The employee housing was a walk across three resort parking lots and over a wooden bridge that straddled a small pond. Bren and I didn’t speak on the way. I knew where we were headed, and although I was pretty certain he wasn’t trying to lure me into his lair for dubious reasons, his comment about my needing new friends made me nervous. I slowed on the bridge, pretending interest in the icy sheet beneath which no life moved or grew. Bren stood a few feet away and waited for me to regain my nerve.
Once we cleared the pond, I stopped and stared up at the row of white, two-story buildings in front of us.
“This is where you stay?” I asked.
He nodded and pointed to the one in the middle, then started toward it.
“Which floor is yours?” I called, sticking to my spot.
“The bottom,” he said over his shoulder. “The first floor apartments have kitchens.”
“Kittens?” I told myself I was trying to be funny, but he turned and looked at me like a mother whose kid was asking for a second glass of water at bedtime.
“Yes, kittens.” He said. “We insist that all our rooms have kittens. They are the fastest way to lure women. Without kittens, we would have to rely solely on our charm.”
“Well,” I said, trying to stifle my laugh into sarcasm, “then you’re lucky the kitten rooms were available.”
When he reached the doors, he opened the one on the left and held it, standing to the side and making a sweeping motion with one hand. After a moment, he raised his brows. “You want to see the kittens, right?”
I laughed out loud this time, and crossed the space between us. Once I stepped over the threshold, I let him lead the way again.
His apartment was directly on the right. The door wasn’t locked, and he made another sweeping motion before closing it behind us. The kitchen opened immediately to the left. The countertops, appliances and floor were white. A microwave sat next to the sink, with a coffee pot beside it. The refrigerator stood against the far wall, and directly across from it was a small wooden dinette with four chairs.
“Hey,” I said dragging the word out, “This is a kitchen, not a kitten.”
He pressed his hand to his forehead and grinned. “Yeah, I always get those two confused.”
Across the room was the start of a dark hallway. It looked like it continued left behind the kitchen, and I assumed that was where the bathroom and bedrooms were. To our right was the living room. A set of sliding glass doors hung with long vertical blinds faced the pond, and a large T.V. flickered against the far wall. The news was on. An earthquake somewhere.
The girl with the red braids lounged on one of the tan sofas, watching T.V. The tall boy was stretched out across its length with his head in her lap. Her long fingers crept through his hair. Beneath the warm brown strands, I saw a thinner version of Bren’s ring circling the middle finger of her right hand.
She looked up at us and gave me a feline grin.
“Hello.” Her voice was soft. Everything about her seemed soft, right down to her fuzzy blue sweater with the brown snowflakes and her white pajama bottoms.
“Hi,” I said.
The boy in her lap raised himself up on one elbow and craned his neck to peer at me. Then his gaze shifted to Bren, his brows arching high on his forehead. I threw a quick glance at his hand and saw what I expected, thick silver ring on his middle finger, gap slicing through the width.
“This is Jenna,” Bren said.
“Hi Jenna.” The girl purred. There was something in her smile. Not sarcasm exactly. More like satisfaction.
“Hi,” I said again.
“This is Frieda, and my brother Dag,” Bren told me. He tossed his helmet on the table and opened the refrigerator. I tried to keep my expression from registering the strangeness of their names.
“You want a soda or something?” Bren was crouched behind the refrigerator door. It sounded like he had shoved something in his mouth while he was searching. A few seconds later he emerged with two sodas and closed the fridge with his elbow.
I shrugged. “Sure.”
He tossed me a long black can with some blue lightning scrawled across it and I cracked it open, taking care not to slurp the first sip.
“So Jenna,” Frieda said, sitting up straighter, her green eyes like kryptonite. “You live here?”
I stepped forward and rested my soda on the back of the empty sofa. "Yeah. We just moved here. My mother and I.”
A chunk of hair fell into Dag’s face and he let himself collapse back into Frieda’s lap. He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them on the news once more. Frieda swept the lock from his forehead with one long, black fingernail.
“Good for you.” she said. “It’s nice here.”
“Except I don’t do any snow sports,” I said.
“Oh well, you’ll learn.” She waved a hand at me. “Bren will teach you. He’s reasonably competent.” She threw him a sly glance.
He stepped up beside me and flicked his soda tab at her. She batted it away without taking her eyes from mine. It hit the T.V. screen and bounced onto the carpet.
A moment later, I heard a door open and footsteps trudging down the hall. The boy with the blonde dreadlocks rounded the corner, shirtless, his jeans unbuttoned and a white towel slung over his shoulders. Every line and muscle in his torso stood out against his pale skin. A black, spiny tattoo circled his left bicep, and at first I mistook it for branches or thorns, but then I spotted the subtle outline of a stag head and realized that they were antlers, winding their way in both directions around to the back of his arm.
As he smoothed a hand over his jaw, I noted the ring on his middle finger. Clean-shaven now, he appeared much younger than when I had first seen him. He grabbed the damp towel around his neck with both hands.
“Are you trying to make us believe you shower?” Frieda said to him.
“At least once a month.” He grinned, slid the towel off his shoulders and snapped it in her direction. Then he caught a glimpse of us. He tossed his towel on the couch and stood up straight, looking from Bren to me.
“Who’s this?” He asked, his eyes firmly on me now.
“Jenna,” Bren said.
“Jenna,” he repeated, taking three large strides across the room toward us. He was too close to me, but his grin charmed me out of my discomfort, half-naked or not. Maybe they didn’t need the kittens after all.
“Frey is Frieda’s brother,” Bren said, pressing a hand against Frey's chest to back him off. “They’re twins.”
I took this as an excuse to step back, and glanced from Frieda to Frey.
“You two don’t look anything alike,” I said.
Frey grinned again. “That’s because we’re fraternal. If you look very closely, you can just about tell that Frieda’s female.”
She smiled sweetly at him. “Well, we can all tell that you’re an ass from a mile away.”
I laughed and so did she, raising her eyebrows twice at me before turning her attention back to Dag.
“Where are the quakes?” Bren asked, nodding toward the T.V.
“South America. One in California.” Frieda said.
“Typical,” he said, but it sounded like a question. She lifted a shoulder and let it fall. I didn’t get it. I’d never met anyone my age particularly interested in things like that.
Bren turned to me. “Come on.” He headed for the sliders and I followed.
There was a sort of porch beyond the doors - a concrete rectangle with a white iron railing around it. Two white, plastic chairs flanked a tiny matching table in the middle. It was chilly, but bearable with the sun. We sat down and sipped our drinks.
“So when will we work on those turns?” Bren asked.
I made a choking sound.
He laughed. “We’ll talk about it later.”
“So did you all go to school in Norway?” I asked him. He leaned forward with his forearms on his knees. The wind bl
ew his hair back, turning him, for a moment, into the cover of a romance novel.
“We went in lots of places,” he said.
“Did you graduate?”
He nodded once.
I tried to squash my frustration. He didn’t seem to want to elaborate.
“How did you finish so early?” I asked, leaning forward until he looked at me.
“Homeschooling.” He smiled, and something in his face told me that he was done talking about it. He turned and looked out over the pond.
“So what brings you all here?”
“Snow,” he said, and when I lifted my hands and let them slap down in frustration, he added, “We like to travel.”
“That older guy I saw you with,” I said, changing course, “is he related to you?”
“My uncle Val.”
“Is he, like, your guardian?”
“Something like that.”
“None of you are eighteen?”
He turned to me again. “If we were, would we need a guardian?” He said it like he had just delivered the punch line of a joke.
I stared at him for a few moments, then opened my mouth to ask how long he was staying, but he jumped in first.
“When are you going to learn your turns?” Now it was a debate.
“Okay fine.” I said, showing him my palms. "No more questions.”
He laughed under his breath, one amused huff, and took a long gulp of soda. As he lowered the can, his eyes narrowed. I followed his gaze to where a petite blonde in a slim-cut purple jacket was moving up the walk toward the front doors. When she saw us, she veered off the path, folded her arms across her chest and picked up speed. Her strides were impossibly long for a girl her size. She didn’t stop until her hips were pressed against the railing.
She glared at Bren, her hair sweeping against her shoulders, and I noticed now that there were violet streaks shot all through her white-gold locks. Her face was a small oval, her lips pink and full, and her eyes - a strange indigo - seemed to take up half her face. She was striking, and her angry brood made her appear exotic and fierce. I shifted in my chair and looked to Bren.
“This is Skye,” he said, his eyes hard on hers. He nodded in my direction. “This is Jenna.”
I smiled, but she didn’t even glance at me.
“We need to talk,” she told him. Her voice was husky, and though she was small, it suited her.
Bren nodded.
My heart fell. There was a history in their gazes, so much weight that I had to stand up to shed myself of it. This was probably his girlfriend. And I was probably not what she wanted to find here. And the worst part was, she looked as if she had found this kind of thing before.
“I have to go anyway,” I said.
Bren stood up. “I’ll walk you back.”
“No,” I put a hand up as I stepped over the rail, “it’s fine. I have some things I have to do for my mom. I’ll just see you later.”
“Jenna…” He called after me.
“I’ll see you later,” I said again, now moving at a slow jog to get away from them. I headed for the bridge, feeling exactly like the girl Sydney had warned me not to become. Feeling like I didn’t need new friends after all.
Chapter 8