by Claire Ray
“Oh! We’re on!” I exclaimed suddenly as Mrs. Reid walked through the entrance to the lodge, followed by Jake and an energetic firecracker named Madison, his little sister. Before I even had a chance to tell Abby what the plan was (which I hadn’t done before because, as usual, I hadn’t come up with a plan yet) Madison screamed at the top of her lungs, “Jessie!”
Madison’s and Jake’s mother turned to look at what her daughter was screeching at, and I waved wildly.
As Madison flew toward me in a whirlwind of brown braids, I caught Jake’s expression. He looked grumpy and annoyed, just as he had when he saw me at his window. This was check one in the “that kiss didn’t mean anything” column.
“Jessie! I’m so glad to see you!” Madison leaped into the air, and I stood up and caught her, swinging her around.
“You’re so big!” I screamed, and hugged her close.
“I know! I’m the biggest girl in the second grade,” she said very proudly. Her face looked like a rounder, frecklier version of Jake’s, but with a girl’s smile, a turned-up nose, and long eyelashes that your average supermodel would kill for.
“You’re doing the black-diamond hills this year, Mad?” I asked, setting her down.
“That’s right, we promised, as long as one of us is with her at all times. How are you, Jessie?” Mrs. Reid was standing there, trying to smooth down Madison’s hair, which was sticking out in all directions.
“I’m good, Mrs. Reid.”
She smiled at me and I stole a quick glance at Jake, to show him that his family still loved me.
“Madison, let’s go!” Jake snapped at her from across the lodge.
“Shut up, Jake, I’m allowed to talk to her. Just because you broke up with her, doesn’t mean we’re not friends anymore, right, Jessie?”
I felt like I’d been slapped in the face. You broke up with her. For a moment I thought I was going to cry, but I ground my teeth and answered the little girl as sure-voiced as I could, “That’s right, Mad.”
Mrs. Reid looked at me sadly, which made me feel even more terrible, and pulled Madison away from me. “Let’s go, sweetheart, we want to get as many runs in as we can.”
“Okay, Mom,” and Madison ran out the door. She had a lot of energy.
“It’s nice to see you, Jessie,” Mrs. Reid said to me. “You look good.” She smiled quickly, then followed her daughter out to the slopes.
I watched them go, and then Abby rose from her spot on the couch and nudged my arm. When she got my attention, she pointed at the hot-dog counter so that I could see that Jake hadn’t followed them outside. “Why don’t I go find Erin and see if Mean Agnes will let her take a break?”
I still felt like breaking into sobs from what Madison had said. “I don’t think—” Abby touched my arm again. “But what should I say?” I asked, trying to gather my courage.
Abby blew out a breath. “I don’t know, Jessie. Obviously I know nothing about getting the guy you want.” And then she was gone. She barely nodded to Jake on the way out of the lodge.
Jake saw that I was standing in the middle of the room. He stayed where he was. He was in his bright red coat and goggles and had a pair of shiny new ski boots dangling in his hand.
Well, I couldn’t very well just stand there and gawk at him, my patheticness on display for the whole lodge to see. And really, I had designed this whole run-in, so what was my problem? I swallowed hard, trying to forget the phrase “You broke up with her.”
I walked up to him and said with all the coolness I could muster, “Hey.”
“Hey,” he responded. He kept about a foot and a half distance between us and I couldn’t decide what that meant.
“First run of the season?” I asked, trying very hard to sound casual even though I could still feel the blood rushing to my feet.
“Yeah. You going today?”
“Nah,” I responded truthfully. “I think I kind of hurt my ankle, jumping off your porch.”
He clasped his hands behind his back, and this I took as a really bad sign. He was uncomfortable in my presence. Maybe because he thought we were broken up. But maybe it was because he really wanted to kiss me again. “Were you waiting here for me, then?”
This threw me for a loop. It was one thing to be caught stalking. It was quite another to admit it. “No!”
He snorted. “Then what are you doing here?”
“I believe that I’m allowed to be anywhere I want. It’s my town, actually.”
His eyes narrowed, and part of my brain, the Abby part, I guess, whispered to me that this wasn’t like us. We’d never been snotty to each other before.
“Whatever.”
At that moment, Will burst through the slope entryway in a burst of cold air and windy breeze. He stood in the doorway and peeled off his goggles and hat and then shook his hair out with all his might, like a shaggy, ski-loving dog. The blond girl behind the snack counter called out to him sweetly and tossed him a bottle of water. He grinned at her and drank the whole bottle in one gulp before making a basketball shot with it into the nearby trash can. The girl behind the counter looked like she was going to explode, her smile was so big.
“Whitman!” Will shouted when he saw me. “You gotta get out there!” He pointed gleefully. “There’s six feet of powder! Let’s you and me go.” Then he bounded up to us, nodded at Jake, and tugged on the hem of the green parka that I was wearing. “Where’s my coat, lady? It looks way better on you than this green thing.”
I was initially embarrassed by Will’s putting my coat down, but then I saw that Jake was looking from Will to me to Will again with a confused, shocked look on his face. And I realized in that second that Jake thought that I’d been waiting in the lodge for Will, not for him.
I didn’t say anything right away, then my nerve found me and I turned to Will and grabbed his hand. “I just wanted to tell you that, um, Abby needs to get your measurements for the dance.” This was technically not a lie. In fact, the best part was that this was absolutely true! And at any rate it served Jake right for telling his family that he had broken up with me.
There was a devilish expression on Will’s face and I knew that he knew what I was doing. He squeezed my hand and pulled me into him a little bit, and suddenly my heart sped up. “Sure thing. I’ll be over later, okay, babe?” Will had a tendency to call all girls “babe” but Jake didn’t know that.
The only thing that could have made me happier about this was if Sabrina had been there. I couldn’t keep from smiling a little too broadly at Will. “’Kay. See you later, then.” He squeezed my hand again and then headed back out to the slopes, but gave me a wink when he was out of Jake’s line of sight.
Once he was gone, I turned back to Jake and that’s when the thrill of our little game left me and I was suddenly unsure of what I had hoped to accomplish by being in the lodge in the first place. Everything was getting away from me. Now not only did I not know whether Jake had meant anything by kissing me, but now I’d probably gone and planted a seed of doubt in his mind about whether or not I’d even wanted to be kissed in the first place.
“Jake—”
But I couldn’t finish whatever it was that I was going to say, because Jake spun on his heel and followed Will’s path out to the slopes, without so much as a backward look at me.
Chapter 7
“Just because you broke up with her, doesn’t mean we’re not friends anymore, right, Jessie?”
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.
Chapter 8
I had awoken the next morning with every intention of confronting Jake about what Madison had said and about the accidental kiss. But for the next three days, I couldn’t get him alone. Every time I “ran into” him on the mountain, he was with Madison or one of Evie’s blond sisters, and pretended that he didn’t have time to talk to me. During the times he wasn’t skiing, Abby and I would linger in the lobby with Erin, but between Erin’s grumpy moods and Mean Agnes chasing us out of there, we didn’t have much luck. The only time I saw him inside, he ran into the gift shop to avoid me.
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.
