Snow in Love (4 page)

“Hey, Abby,” he said quietly. This caused Sabrina to scoot closer to Cam, even though she quickly returned her gaze to Will, who stood in the middle of the floor looking at Sabrina and her girls before settling onto the stool next to Erin.

“Gimme some of that,” he said, taking Erin’s spoon and proceeding to eat her ice cream. Abby flashed a quick look at me. Right then and there I decided that if Abby and I couldn’t have love in our lives, I was going to make sure that Erin had some, even if I had to kill Sabrina to do it.

Sabrina didn’t take too kindly to Will sitting with the enemy. Her lovely face drew itself into a frown, and Stephanie and Hannah grew deathly quiet.

“Will, we were just talking about the Northern Lights Ball,” Sabrina said out loud, placing a hand over Cam’s. Will smiled at me easily, and pushed Erin’s empty dish in my direction. I filled it with chocolate. My breakup was bad for my mom’s bottom line. I was giving ice cream away.

“Yeah?” Will asked.

“Yeah,” Sabrina cooed. “You’re going to ride in our limo, right?”

Erin snorted, and I couldn’t help myself. “There’re no
limousines
in Willow Hill, Sabrina.” Erin and Abby both smirked, and Sabrina gave me a death stare.

“
You
going?” Will poked Erin in the ribs. Abby’s eyes grew wide.

“Please,” Erin snorted. “I’d rather ride in a limo with Sabrina.” Then she quickly looked back and forth between me and Will. I recognized that look. It was the look she got when she was about to come up with a masterly sinister plan. “But you know what? Were you going?”

“I don’t know. No date,” he said with a giant, gleaming white smile. Sabrina’s spoon clattered onto the floor.

“You should go with Jessie.” Erin’s voice got very excited.

“What?” I asked. “No, I’m not going now.” I stage-whispered this, like my mom does when she doesn’t want my brother, Brian, to know that the slopes are still open.

“You have to go with somebody! You can’t let Jake just go to the dance with that girl and not be there to stop it! And you can’t go without a date.”

“She’s got a point, you know,” Abby chimed in. “And I have the dress all set.”

“Will, I don’t want to go anymore. So, don’t worry.”

Will took a bite of ice cream and smiled at me. “Come on, Whitman, don’t be chicken. I’ll take you. It’ll be fun.”

“Jessie, you gotta fight fire with fire,” Cam chimed in. Sabrina hit him in the arm.

I looked back and forth between Cam and Will. I didn’t know what to say. Everything was happening so fast, I couldn’t keep up. I was vaguely aware, though, of how Sabrina and the Minions were staring at me, clearly waiting to hear what I was going to say.

Erin leaned forward and whispered under her breath, “It’ll drive Sabrina insane if you go with Will.”

I don’t know if Will knew that Sabrina liked him, but he heard what Erin said and didn’t dispute it. In fact, his grin became even wider, if that was possible. I looked at Abby quickly, hoping she would give me a sign. We both wanted Erin to date somebody, and Will was the only guy she seemed even mildly interested in. Wasn’t I sabotaging this possible love match if I went to the Northern Lights Ball with him?

“There’s no way you’d want to go to this dance, right, Erin?”

“Please. Not if Johnny Depp were my date.”

Abby nodded at me.

“Okay.”

“Yeah?” Will asked.

“Yes. It’s a date.”

Will stood on his stool and high-fived me. “Yeah, Whitman! One date with me and you’ll forget all about that guy anyway.” He waggled his eyebrows. Erin shot a triumphant look at Sabrina, who choked on her bite of ice cream.

“
E

I was having dinner with my family later that night, and I wished I had the power to nod my head and disappear. Mothers have a way of talking about inconsequential things, like eating your vegetables, right when your whole world is falling apart. I mean, peas? Peas? Would peas get me Jake back? I mashed a whole smattering of them with the back of my fork, and then choked them down. Nope. Didn’t help. My life was still a heartbreaking episode of a romantic television show.

I sighed and looked around, trying not to yell at my brother even though he was talking about his ice-hockey team as if anyone in the world cared about how many goals he had to score to break the Willow Hill Bantam League record.

At least the house was warm. It was so cold outside, this was the first time I’d felt my toes all day. It was depressing that I was counting being able to feel my toes as a positive thing. I’d sunk so low that I now looked to the fact that I had basic shelter as a silver lining.

In winter, we always ate in our kitchen, a large, pine-paneled room with a wooden island in the middle of it. Next to the table were three floor-to-ceiling glass doors that led out onto a huge deck, a deck my father said was the only reason he agreed to build the house in the first place. In summer, we ate outside around a pine table that was also made by my dad. In the dead of winter, like now, when there was barely any sunlight, we’d sit inside and I’d pass most of our family dinners staring outside at the pine trees and trying to make out the shapes of the mountain in the background.

There was a baby deer and her momma in our yard just now, grazing. That was a positive, yes? God. I was going to start counting the fact that I was breathing as a good thing.

“Look! A deer!” Brian exclaimed, and pointed at the window. When my father and mother turned to look, Brian snuck a handful of peas into the mouth of our shaggy brown dog, Bear. I pushed my food around my plate absent-mindedly.

“Jessie. The food goes in your mouth,” my father pronounced. I looked up to find that he was looking at me. “You’re a growing girl. Eat.”

My father is a typical Alaskan. He’s huge, like, six five and burly. He’s got a beard that used to be really shaggy until my mother made him start trimming it. He always wears flannel and denim and baseball caps. And he’s real outdoorsy. He loves to fish and fly his plane and hike and build things. And he hates it when I’m depressed. He says that he can’t handle sad girls in his house.

“She’ll eat when she’s hungry, Bart,” my mother said. “Eat,” she commanded me.

Brian assumed that my parents were too concerned with my eating habits to notice if he fed another handful of peas to the dog.

“Hey!” I pointed at him on purpose to rat him out. He threw his arms up in anger.

“Brian! Go wash your hands, right now!”

My brother did what my mother said. While he was in the kitchen, noisily sloshing water around the sink and making bombing noises—he was pretending that the soap dispenser was an airplane and his hands were the target—my mother turned her laserlike gaze on me.

“Jessie is going to the Northern Lights dance with Will Parker,” she said, staring at me but talking to my father.

“Mom!” I shouted at her. I wasn’t surprised that she knew this. I hadn’t told her, but my mother was omniscient. She knew everything.

My dad stared at me. “Really? What about the pretty kid from the States?”

I threw my fork down with a clatter. “Dad,” my voice sounded really whiny, even to me, “Jake’s not
pretty
and he’s from Alaska.”

My dad widened his eyes in annoyed disagreement. He didn’t consider Juneau to be part of Alaska, because it was so close to the mainland and because he claimed all the people who lived down there were soft and couldn’t hack it in the wilds of the north.

“Bart,” my mother said in a singsong voice. When my father looked at her, she drew a finger across her neck a few times, to signal to him to let it drop. Even though she was the one who brought it up.

“Mom, I can see you.”

“Well, I’m just saying we don’t have to talk about this.”

“There are no secrets at this table,” my father said as he popped a large piece of steak in his mouth. Just then a large thudding sound came from the kitchen sink, punctuated by my brother’s screeching yell.

“Brian! Clean that up!” My mother shouted, before she could even see what he’d done. She got up to inspect the damage in the kitchen.

“Think he broke anything?” my father asked me.

“Hopefully his face,” I pouted, still pushing peas around my plate.

“Tell me.”

I sighed and looked at my dad without lifting my head from my hand. “It’s nothing.”

My father looked at me and didn’t say anything.

“Just that Jake is going to the dance with another girl,” I mumbled.

He again didn’t say anything and looked anxiously toward my mother, who was still in the kitchen. He talked a good game about no secrets, but heart-to-hearts with me made him nervous. “Annie!”

“Give me two seconds, Bart.”

I started laughing. “Dad, you can handle a bear, but you can’t handle talking to your own daughter?”

He swallowed and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Okay.” He folded his hands and placed them in his lap and turned toward me.

“Yeah? You want to give this a crack?”

My father nodded. “You don’t scare me.”

“Okay,” I said, smiling for the first time since I’d been home. “Let’s say you wanted a new, um,
airplane.
”

My father looked at me like one of us was an idiot. “A new
airplane
.” He nodded, understanding that I wasn’t talking about airplanes.

“Right. You want a new airplane. Before you got that new airplane, wouldn’t you tell the old airplane that you were getting a new airplane?”

“Would I tell the old airplane?”

“You know what I mean!”

My father took a deep breath and looked into the kitchen. I could tell he was desperate for my mother to return. “Um, I don’t talk to my airplanes.”

“Dad. First of all, I’ve heard you talk to your airplanes.” This was true. He tended to baby-talk them while he flew. “But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

Now he began slicing his steak into large pieces that were only bite-sized to a man as big as my dad. “Can you just tell me what we’re talking about?”

I sighed. I didn’t want to have to admit to my dad that I might have been dumped. “Forget it.”

My father again looked nervously to the kitchen. “Um. You go to the dance with Will Parker. He’s a good kid. Forget that other softy.”

I just looked at him. He widened his eyes and grinned, then patted me on the cheek. “Don’t tell me your old dad can’t handle your problems.”

After dinner I was lying on my bed, listening to a depressing playlist of songs that Erin had emailed. She’d said that they would make me feel better, but so far they were making me feel sadder. The sound of the female singer wailing into the microphone, in fact, made me want to do myself serious harm.

Normally my bedroom was a cozy sanctuary. Our house was a three-floor cabin, and my room was on the very top floor. The ceiling sloped down on one side and met the wall at about five and a half feet. This was where Dad built me a desk and a matching bookcase. Most of the walls were made of wood, but there was one wall painted peach, and I had hung jewelry and posters and pictures of several national parks on it. I had a rocking chair and a beanbag chair and a big queen-sized bed. It was a room to be proud of. Erin’s room was half this big, and Abby had to share with her little sister. This was why they spent most of their free time here, unless we were at Snow Cones pigging out on ice cream or at the resort trying to stay out of Mean Agnes’s line of vision.

Right now I felt anything but cozy. I rolled over onto my stomach and reached for my laptop, which was on the floor. I hit the
MUTE
button quickly to stop the caterwaul of despair, and then picked up the computer, rolled back over, and balanced it on my lap.

Breathing deeply, I opened up my Jake file. There were pictures of our trip to Denali, pictures of our many ski adventures, pictures of us riding on the back of Mr. Winter’s dogsled. My favorite, which I’d printed out and put in a frame on my nightstand, was of the two of us standing at the top of Mount Crow. We’d spent the day hiking around, and just as the sun began to set, he’d asked a passerby to take our picture. Behind our smiling, laughing faces was a sky full of bright orange and pink prettiness. Jake’s arm was around me and his head was bent toward mine so that the tips of our hats were touching.

I don’t know what possessed me, but I suddenly leaped from my bed. My laptop fell crashing to the floor. I ran to my closet and flung the door open, surveying the clothes within. There were racks of flannel shirts and thick wool sweaters beside corduroy pants in every color imaginable. I thought about Sabrina and what her closet probably looked like. There was likely no
flannel
in it. I bet Evie didn’t even own flannel.

Well, I couldn’t transform myself into a fashion icon. There was no time. I pulled down a soft baby blue cashmere sweater my father had bought me in Seattle, and then searched for the newest, darkest, cleanest jeans I could find. Then I went to my mom’s closet and searched for the pair of black boots that she told me I could never wear because they were unseemly for a teenage girl. I shoved the boots into a backpack, hoping that they would retain their shape. I brushed my hair until it shone, and then plugged in my curling iron and worked on it until there were wavy pieces framing my face. I put on lip gloss and some mascara and a pair of earrings I never wore because they pulled on my ears and kind of hurt.

Stepping back, I surveyed myself in the antique, full-length mirror that sat in a wooden stand my father made, and took a breath. I actually looked pretty good, and that was without the boots.

I reached for a scarf and wrapped it around my neck. I’d be forgoing a coat; I didn’t have one that didn’t make me look like I was nine years old or a truck driver from the Arctic Circle.

It wasn’t until I’d jumped from my window onto the roof, and then landed in the backyard with only Bear seeing me, that I really committed to sneaking out of my house. And it wasn’t until I was walking along the path from my house to the main road that led into town that I decided where I was going.

Staring at those pictures, the ones of me and Jake, I realized that I deserved more than this. I deserved a conversation at least. That’s what my mother would have demanded. If my dad suddenly showed up at our house with another woman, she’d demand answers!

I shoved my hands in my pockets and raised my shoulders to brace against the wind, laughing at the idea of my dad ever doing that. First of all, he was my dad, but also, he was terrified of my mother. He’d never do
anything
that would upset her.

I kept walking. The boots were pinching my toes, and as it had started snowing slightly, I was having a hard time getting any traction. I thought longingly of my real boots, which were currently in my backpack, hidden in the bushes by the turnoff to Old Man Jones’s yurt. I also thought longingly of my coat, which was in my closet doing me no good. In my room, planning to brave the elements for style seemed like a good idea. Out here, where it was windy and snowy and there was hardly any moonlight, it didn’t seem so smart.

But what could I do? I wanted answers and I deserved them. So what if it was almost ten o’clock at night? So what if I was going to get frostbite and likely lose a couple of fingers? So what? What was all this in the face of lost love?

When I got to the main street in town, I veered to the left, and cut across the parking lot of the Mountain Diner. This was the quickest route to the edge of the resort where the cabins were, but as soon as I stepped into the lamp-lit lot, I realized what a mistake it was to come this way. Will, Jay, and Cam were huddled around the back of Jay’s pickup truck, loading in their skis and snowboards. Sabrina lounged against the back bumper and from all the way on the other side of the lot, I could tell that she was whining at Cam. I took a deep breath and tried to hide in the shadows. It wasn’t that I was afraid of them, but I really didn’t feel like hearing about it from Sabrina.

But after two steps I was overtaken by a sneezing fit. It had been a matter of time. My nose had been getting progressively runnier as I walked, but God hated me sometimes and that’s why I started sneezing in front of everybody.

Will, whose back had been to me, turned to find the source of the noise. Sabrina pointed in my direction and laughed as Stephanie and Hannah huddled around her and began whispering furiously in her ears.

“Is that my date?” Will called across the lot. I wanted to drop dead of embarrassment. But instead of fleeing the scene, I waved my hand in the air, and said, “Hey,” before continuing on.

“Whitman!” Will pushed his board into the truck and came running for me. I had no choice but to stop.

“What’s up?” I asked him.

As he approached me, I could see his expression turn from relaxation to mild confusion. “Where’s your coat?”

“Um, uh. Home,” I responded lamely.

“You visiting Erin? She’s still behind the desk. Mean Agnes caught her throwing away the beef jerky from the gift shop, so she’s working extra to cover the cost. Like resort detention.”

I looked toward the resort and then back at Will, trying to decide whether or not to admit what I was up to. But lying was too much trouble, so I faced him, wrapping my arms around me to keep warm. “Hey, have you seen Jake around tonight?”

“Ah,” he said, getting it. “Nope, not on the slopes anyway, and he wasn’t in there.” He gestured to the diner. Sabrina and the Minions eyed me suspiciously from over by Will’s truck.

“Oh, okay. Well, cool. I’ll see you, Will, and listen, thanks for, you know, the ball, and everything. If you change your mind, it’s no big deal.”