by Claire Ray
Chapter 3
“Let’s go.” Abby tugged on the sleeve of my corduroy coat. Her face was framed in the fluff of white lining and shiny blue parka.
“No way. We’ve got to go talk to him,” Erin countered.
My cheeks burned. My insides churned. My stomach felt like it was on the ground with my toes. My eyes were tingling, not with tears, but with that same sensation I got after a long night of reading or studying or wearing glasses. And the sound of my heartbeat flooded my ears. I felt like I was stuck in time. My feet wouldn’t move, neither toward him nor away from him.
The two of them, Jake and this girl, were standing in the middle of the snowflake forest. He was mostly hidden by the large white paper flakes, but I could see her. She was tall and blond and excessively smiley. Her clothes looked expensive—she wore camel-colored pants and a pair of UGGs. I self-consciously crossed my arms to hide my own shabby-looking olive-green corduroy coat. I felt suddenly the same way I did at school in the presence of girls like Hannah and Stephanie, like I had missed a memo on how to dress.
“Come on, Jess,” Abby said gently.
“Abby! She can’t run!”
It was Sabrina who finally shook me from the wrinkle in time I was experiencing. I don’t know if she and her henchmen were following me or what, but they appeared just in time to witness my shame. Sabrina stood right next to me, and I could feel her laughter in every corner of my body. “Wow, who’s that, Jessie?”
“Shut up, Sabrina,” Erin commanded, and pulled me away from her. I could hear the three of them cackling as they walked away and this only added to my feeling of confusion.
Then Jake clutched the girl’s hand, and suddenly all the confusion I felt transformed instantaneously to sharp, bright anger. I couldn’t help it. There Jake was, right here in Willow Hill, smiling. Cavorting. HOLDING HANDS. Here I’d been spending hours convincing myself that there was nothing wrong, and the whole time, there was a big something wrong! And it was BLOND!
Jake dropped the girl’s hand and bent to pack together a medium-sized ball of snow. As he straightened, the dimples that he gets when he smiles were clearer than anything. Suddenly I was moving forward steadily, like a grizzly bear stalking for fish. Erin and Abby were right behind me, I could sense them. All around us little kids were shrieking and streaking through the snowflakes, which hung at different heights, some waist high, some right at head level. I pushed my way through, all the while looking at Jake and this girl.
Jake threw the snowball in her direction and she dove headlong into a thick section of paper snowflakes. He stooped to pack together another snowball and chased her. They bobbed and weaved through the flakes, throwing snowballs at each other and laughing. The girl was beautiful. Striking. Her eyes were green and her skin shone a bright copper color. This was something you never saw in Alaska, a girl with this kind of tan. This said to me that she wasn’t from here, and then I remembered what had been written down in the book—Boise, Idaho. They had sun enough there to tan you like this? I was being silly; you could get a tan everywhere, even in downtown Willow Hill. Mean Agnes’s niece ran a tanning salon. My mother went there once and came back looking like a burnt cookie.
I marched forward and nearly lost my head to a snowflake. As I pushed it out of the way, I got a nasty paper cut on the palm of my right hand. “Ouch!” I tore the snowflake down. I recognized it—it was the one my brother, Brian, had made, complete with spikes. Great. Watching him make it, I had known that somebody would pay the price for his typical twelve-year-old fascination with warfare. I looked quickly behind us, hoping that Sabrina was within throwing distance.
Erin said quietly, “What are you going to do?”
Abby chimed in, “I think we should go.”
I kept walking, until there was only three feet between me and them. And then I stood there, quietly observing their glee. I didn’t know the answer to Erin’s question, I hadn’t thought about what I wanted to accomplish. I guess I just wanted to see for myself that it was indeed Jake and not some evil twin who had taken over his body.
The two of them didn’t notice me right away. They kept hurling snowballs at each other and giggling and shouting, until Erin said out loud, “Um, hello!”
This got their attention. The girl turned toward us, with a confused look on her face. A snowball dropped out of Jake’s hand as he recognized the sound of Erin’s voice. His dimples disappeared and he bit his lip. This was what he did when he got nervous. Like before the two of us would race down the double-black-diamond hill at the resort. Or the time we were hiking and came right into the path of a moose and her baby.
“Hey,” I finally managed. As soon as I spoke, half the steam I had gathered in my march to where they stood leaked out of me. I normally wasn’t a very angry sort of girl, and now that I was this close to him, I started to feel things other than anger. I wanted to talk to him. And despite everything, I had missed him, and there was a part of me that was really glad that he was here.
Jake didn’t say anything. He just looked at me. My eyes widened and I laughed a little bit. Abby moved in closer to my side.
Erin was the one who broke the tableau. “I’m Erin, and this is Jessie and Abby,” she said to the blond, green-eyed girl.
“Hiya!” the girl exclaimed sweetly, brushing her snowy hands down the front of her gorgeous, green, flower-embroidered coat. It looked like it cost about five times as much as my coat did. “Are you guys friends of Jakey’s?” She looked at him for an answer.
“Jakey?” Erin snorted.
I shot her a look both to quiet her and also to confirm that referring to him as “Jakey” was completely ridiculous. I’d never heard anybody call him that, even his mother.
But he didn’t say anything to correct her. Instead he took a giant step away from her. I could hear the sound of crunching snow beneath his boots. He mumbled, “Yeah. This is Abby and Erin. And Jessie.” That last part, the part about me, he completely swallowed into his throat. You could barely hear him. I stared at him hard, while he studied something interesting on the ground.
“We introduced ourselves already,” Erin snapped. He looked at her quickly, then turned his head away again.
I don’t know if the girl even noticed how awkward the moment was, or how mean Erin sounded, or how quiet Abby was, or that Jake’s neck was turning a creepy shade of orangey-red, or that I was sweating a little bit too much for the mid-twenties Alaskan temperature.
Then, something hit me on the back of the neck with a thwack. My head snapped forward as I recognized the icy sting of a snowball. “Ow!” I screamed. More like bellowed. I couldn’t help myself. It was entirely not cute or ladylike at all.
I whipped around to see who had released the offending missile, ready to stab Sabrina Hartley through the heart with my brother’s snowflake if I had to.
“Sorry!” Will Parker pushed aside a snowflake to see who he’d hit. He was holding a snowball in his other hand; it was poised in the air as if he were about to hurl it. “You okay, Whitman?” Two of his friends appeared at his side, Cam Brock and Jason Mitchell, this guy who used to go to our school but who was now in his second year of college in Anchorage.
Cam saw who Will was talking to and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Hey, Abby,” he said, more to the ground than to her.
“Hey, Cam,” she said quietly, also to the ground.
“Oh please no,” Erin muttered. I felt bad for her. This had to be the worst meeting of people in the history of the world. I’m sure she didn’t want to have to take care of two basket-case friends.
“Sorry about that.” Will laughed as he trotted over to me. “Thought you were Brock,” and with that he flung the snowball he was holding right at Cam’s face.
“Hey!” Cam said as he got hit in the side of the head. It left a mark. Abby giggled in delight.
Will touched my arm. He was wearing a navy knit cap with a pair of goggles resting over it, and the white snowsuit he’d worn last year at
the Winter X games.
“That really hurt!” My voice was really—and I mean really—loud. Too loud. I was screaming at Sabrina and the tan girl and Jake all in one, and poor Will got the brunt of it.
“Whitman,” he said, oozing the kind of charm that got him out of homework assignments and into the movies without having to pay, “I know you can handle a tiny little snowball.” He smiled in a way that just irritated me and despite my intentions to retain some dignity, my eyes got a bit teary. That wiped the grin off his face.
Erin gritted her teeth. “Good work, genius,” and nodded backward to Jake. That seemed to get through Will’s easygoing, snowboarding skull. His face immediately changed.
“Are you okay?” the tanned girl asked me.
“Um, yeah, I’m okay. It was just a, um, a snowball.” I don’t know why I answered her. I was just so discombobulated by the whole exchange; I wasn’t even clear on what the rules were. Was I supposed to not talk to her? What did one do in a situation like this?
“I never knew how much snowballs could hurt until today!” she responded empathetically. She was like a cheerleader, all sprightly and happy and cheery. I hated her. Then she stooped down, gathered together a snowball, and whipped it at Jake’s legs.
“No!” Jake tried to stop her but it was too late. He had to jump to avoid being hit.
“I’m Evie, by the way,” she said to us.
Will, who was late to the party, began to introduce us all, again. “I’m Will, and this is Cam and Jay. And this is Er—”
“Erin, Abby, and Jessie, I know.” The girl grinned. I had a feeling that she was a girl who was hard to hate. Which made me hate her even more. “So Jake was telling me that you guys live here year-round. I can’t believe that! You must have fun all the time. Look at this place!” And she spread her arms out at her side and did a little spin. “I feel like we’re at the North Pole or something!”
Cam and Jay gave each other a look, and Erin narrowed her eyes. Even among people she liked, cheeriness annoyed her.
I couldn’t take it anymore. “Jake.”
He exhaled deeply. “I’ll call you later, okay?” he said under his breath.
Evie, the tanning goddess, heard him and mistook his meaning. “Yeah! That’d be fun! Can you guys hang out with us later?”
“Um. No,” Jake said. “I mean, they probably have stuff to do.”
“No, act—”
“We do, actually,” Erin interrupted me. “Right, guys?” she said this part to me, Will, Cam, Jay, and Abby.
I knew what she was trying to do. She was trying to salvage my self-respect, which I was too upset to do on my own.
Fortunately Abby knew all about self-respect and how much you missed it when it was gone, so she stepped up to me and threaded her arm through mine. “Yeah, it was good seeing you, Jake. We’ve got to get going.”
Then Will got in on the act. He nodded his head and said a little too loudly, “Okay, Whitman. We’ll see you guys tonight.”
Erin gave him a condescending look, and he raised his shoulders to let us know that he was trying to help.
And with that, Erin and Abby ushered me away from Jake. I was crying before I could even get to the ice cream.
Chapter 4
You know you’re in a bad way when even unlimited ice cream can’t cheer you up.
I’d gotten up early that morning. In the wintertime in Alaska, it’s hard to tell the time because it is always so dark. So when I looked at the clock and saw that it was seven in the morning, I flipped over onto my stomach and tried to stay still. I’d had dreams about skiing with Jake. I was flying down the mountain and had assumed that Jake was right behind me. I kept looking over my shoulder, searching for him. He was too far up the hill for me to see him. I kept shouting, “Catch me! Catch me!” but my voice was lost in the wind.
I woke up just as I was about to crash into Will Parker, who was darting in and out of the trees on his snowboard, with Sabrina Hartley wrapped around his waist. This, as I stretched myself awake, I knew was silly. First of all, you can’t double up on a snowboard. And if you could, there’s no way Will Parker would let Sabrina Hartley anywhere near his board. Not that he doesn’t like her. Will’s too easygoing to not like anybody. But he loves his boards more than he loves people, and he probably wouldn’t let Scarlett Johansson double up with him.
Anyway, I was awake early, and from the minute I plunked my feet down onto the icy cold of my bedroom floor, I couldn’t get the image of Jake throwing snowballs at that girl out of my head. I didn’t know what I’d done that he didn’t like me anymore, and I obsessed about it through breakfast (which I couldn’t eat), through an hour of mindless video-game playing with my brother (he kept killing me over and over; which was fitting, I guess), and through my sad attempts to clean the kitchen for my mom.
Finally I just gave up. I went into Snow Cones early. Normally we don’t open until eleven in the morning, but my mother had to come down to do some work in the back office. I sat in the front and made ice-cream concoctions. I tasted probably twelve different sundaes, and all that did for my heartache was give it a matching stomachache.
The first full winter after I met Jake, I created a milk shake for him. I called it the Jessie Whitman Special Love Shake. It was made with strawberry ice cream, graham crackers, and chopped-up chocolate chips. Right now I was bashing graham crackers into dust, creating a pile of Love Shake ingredients that would never be tasted by another. It reminded me of my heart, how my heart felt crushed.
I looked up and peered out the glass front door of Snow Cones. It was close to eleven and the sun was finally out. Not strong, but at least now you could see the outline of skiers careening down the mountain. The floodlights were on. They’d stay on all day long during this time of winter. People were milling the streets, drinking from large cardboard cups of coffee, lugging skis and snowboards and sleds around. On the horizon you could see the faint outline of some of the mountains from Denali. This meant the day’s weather would be clear and fine. A terrible day to be heartbroken.
A young girl rapped on the glass window, the window that was at the far side of the bar I was standing behind. I gave her the “in five minutes” sign with my hand. She walked to the front door to wait, and I returned to my pile of graham-crackery sadness.
Several things bothered me.
First, I was pretty sure I’d been dumped. Me! I had taken for granted that I had a boyfriend who loved me. It gave me some sense of comfort roaming the cutthroat halls of Willow High. Even if I sometimes felt like an anonymous girl trying to sign people up for clubs that nobody wanted to join and desperately avoiding the callous opinions of Sabrina and her girly, idiot minions, I knew I had someone who thought I was completely special. The thought of having to go back to school, with nothing to look forward to while wasting away playing dodgeball and studying earth samples, made me want to cry.
And now who would I daydream about? I spent a lot of time in fantasyland, and it would be a lonely place indeed if no boyfriend lived there. What would I spend my time contemplating? Flavors of ice cream? And my future looked bleak too. Jake and I had had plans to travel the country’s national park system after I graduated. We’d been talking about this for years, and now what? Something I’d been planning since I was thirteen was just not a possibility anymore? How was that fair? I wanted to go to Yosemite and Yellowstone and Glacier. And I wanted to go to the Southwest, to where there were cacti and desert and sagebrush. Would Jake insert Evie into all the plans I had made?
Even worse was, I didn’t know why he didn’t like me anymore. I hadn’t said or done anything differently. I hadn’t cheated on him—not that there were any boys in town who I liked enough to cheat on him with. And who really cheated on their boyfriends? I mean, other than devious girls like Sabrina. I slammed my fist into the pile of graham crackers, thinking about how mean Sabrina could be to Cam. She’d cut him down in front of people and then in the very next second be flirty and fun t
o Will. But she still had a boyfriend, and girls like me and Abby didn’t. Maybe I should’ve been a little meaner to Jake.
I pounded my fist into the graham crackers over and over, grinding them into oblivion. The crackers were being pulverized into a fine dust, and with each downward punch I remembered how sad I had felt waiting by the phone the previous night, just because he had said he would call.
“Jessie.” With a fist covered in food, I looked up to see my petite mom in the doorway that led behind the counter to the storage closet, the freezer, and her little office. She held up her arm and pointed to her wrist. “Time, sweetie.” Just as she spoke, the little girl who was waiting outside knocked on the door with all the verve that I had used on the poor ingredients.
“Sorry,” I said to my mother, brushing my hands off over the sink. “I’m on it.” My voice must have sounded thick, because my mother walked toward me and ran a finger through the pile of crumbs I’d created.
“Take it easy on the food, okay?”
I nodded my head quickly, and bit my lip to keep from crying.
My mom narrowed her eyes at me, and said, “I don’t believe the world has ended. You’ll be just fine.” With that she brushed the crumbs into a wastepaper basket and kissed me on the head.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Call me if you need me,” my mother said, and then disappeared back into her office.
I walked to the door and opened it, flipping the CLOSED sign over to the OPEN side.
A stream of people poured in, lugging all manner of skis and snowboards in behind them.
“I’ll have vanilla with honey sauce, please,” the little girl who had been waiting said in a clear voice.
“Make that two,” her mother said to me kindly.
I set to work, and by the time I handed the woman two cups full of ice cream, I saw that Abby and Erin were sitting on stools on the other side of the counter, waiting for me.
