Snow in Love (10 page)

His face softened and the curves of his mouth tilted up. “Okay.”

“I just didn’t know that you liked Evie.” And then I began to walk. He ran to catch up to me but didn’t say anything the rest of the walk home.

The moon was full, and so the woods and snow were glistening. There was as much light reflecting as there ever was these days, even in daytime. The only sound was the crunch of our feet over the snow. I could hear him breathing, and I could see the stream of our breath greeting the night air. I shoved my hands in my pockets. He did the same.

When we got to my house, a lot of the lights were on, and I could see that my brother was playing video games with my dad.

We walked to the front door. I turned to Will and said, “Do you want to come in and play with Brian?”

He laughed. “Nah. I should hang out with kids my own age.”

I laughed and looked at my toes. “Will, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry.” He wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Thank you,” I said quietly.

“Jessie, just so you know, I don’t like Evie,” he said.

Then he stepped in closer to me, put a hand on my waist and another on my shoulder, and kissed me. Right there on my doorstep! And the awful thing was that I kissed him back, without a second thought. I wrapped my arms around his neck and we kept kissing, until I could hear my father rapping on the inside of the front door.

I was mortified.

Will drew back, shoved his hands in his pockets, and said, “See you around, Jessie.”

He hadn’t called me Whitman the entire night.

“
H

The girls and I were skating in the enclosed outdoor rink at the resort. The rink was usually crowded with figure skaters and junior hockey teams from all around the area. Today the rink had free skate hours, so I brought Brian and Tiffany to skate while I filled the girls in and waited for their reaction.

Abby was clearly shocked. In fact, she, who even in the best of times could barely keep her balance, tripped over her toe pick and went careening into Erin.

Erin, an out-of-place, black-clothed blackberry on hockey skates, caught Abby. The two of them slipped about a yard from me. They were holding on to each other for dear life and staring at me like two uncoordinated deer trapped in the path of oncoming traffic. I pushed off and skated for them. I pried them apart, holding Abby up with my left hand and Erin up with my right.

“You guys are worse than Brian,” I said as the person mentioned caught sight of us and began skating headlong in our direction. “Don’t you dare!” I shouted at him, but it was too late. Brian’s favorite thing to do on skates was to gather as much speed as possible, then stop right in front of me, spraying me with a sheet of upward flying ice.

“God, I hate your little brother,” Erin grumbled, patting at her black shirt and pants. Brian skated away, guffawing in delight.

Abby clutched my one arm with both hands, and I let go of Erin to give her my full balance. We began to skate, me moving backward and her moving forward, like a pair of ballroom dancers. I had no idea how my friend could be so bad at outdoor activities. It wasn’t like there were a lot of other things to do here.

Once she had her balance, she said, “Um, can we go back to the part where you said that Will Parker kissed you?” She squeaked again and nearly pulled me down with her.

“Okay, Michelle Kwan, let’s go sit if we’re going to talk,” Erin said, and I heartily agreed. I flashed her a look of gratitude. Abby was little but kind of heavy when she was on skates and in a parka.

We skated over to the side of the rink, stepped through the door in the boards, and made our way to the Choco Shack, a little brick hut where you could order hot beverages and snacks. We each ordered a hot chocolate, then went to sit on one of the hockey benches. You weren’t technically allowed to sit there unless you were a member of a participating hockey team, but Erin hated that rule and made it her cause to break it whenever we were skating.

I caught Brian’s eye to let him know where we were, and he responded by setting us in his sights and coming at us like a kamikaze pilot. Once we were all sprayed, and Brian was skating away gleefully, Abby and Erin turned to me. I was conveniently seated in the middle.

“He kissed you?!” Abby shrieked. Poor girl had been holding it in for too long.

Erin started laughing and held her hot chocolate in front of her nose. “Please tell me that Sabrina saw this kiss.”

“No, she didn’t. It was later. When he walked me home.”

This got their attention. Their looks, which were on me to begin with, became more intense. In fact, they each leaned in and asked at the same time, “What?”

Then Erin went on, “You mean, this was a for-real kiss?”

“Oh my GOD!” Abby couldn’t help herself.

“Shush. Come on. What if one of his friends is here?” I pleaded.

Erin gestured with her hand, sweeping across the entire rink. “Where? Where would his friends be?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’m just…I’m confused.”

Erin nodded her head, agreeing that I was confused. “Start from the beginning.”

Abby couldn’t wait for that, though. “Was he a good kisser?”

“Yes!” This word tumbled out of me, like I couldn’t wait to confess. “Really good. Different from Jake. Like, I think he’s kissed a lot of girls, you guys.”

Abby bit her lip. Erin continued her professorial-like nodding. “Tell us what happened,” she said.

“Okay.” I raised the hot chocolate to my face, so that it could be warmed by the steam. “He picked me up. We laid out the ground rules, you know, that the whole date was to help me win Jake back. We went to the diner. The four of us talked. And the whole time, I thought that Will kind of liked Evie. He invited her to go skiing with us up to Grizzly.”

“Really? I thought he was planning that for you two,” Abby said pensively.

Erin answered before I could. “He was definitely planning it for the two of you.”

I looked at her. “How do you know that?”

“He told me,” Erin said calmly as if this were the most normal thing in the world.

“When did he tell you?” I asked.

She sipped her hot chocolate, all nonchalance. “When we were playing video games yesterday.”

“What did he say?” Abby and I asked the question together.

“Nothing. Just, he said he asked you to go to Grizzly Mountain with him.”

“Like a date? A real date?” Abby asked. I waited for Erin to answer. Now my cheeks felt so warm I didn’t need the hot chocolate.

“I think so.” Erin leaned in. “He made me promise not to say anything so you can’t tell him that I told you.”

“That’s complicated,” Abby said.

“I know,” Erin concurred.

“I don’t understand,” I exclaimed.

Erin put down her hot chocolate. “I think he likes you. Like, likes you likes you.”

“Did he say that?” I asked.

“No, but he doesn’t have to. I can tell.”

My guts were churning. To think that I’d felt a little jealous when I’d seen them playing video games. I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

“What’s to understand? You are always going on and on about how I should go out with him. You should listen to your reasons and go out with him yourself.”

Abby touched my hand. “Jess?”

“I don’t get it. If he wanted to go on a date with me, and went so far as to ask my dad to fly us all the way to Grizzly Mountain, why’d he invite Evie and Jake to come?”

Erin’s face scrunched up. “Yeah, that’s something to figure out, I guess.”

“When exactly did he invite them?” Abby asked, as confused-sounding as I felt.

“During dinner, he and Evie were talking the whole time, and he seemed to really like her! You know that tone he uses with Mrs. Mulch in English, when he hasn’t read the assignment?”

“Yeah?” the two of them said in unison.

“It was that tone.”

“Hmmm,” Erin said, her face solemnly in concentration. “Weird.”

“But he kissed you, right?” Abby asked.

“Yeah. After he said he didn’t like Evie.”

“But he invited her to Grizzly Mountain.”

“Where he’s going to spend the whole day with her, teaching her to ski.”

Erin shook her head. “I’m working tonight. I’ll see if I can get the truth out of him.”

Abby agreed. “That’s a good idea.”

I exhaled. I didn’t understand boys at all.

After Brian finished skating, I brought him home and then went to work my shift at Snow Cones. I felt cranky and irritable and needed to soothe my feelings with ice cream.

When I got there, my mother was behind the counter, and so I offered to go back to the kitchen and work on the ice-cream flavors for the next day.

Standing with my hair tied in a ponytail and an apron around my waist, I measured out eggs, cream, and sugar. I picked out the special ingredients, like the peppermint, the green tea, and the licorice. I shredded chocolate and measured walnuts, raisins, and butterscotch chips.

And all the while I tried to sort out why my insides felt so scrambled.

The best thing to do was a wholesale review.

My entire life had been upended by Jake deciding that he didn’t want to be my boyfriend anymore and then not even telling me about it. But in the past two days or so, I started to think that maybe I didn’t want to be his girlfriend. I didn’t know when the tables had been turned.

I had a whole plan with Jake! We were going to travel together, and then go to UAA together. I was going to study geology, and he was going to study law. We’d spend the summer break in the States, or abroad even, and the winter break here, where winter break was best.

And now, here I was getting ready to go on a day trip with him, and all I could think about was Will.

Will Parker, the boy in our class who everyone liked. The boy who the teachers loved. The boy from ESPN. The boy who promised to win an Olympic gold medal for our town. The boy who had rescued me from a post-Brian collision and walked me to my mom. A boy who pretended to be my boyfriend. A boy who kissed me.

When I had been Jake’s girlfriend, I never felt this confused. He never made my stomach feel like it was trapped in a blender. He was honest and didn’t play games. Except for this whole breakup thing.

I plopped the batch of vanilla into the large metallic tub my mother used for ice-cream making. I crammed it into the freezer and repeated this task until I had made twenty tubs.

By the time my mother drove me home, I had decided. All that was happening was that I was falling under Will’s weirdo hypnotic spell that he cast on everyone. He probably didn’t think about me at all! I suddenly felt bad for Sabrina, and the blond girl at the lodge, and Mrs. Mulch, and all the other women of Willow Hill who had confused Will’s charming personality for actual interest.

My mind was made up. I was going to take the opportunity that Will had given me, and I was going to once and for all tell Jake that I wanted to be his girlfriend again, his
only
girlfriend. Even if he had trouble deciding, after one day with Will, Evie wouldn’t even know Jake’s name anymore. She’d feel the way I did now, all jittery and crushy on him. Well, I wasn’t going to let this continue. Will Parker had me all confused and I wanted it to end. I knew what I wanted: I wanted to go to UAA with Jake, and to be done with the stomach mambo.

J

My father, who always got a kick out of passengers who had flight sickness, dipped and curved among the mountaintops. Part of this was because my father loved nothing more than showing off the Alaskan scenery, but I suspected that part of the aerial theatrics had to do with highlighting Jake’s “softness.”

I hadn’t seen Will since the night of our double date. And when he met us at the airport that morning, he acted as if nothing had taken place between us at all. He smiled at me in a friendly way and then climbed into the plane and sat down right next to Evie. His cool demeanor was fine by me. I was bound and determined to not be just another dumb Willow Hill girl with an unrequited crush on the boy nobody could have. Will probably kissed a different girl every night and then couldn’t tell you who it had been the next morning.

I sat down next to Jake and concentrated on helping him through his air sickness. I fed him crackers and held a bottle of water for him. At one point, Jake rested his eyes and I took the opportunity to spy on Will and Evie. Part of my developing Will-sickness was that I couldn’t stop noticing how good he looked, all the time. He wore his favorite navy snow pants plus a fleece pullover and a navy parka. I tried to distract myself by staring at Evie, who also looked spectacular. Her hair was blond and shiny. Her lips were covered in sparkly lip gloss and her cheeks were dusky rose. I thought how lucky I was that Will was working for me and not against me. Without an uneven playing surface, Green Jake would definitely pick her over me.

By the time my father landed the plane, it was nearly ten o’clock and the sun was just starting to peek out over the mountaintops of the Grizzly area.

I’d never been there, ever, but my father had spoken of this place enough that I knew this would be an extraordinary day. Grizzly was north of where I lived, and it was a little bit
more
of everything than Willow Hill: more cold, more mountains, more snow. When my feet touched the ground, a wind wrapped around my face and nearly knocked me back. All my boy troubles were momentarily forgotten. I stretched my arms to the sky.

“This is going to be a good day!” I pronounced to nobody in general.

But Evie took up the rallying cry. She also spread out her arms to the sky. “I feel it too!”

“Okay, kids, I’ll be back for you at the end of the day. Meet me back here sharply at six o’clock. Got it?” My father looked at me, and pressed a fifty-dollar bill into my hands.

He pointed toward the front of the airplane hangar. Waiting there was an old school bus that had been painted over with blue paint and transformed into a shuttle for the ski area. I hugged my father good-bye and then the four of us marched over to the bus. I was preparing to do whatever I had to in order to sit next to Jake, but Will grabbed my hand and pulled me into a seat right next to him. My stomach turned, my annoyance level rose, and I was forced to watch Evie and Jake sit next to each other a few rows behind us.

Will leaned close to me and smiled. “Are you ready?”

He was close enough to kiss. I turned my head and chanted to myself,
I will not be a dumb Willow Hill girl
three times. I forced myself to think of our walk home and how Will had probably forgotten it already. I looked to the aisle of the bus before returning my gaze directly ahead of me.

“As I’ll ever be,” I responded without making eye contact.

“Good.” He slid down and raised one knee, resting it against the seat in front of us. I tried not to stare at his ankle, which was visible as his white sock had slipped to the edge of his sneaker. “You okay?”

“Hmm-mmm.” I looked behind us, to see what Jake and Evie were up to. Apparently bus rides made him as sick as airplane rides. He was doubled over and she was rubbing his back.

“You’re gonna love it here, Whitman,” Will said.

“I hear the powder’s good.”

“Yeah.” He poked me in the ribs, and my stomach leaped. “Listen, I know you’re going to be
busy
and all, but after we ski, I want to take you somewhere.”

“You do?”

He smiled wide and I chanted to myself again. “I don’t know,” I said finally.

“Jessie,” he said in a low voice. “There’s an animal sanctuary.”

I couldn’t help myself. “There are animals?”

“Yes. After you’re done with that green kid”—he motioned behind us—“I want an hour of your time. There’s a Nature Loop. You can hike it up to an animal enclosure. There’re deer, elk, moose. I saw a bear there once.”

I couldn’t answer. An hour was all he’d need to make me fall completely head over heels with him. There was no way I could go, even if part of me really, really wanted to.

He poked me in the ribs again and grinned. “It’s romantic. You’ll like it.”

There wasn’t a trace of anything mean or nasty in his face. In fact, he looked completely earnest.

He was driving me crazy.

I swallowed hard and tried to change the subject. “Do you think you can teach her how to ski?”

He looked at me like I’d asked the stupidest question ever.

“I can teach anybody to ski.”

“Well, not anybody,” I joked.

“Yeah, not Erin.”

We laughed, and I thought to myself how long ago it seemed that I wanted to set him up with Erin. Now I couldn’t imagine him with any other girl. Which of course wasn’t very fair of me.

We got silent again, and the bus rattled on.

“How much longer?” I asked.

“Half hour or so.”

I wanted to scream. I didn’t think I could take another half hour of this ride, especially with the long silences. The knee that wasn’t pressed into the back of the seat in front of us was pressed into mine, and my stomach had gone from nervousness to outright nausea. I was so uncomfortable that I blurted:

“You know, I wanted to fix you up with Erin.”

“Clark?”

“Yeah.”

“Nah. I don’t think she’d like me that way.”

This got my attention. I had to assume that he assumed he could get any girl he wanted.

“And anyway, she’s like my sister or something.”

He caught my eye then and I couldn’t help but smile at him just a bit.

Finally after what seemed like an eternity, the bus pulled into a big parking lot, and the bus driver opened the door. Evie helped Jake to his feet and they made their way off the bus.

Just before we stood to join them outside, Will said, “Besides, you’re the only girl for me.” And then he kissed me again, on the cheek. It was quick, but he had unmistakably put his lips near mine, and for a moment I thought it might not be so bad to be one of the pining Willow Hill girls.

The minute we descended from the bus, Will took over. He told us that he’d take Evie to the bunny hill, where he would allegedly work all kinds of skier magic on her. She looked thrilled and whether she was excited by the prospect of finally learning to ski or of being with Will, I didn’t know. Then he reminded me about the Nature Loop, the path to the animal sanctuary he’d told me about on the bus. There was no hint that he had meant anything by what he had said about me being the only girl for him. Will was the king of mixed messages. Though if I thought about it, maybe I was the queen of mixed messages, because I
was
letting Will steal kisses even though I was there to be getting back Jake’s love.

“Okay, so we’ll meet back here at five fifteen?” Will asked.

“But what about lunch?” Jake asked.

“I won’t want to stop for lunch,” I said. Who cared about lunch when we were here in this beautiful country?

“That’s my girl.” Will smiled at me. Again, an annoying little jolt went through my stomach. “’Kay, Evie. Ready for your world to be rocked?”

Now it was Evie’s turn to giggle. “I’m ready.”

“’Kay. We’ll see you here at five fifteen.” Then he leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “Meet me here an hour before that.” Then he kissed me on the cheek AGAIN. Right in front of everybody. He was getting carried away and he knew it. Before he pulled away from me, he gave me an evil grin. I knew then, in that second, that he was totally toying with me.

They disappeared from view, into the large red stone lodge in front of us. I turned to Jake; it was just him and me now. I took a deep breath and could feel my insides return to normal.

“Feeling okay?” I asked.

Jake’s face turned as red as it had been green before. “I’m a baby. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said. Something about how he said that, so vulnerable and without any thought of game-playing, made me smile. Life as Jake’s real girlfriend had been much easier on my stomach than life as Will’s fake girlfriend.

“You want to ski with me?” I asked.

He reached for my skis and hoisted them up with his own. “Of course I do.”

Jake and I had a great time.

First, we went into the lodge and paid for our passes. Before we hit the slopes, I bought us each a granola bar and a bottle of water. He was grateful and gave me one of those toe-curling smiles that had won my heart in the first place. I thought to myself that when he smiled, you knew he meant it. Not like Will, whose smile gave you the feeling that he had an ulterior motive.

Then Jake and I skied, and the whole time he was chatty and friendly and calm, and I started to feel comfortable and happy. I barely thought about Will at all, and when I did, I chanted my favorite mantra and vowed to forget him.

We raced, running the course so many times that we lost track of who was winning. The only less-than-perfect moment was when he said that he wanted to check on Evie. We trudged our way over to the bunny hill, but she wasn’t there and neither was Will. I wondered where they had wandered off to, but Jake found them.

They were on the beginner’s hill, a hill that in any other resort would have been an intermediate. We were in the north. The mountains were bigger here. The slopes were harder to navigate, their angles were more severe. The first thing I saw was the blue burst of Will on a pair of skis. It struck me that I’d never seen him ski much. He always snowboarded, but here he was careening down the mountain with as much grace as an Olympian.

The real magic was that behind him was Evie, and she was skiing like an old pro.

“I can’t believe it!” Jake exclaimed.

“Me neither!” I was shocked. Will had come through.

“Your boyfriend is a magician.”

“What?” I turned to Jake, not sure what he meant at first.

“I didn’t think anyone could teach her to ski.”

“Oh. Yeah. Will’s something else.”

We tried to catch up with them, but they were too far away, and I had the feeling that if we connected with them, then my time with Jake would be done. And I wasn’t ready for that yet.

So I persuaded him to run the big hill with me again, which he did.

At the bottom, we took another break. We found a little restaurant in the main lodge and I bought the two of us roast beef sandwiches.

We sat across from each other at large picnic tables and ate in comfortable silence. My stomach was completely at ease.
This,
I thought to myself,
is what a relationship should be. Two people who can have pleasant days together without nausea.

“Jake.”

He looked up at me. His hair was messy from the hat he’d been wearing, and his skin was still red from the wind.

“I’m having a really good time.”

He smiled. “Me too.”

I bit my lip. “Listen, Will told me about this animal sanctuary. You wanna go with me?”

He ripped the remains of his bread into a dozen tiny pieces. “What about, you know, Will?”

“He won’t mind,” I said quickly. And though for a moment I questioned whether that was true, I stood, determined to put this whole Will thing behind me. If that meant ditching him, well then, I could live with that. Honestly, he probably wouldn’t care.

Jake stood too. We smiled at each other, then stashed our skis behind a counter at the lodge and took the chairlift up to the trail leading to the Nature Loop.

“It’s colder up here, huh?” he asked, walking beside me. We’d been walking for what seemed like an hour, and there was no sign of any animals. I chalked that up to my terrible sense of direction.

“Freezing,” I said, looking around the path for any sight of a deer or an elk. I would’ve been happy to see a squirrel at that point.

“I can’t ever imagine that it can be colder than it gets down in Juneau, and then in Willow Hill, forget it. But here, God. The reindeer must freeze their antlers off.”

I looked at him sideways. “The reindeer must freeze their antlers off?”

He smiled. “What? I’m trying to be funny.”

“Keep trying,” I joked.

He gave me a playful shove in the arm. “Hey!” I shouted in mock anger. “That’s it.”

And, in classic Brian Whitman fashion, I scooped up a handful of wet, icy snow and pelted him with it.

“Aw, you’re dead!” He scrambled off the path and began scooping up his own fistfuls of snow. I headed in the opposite direction, where there was a dense stand of pine trees. I had learned my lessons well: You needed cover to avoid excess hits.

I peeked from behind a pine tree long enough to vault another snowball over the path toward Jake. I had thrown it so terribly, it hit the ground six feet in front of him.

“You throw like a girl!” he called out.

“I
am
a girl!” I defended myself. Then I leaned down to scoop up another snowball, and waited until I saw him reaching down to do the same before leaving my hiding place, running up to the edge of the walking path, and nailing him on the back of the neck with an icy bullet.

“Ouch!” He reached his hand back to touch his neck, which was now red and covered in moisture. “You’re dead!” He ran after me and tackled me to the ground just as we reached the edge of the trees, but I was a slippery one. I slipped out from his grasp and made a run for it. I ran past three, four, five, six trees before stopping to catch my breath behind a wide, round, knobby birch.