Spy Ski School (17 page)

Since my lessons had ended before the lifts closed, Mike had agreed to meet me for one last run at the end of the day. (
To give us some time, Erica had told him she needed an hour to change and do her hair before she met up with him for another ice-skating date.) We had taken the gondola up to Eagle's Nest Ridge and were now coming down a wide intermediate run called “Simba.” (Why anyone had named a ski run in the Colorado Rockies after the Swahili word for “lion” was something no one could explain to me.) It was the toughest run I'd ever attempted, a huge challenge for me—while it was so easy for Mike, he was skiing backward down it. This allowed him to talk to me as we went.

“Actually,” I said, “I need advice about something besides skiing.”

“Cool,” Mike said. “Because, to be honest, you're skiing's coming along great. You've got a lot of natural talent for this.”

“I do?” I asked, getting distracted from the topic once again. I couldn't help it. In my entire life, Mike had never given me a compliment like that. Well, he
had
, but I knew he hadn't really meant any of the others. With those, he was merely being a good friend and trying to bolster my spirits, like when he said “You're getting a lot better at basketball” after he'd just creamed me in a game of one-on-one. Or “You've got a great swing” after I'd just whiffed at thirty straight baseballs in the batting cages.

This was different, though. I could tell Mike was being honest, which meant a lot to me.

I'd
pushed myself hard in my ski lessons that day, determined to improve as quickly as possible. Woodchuck had been impressed enough to put me at the top of the class. (Well, not quite the top. Jawa and Chip were the best skiers, but then, they had been good to start with. I could tell it was driving them crazy to have to keep pretending to be beginners when they could have been off skiing the fun runs like Mike all day.) I had gone from the beginner's wedge turn (known as “making a piece of pizza” because of the angle you formed with your skis) to the more advanced turn, where I kept my skis parallel to each other (known as “making french fries.”) This allowed me to go faster and take on tougher runs.

“Keep going like this,” Mike said, “and you'll be able to ski almost anything by the end of the week.” He skidded to a halt with a deft spin.

I stopped right next to him. We were now perched at a lip where the run got steeper. The entire Vail Valley was spread out far below us, while low-slung gray clouds covered the mountaintops not far above our heads. It looked like someone had installed a ceiling over the earth.

“Looks like snow,” Mike said eagerly. “I heard we might get twelve inches tonight.”

“Is that good?”

“No. It's
great
. If we get a foot of fresh powder, it's gonna
be epic tomorrow.” Mike shifted his gaze from the clouds to me. “So, what do you need advice about?”

“Jessica.”

“Ah! You have chosen wisely, my friend. She's cute. And loaded.”

“And into
you
,” I pointed out.

“Oh.” Mike seemed genuinely upset. “Sorry about that. I got that vibe, but I also sensed she might like
both
of us. I thought maybe she'd shift to you once I took off with Sasha.”

“She didn't. Instead, she got all annoyed and she's been cold to me ever since.”

I had tried to talk to Jessica plenty of times during ski lessons that day, but she hadn't been very interested. The sweet, approachable girl I'd met on the first day had been replaced by a sullen loner. What made everything even stranger was that Erica—who was usually the sullen loner—was stuck pretending to be nice and friendly all day for Jessica's sake. It felt like the two of them had switched brains.

“Well, now,” Mike said confidently, “that doesn't mean she's not into you at all. She might just be embarrassed by the idea of making an obvious rebound to you.”

“You really think so?”

“She
was
awfully friendly to you at first, right? When I found you two in the gondola, it looked like you were getting along great.”

“We were.”

“So, there you go: She likes you. I think we can still get you back in the game.”

“You do? That's awesome! Thanks!”

“And I only need one thing from you in return.”

“Oh,” I said, growing concerned. I assumed Mike wanted my help getting closer to Erica in some way—and I was going to have to give it, no matter how much I didn't want to. “What is it?”

Mike raised his ski goggles, then fixed me with a hard stare. “Tell me the truth about this school you're going to.”

This caught me by surprise so badly, I pulled away from Mike, lost my balance, and fell on my butt. Which then made it very hard to pretend like nothing was wrong. I gave it my best shot anyhow. “What are you talking about?”

“You said you were coming out here on a class trip. So where's your class?”

“They're all in different lessons from me.”

“Oh, come on!” Mike snapped. “Give it a rest, will you? I'm not an idiot.”

“I know that. . . .”

“Then stop treating me like one. You're not out here doing snowpack research. I want to know what's really going on. And don't give me that garbage about you being a human guinea pig.”

“
You
were the one who guessed I was a human guinea pig,” I pointed out.

“Yeah. That's why I know it's garbage. And you actually played along. No one would ever willingly admit to being a human guinea pig! Not unless they were trying to cover up something else that they couldn't admit to!”

“That's not true,” I said, struggling back to my feet.

“You're training to be a spy, aren't you?” Mike asked.

He caught me so off guard, I promptly fell over again. This time I made a valiant attempt to cover my surprise, laughing like this was the funniest thing I'd ever heard. “C'mon, Mike! That's crazy. You said it yourself the other day: I'd be the worst spy of all time.”

“I was trying to get a rise out of you so you'd admit the truth.”

I looked around the ski run nervously, worried someone else might be listening in on our conversation. Luckily, it was late in the afternoon and most other skiers had already gone in for the day. Those still out on the slopes were a good distance away and focused on getting down the mountain.

“Being a spy explains everything,” Mike continued, ticking things off on his gloved fingers. “Your strange behavior. The commandos around your school. How you could beat up Trey Patterson and three other guys. Plus, when I told a bunch of cute girls that you were training to be a spy, you denied it.”

“How on earth does that prove I'm a spy?” I asked.

“The only reason a thirteen-year-old boy would deny he was training to be a spy in front of three cute girls is if he actually
was
training to be a spy. Anyone else would have totally lied about it.”

“I'm not training to be a spy,” I said.

“There!” Mike cried. “You're doing it again!”

I struggled back to my feet again. “If you're going to take my denial of training to be a spy as proof that I'm actually training to be a spy, then if I say I
am
training to be a spy, won't that be proof that I'm
not
training to be a spy?”

Mike paused a moment to make sense of that, then said, “It's different with me. I'd know if you were telling the truth.”

I glanced around the ski run again. I now had the eerie sensation that we were being watched. None of the other skiers were paying any attention to us—but when I looked toward a grove of aspen trees to my right, I thought I caught a glimpse of something moving among them. However, whatever it was seemed to disappear the moment I looked that way.

“Come on,” Mike pleaded. “I know there's probably a ton of rules against admitting this, but I'm your best friend. It's not cool to lie to your best friend. And you've been lying to me for months.” He then fixed me with a mournful, wide-eyed stare.

It suddenly started to snow. Hard. Like the clouds had ripped open and everything was falling out of them. Big, wide flakes came down in sheets. The grove of aspens—and whoever might have been watching us from it—vanished behind the white curtain. The snow made the world quieter, too. It swallowed up the conversations of all the skiers near us, meaning that they would have trouble hearing anything I said too.

If I was ever going to tell Mike the truth, this seemed like as good a place as any to do it.

And I was tired of lying to him. It wasn't simply because it made me feel like a bad friend. It was because he already
knew
. Like Mike had said, he wasn't an idiot. He'd stumbled upon too many things that were too hard to explain away, and the more lies I piled up on top of one another, the worse things would get.

And yet I lied to him anyhow. I'd been sworn to secrecy; if I spilled the beans without permission, I could be expelled from school. And kicked out of the CIA. And Erica would never talk to me again. And, for all I knew, Cyrus might order a hit on Mike and me. So I looked Mike right in the eye, doing my best to seem believable, and sold the lie as hard as I could. “For the last time: I. Am. Not. A. Spy.”

Mike held my gaze for a moment, then huffed in disgust. “Fine. Be that way. Some friend you are.” With that,
he stabbed his poles into the ground, starting down the hill.

“Wait!” I yelled, unable to hide my panic. I didn't want Mike upset with me—and I didn't want him to strand me up on the mountain, either. I still hadn't solved my problems with Jessica—and I wasn't sure I could get back down without him.

Mike skidded to a stop a few feet down the slope. “What?”

“I still need help . . . ,” I began.

“You're unbelievable,” Mike sneered. “First you lie to me—and then you still ask for a favor?”

“I'm not lying,” I lied.

“Whatever.” Mike looked like he was about to start downhill again but couldn't bring himself to ditch me. He groaned and turned back. “Fine. I'll help you. Because that's what friends do. Even when their friends are being jerks. If you want to get back in with Jessica, just make her jealous of you.”

“How?”

“Have Sasha act interested in you. Jessica's already annoyed at her. If she thinks Sasha likes
you
and not me, she'll shift right back to you again.”

“Are you sure?”

“No,” Mike said pointedly. “I'm not sure of anything. Not even who my friends are.” With that, he turned and shot downhill, vanishing into the snow.

“Mike!” I yelled after him. “Don't leave me here!”

There was no answer. The snow was coming down even harder now. I was surrounded by white. There still might have been other skiers close by—or an enemy lurking in the trees next to the run—but I couldn't see any of them. I was all alone.

I called for Mike a few more times, but heard nothing. So I angled my ski tips at each other, making a piece of pizza, and pushed forward.

It turned out, skiing in fresh powder was much harder than skiing the groomed runs I'd been on so far. I promptly pitched forward, snapped out of my skis, and face-planted in the snow.

It was going to be a long way down.

Lionshead Village

Vail, Colorado

December 28

1800 hours

It took me more than
an hour to get down the mountain.

I wiped out in every way possible. I had slips, skids, slides, stumbles, tumbles, sprawls, splats, topples, crumples, and collapses. I had little falls where I landed on my rear and big ones where I ended up somersaulting down the slope, shedding ski gear the whole way. The falling snow was so thick, I could barely see anything in front of me until I was about to run into it—and thus, I ran into plenty: two ski-lift
poles, four fellow skiers, and six trees. At one point, I somehow veered onto a mogul run, which was so difficult to traverse, it seemed as though SPYDER might have designed it. Instead of being nice and smooth, it was full of tiny hills; it was like trying to ski over a herd of Galápagos tortoises. I fell over and over and over again. I ended up with snow in my jacket, my gloves, my ears, my nose, and—by far the worst—down my pants. There were a dozen times when I wanted to simply chuck my skis into the woods and just walk the rest of the way down the mountain.

But I didn't.

I stuck it out, figuring out what mistakes I'd made and correcting them, pushing myself harder and harder. And I improved. It was baptism by fire—or ice, really. I got better at keeping my skis parallel and started to make tighter turns. Every now and then, I'd link two or three turns together, carving through the powder like a pro, and it would feel absolutely amazing.