Snow in Love (6 page)

“
J

I was facing a full-length reflection of me in Abby’s ball gown, but all I could see in my bedroom mirror was little Madison Reid repeating, over and over, the phrase:
You broke up with her.

“Jessie! Hello?” I felt a sharp jab in my ribs.

“Huh?” I turned to see Erin and Abby staring at me.

“Don’t keep Abby in suspense. Look at her. She’s about to faint.”

Erin was right. Abby was pale from holding her breath. She thought I hated the dress!

“Oh, Abby, I’m sorry.” I turned back to the mirror and took in the sight.

I looked like a real, live fairy-tale princess. If you excluded the sadness in my eyes and the pasty white Alaskan skin tone, then I was prettier than I’d ever been, even if I seemed to be trapped in a prison of white, gauzy netting.

“So?” Abby’s nervous face appeared behind mine in the mirror. You couldn’t see her body, though, because of all the lace.

“
I
think you look like you got eaten by a fabric monster,” Erin said matter-of-factly from the rocking chair in the corner of my room. On her lap was the thickest book I’d ever seen anyone attempt to read.

“Erin!” I said, trying to cut off her bluntness. “I like it. It’s really, um—”

“Lacy,” Erin stated.

Abby’s feelings didn’t seem to be hurt. Rather, she seemed to take our comments in stride. She walked around the whole of me, which wasn’t easy. I seemed to be two yards wide, five feet of which was lace. “I guess I went overboard with the skirt.” She giggled softly as she scooped up layers of the white fabric in her hand. “I couldn’t help it. It’s so soft and pretty!” She threw the fistfuls of fabric up, and the layers settled back down around my legs like newly fallen snow.

“Don’t worry, Jess,” she said. “I’ll fix it. But you like the shape and the fabric and everything?”

I did. I looked like I belonged in a Disney cartoon. The dress had two-inch-wide strappy sleeves and a tight-fitting bodice that Abby was going to decorate with sparkly sequins. And then the skirt, once it was trimmed a little, would cascade around me. It was exactly what we had envisioned: a dress to make a girl cry. When I walked into the dance wearing this, Sabrina would have absolutely no shot at winning the contest no matter what she showed up in.

“You do look pretty, Jess,” Erin said. “Even if I need sunglasses to look at you.”

Abby shook her head and pointed at Erin. “You’re next. I’m making you something white and girly.”

Erin snorted. “You’ll have to chain me down to get me to wear it.”

In days gone by, I’d crack a joke about getting Will Parker to chain Erin down. But something kept me from it. I didn’t think it was appropriate now in light of the fact that he was taking me to the dance, and by all appearances, helping me to make Jake jealous. Not that a boy who’d broken up with you could
be
jealous. I shook my head to clear that thought and peered at myself in the mirror again. “Are we done now?” I asked Abby sadly.

“Yeah, you can take it off.”

She unzipped the back of the dress and helped me out of it. I put on my real clothes and then flung myself onto my bed, scooting over to where my headboard met the wall. Stretching my legs out in front of me, I reached for the teddy bear that I’d had since I was three. My father had brought it back for me after one of his flights, and even though I was getting too old for such things, Teddy made me feel calmer when things seemed hard to figure. I was lucky that I had two such good friends who didn’t think I was a baby for having a stuffed animal. If Sabrina ever knew about it, there’d be no end to my torment.

There was a knock on the door. I shouted, “Go away,” thinking it was Brian. The door opened anyway.

“You’ve got company, Jessie,” my mother said, holding a tray with four steaming mugs on it. As Abby and Erin looked at me with expressions of joy, I stashed Teddy under my covers fast as lightning, even though Jake had seen Teddy many times. Perhaps it was these babyish trappings that were giving him second thoughts about me. “I brought some hot chocolate for you.”

“Thanks, Mrs. W,” Will Parker said as he barged in, taking a cup from the tray without missing a step. My heart dropped into my feet. Will Parker, the king of Willow High, was in
my
bedroom. Will Parker!

“Erin? Abby?” my mother called to them, and the girls ran for the hot drinks.

“Will, hey,” I said, making my voice sound as normal as I could. My mother handed me my own cup. She gave me the “no boys are supposed to be in your room” look. Erin picked up on it right away.

“Mrs. Whitman, did you see the dress that Jessie is wearing to the Northern Lights Ball?” Abby held it up for my mother to see. Will did a double take as he took in the sight of all the skirt.

“She’s fixing it,” I said a little too loudly.

“Very pretty, Abby, you have a real gift,” my mother said.

“Thanks, Mrs. Whitman. Will’s here so I can get his measurements for his tuxedo.”

My mother turned to me. “Okay, well, I’m
right downstairs
if you need anything.”

Will piped up, “This is delicious hot chocolate, ma’am.”

My mother looked at him evenly, muttered, “Um-hmm,” and then squinted at me before walking out of the room, quite deliberately leaving the door open.

I shook my head. “Great. Ten bucks says my brother is being paid right now to spy on us.”

Will walked to where Abby was sitting, holding a tape measure. “No worries. He’s a good kid.”

I hated when people who didn’t have little brothers referred to Brian as a “good kid.” He wasn’t a good kid. He was a rambunctious filth machine, who I didn’t let into my room.

I stretched out on my bed and sipped my hot chocolate. I’d wager that about thirty girls in my school would have given their skis to have Will Parker in their house. And here he was in my room, standing in front of my mirror, letting Abby wrap his arms and legs in a tape measure. I had to admit, it
was
a little thrilling. I wished we could record this moment and email it to Sabrina.

Abby must have been as awed by Will’s presence as I was, because she caught Erin’s and my eyes behind Will’s back and dropped her jaw wide in shock that Will was there and cooperating.

Erin shook her head. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the wall.

“The tux won’t look like that, will it?” He gestured toward the heap of taffeta and netting lying on the floor.

Erin said, “God, I hope not.”

“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

Three pairs of eyes turned on me.

“What? I’m just saying.”

“He’s going, and I don’t want to hear about it again,” Erin said, finally lifting the book from her lap and moving over to where the two of them stood in front of the mirror.

Will caught my eye and winked. “No worries. I like giving Abby a reason to put her hands all over me.” Abby turned bright red. “Did you tell ’em how good an actor I am?”

Will stared at me in the mirror and I lowered my head. I think I was blushing. “No, I didn’t.”

“Erin, sign me up for an Oscar. We made that Jake kid totally jealous in the lodge, right, Whitman?”

“Er, right.” I wanted to sink into my covers. Erin stared at me as if I had six heads.

“Really,” she said, contemplating. “How interesting.”

“So you didn’t, um,
talk
?” Abby asked me, while wrapping some of the taffeta around Will’s legs.

“Um,
no.
We didn’t.”

Erin cleared her throat and asked Will, “Have you ever accidentally kissed a girl?”

I officially wanted to die.

Will caught Erin’s eye in the mirror and answered with a raised eyebrow, “Accidentally? No.” He held out his arms so that Abby could measure them. “Have you girls been having kissing ‘accidents’?”

Abby said, “Jessie might have.”

Will feigned a look of hurt and clutched at his heart. “You’re going out with me and kissing other guys?” I threw a pillow at him. Abby was shocked at my boldness and I have to admit that I was too. Will had a way of bringing things out in people, things that they didn’t know they had in them.

He caught the pillow with ease, and then, without a trace of a smile or a hint of laughter in his voice, said, “Jessie, if I kissed you it wouldn’t be by accident. Trust me.”

I don’t know if he meant to phrase it that way, but I had never felt so red-faced in my whole life—maybe because he’d used my first name. Abby dropped the tape measure. Erin smirked like an idiot.

I took a deep breath and told myself to get a grip. He was talking about boys in general, and in that respect, I really wanted to believe him. But if that were true, if Jake had kissed me on purpose, because he wanted to, then why had he been so cold to me in the ski lodge? Why’d his family think he’d broken up with me? Did you just go around kissing girls you were broken up with?

I thought for a moment about asking Will this question, but decided not to. Abby was holding my dress up for him and he was telling her that my skirt looked like he could ski down it.

I

When I wasn’t at the resort, I’d taken to hiking along the trail in the woods behind the cabins. I normally walked this route even when Jake wasn’t in town, because the track wound through a gorgeous section of woods. You could hear the birds sing and see ice glistening on the branches. But now that I was hoping for “run-ins,” I made these walks because the trail passed his house. I must have walked by the Reid cabin ten times, and only once did Jake magically appear. He stood on their porch, drinking what was probably a cup of coffee. He was bundled up in baggy ski pants and a huge, fur-lined jacket; it was these kinds of clothes that made my father think he was soft. I called his name. He put his hand in the air, not a wave really but definitely an acknowledgment that I was there, and then hightailed it back into his cabin.

The only time he didn’t run when he saw me was when he came into Snow Cones. Evie, it turned out, liked herself some ice cream. The first time the two of them came into the shop, I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I would think that
my
family’s shop would be off-limits for
their
daytime rendezvous, but apparently Evie’s desire for sweets trumped his desire for avoidance. Each time, she’d order vanilla peppermint and he’d have strawberry. The first visit, I put whipped cream on his in the shape of a heart. He shook his head at me, and I raised my shoulders as if to say, “Whoops!” After that he specifically ordered his with
no
whipped cream.

After three days of this, I decided that I’d had enough. I couldn’t keep living like this, hoping that his kiss had meant something but knowing by all the evidence, especially the “you broke up with her” comment, that it probably hadn’t. The problem was that while I had even a shred of hope, I had
hope.

On the fourth day, I was determined to cut work and find Jake, and if I couldn’t, then I’d have to show up outside his window again that night.

Unfortunately my mother didn’t seem too thrilled with my plan of ditching work. It was either Snow Cones or babysitting. I chose babysitting, something normally on the bottom of the list of things I’d agree to do for my parents. But Brian was desperate to visit Mr. Winter’s new litter of puppies, and if we had anything in common, it was our love of animals. I wanted to see them too.

And honestly I needed a break from Snow Cones. I was eating too much ice cream and I needed to fit into Abby’s dress. Also, I couldn’t take any more Evie sightings.

“Hey, kids!” Mr. Winter called out to me and Brian as we walked around the side of his barn to the pen at the back. He was a big bear of a man, not quite as huge as my dad but big enough that you knew he was born here. He wore overalls with suspenders over a thermal undershirt. He had a red plaid cap on his head and was bending at the waist, petting six small yipping bundles of fur.

Brian broke out into a run and hopped over the pen fence in one fluid motion.

“Easy, big guy!”

“Can I hold ’em? Please? Please? Please?”

Mr. Winter handed him a red-coated little furball and said, “Be gentle now, they’re babies yet.” Then he walked to the pen door and opened it wide for me.

“Hi, Mr. Winter,” I said, walking to where Brian was holding the puppy. He had slid down into the mud by this point, and was talking to the baby dog as he were a general giving orders to his troops. “My mom says we’re not allowed to take one home.”

Mr. Winter laughed a great belly laugh and placed two black puppies with shiny noses into my right arm. I cuddled them against my cheek. “They’re not going anywhere yet. I think the whole lot will be my next team!”

Mr. Winter bred Iditarod dogs, and every year, with every litter, he expected that they’d all be good running dogs. He was the only man in our area to have won the Iditarod three times, and his family ran this farm the rest of the year, letting tourists pay to visit with the dogs and to walk through the makeshift museum he set up in another barn building toward the back of the estate.

“This one’s your next lead!” Brian shouted, and raised the dog he was holding over his head.

“I think you’re right!” he said. “Jessie, you two want to stay and help me with the next tour group?”

I checked my watch. Brian started jumping up and down. “Can we? Can we? Can we?”

“Oh, look, some of ’em are early.” Mr. Winter pointed to the driveway at the front of the house.

“Damn it!” Brian shouted.

“Brian!” I scolded, sounding like my mother. “I’m sorry, Mr. Winter. Brian, what is wrong with you?”

“You won’t let us stay now.”

I looked to the driveway, and sure enough, the car that had pulled in was a giant black Escalade, a car from out of town. The front door opened, and the blond goddess that was Evie descended from the passenger seat, followed by three miniature versions from the back of the car. Then, a man who wore a shiny suit and shoes that would get soaked from the snow made his way from the driver’s side and locked the door of the car with the squeaky beeping sound from his key chain. He didn’t look like any of my friends’ dads. His hair was slicked back and he had one of those little phones in his ear and his teeth were unnaturally bright. I guessed this was Evie’s father.

“Jessie! Hi!” Evie saw me and waved frantically. I didn’t say anything, just smiled halfway and nodded my head at her. She came over to the edge of the pen and leaned against it.

“Do you work
here
, too?” she asked, puzzled.

Mr. Winter answered for me. “Nope. She just stopped by with Brian to see the pups.” Then he walked out of the pen toward Evie’s dad, who still stood by his car. I noticed that after he shook his hand, Mr. Stewart wiped it on a handkerchief he produced from his pants pocket.

Two of Evie’s sisters hung back, hovering by their father, but another one, who was gaptoothed and freckly and about the same age as Brian, crowded around Evie’s legs and began hanging on her. “Tiffany, get off!” she shouted. She wrenched her hand free of the girl.

“I want to go in!” the girl said demandingly.

“Fine, go. Geez.” Evie pushed her toward the gate and the girl hopped it, like Brian had. She walked right over to Brian, who eyed her suspiciously.

“These are babies,” he said to her. “You have to be quiet and patient.”

She stuck her hands in the pockets of her rainbow-embroidered denim jacket and said, “What do you think? I’m stupid?”

Evie and I watched this exchange carefully. “Tiffany!” Evie begged. “Be nice!”

The little girl wedged herself in next to my brother and commanded, “Show me.” He looked at her sideways, then up at me for permission. I raised my shoulders in confusion. At that moment, I wouldn’t have minded if he threw a fistful of dirt at the little girl. Because that’s what I wanted to do to Evie, even though she’d always been nice to me. Going against all my brother’s tactical instincts when it came to girls, he gingerly placed the puppy in Tiffany’s lap and then picked up one of the puppy siblings and started pretending that it was attacking the others.

“Your brother’s cute,” Evie said to me.

I didn’t say anything. What I wanted to say was “Are you going to try to steal him, too?” but I didn’t. And I was a little proud of myself for my restraint.

“This place is amazing!” Evie went on. “Can you imagine living here year-round playing with puppies and dogs and deer and moose? Well, I guess you can, because you do live here year-round!”

I exhaled. Her happy tourist routine was seriously grating. “Yeah,” I said, trying to make my voice sound friendly.

Evie must’ve sensed my quietness, because she bit her lip and then said to me in an entirely different tone, “Hey, listen, I hope we can be friends, okay?”

“Huh?”

“I mean, not that you need a new friend, I know you’ve got friends, and I mean, I may not be here for long—”

“That’s right. This is just a vacation.”

“Well, actually, my dad is buying one of the cabins, the empty one near the Reids’.”

I nearly dropped the dogs I was holding. All this time, I thought that maybe this was a onetime visit, that maybe Evie would disappear from Jake’s life once this trip was over.

“So we’re going to be around more often. Which I can’t wait for.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And I was just thinking that I’d like to have some girlfriends to hang out with when I’m here.”

“Oh,” I said, dreading what was coming next.

“And you and Erin and Abby seem so cool, so, you know…I just wanted to say that I’d like to hang out with you.”

“Well, er, I mean, Erin can be kind of, um, unsure about new friends.”

Evie just looked at me. “Jessie, I know that you and Jake went out and everything.”

My face did that funny hot thing it had done when Will mentioned kissing, and I put the dogs on the ground. She said “went out.” Past tense. Which, I mean, hello? How stubborn was I that I would not acknowledge the fact that Evie was Jake’s
new girlfriend
? I didn’t say anything but I didn’t seem to need to, what with Evie’s running-at-the-mouth disorder.

“And I think it’s really cool that you guys remained friends. And I think Will is really cool, and maybe it’d break the ice if we all went out together, like a double date.”

“What? Will?”

“Yeah, you know, so that you won’t feel weird around me anymore, and then we can all be friends.”

I stared at her, unable to think of anything polite to say. It was just that I couldn’t imagine anything that would make me feel weirder than going on a date with her and Jake. Wait. Yes, I could. And that would be going on a date with Will Parker.

“You cannot, cannot do that.” Abby emphasized her point by slamming her fist onto the table.

It was later the same day, and I had called an emergency meeting of the troops to discuss whether or not to double-date.

“Whoa. Ab. Watch it there,” Erin said, kidding our gentle friend who rarely displayed such a fiery temper.

We were at the Mountain Diner, the closest thing to a restaurant in Willow Hill. The diner wasn’t on the resort premises; it was in the actual downtown area, which really wasn’t much of anything. There was a post office here, and a small grocery store that looked like a house on the outside, and a hunting-and-camping/outdoor-needs store. There was also a gas station, a pharmacy, and this diner. Willow Hill didn’t have fast-food restaurants or chain stores or even a Wal-Mart. The girls and I would take a drive into Anchorage every week or so for a McNugget fix and a whirl around the aisles at the Kmart in town for kicks. And Evie thought this was such a great place! I’m pretty sure she could get McNuggets in Boise if she wanted to. I made a mental note to mention that the next time I was standing in awkward silence with her.

“I think you should go,” Erin said, taking a fry off my mostly untouched plate.

“Why exactly?” I asked both of them, wanting to know their reasons for their opposing advice.

Erin gestured that Abby should make her case first. Abby began by also taking a fry from my plate. “It’ll break your heart to have to sit there across the table and watch them all gooey-eyed over each other.”

“Abby! I can handle that. It’s nothing we haven’t seen since they got here.”

“She has some self-respect, Ab, or else she wouldn’t be all over Will Parker right now.”

“Erin!”

“What?”

“How in any way am I all over him?”

She pointed at the coat I had worn to meet them—it was rolled up in the corner of the booth, but the large, red
X
was clearly visible.

“It’s a
coat
, Erin. It’s warmer than anything I have.”

“Whatever. I respect it. He’s way cuter than Jake anyway.”

I looked at Abby out of habit, but she was looking past my shoulder to the doorway. Sabrina and Cam Brock were being shown to a table.

“Great,” Abby whispered under her breath. She then shoveled a fistful of French fries into her mouth.

“Uck,” Erin said. “You know what? We should get you a fake boyfriend too. Maybe when Jake leaves, Will can just move over to you.”

“Will’s not my fake boyfriend,” I said.

“What do you think Evie thinks? Double date. She means with you and your new boyfriend.”

I sipped a drink and thought about that.

“Besides, Jake’s totally jealous, I can tell.”

“How?”

Erin scooted closer to the table and beckoned Abby to lean in. “Okay. News. Today, when Agnes went on her break, you know, when she’s gone for like an hour and then gets back and pretends that she only went to the ladies’ room? Whatever.”

“Just, what’s the story?”

“Right. Well, I was behind the desk, and Jake came up, asking for a flyer for Mr. Winter’s farm, you know, to check the schedule for the sled rides.”

“But that makes no sense. Evie was already there.”

“I know! I didn’t think anything of this until just now. But I handed it to him and said, ‘Jessie loves those dogs.’”

“Please tell me you didn’t say that.”

“Oh, I said it.”

“Oh God.” I dropped my head into my hands.

“Anyway, I said, ‘Jessie loves those dogs,’ and he looked at me funny, and said, ‘Yeah. We took this sled ride once. I thought it might be a good thing to try again.’”

Abby and I just looked at Erin, who was grinning like she ate a whole pie in one sitting. “So? He’s thinking about you.”

I looked at Abby. “Erin, he was talking about Evie. About taking Evie.”