bagel when my mother walked in.
“I didn’t see you last night,” she said, filling her mug with coffee. “What time did you get in?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure, I was so tired I just came up here and went right to bed.”
“Did you have fun?” She turned to face me, nodding as if she were trying to answer the question herself. She looked too hopeful to disappoint, and I had decided not to tell her about Tyler anyway. It was over.
“Yeah,” I said. “Some of my friends were there. It was fun.”
“Good. I’m so glad. And what are your plans for today? Anything exciting?”
I finished chewing and gulped. “First tracks start in a few minutes, and I like getting out before the place gets crazy. I’m trying to learn my turns.”
She slid out the chair opposite me and sat down, warming her hands around her mug. “I hear learning to snowboard is very difficult.”
“It is.” I nodded, eyeing my next bite.
“And painful. I’ve seen you limping around this week.”
I nodded again. “I’m probably the worst case though. Being athletically challenged.”
She ignored this. She never agreed to any negative statement about me. “Well, I was thinking…would it be easier for you if you had your own board? One that was a good size for you and had the right bindings and boots?” I froze before my teeth hit the cream cheese. “I mean,” she went on, “I can’t afford anything brand new right now…I wish I could. But I told Mr. Neil that you were learning, and he signed a coupon for a very big discount at the pro shop. He said they have some slightly used equipment downstairs, and he thinks you can find something there.”
I stared at her. “Really? I mean, can we afford that?” The idea of having my own stuff, of feeling like I belonged here, was something I hadn’t hoped for.
“We can afford it.” She smiled. “I’ll give you the coupon and the credit card, and after you’re finished you can go down to the shop and find Jeff – Mr. Neil said he’s the best person to help you – and get yourself some equipment.”
I stood up, too anxious to eat anymore, dropped my bagel and threw my arms around her neck. She laughed and patted my hands.
“Thank you, Mom. Thank you so much.”
“I’m glad you’re happy,” she said, then turned in my arms to look up at me. “I really just want you to be happy, Jenna.”
“I know.” I held her gaze for a moment, and a surge of guilt passed through me…for not telling her about Bren, or about what happened with Tyler, and for getting myself into that mess in the first place.
“I love you.” I kissed her on the cheek and ran to get my jacket, leaving her laughing behind me.
Jeff, of pro shop fame, was somewhere in his twenties and thoroughly ungroomed, his hair a straw nest atop his head and a matching soul patch lying like a worn bath mat on his chin. He spoke in a laid-back, surfer drawl, but his eyes were sharp, and he darted around the shop with purpose. After ascertaining my level of experience – none - and my intentions – survival - he eyed my baby blue coat and white pants, nodded once to himself, and got moving. In less than half an hour, he had rustled up a barely used board with blue and white paisley designs curled against a black background. He said it was a good size for me, and could be used on the slopes or in the terrain park. I told him I didn’t anticipate doing any rails or jumps, considering that those things required an actual death wish, and he laughed and said a lot of people said that at first. He also dug up some shiny, baby blue bindings with very few scratches and slightly chewed up padding, and white boots which were new in the box, but discounted because they were left over from the previous year. He topped things off with a blue hard-shell helmet. It was pretty beat up, but I thought it looked kind of cool with all its battle scars. Before I left, he waxed and sharpened my board.
“Now it’s going to feel slick because of the tune-up,” he said, “but don’t let the speed throw you. Just make your turns and you’ll be chill.”
Which meant I would not be chill. But as I walked out into the sunlight and gazed out over the snowy landscape with my own board under my arm, I felt a surge of pride overshadow my fear. I may not be chill, but I’d look good.
Jeff was right. On my first run down the bunny hill, my board felt like a blade on ice. Each time I gained momentum, I reached a speed I hadn’t before, got scared, and hunkered down until I dropped safely onto my butt. I stuck to the falling leaf technique, afraid that if I tried to turn while the board was moving that fast I would catch an edge and slam to the ground, knocking myself unconscious before I had a chance to identify which bones were broken. Although I tumbled into a middle aged-guy getting off the lift – he tried to help me up and kept falling until I finally scuttled far enough away to get up on my own – the second run was better. I had to bring myself to almost a complete stop to make a turn, but I pulled it off a few times and managed to remain upright all the way to the bottom.
Sliding to a stop on the flats, I bent down and unbuckled, then pressed my gloved hands against my waist and rotated my sore ankle.
“Jenna!” It was a small voice, female, and so far away that I couldn’t decide where to look. I scanned the lift chairs above me, but saw only the backs of people’s heads. I glanced up the hill, my eyes roving over the line of skiers and riders preparing to take their runs, but there was no one waving or even looking in my direction.
“Jenna!”
I spun around and squinted over the wide strip of snow, flanked on both sides by evergreens, that led to the north face of the mountain and the lifts for the raceway and terrain parks. There, I saw a huddle of riders near a lift. One had her back to the others, and was waving emphatically at me with one hand while she clutched her board with the other. Her orange braids bounced on her shoulders. Frieda.
I did a fast search of the group behind her and found Bren’s hair, his mirrored sunglasses, his helmet wedged between his arm and his side. Inhaling a sharp breath and holding it to control my nerves, I unbuckled my other foot, grabbed up my board and trudged my way toward them. Frieda set her board on the ground and straightened up, waiting for me.
Bren didn’t even glance at me. I tried to keep my eyes on Frieda, a smile stiff on my lips, but I couldn’t help watching him. He was talking to Frey and Dag, the three of them rambling in amused voices between bursts of quiet laughter. He had on a royal blue sweatshirt that made his skin and hair glow like no colors in the natural world, but today he was zipped up and his sleeves were down, so I figured they were headed to the terrain park. Frieda confirmed this as I approached, taking a few steps forward to meet me.
“We’re going up to the terrain park,” she said. “Come with us.”
I bugged my eyes at her. “I can’t. I’m just learning. I haven’t even been up on the mountain.”
She waved a hand at me. “I saw you. You’re good enough to come up and mess around. Besides, it’s really no different than the bunny hill. The runs are just longer.”
“And steeper. No way.”
“Only in some places. And you can control your speed and stops, so you’ll be fine.” She smiled at me. Over her shoulder, I saw Dag’s eyes flick in our direction, his own smile faltering.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea, Frieda.” I felt a warmth in saying her name. I liked knowing her. “I’ll never be able to keep up with you guys.”
“There’s nothing to keep up with,” she said sweetly, “the park has its own lift. It’s contained. And there are wide paths down the sides where you can ride through. Please come.”
And before I could figure out how to refuse, Dag’s eyes fl
icked to us again. He turned, his long bangs falling across his forehead. “She said she doesn’t want to, Free. Don’t force her. What if she gets hurt?”
Frieda pivoted and regarded him with her huge green eyes, her smile still sweet. “Well, we are all instructors, so that would be pathetic, wouldn’t it? She’s not going to get hurt. Don’t scare her. Besides, I’m tired of hanging around with the boys all the time.”
“What about Skye?” Frey said with obvious humor. Bren still hadn’t so much as glanced at me, and I thought I could actually feel my heart tracing a cold path into my stomach.
Frieda turned back and tossed her gaze skyward, dismissing Frey’s comment. Then, focusing only on me, she said, “Don’t you think she should come with us, Bren?”
I froze. Maybe he had just been doing me a favor last night, walking me home and comforting me. I kept my eyes on Frieda and watched Bren walk toward us in my peripheral vision. When he stopped beside her, I shifted my gaze to his.
“Yes, if she wants to,” he said. “Do you want to?”
The space between us felt thick, slowed his words in my mind, made it hard to understand their meaning.
“I don’t think I’m ready,” I said. But I wanted to be with him, with them, so much so that I thought I might buckle under the weight of it.
“The only way to be ready is to do it,” he said. Then, when I didn’t answer, he added, “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
I still didn’t reply, didn’t know what I was waiting for until he said it.
He tilted his head. “Come with us.”
The knot in my stomach loosened. I took a deep breath and nodded, and then we all walked over to the lift. I was finally heading up the mountain.
Frieda made a big show of having to sit with both Frey and Dag, letting her head fall back and making hairball noises in her throat as she complained, but I knew she was just making it clear that Bren and I should ride up together. I was humming with nerves, and he must have known it because he held my arm as we sat down, and lowered the bar for me. He slid his sunglasses up onto his head and we glanced at each other and away.
He let out a whispery laugh.
“What?”
“What is this weirdness between us?” He asked, looking at me now, his eyes soft and searching mine.
“You barely even looked at me when Frieda called me over.” I sounded like a pouting kid.
He laid his arm across the back of the lift and turned to face me. “I didn’t know if you’d still want to see me today.”
“What? Why not?”
“You were kind of, you know, vulnerable, last night. After what you’d been through.” His jaw tightened. "And I realized later that you might think I was taking advantage of that.”
As I absorbed what he said, relief washed through me.
“If you hadn’t been there, I probably would’ve had a nervous breakdown on my way back,” I said. “I didn’t want to go to that stupid bonfire in the first place.” I glanced down at my gloved hands, curled around the bar. “You saved my night.”
He waited until my eyes found his again. “I was hoping you’d say that."
I was still smiling when I caught the glint of a stream below us. I leaned over to get a better look. The flow of tumbling water, interrupted here and there by dark, jagged stones, cut through frozen snow on either side. Evergreens shadowed the banks.
“That’s the raceway,” Bren said, gesturing to the wide run beyond the water.
I followed it with my eyes until I felt Bren’s hand on my back. When I looked over, he was pointing above the treeline to the left, where a huge expanse of ground had been cleared. Near the top were a few jumps marked with some kind of red and blue paint, and beneath them, a half-buried car surrounded by all kinds of boxes and rails hunched in the snow. In the dead center of the run, a huge hill rose above everything, the approach side a steep ramp, the launch side a cliff.
“And that’s the terrain park,” Bren said.
I held my breath. To me, it looked like a playground for the suicidal.
“The pipe’s farther down.”
“Great.” I swallowed, and trained my eyes on the chairs ahead.
Brianna was right, getting off this lift was nothing compared to the one at the top of the bunny hill. I made it without help and let my board come to a stop on its own, looking out across the top of the mountain. It wasn’t as intimidating as I thought it would be. We were still on solid ground, and in truth, it didn’t look any different than base except that I couldn’t see the end of the runs.
I followed Bren toward the terrain park, and as we cleared some trees, the view sprawled out before us. I sucked in a breath. Beyond the outer buildings of the resort were tiny houses and tendril streams, clumps of forest and long, winding roads. A miniature water tower crouched like an unlikely winter insect behind a knoll, and patchwork farmland slept under blankets of snow, broken through here and there by matchstick silos. Layers of hills in blues and grays backdropped the whole scene, ghostly and reaching back into forever.
I could never have imagined this from my timid post at the base of the mountain, but it was somehow what I had expected - to feel like I had escaped.
“Jenna.”
I turned to the only view that could’ve pulled me from this one. Bren waved me toward him. I hobbled over to where he sat at the top of the run and fell back next to him. The others were already buckling in.
“Ready for some jumps?” He was joking, but the park looked cruelly dangerous from this perspective and I wrapped my arms around myself.
“As long as I’m not the one doing them,” I said.
He laughed, the sun shooting copper streaks through his hair. I felt warmth radiating off him and it calmed the nerves in my stomach. Frieda slid over and sat down on the other side of me.
“Look,” she said, pointing to the edge of one of the jumps and then gesturing across the run to the other side. “See how wide those spaces are along the sides? You’ll have no problem getting down those.”
They did look pretty wide, but I had learned that things were different on a moving board.
“She’ll be okay,” Bren said.
“You want to go first?” Frieda asked.
I let out a breathy laugh and shook my head. “No way. I’m actually just going to sit here and watch for a while, if I’m not in the way.”
“You’re not in the way." She said.
Bren scooted closer to me, bending his knees so that his board didn’t hit mine. The dark symbols danced over the wood.
“You got new stuff,” he said, nodding at my board. “Did Jeff fix you up?”
“This morning.” I looked out over the world again.
“Nice,” he said. He reached out and dragged my hand toward him, and I forgot about everything else.
“It’s all you, bro.” Dag shouted from a few yards away as Frey hopped his board into position. We turned to look at them. Frey pointed his board down the mountain, dropped his sunglasses, and gave us all a troublemaking grin. Then he let the steep take him.
He leaned back, somehow picking up speed despite being knocked left and right by the uneven terrain. His body slack, he seemed to have no interest in controlling his situation. He was like a dead man floating on the ocean as the center jump appeared in his line, his arms lifting from his sides the only sign of momentum. Clearing the height of the ramp, he coasted high into the air, the sun turning his dreadlocks into spun gold, gripped the front edge of his board, and whirled with the random carelessness of a roulette wheel. His movements seemed slow, but I lost count of the number of rotations he made. He landed backward, pressing the nose of his board into the snow to drag a white spray in his wake. When he came to a stop, he spread his arms and grinned up at Dag. A lazy challenge.
“Oh, it’s like that, huh?” Dag shouted, penguin-walking his board to the far side of the run. Frey raised his palms higher
and then made a sweeping motion with one hand, inviting an answer.
Dag’s lips curved in a grin that took over half his face, his brows dropping in a sharp 'v,' his eyes narrow and tilted upward. It was an evil effect that only intensified as he popped into the air and landed, moving fast. He hunkered low, twisting his body so one arm pointed ahead and the other behind, and cut left, aiming at the ramp on the far side. He flung himself off the crest so quickly that I almost missed it, then reached behind him, grabbed his board and flipped in the air. He steered himself like a wild car careening out of control, plummeting until he landed, finally, on the rail below the jump. He rode the length of it, the nose of his board a full few inches off the metal, then tapped down with the board’s tail before shooting off the end, turning backward, and landing solidly a few feet farther down. A fountain of snow showered Frey’s legs as he skidded to a stop next to him.
“Wow,” I said, staring down at them.
Bren smiled at me, then leaned forward to look at Frieda. “You gonna take that from them?”
She peered at us from the corner of her eye, grinned her feline grin, and shrugged one shoulder. Then she rose from the ground and stretched her arms above her head, closing her eyes and warming her face in the sun. When she straightened and opened her eyes again, her gaze was intense and focused ahead, but the grin still played on her lips.
She took off, coasting down toward the ramp on our side, her legs undulating as they absorbed the shock of the bumps and divots on the hill. Her arms stayed low to her sides, wavering like reeds underwater, her wrists bent so that her hands pointed outward. She seemed to negotiate the ramp, wriggling back and forth a little to achieve a perfect line, and when she seemed satisfied, she flattened her back, bent her knees and sprang, wheeling high into the air, her braids whipping around her face, her body arching into a bow as she caught the tail of her board. As she touched down, she quickly wriggled again, negotiating as she had before, and hit the half-buried car at full speed. Launching herself off the roof, she set her gaze on Frey and Dag, turned her body mid-flight to shift her path, and pounced, landing with just enough time to serpentine around Frey and halt next to Dag, her shoulder grazing his. Both of the guys flinched.
“Whoo!” I shouted.
She threw a fist in the air and wiggled her hips.
“This is amazing,” I said, not sure if I was referring to them, or the view, or what. They were already calling to Bren from the bottom of the run, Frey and Dag making weird barking noises with their hands cupped around their mouths.
“You’d better go.” I told him.
He smiled. “I’ll follow you down the side.”
“Yeah, because I love the idea of being that helpless girl who holds a guy back,” I said. “Just give me some time to get used to it up here.”
“Come on, bro,” Dag shouted. In these last few minutes, Dag had been more animated than I’d ever seen him, and their noise just kept getting louder.
“I’ll go with them next time,” Bren said.
I shook my head. “You’ll go with me next time. Come on, I want to see this.”
“This is why I don’t have a girlfriend.” Frey shouted up. Girlfriend. I felt the heat in my cheeks and stared down at my knees, but I allowed myself a second of bliss at hearing the word.
In my peripheral vision, I watched Bren look out over the mountains.
“Huh.” He said. “Never had one of those.”
“What?” I toggled the zipper on the side of my pants.
“A girlfriend.”
“Neither have I,” I said. He laughed and I grinned at him.
Frey mocked something in a high voice, but I couldn’t make it out.
“Don’t you want to shut them up?” I asked.
“Impossible.” But he let go of my hand – a chill settling into my body as he did – put on his helmet, and slid his sunglasses onto his face. Then he rose and put his hands on his hips, rocking back and forth on his board.
“Okay,” he yelled, dragging the word into an exasperated warning as he shook his head. "It’s on.”
“Yeah it is.” Frey shouted. Then the three settled and shifted around on their boards. It got so quiet that I could hear their edges scratch the snow.
Bren leaned back, his arms loose by his sides, and I felt tension like low thunder rumbling into something terrible. He twisted and made a fist with his left hand, his forearm shielding his torso as he cast his full attention down the hill. Still rocking, he stared hard, weaving the next few moments into the run. It was as though he had sown a handful of future over the present, and was waiting for it to take root.
His takeoff didn’t so much begin as merge into something unseen, his approach to the first jump flat and perfectly straight, his arm thrust out behind him to hold off the world. He bent his knees as he hit the ascent and vaulted, his board creeping up to meet his hand, his body pivoting, his head still as he spotted the center of the run. His legs took the landing like springs, and, barely noticing the impact, he made two sharp angles to align himself with the main jump. Again, he straightened his approach to a perfect line, and then hit the second ramp. This time, he pumped his legs and pushed down with his arms as he gained the crest, bullying the ground out of his way, and when he bounded into the air I felt a fear that nearly stopped my heart. He rose, rose, like his bond with gravity had snapped, until there was nothing but him and the blue day and no earth in my view. He grabbed the back of his board like he was simply using it to keep himself from drifting off like a helium balloon. Logic told me he was whirling – some corkscrew spiral I could only vaguely perceive, but my eyes insisted he was frozen, still, everything in the world revolving around him. Time had slowed. There was only the bite of the cold on my skin, the warmth still pulsing in the hand he had held, the awe rising in my chest, and Bren, a spinning sun against the sky, dimming his pale twin above, his hair a dark corona flaring around him.
He streaked to earth like a meteor and stomped down in a low crouch. Then, rising on his board, he arched his back and slid behind the others, heading toward the lift.
He didn’t glance back.
I let out a long breath I was unaware I was holding onto and watched its white stream float up and away. I had seen competitive snowboarding before - the X-Games, the Olympics - but I had never seen anything this…unreasonable. By the time they all made it back up, I still hadn’t recovered. The second runs commenced, but Bren slid over to me instead, and sat down where Frieda had been.
I stared at him with open shock and he grinned.
“That was… awesome,” I said. It sounded lame.
“You sound surprised,” he said. “Don’t you remember what I told you last night?”
I remembered his arms around me, his scent, his fingers tangled in my hair.
“Jenna?”
I looked up at him. “I remember,” I said.
“What, you didn’t believe me?” He took my hand. Then he flattened his other hand against his chest and arranged on his face the most arrogant look I had ever seen. “I told you I was awesome.”
“And I believe I noted your huge ego.” I knocked into him with my shoulder and he pretended to fall over.
“Seriously,” I said only half-seriously, nodding down the run. “For a minute there I thought you might actually die.”
He leaned back on his elbows, the sun glinting off his glasses. “Nah. Don’t you trust me?”
I was quiet for a while, a careful smile on my lips. “I guess.”
“Good.” He pushed himself up. “Because now it’s your turn.”
I glanced toward the others. Frey was already at the bottom of the hill again, Dag and Frieda in mid-run. When I turned back to Bren, he motioned toward a flat swatch of snow below us.
“Let’s get those turns down,” he said.
Pure dread. How could I wobble down this hill, desperately clinging to the only flat space available, and
fall, often and unattractively, while these paranormal creatures flung themselves off of every available ledge beside me, competing for the most deadly speed and altitude? I knew I didn’t belong here, but I didn’t want it written across my forehead in red Sharpie.
“Jenna?”
I looked at him, wide-eyed. He had lost the smile.
“I know you’re scared,” he said. Then he cocked his head to the side. “But that’s one of the things I like about you. It’s what makes you brave.”
I gave him a confused look.
“Because you aren’t letting it stop you." He said.
And I didn’t want it to be a lie.
He took off his sunglasses, put them in his pocket and stood up, hopping so that his board pointed down the hill.
“Come on.” He put his hands out, flicking his fingers to indicate that I should stand up. I teetered to my feet and leaned on my back edge. He took my hands.
“Turn so you’re facing me,” he said. I did, hopping like he had done, and immediately started to slide. Before I could panic, he pulled me back.
“Now, two things.” He said, his eyes firmly on mine. “One. Think about what you want the board to do. See it in your head just before you want it to happen. Your mind causes your body to act, so you have to be in control of it.”
I thought about the way he had paused before he started his run, focusing on the invisible. I nodded, making no promises.
“Two.” He continued. “Don’t look down. Look at me. Right into my eyes.” That was something I felt I could commit to. But as I fixed my gaze on his, lost in that intense, honey glow, I doubted that this would help me concentrate. When I glanced away, he ducked his head to force eye contact and grinned.
“What, I’m that ugly?” We both knew that was utterly absurd, and I was suddenly annoyed that he was confident enough to say it with such sarcasm.
“Horrible,” I said, my tone a mixture of irritation and anxiety.
He laughed. “You’re just nervous. Let’s get moving before you hit me or something.” And before I could open my mouth in protest, we were sliding down the hill.
“Don’t.” Bren said as I glanced down at our boards. “Look at me.”
I pulled my gaze up and caught his eyes. Pressing my front edge into the snow, I felt him rock onto his back edge to match my movements. When he nodded for me to make my first turn, I tightened my grip on his hands and froze. We were still moving, and I was sure we would hit the trees behind us, but the seconds just seemed to draw out, the ground stretching to accommodate my hesitation.
“See your turn,” he said, his eyes locked on mine. “Front edge, to neutral, to back.”
I saw it as he said it. My board wavered in the snow, then went flat. When I eased onto my back edge, Bren leaned forward.
“Good,” he said. “Again.”
This time it took me even longer to find my nerve, and again I felt sure we would crash into one of the jumps, or at least ruin somebody’s run, but the time and the snow just kept unraveling. By the time we hit the end of the run, I had made three or four fluent turns in a row and had gained enough momentum to ride to the lift without stopping. I was breathless when we dropped down onto the chair.
“Good job,” Bren said, offering with a raised brow to lower the bar. I shook my head and he dropped his arm onto my shoulders. These tiny things - hearing the word girlfriend, holding his hand, feeling the weight of his arm around me - were glimpses into what it would be like to belong with him. With them. There was no one else in the park, and I felt like they had invited me into their private world. I thought of the fire in the woods.
“What are you thinking?” He asked as we watched Frieda spiral against the trees below.
I didn’t want to mention the fire - a subject that made me feel far from him - so I asked him a question instead.
“Why haven’t you ever had a girlfriend? Is there something wrong with you?” I added this last part to lighten the mood, make it casual.
“Please.” He pointed at himself and then flipped his palms up, an expression of disbelief at the very question. I ignored it, gave him one of Frieda’s sweet smiles, and raised my brows. When he realized I was waiting for an answer, he dropped his hands. “Actually,” he said, “there’s something wrong with most girls.”
“I see,” I said with a tone of feminist disapproval.
“Honestly…” He hesitated, then shrugged. “Okay listen, you may think I’m a jerk for saying this, but I don’t take teenaged girls all that seriously.”
I thought about that. Maybe he was a jerk, and maybe I should have been insulted, but I didn’t take many teenaged girls seriously either. “So, what, you date soccer moms?”
He laughed his deep, hearty laugh, which made me smile, then shook his head. “I just mean that sometimes girls aren’t all that nice. In fact, they can be pretty mean. And you know what? They don’t like themselves very much.” His said this with a kind of sickened dismay, as if he had just realized that not all animals were Disney characters; that some animals actually ripped each other apart with their teeth.
I thought of Brianna. Of countless other girls I’d known. “No,” I said, “I guess some of them don’t.”
When I looked down this time, Dag and Frieda were waiting for Frey. He was heading for the center jump. As he approached, a strange thing happened to my vision. The jump seemed to waver, grow higher from the ground, the space between Frey and the ramp stretching so that he appeared to ride toward it in an endless stream of acceleration.
“Jenna.”
The jump wavered and grew taller still, Frey dissolving into a blur.
“Jenna.”
A hand shook my shoulder. The arc of the jump now curled to nearly vertical. Frey zipped over it and soared like a missile into the air. I jerked back against Bren in shock, but Frey was still at eye level.
Then I blinked and he was gone.
I had heard of things like this. People hallucinating in situations where they were afraid. I thought maybe I was having some kind of panic attack.
“Hey.” This time Bren tugged my shoulder hard, leaned over and peered into my face. “Are you all right?”
I stared at him.
“Yeah, sorry,” I said, my voice unsteady. “I guess I’m not used to this.”
“Don’t worry.” He sat back. “If anyone crashes, we’ll clean it up.”
I made a disgusted face, he laughed, and we rode smoothly off the lift.
In between watching the riders and practicing my turns, there were three other times when I had to blink my vision clear. Once when it looked like Frieda was going to hit a tree in mid-air, but then I saw that the trunk was bent and watched her skirt around it, grazing the bark with her fingers. Once on the lift, when I thought the half-buried car was actually rising out of the snow and would eventually slide down the hill and run over somebody in the half-pipe. And once during Bren’s last run, when the whole vista sprawled out in the valley below seemed to disappear behind a monster swell of snow rising in my vision, until he finally coasted off the crest and vanished behind it. I knew the snow could play tricks with a person’s sight, and the sun was so bright my eyes watered against its reflection, but I was glad when we decided to head down. I’d had enough of Tim Burton’s perverse park for one day.
We caught the lift one more time for a simple, straight run to base – a gift from them to me, I assumed. Frey chose to take a chair by himself, and Dag and Frieda hopped on the one directly in front of Bren and me. Relieved to be facing my last ride of the day, I relaxed back against the chair, inhaling the frost and pine.
I felt Bren staring at me.
“What?” I asked.
“You’re lucky.”
I turned to him. “Lucky?”
“Because I’m going to let you do something I’ve never let anyone else do.”
“What?” I stiffened. I couldn’t take
any more firsts today.
He paused, apprehension dimming his face for a moment like a cloud sliding across the sun. Then he grinned. “Be my girlfriend.”
My stomach flipped and my heart knocked hard against my chest a few times. His statement required a sarcastic answer, but I had nothing. I grappled for some way to respond. I needed a little outrage, with a dash of consent and humor thrown in.
I gasped, widened my eyes, patted at my mouth with my fingers. “You’d allow that?”
“Yes.” He averted his gaze for a second or two. I thought his cheeks might have reddened, but it could’ve been the cold. His eyes found mine again. “It’s quite an honor. I’m sure you realize.”
As I prepared to say something snarky, I was blindsided by an irrational fear. To be his girlfriend meant I would probably lose him. Breaking up and moving on always seemed like the final stage of a relationship, and I didn’t know if I wanted to set myself up for that kind of hurt. To commit to it.
But then he smiled, and those thoughts were like some horror movie I’d just walked out of - far off in the darkness, and not real.
“I just don’t see how I can pass up such a rare opportunity,” I said.
“You can’t. And since you didn’t thank me, I’ll assume your gratitude is implied by your acceptance.”
I shrugged one shoulder. “Obviously.”
Bren grinned and put his arm around me. I gazed out ahead of us, at Frey’s dreads fanned out beneath his rainbow hat, his head bobbing to whatever was on his iPod, at Frieda laughing at Dag, one braid slung over the back of their chair, at the summit slowly appearing above the snowline as we ascended.
Bren pulled me closer, and I let my head drop onto his shoulder.
Chapter 11