by Jamie Sumner
That’s it. Not much to go on. Jasmine holds her breath.
“Well?” Vij prompts.
“Ummm, the sketch is cool. Have you seen him draw before?”
Jasmine starts to shake her head no, pauses, and begins to nod rapidly. “Yes! He’s always bent over his notebook in history. I thought he was taking notes, but he’s actually terrible with the timelines. This makes much more sense! So he’s an artist,” she says dreamily, and I try not to gag.
“Also, uh, he might be in learning services, for, uh, English, so maybe don’t compare grades?” Or remark on his bad timelines in history, I think.
“I would never,” she says, and puts her hand on her heart.
“He seems to like spicy food though, so next time you’re around him, you could talk about your favorite Indian or Mexican restaurant or the hot wings in the cafeteria?” I’m kind of shooting in the dark here—trash I can handle, but dating advice? Not so much. Jasmine doesn’t seem to notice.
“Yes, perfect!”
“Does he have a girlfriend, though? Or maybe a little sister?” I ask.
“Oh, you mean the hair tie?” Jasmine says. “It’s his. Did I mention his long hair? He likes to put it up during games.” She zones out for a second—probably picturing Thomas’s long, flowing hair. I clear my throat, and she snaps out of it.
“Hugo, thank you. Really. This was amazing. Totally,” she says, and takes back the bag. And then she gives me a quick hug. I watch her walk toward the cafeteria while every single atom in my body zings. Garbology is a beautiful thing.
“How’d you know about the English stuff?” Vij asks once she’s out of earshot.
Thomas’s vocab quiz was separated out into single pages instead of stapled and double-sided, like normal. When you have extended time to finish, the teacher only gives you one sheet at a time. Cole, back home, had the same setup last year. But I’m not telling Vij any of that because I just remembered that I want to pummel him.
I shove Vij toward the cafeteria. Today they’re serving potato salad, tuna salad, chicken salad, and watermelon. Picnic food on the snowiest day of the year. We collect our food in silence, but as we get closer to our table, I can’t take it anymore. “What you pulled in math class was not cool! And I thought we swore the garbology stuff would stay a secret. How did Jasmine even find out?”
“Who says it was me who told?” Vij sets his tray next to mine and begins to pick seeds out of his watermelon.
“Come on! Of course it was you! You’ve managed to tell the whole school I’m the trash-whisperer!”
“And you just had the longest conversation with a girl you’ve ever had in your life, so don’t whine about it!” Vij says, waving his plastic fork in my face.
I grab his fork and then don’t know what to do with it. I clutch it, like a spear. Farther down the table, Em and Micah watch us whisper-yell. I’m glad the twins aren’t here to see this.
“I single-handedly made you cool and all you do is complain.”
“You made me cool?” I snort. “What are you, king of the school?”
“No. I never said that.” He folds his hands together on the table. A super-annoying picture of calm. “But you have to admit, what happened back there with Jasmine, you liked it. You liked the attention, and you liked being right.”
Em raises her eyebrows.
Of course I did. I can still feel the tingle in my arms from her hug and how she paid attention to me for something other than my size. I can’t say he’s wrong. But I’m also never going to say he’s right.
“You didn’t make me cool. Garbology made me cool. And since I’m the only one with that skill set, do the math… I made me cool.” I catch Em shaking her head out of the corner of my eye, but I don’t even care. Let her judge me. I’m just speaking the truth. “You’re the one who almost ruined it all with your gum stunt in math.”
“Come on, Hugo,” he says. “We both know that if it weren’t for me, you’d still be shuffling through the halls feeling sorry for yourself.”
I slam his fork down. “Well I guess I should say ‘thank you,’ then. For making me cool right before you get me expelled. Everyone is going to blame me for what happened in Mr. Wahl’s class!”
Vij picks his fork up, and through a huge bite of potato salad, he says “They’d have to learn your name first, cuz.”
His words squeeze my heart like a fist—a fist that wants to punch back. I shove my tray. It bangs into his with a deafening clatter. They fly off the table and land on the floor in a wet mayonnaise-y, watermelon-y heap. The room goes deathly silent, and all heads turn toward us like we’re in some zombie movie. One of the cafeteria workers begins to walk over. Em scoots as far away from us as she can get without actually switching tables. Micah, though, gets down on his hands and knees and begins to swipe at the mess with his one and only paper napkin.
Before I can decide whether to hide or help, Janitor Phil materializes out of nowhere and lays heavy hands on my and Vij’s shoulders. “You better clean every bit of this up,” he growls, “or you’ll be spending the afternoon with me, scraping scuff marks off the gym floor.” He’s got a bristly beard and smells like bleach—all signs point to “do not mess with me.” We nod.
He tosses us a roll of brown paper towels, the kind that don’t soak up anything. We begin to shovel and scoop the lumps of chicken and potato and other goo back onto our trays. We do not make eye contact. Janitor Phil watches with his arms folded. He doesn’t move until we’ve wiped the floor clean with water and patted it dry. Micah and Em watch from the sidelines as teachers order everyone else to class.
After the floor is better than we found it, Janitor Phil dismisses us to gym—from one nightmare to the next. We don’t speak to each other on our way to the locker room. As I’m changing, Andrew grins at me and whispers, “Nice one with the gum.” A few heads lift. Whispers carry. Here’s the moment. I could deny it and stay safe and out of trouble. But that would also mean going back to being what’s-his-name, the little guy. Or I can own it, the good and the bad, and possibly become what I never thought I could be—a legend. Hugo O’Connell, Master Garbologist.
I hold out a fist for Andrew to bump so everybody can see me take the credit. If I’m doing this, I’m going all in. Vij watches me from across the locker room.
* * *
When school ends, everyone races through the front doors in a rush to get out in the snow. Vij finds me by my locker.
“Uh, hey, man. I know we got into it back there.” He leans against the wall. “But you want to hang after school? I told my mom I had to stay late for the newsletter. If you want, we can sled down the hill behind the soccer field?”
This is how we apologize. It’s how it’s always been. He knocks me out of the tree he convinced me to climb and then buys me a Popsicle from the ice cream truck to make up for it. I tell his mom he lost the neon yellow scarf she gave him for Christmas and then loan him my favorite Xbox game to pass the time while he’s grounded. This is Vij saying sorry for math class and for basically calling me a helpless loser. If I wanted to say sorry for the food fight at lunch, I’d go sledding. But this is different. I’m not sorry. Because now I know what he really thinks of me. I’m his poor little cousin who couldn’t survive without him. I don’t need his pity.
“I can’t. Got plans,” I say, and yank the zipper of my bag, which is stuck on a torn sheet of paper. Vij reaches out to help, and I jerk away.
He puts his hands up in surrender, and I walk off.
* * *
Miracle of miracles, Dad showed up. When I walk down the school steps, he’s leaning against the Jeep with two pairs of skis, one extra-long and one extra-short, strapped to the top.
“Are you serious?”
He grins.
“No, really. We’re going up the mountain?”
He tosses a duffel bag at me. “Here. Your mother packed it. Dig through and make sure all your gear is there.”
I get into the Jeep and hug
the bag to me. I’m going skiing on fresh snow before the entire rest of the world. Dad just won back all his Good Dad points.
“Will they even let us on the runs?” I ask, shoving hats and hand warmers aside to hunt for my gloves.
“ ‘They’ is ‘me,’ kid, and I say we go. Check behind your seat. Are those the right size poles?”
I twist around to look behind me at the ski poles zigzagged across the back seat.
“Buckle,” Dad orders, and zooms out of the parking lot.
Mom once got pulled over for speeding, and the police officer also tried to write her up for not having me in a car seat. I was nine. When she explained that I was just really small for my age, the officer had nodded at me and said, “Little guys have it rough.” I did not nod back.
“Off we go!” Dad shouts, and hits the roundabout too fast. People lay on their horns, but he rolls down his window and gives them a friendly wave. The wind whips the flags that mark the resort entrance to the mountain.
“Hey, Dad?”
“Yeah?” He’s fiddling with the radio, eyes on the dial instead of the road. Mom hates it when he does that.
“What do you actually do?”
He finds a Beastie Boys song and cranks it up.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean for your job!” I yell over the noise.
“Well, my official title is ‘intermediate ski instructor and lift technician.’ ”
“So you teach ski lessons and grease the lift?” Wow. And for this we gave up our whole lives? But he’s grinning like I just nominated him president of the mountain.
“I get to help people be better skiers and also run analytics on the lifts to make sure they’re operating correctly so everyone stays safe. It’s the best of both worlds!” He thumps the steering wheel along with the bass. “Though your mother would argue it’s not the best use of my engineering degree.”
I silently agree. It doesn’t seem like something you’d move your family all the way across the state for.
He turns off the radio and looks at me sideways. “Did you know I made it to Eagle Scout in high school?” he asks.
“What, like the king of the Boy Scouts?”
“Pretty much. I earned my twenty-first merit badge my junior year. I can start a fire with almost anything.” He laughs.
I never made it to Boy Scout. I had to drop out at Cub level because I couldn’t do a lot of the physical challenges, being half the size of the rest of the boys in my troupe. He didn’t make it a big deal at the time, but now I wonder if he was secretly disappointed in me. I sink down in my seat.
“I loved the service badges the most, the ones I earned for good citizenship—first aid and community service,” he says now. “The Eagle Scout ceremony was on a Friday afternoon, and your grandparents couldn’t come. They both worked for the school district and couldn’t get time off. Did you know your grandma drove a bus?”
I flip the seat warmer on, off, on, off, trying to picture Grandma Rose in her Broncos sweatshirt and Keds driving a big yellow bus.
“They were excited for me, but they never really understood why I liked the Scouts so much.” He pushes up his glasses. “When I got a full scholarship to college, they expected me to do something practical that would earn a steady paycheck, like Uncle Dave with his business degree. They didn’t want us to have to work as hard as they did to provide for our families.” Dad shrugs. “So, I majored in computer engineering. But I never stopped skiing. I’d volunteer to teach other students at the university to ski in exchange for a ride out to the mountains. It’s how I met your mom, actually.”
He cracks the windows, and the cold swirls in, chasing the hot air around the car. I can’t picture Mom letting Dad teach her anything.
“The mountain is beautiful, Hugo, but it can be intimidating. When I teach people how to ski, I help them be brave. You should have seen the look on your mom’s face when she let go of my hand and skied a full run without falling. You don’t get those kinds of looks in IT work, believe me.”
I do believe him. And I can see how much happier he is. But I’m still on Grandma Rose’s side. Do your job and be an Eagle Scout on the weekends. Don’t toss your kid to the wolves just so you can “follow your bliss” or whatever.
How can I say that now, though, as Dad flashes his badge at the resort gates and the attendant waves us into Creekside? I’m about to get an all-access pass to the mountain. Free skiing on wide-open runs.
After squeezing into a spot in the Hilton’s parking garage, we lug all our gear onto the sidewalk, and I look around. I forget how different it is up here. Down below, you’ve got all your normal stuff: Kroger, Walgreens, school, traffic, neighborhoods with houses and bits of scraggly yard. Up here it’s like a Swiss village. A rich Swiss village. The streets are cobblestone and closed off to cars. The ice-skating rink is open all winter and summer. The condos have copper gutters and iron balconies and window boxes of fake wildflowers. Forget Rite Aid; the wooden sign above the drugstore reads APOTHECARY. And for just twenty bucks, you can buy a special “s’mores roasting kit” for the firepit behind the Hilton.
Dad carries the skis and I carry the bag toward the ski rental shop. At least for today, I belong here.
“That’s new.” I point to a bronze statue of a black bear near the ice-skating rink.
“Yes, they do like their upgrades,” Dad says and winks.
He scans his employee ID card to get us into the locker room at the rental place, and we change fast. We might have super-secret access to the mountain, but there’s still only about an hour of daylight left. We do the awkward robot walk in our ski boots up to the chairlift. When I clip into my skis, it feels like slipping on an old pair of shoes. I may not have made it to Eagle Scout, but at least I can ski.
While Dad’s still knocking the snow from his buckles, I push off with my poles and glide forward a foot or two. It’s so smooth. I look down at my K2s. They’re my favorite skis I’ve ever owned. Bright neon yellow with black stripes across the back. On the mountain, it doesn’t matter how small I am. In these skis, I’m uncatchable.
The lift operator says, “Hey, Sean. Got a hitchhiker?”
Dad nods. “My son, Hugo!”
“Hugo, my man!” he says, and we high-five. He yells at Dad over the sound of the lift motors: “Good powder up top, but it’s patchy lower down! Watch yourself on Strawberry Hill!” And then he slows down the lift long enough for us to hop on.
I’ve never told anyone this, but the chairlift is one of my favorite parts of skiing. Humans should not be allowed to float, suspended by nothing but a wire, hundreds of feet above ground. It’s a dare to the laws of physics.
When I was little, I’d pretend I was an explorer in search of animal tracks below. And if Mom went in early for the day, Dad and I would keep a lookout for her purple ski suit as she finished her last run. She’d shout up, “Hello, boys!” and we’d yell down, “Hello, girl!” and wave like crazy.
The setting sun turns the mountain orange as we get off at the top. With nobody else around, it feels like an alien planet. The winds whirl the fresh snow into miniature tornados along the top of the peak. They whirl across our path and hurl themselves into the trees below.
Dad turns toward me, and I see my red woolly hat reflected in the blue mirrors of his glasses. “Easy, medium, or hard?” he asks.
“Medium-hard,” I answer.
He grins. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
We push off at the same time, and the snow is soft and clean and the mountain silent except for the air whistling by my ears as we speed down the blue run. It’s smooth powder all the way down. Dad makes wide turns, slicing the first tracks across the mountain so I can follow. It’s really hard to question his life choices when this is what I get out of it.
We get five runs in before it’s too dark to tell tree from shadow. With the heater cranked on high and our noses dripping, we take our time driving home.
“D
o you remember bike-sledding?” Dad asks as we go back around the roundabout and return to the normal world—neon Subway sign, the St. Stephen’s steeple lit up by streetlights, the half-full parking lot of a Walmart.
“Of course I do.”
The Christmas when I was six, both Aunt Soniah and Uncle Dave got the flu and were too sick to travel. We couldn’t go on our annual family ski trip—the one time a year Dad takes a full week off work. Vij and all his sisters were up here, and I was stuck in Denver. It was like Christmas itself was canceled. I was moping on the couch in my pajamas on Christmas Eve when I heard a bell ringing outside and Mom told me to check the front door. Dad was on the sidewalk, straddling his bike with our old red sled tied to the back. “Get your coat!” he said. I looked back to Mom, the family safety monitor. She held out my ski coat and buckled my helmet so it wouldn’t pinch.
We rode to the coffee shop on Main Street, where Dad bought me a cider and a brownie even though we hadn’t eaten dinner yet. I spun on a stool in my pajamas and ate as slowly as possible to make it last. Then we rode back. I can still feel the bump of the sled over the ice and gravel.
“That was probably not the safest parenting move,” he says now, his cheeks as red as his hair from the cold.
“I’m surprised Mom let us do it.”
“You should have heard the fight she put up when I dragged out the bungee cord. That’s why you had to wear the reflective vest.”
“It was worth it.”
A few seconds of comfortable silence pass, and then, like a cut to commercial, Dad’s whole tone switches as he says, “Listen, Hugo. I know I haven’t been around as much as I promised I’d be.”
Understatement of the year.
“There’s always a lot to learn when you start a new job, and this one more than most. I had to get recertified in CPR, and memorize the lift procedures and the emergency protocols before the mountain officially opens. But that’s ending. I’ll be home more. We’ll find our new normal, okay?”
What was old normal? Dinner around the table would be nice. Maybe it’ll happen.
