I ate lunch with Brianna and the others all week, but when Thursday finally came, I still hadn't concocted any good excuses for sitting out of Ski Club. They grilled me about it all through lunch - why had I never learned to ski, why didn’t I want to learn now, why wouldn’t I even take a lesson. Brianna asked if I’d had some traumatic childhood event with skis or boards or maybe just snow. Then Dillon challenged her to come up with a traumatic snow event and she had proposed several, including being buried, caved in on, avalanched, and plowed. I had never heard of a plowing tragedy, but I almost agreed to that one. How could you argue with the victim of a plow?
We arranged to meet on the lodge deck at the top of the bunny hill as soon as they got off the bus. I was watching people spill off the lift when Brianna, Laura, and Dillon came clopping out to my perch on one of the picnic tables and surrounded me.
“I hate that lift,” Brianna said. “It doesn’t make sense that the hardest lift to get off of is the bunny lift.”
“Looks horrible,” I said.
“So you coming with us?” Dillon asked, one eye crushed shut against the sun.
“Not today. I really haven’t had time for a lesson, and my Mom would ban me from the mountain for good if I tried it without one.” This was probably not true, but I was only willing to look so pathetic to these people if I was going to hang out with them. Then, before they could protest, I shuddered dramatically and wrapped my arms around myself. “I still have nightmares about that plow.”
They all laughed. Then, little by little, Brianna’s face changed, her smile fading, her eyes turning hard as she gazed over my head toward the bunny hill. The others looked up and I turned, searching the top of the hill for a moment before I saw Bren. He was on one knee buckling his boot into his board, his staff jacket open, his hair a russet curtain obscuring his face.
“You know him?” Brianna said in my ear. I jumped. She had bent so that her head was level with mine.
“No,” I said. I opened my mouth to say that I’d seen him around, then thought twice.
“Bren Bergan.” She said, and waited for my response.
“I don’t know anyone who works here yet. Weird name.” I tried for an amused tone.
She turned toward me with a cynical smile, the kind that said that I wasn’t now, nor was I ever going to, fool her with the dumb act, but that she’d give me a pass because I couldn’t be blamed. “Weird guy,” she said.
“Brianna’s been sweating him for weeks,” Dillon said.
“That’s disgusting. I do not sweat people.” She put a hand on her hip and raised her eyebrows at him. “Can’t I just be friends with a guy?”
“Yeah, me,” Dillon said.
She rolled her eyes. “That’s not the same thing.”
“All I know,” he continued, ignoring her, “is that you went on for centuries about what freaks he and his friends were, then came back giddy after having coffee with him before vacation.” He air quoted coffee. I cringed. It looked like Sydney wasn’t kidding. I hated how disappointed I felt, and the fact that I’d slumped and rested my chin in my hands without noticing. I straightened up.
“Giddy is a stupid word.” Brianna said, turning to me. “Dillon loves stupid words. I was not giddy.” She glanced back in Dillon’s direction. “And they are freaks.”
“No argument there.” He gave my arm a shake. “So I guess you can have him, Jenna. Apparently Brianna’s finished with him.”
“Jenna doesn’t want him.” She snapped. She was smiling at him but her expression was intense, her eyes narrow. “She’s just made new friends here. Normal friends. Why would she want to ruin it by hanging out with them?”
Dillon grinned at the warning in her eyes, but her smile did not falter. As he opened his mouth to provoke her further, I started to feel like bait.
“Sorry Dillon,” I said. “But I have more important things than guys on my mind right now. You guys can have them all.”
This seemed to calm Brianna. She leaned on the railing and gave me a playful glance. “Are there more important things? Like what?”
I shrugged. “School? I want to get into a good college. I’ve been working my butt off all this time and I’m not going to let some guy come along and ruin it.” It was something my father would say. Did say, in fact, every time I mentioned a boy. How ironic that he was the one who ruined things for me and my mother.
Brianna stared at me for a few seconds, then reached out with both hands and shook my shoulders. “We have to loosen you up, girl.”
I glanced over at Laura. She laughed, but she was rocking her skis back and forth and bouncing on her heels as she threw glances out over the mountain.
“You guys had better go,” I said. “I don’t want to hold you up.”
“Meet us in the lodge later?” Laura asked.
“Sure. Just text me when you’re coming in.”
“I still think you should get a lesson,” Brianna called over her shoulder as they plodded back across the deck.
I smiled and waved, then turned back toward the bunny hill. Bren was gone, a shadowy curve in a patch of sunlight marking the snow where he had knelt.
Two hours later, Brianna texted that they were coming in for a break. I crunched over to the lodge in my snow boots and heavy jacket, hugging myself against the chill. Yew Dales turned glacial at night, the wind hardening the snow to an icy grain and stinging any inch of exposed skin. I huffed out a sigh of relief when the lodge door closed behind me.
They were all huddled around the big stone fireplace in the middle of the room - Brianna, Laura, Dillon, Tyler, Brian, Matt, and a few kids I didn’t recognize.
“The soccer girls don’t do Ski Club?” I asked Brianna, realizing too late that I probably shouldn’t have called them that.
“They do,” she said, “but there was a lacrosse meeting today so they had to miss.” She settled back into one of the chairs across from the fire and laced her hands across her stomach.
“They all do lacrosse?”
She rolled her eyes. I was becoming accustomed to the expression. “They’re like a cult,” she said.
“What about us?” Tyler called from the hearth. He flattened his wet gloves in front of the fire before he turned to her. “Is the football team a cult, too?”
“More like a herd,” she said.
He threw his hat at her and it landed in her lap.
“Ew, Tyler this is soaked.” She tossed it back at him, then looked at me. “Unfortunately for you, Tyler is always here. He’s on the racing team. But don’t worry, their run is on the other side of the mountain where he can’t harass you.”
A moment later, a twenty-something man wearing an employee tag with the name ‘Ryan’ on it brought Brianna a cup of hot chocolate with a huge dollop of whipped cream.
“Thanks Ryan.” Her voice was dramatically sweet.
“Slave.” Tyler muttered as Ryan walked away.
Brianna fluttered her lashes and smiled around her first sip, then frowned as Tyler pointed at her, grinned, and peered around at his friends. “Rudolph.” He said.
I glanced at Brianna. She was swiping white foam from the tip of her nose.
“Rudolph has a red nose, dumbass,” she said.
When they all left again, I sat by the fire for a moment, the quiet ringing in my ears. The crowds tended to roll in and out of the lodge in waves, everybody seeming to take breaks and return to the slopes at once. I promised them I would go out onto the deck in a few minutes to watch them come down. They were determined to show me how positively amusing it could be to clamp your feet onto waxed, sharpened boards and propel yourself down icy crags.
Though I was nearly on top of the fire, I felt a chill. I pulled my jacket tighter around me and pivoted toward the flame. A chunk had fallen from a piece of wood and lay to one side, glowing red-gold in the ash. I stared for a moment, then stood up, zipped my jacket, and went out into the cold. The a
ir stung when it hit my face, but as I walked out to the far rail of the deck and gazed up at Mount Lenape, bejeweled all the way to the top with those diamond lights, the chill seemed to fade.
It was only a moment before they came speeding down, Laura on her skis first, then Brian and Matt on theirs, and finally Tyler, Brianna, and Dillon on their boards. Laura raised a pole and waved it at me about halfway down the final hill. I waved back and watched them gather at the lift, one after the other.
“Come on Jenna, you can’t just sit there all night,” Brianna yelled.
“You’re right,” I yelled back. “I’m going in soon.”
They called to me for a little while as they filed into the lift line. Once they had settled into their chairs and started up, Brianna and Laura waved over their shoulders a final time and I waved back again.
As they disappeared over the crest, things seemed to darken a bit in the space around me. I let the smile fall from my face and plunked down on the end of a bench. A remake of an eighties song I didn’t know the name of straggled through the speakers, and a couple with a little boy between them slid by, the mom singing along. A moment later, they reached the top of the bunny hill and dropped out of sight.
I pushed at a pile of snow with one gray, furry boot. Then I heard a crunch, saw a shadow in my peripheral vision, and he was there, leaning on the rail as he surveyed the mountain. I didn’t turn my head, just watched him from the corner of my eye. He was only a few feet from me. I could have reached out and touched him.
First, just a flake or two tumbled through the space between us. One landed on the knee of my jeans and I stared, momentarily awed by that impossible combination of sharp and soft that belongs exclusively to winter. By the time I raised my head again, the world was a slow, shifting tide of white confetti. I watched it settle in his hair.
His broad shoulders rose, then fell heavily beneath his jacket.
“Are you going to learn?” He asked, his voice almost too soft to hear.
I jumped, mostly inside. My body felt like it had no bones. I cleared my throat.
“What?”
“You spend a lot of time watching,” he said, staring ahead. “Are you going to learn?”
“Uh, no. I don’t think so.” My heart was beating fast and shallow in my chest, so I took a deep breath. I looked up into the sky to orient myself, the way my father had taught me to do when I was little, but there were no constellations, only white, blinding snow.
“Why not?”
“It’s just not my thing.” I shrugged even though he wasn’t looking.
“How do you know?”
“I just know.” But I didn’t want him to think I was afraid, so I added, “I’ve tried it.”
“Oh,” he said, finally turning toward me. His face didn’t look real. The angles were perfect and symmetrical, every feature – his mouth, his eyes, his cheekbones - slightly exaggerated, as if he had strolled out of a comic book. “So you’ve put on a board, or skis maybe, and ridden the lift, and made it all the way down the hill, and you hated it?”
I had the urge to roll my eyes and stopped myself, an image of Brianna flashing in my mind.
“Not exactly,” I said. “But I’ve been on a board, and believe me, the only way I can control one is by throwing myself to the ground.”
“That’s letting it control you,” he said. He tilted his head and a chunk of hair fell into his eyes – a perfectly chopped anime tuft. The snow fell faster between us, but his eyes were bright through the blur. They had the clear amber gleam of maple syrup.
“I didn’t have much of a choice.”
He laughed. It was a deep, hollow sound. Everything about him seemed young when he was still, but when he moved or spoke a strange maturity broke through.
“That’s a lie people like to tell themselves.” He said. “A safety net.”
I raised my brows, annoyed by the condescension. “A safety net isn’t a bad thing.”
“Not if you’re doing something that warrants it."
“Maybe I’m enjoying just sitting here.” I heard the anger in my voice and turned back to the mountain to avoid his stare. “Or at least I was. Maybe I just don’t want to learn.”
“Doesn’t look that way to me,” he said.
After a long pause, I felt him walk away. I sensed when he was gone, and hated that he was gone. And then I hated that I hated it.
Chapter 5