The next time I saw him was almost a week later. My butt was freezing onto a bench outside the ski lodge as I watched a twenty-something girl pick her way down a beginner run, and I spotted him in my peripheral vision. It wasn’t the bright yellow instructor’s jacket that pulled my focus; there were a lot of those on the bunny hill. It was the sunset glow of him - his cinnamon hair against his coat, the coppery gleam of his mirrored shades, the scarlet bolts streaking his helmet.
He was sliding off a lift chair with a little girl in a pink coat. She was maybe six or seven, and shaky on her small board. He gripped her shoulders as they curved left toward the top of the hill and glided past a few of the lift victims flailing on the ground. Then he flattened a hand against her back, brought her to a standstill at the crest, and held onto her while she bent and fastened her boots into the bindings. Her equipment looked new and was mostly pink like the rest of her.
Once she was buckled in, she grasped at him until she was clutching both of his arms and wriggled so she had him directly in front of her. Then she bent her knees, balanced on the back edge of her board, and stared up into his face. Terrified.
“Okay,” he said. His voice was deeper than I thought it would be. I wasn’t sure it sounded right for him. His face was all strong angles, but his expression made him look like a twelve-year-old with a book of matches hidden behind his back. “Remember how we did it last time.”
The girl glanced down the hill and back up at him. “I fell last time.”
“You fell because you got scared.”
“It hurt, Bren.” Her voice broke like a reed and her face flushed. Bren? I hadn’t thought of him as someone with a name.
“I know it did.” He forced a more gentle tone and gave her a few seconds to catch her breath. Then he said, “Are you sure you want to learn?”
She peered up at him for a moment, not looking sure at all. I didn’t blame her. Her little hand - snug in a puffy white glove - drifted to her knee, and I guessed that was where most of the hurt had taken place. Finally, she nodded.
He stiffened his arms and she gripped them with what looked like all of her strength, his jacket billowing out from between her fingers. As he started to slide backward down the hill, she bent her knees and followed.
“Don’t look at the ground,” he told her. “Look at me.”
When she couldn’t seem to raise her eyes, he stopped, hooked a gloved finger under her chin, and tugged until he had eye contact.
“Now keep your eyes on me,” he said, “and think. Think about the edge of your board in the snow. Think about what you want it to do, and it will happen.”
The girl was too afraid to get a word out, but she gave him a frantic nod and stared at him so hard I thought her eyes might shoot from their sockets.
As they drifted away, his voice trailed off and I couldn’t make out his words, but the little girl looked like she was relaxing. Her board stopped stuttering on the snow and began to move smoothly, and by the time they were halfway down the hill, they were sliding back and forth, their boards curving up one way and then the other like falling leaves.
On their next trip up the lift, she was laughing as he talked. It looked like he said something especially funny just before they rose off their chair, and she didn’t even notice when they slid down the little ramp past the unfortunate fallen. On this run, she was much braver. She held onto him for a little while, swinging back and forth with him in that falling leaf pattern, then lifted her shaking hands off his arms and held her fingers stiff and splayed, bending her knees and leaning further back into her board. He mirrored her every move and kept his arms exactly where she had left them, but she made it all the way down on her own.
For some reason, I felt like crying.
I stood and strode back to the main hotel deck and in through the reception area, looking around for my mother, but I didn’t see her anywhere. The resort was busy, and her new job meant she had to deal with things besides my dismal moods and scheduling power walks with her friends. The influx of people who liked to check in when school vacation was over were usually either older, didn’t have kids, or both, and had all kinds of special requests about their rooms. It was part of my mother’s job to take care of them without looking irritated. When I asked her how she was going to put up with that, she said she’d had sixteen years of experience. I imagined her telling that to Mr. Neil during her interview. He must’ve thought she was a riot.
She wasn’t in her office or the kitchen, and I didn’t feel like scouring the place for her, so I went back up to the suite, grabbed a book, and waited for dark.
Night was when I liked the mountain best. The evergreens sparkled with snow, and diamond bright lights dotted the runs all the way to the summit. I had never been up there. I probably could have gotten somebody to take me up on the lift and back down again, but it seemed like cheating. Anyone who rode up was supposed to come down on his or her own, teetering on strips of waxed planks just like everybody else, and there was no way I could do that. I had been fearless when I was a kid. My mother used to send my father to pull me down from tree limbs and pluck me from rocky outcroppings and yank me out of waves that crashed way over my head, but I couldn’t remember the last time I had pulled something like that. In fact, I had clamped one of the rental snowboards on a few days after we moved into the hotel - just to try it out on the flats - and found that I could either coast in whatever direction the board wanted to go until I crashed, or fall and have to take the board off to get back up. My mother suggested I take a lesson, but some of the instructors lived at the resort, and I did not want to have to face any of them after a disaster like that.
Tonight, snowflakes dropped plump and fast beneath the glow of the lights, concealing the last of the footprints as Yew Dales emptied out. It was almost nine, and as I stood on the lodge deck listening to the snow land on the wood, on my coat, on the nearby trees, I wondered why I didn’t hear the rev of the groomers. Then I caught a group of familiar faces congregating to my left and realized it was an employee night. It wasn’t going to be quite as peaceful out here as I had hoped.
As soon as the mountain closed, the yellow jackets hit the lifts. They went up in a swarm and came down in a swarm, but in the lingering lulls between their runs I could almost pretend I was alone. During one of these, when things had just quieted and I could no longer hear them yelling to each other over their lift chairs or see their colors flashing through the trees, I glanced to my right and saw them all together for the first time.
Bren walked a little ahead of the rest. His head was down, his damp hair hanging in his face. He held his board in front of him like a shield and stalked through the snow as if he had a long way to go and didn’t want to think about it. The bottom of his board was the color of old bone and had black symbols scattered across it that I didn’t recognize. Instead of a jacket, he wore a black hoodie, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows. I shivered and shrunk into my coat as I pulled my eyes away to scan the others.
A few feet behind him, a boy and girl about his age - maybe seventeen - walked close together, knocking into each other and away again. The boy was tall and thin, his floppy brown hair shot through with blond streaks, his long bangs sweeping his forehead. He carried his board low and away, like he was ready to fling it, and his expression suggested he might. He, too, was jacketless, and wore varying shades of browns and golds as though he had a natural sense of what looked good on him. Or maybe the girl did. Her long, copper-fire hair hung in braids over the quilted shoulders of a white jacket trimmed with feathers around the hood. She wore an emerald green hat and matching gloves, and although I wasn’t close, I could see that her huge eyes were green as well. And not an ambiguous hazel green like mine. They were as dazzling as her grin. Her board bobbed against her side with each step she took. As I watched her, she laughed and tossed a glance over her shoulder.
I followed her gaze to the boy behind her. He was shorter
than the others, but solid and muscular, and he kind of sauntered along with his arms draped over the board behind his back. An orange sun sporting dark shades grinned on the t-shirt pulled over his thick thermal. Short, dirty-blonde dreadlocks bounced around his face, and he had a hint of stubble, but his smile was a child’s smirk and his eyes arced into happy half-moons as he laughed.
Trailing the group was a man who looked to be in his mid-thirties. He peered out from the hood of a thick blue jacket, his expression grave, and in my mind, I saw a brief impression of The Ghost of Christmas Future and shivered again. His scruff was dark, and thicker than Dreadlocks’s, but it looked like the product of grooming, not laziness. He carried his board the same way Bren did, like a shield, and had the same stubborn gait. His eyes moved back and forth like radar, never quite resting on anything, as though he were trying to remember something, or could see things around them that no one else could see.
When I pulled my focus back, letting them come together as a group again, I noticed that their footsteps were strangely in sync. I watched Bren laugh a moment before Dreadlocks said something, anticipating the joke, and felt myself smile a little as I realized what I was seeing. I thought of my best friend Emily, who used to finish my sentences and sometimes even start them. I remembered how we would laugh when we caught ourselves walking at the same pace, and how, when we were younger, we had even made a game out of trying to see how long we could keep our footsteps exactly matched.
For the second time today, I felt like crying.
As they got closer, I studied the girl with the braids again, my head turned slightly away so that she wouldn’t notice. She was hopelessly pretty, and her eyes were even more vivid than I'd thought. They glowed out from her pink, heart-shaped face like tiny drops of lime Jell-O. Tucking a tuft of soggy hair behind my ear, I glanced down at the railing. When I looked up again, Bren was stomping past me in huge, heavy strides.
His eyes shifted to mine and locked.
I froze. I felt heat flush into my cheeks and knew that I had turned bright red, but I didn’t break eye contact. I wanted to. Wanted to look away, turn around, transfer my attention to one of the others, but instead, I just stared. And so did he, until he was too far ahead to hold my gaze and let his eyes slide forward again.
At the lift, he let Jello girl and the tall kid take the first chair and rode up with Dreadlocks and Christmas Future on the second. I watched until they were all out of sight, but he never looked back.
Inside, Sydney was already at her post at the reception desk. I slowed when I saw her.
“You’re a little early,” I said.
She looked up and smiled. “Ellen asked me to come in. Her son’s sick. Just a cold or something.”
“Oh. Good. That it’s just a cold, I mean.”
We continued to smile at each other for a moment.
“So it’s a late night tonight?” I gestured to the French doors and the mountain beyond.
“Yep. Employee night.” She rolled a pen beneath her freckled fingers.
I slipped my hands into my pockets. “I wish I skied or boarded or something. Looks like fun.” I hesitated, then went on. “I saw a group of kids going up just now.”
She didn’t say anything, but her smile suddenly looked forced. She abandoned the pen and folded her hands on the desk.
“One girl had braids?” I tried. “And I think there was a guy with dreadlocks.”
She raised her brows at me and let the silence roll out for a few seconds, then dropped her expression and sighed a big, airy sigh. "Let me guess,” she said with the last of her breath, “Bren Bergan.”
“Who?” I kept my voice even, but she wasn’t buying it.
“The Scandinavians?” She said, ignoring my attempt at ignorance.
My exaggerated shrug probably looked more like a cringe. “I don’t know them. Anyway, have a good night, Sydney.” I gave the desk a flat smack and spun toward the elevator.
“Hey listen,” she called. I turned, my brows arched with drama. She seemed to struggle for a minute.
“I started working here a few years ago, right out of high school. And Mr. Neil - you’ve met him, right? Operations Manager?”
I nodded.
“Well, he gave me some advice then that was pretty good, so I’m going to give it to you.”
“Okay.” I felt a crease forming between my brows. I did not like advice. It usually meant someone had screwed up and was now assuming that you would, too.
“The guys who work here…not the locals, but the ones who live here and work…they used to call them ski bums. Mr. Neil calls them transients, because you never know how long they’re going to stay or what. They go wherever they can get a roof over their heads and a place to ski or ride, and that’s all they’re concerned with. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“I think so,” I said. No, not really.
“So what Mr. Neil said to me was, ‘it’s best not to get involved with them, because there’s no future in it. By nature, they’re people who’ve learned not to get attached.’ ”
I frowned. “They just live here? They don’t go to school at Little Woods?”
“Nope. Maybe they’ve graduated. I don’t know when kids finish school in Norway.” She said Norway like it was The North Pole and waved a dismissive hand. “They go wherever they can work and ride, and this year they ended up here. They probably won’t even stay to work the water park this summer.”
“Hm,” I said.
“And I can tell you one thing,” she went on. “The guys? Not so much the uncle or the tall one with the girlfriend, but the other two? I have seen quite a few girls with them already. Especially over break. But I haven’t seen the same girls with them twice. Do you get me?” She lowered her head but kept her eyes on mine, waiting to be sure.
I got it. She was saying that the same guy who took the fear out of a little girl who wanted to snowboard, who made her laugh and held her so she wouldn’t fall, who was ignited by the sun and slept in the sky, was just a homeless slut.
Image crushed. Thank you Sydney.
“Thank you, Sydney,” I said sweetly.
“Sorry,” she said. And I knew she meant it.
Chapter 3