He looks at me, surprised. “You don’t ski?”
“Don’t get too many snow days in San Diego.”
He leans back in his chair. “I just figured, you know, with your parents and all.”
It’s strange to think he has certain information and ideas about Trick and Mom. “I just found out my mom used to ski and, well, I don’t really know anything about Trick. Just that he used to be some sort of skier and got hurt. That’s pretty much it. I mean, we’ve never been, you know, close.” He shifts uncomfortably in his seat and avoids my eyes. Universal body language for Please change the subject. I set the ice pack on the floor and motion to the circle. “So, pretty nice kids you got here.”
“Yeah.” Logan frowns a little, watching them. “So many of them have these terrible lives. Seriously, Dad’s in jail, or they’re living in their car, or their home life is just messed up in some way. It’s intense.” He motions to a shaggy-haired boy sitting with his back to us, wearing a Burton beanie. “Like Franco there. His dad died when he was six. Three older sisters. Mom works two jobs cleaning hotels around here. He sort of slipped through the cracks at school for a few years, but last year his teacher got him hooked up with Goggles and he’s passing all his classes now.”
My chest squeezes. “It’s cool you guys do this,” I say. When he doesn’t say anything, I awkwardly add, “And it will look great on college applications.”
He hesitates. “Actually, Isabel and I aren’t going to put it on our applications.”
“What — why?”
“This year our coach is on this whole mindfulness kick.” Logan makes an apologetic face. “I don’t know; he read an article or something. Anyway, he challenged each of us to choose something in our lives that we decide not to go public about.” He smiles at my confused expression. “Look, it’s not like Isabel and I won’t get into college — we have plenty of other stuff. It’s important to our coach that we try things like this.” He stands, crosses to a table by the stage, and starts setting up snacks, opening bags of chips and Oreos and pulling a jug of lemonade from a cooler of ice.
Sitting here, it suddenly feels like more than just my face got stepped on.
After Logan finishes setting up the snack table, I watch him settle down next to a boy with straw-colored hair and a constellation of freckles across his nose who has just scooted his chair off to the side, his face long. They talk quietly, and in a minute, Logan coaxes a smile out of him.
Every kid in this place has a life that belongs on my Get a Grip List.
An hour later, we wait outside the school until Trick pulls into the driveway. The back of his truck is heaped with pillows, blankets, and quilts. “Hop in,” he tells the three of us. “We can grab some burgers and go do some meditating.” He winks at me.
“Sweet.” Isabel hops into the back, pulling a soft patchwork quilt over her and resting against a mound of pillows near the cab.
I walk around the front of the truck and yank open the passenger door. “I have a chemistry test on Monday to study for,” I tell Trick.
“Right, Monday.” He taps his thumbs on the steering wheel in time to the low music on his stereo. “Good thing it’s Friday.”
I’m not convinced this is a good idea. “Are we even allowed to ride back there?”
“I’ll take back roads.” He squints at me. “What happened to your face?”
“The hazards of accountability triangles.” I leave my backpack in the front with Trick and go around to the bed of the truck. Isabel has her eyes closed, the quilt pulled to her chin. Standing up in the back, Logan offers to help haul me into the truck, and I try not to notice my stomach jolt when he grabs my hand.
A half hour later, Trick parks in the middle of a meadow. Despite the cold, we’re warm under the mounds of fleece blankets and quilts. My head propped on several pillows, I stare up at the glittery stretch of sky. Around me, the Tahoe winter night is still and silent and I want to relax into it, but instead, I’m making a list of the topics I need to study for my chem test. I try counting stars, but they blur above me as my mind shifts to the formulas I need to know for Monday’s test.
A flash of light slips through the sky. “Shooting star,” Isabel announces, her voice sleepy.
“Not actually a star, though,” I say, remembering something from one of my long-ago science classes. “Meteoroids. Space dust. They make that flash when they collide with the atmosphere.”
“Shooting star sounds prettier,” she murmurs. “But that would explain why you’re going to be valedictorian at your fancy-pants private school.”
“Not anymore,” I mumble, pulling the quilt up over my chin.
“Why not anymore?” Logan wants to know.
I swallow, saying the words out loud for the first time. “I got a B in calculus last semester. So, yeah, no more valedictorian for me.”
“That’s it?” Trick asks into the dark. “One class. That shouldn’t matter. One B.”
It mattered to Rebecca Song, new front-runner. We’d been neck and neck since freshman year when she came to Ranfield. I’m sure she ran a victory lap when she found out about my B. Of course, Josie would argue that Rebecca’s run wouldn’t be very fair considering she is clearly some government experiment made out of bionic, superhuman parts.
“So you got a B.” Logan’s voice floats into the mix. “That’s normal.”
Normal. At Ranfield, the goal is not to be normal. Quite the opposite. In every possible way, we’re taught to want to be exceptional — winners, leaders, the cream of the crop. Just read the brochure. No one wants to be normal. At Ran, everyone has something special, whether it’s sports or dancing or debate or ceramics. One kid at our school is a world-champion juggler. And even if you aren’t currently the best at whatever that something is, you’re trying to be. That’s the point. We set goals and if we work our hardest and give our best selves, we can achieve anything. Ranfield prides itself on being a school community nobly built from each of its distinct achievers.
Seriously, that’s a direct quote from the website. Go, Ravens.
And my thing has always been my academics — the tests and essays and the 100 books you’re supposed to read before you graduate from high school (3 different lists cross-checked and compiled into a list of 216 books, of which I still need to read 47).
I have only, ever, gotten As.
My thing: to be the Ranfield valedictorian.
So what happens when you devote your whole self to a goal, you give your best self, but still fall short of it?
I couldn’t possibly have worked harder than I did, not and actually sleep, so that’s not it. People think it comes easily for me, but it doesn’t. I’m not like Rebecca Song, bionic human. I work my butt off for my grades. I stay up late every night, spend every weekend studying, no exceptions. I have taken schoolwork on every family vacation since I started high school. If I’m not playing tennis or sitting in class or going to choir rehearsal or eating dinner with my family, I’m working on school because I don’t know how to want anything else. To be anything else.
And then I had a very bad day and all that changed.
I fell flat on my YouTube-viral-video-worthy face. So it’s occurred to me in these last few weeks that somewhere along the line, I may have been given faulty information. Apparently, you can do your best and not achieve your goal. Turns out, you can’t do anything just because you set your mind to it. Which changes things, doesn’t it?
“It’s partly why I’m here,” I find myself telling them, my eyes tracing the ribbon of the Milky Way across the night. Then I say something that surprises me.
“I would actually love to feel normal.”
Sitting in Elevation, I check my watch again. Logan and Isabel should be done in another hour and the butterflies are starting to wage war in my belly. Stargazing last night, they offered to start teaching me to ski today when they finished their race. “You want to be normal in Tahoe?” Logan had asked. “We need to get you on the moun
tain.”
Now List #1: Learn to ski.
My whole body feels carbonated at the thought of heading up onto that mountain. When was the last time I felt this excited and nervous about something I was probably going to be horrible at? Maybe when I was eight and tried to play basketball for a season, only to discover I clearly belonged in sports that involved a net between me and the girl who was trying to smash me in the face. Still, I liked playing basketball. I just wasn’t any good at it. So Mom and Will thought it would be best for me to focus on tennis, where I at least showed some natural ability.
I tap my pencil lightly over my chem formulas, staring out at the winter light of Squaw Valley. It’s strange to realize I haven’t tried a new sport in years. I haven’t tried much of anything new in years. Too risky. Stick to your strengths. Over the years, Mom and Will have encouraged me to focus on the things I’m already excelling in so I would have better chances for college scholarships. No time for dabbling. That would waste time and resources.
Behind me, Elevation’s door opens and, turning, I see Beck Davis stroll in, his face flushed from the mountain. His eyes light up when he sees me and he heads for my table. “Hey, bookworm.” Is this becoming a thing with him? The nicknames. San Diego. Bookworm.
I try not to like it. “Hi, Beck. You done racing for the day?” Maybe Isabel and Logan aren’t far behind.
He slides into the chair next to me and helps himself to a piece of my cookie. “Oh, I don’t race anymore.”
“You’re not on the ski team?”
Shaking his head, he wipes his hands on his ski pants. “Used to be. A bunch of us were on Squaw’s development team when we were kids. That’s the team they start you out on to see if you have the chops. I raced some gates for a few years, but it wasn’t my scene. Racers are such jocks. I’m a freeskier now.”
“I don’t know what most of that means,” I say apologetically. There it is again, Tahoe as foreign language.
He runs his hand through his tangle of hair. “Freeskiing is not traditional skiing. It’s way chill. You do your own thing. Mess around at the terrain park, you know?
“So you’re on a freeski team?”
He makes a sour face. “Nah, they have competitions and stuff, but I don’t do any of that. I ski for the fun of it, not so some guy can hand me a medal and a ranking.”
“Sure,” I say, slightly unnerved to hear an argumentative echo to my earlier thoughts.
“Hey,” he says, crossing his arms and leaning back in the chair. “How’d your Emily Dickinson paper turn out?”
Surprised he remembered, I say, “Good, I think. It was mostly just an analysis of five of her poems.” I don’t tell him how unhappy I was with it, how I couldn’t seem to get the conclusion quite right.
Beck watches Finn across the room as he adds some wood to the fire. “I heard something cool once about Emily Dickinson, that she didn’t really want her poems published.”
Something warm moves through me. “Yeah, I read something about that, too. I’m not sure if it’s true or not.” I should research that.
He waves to someone walking by the window outside. “Still, it’s a cool thought. Especially these days. To write for yourself. To not need other people telling you how great you are all the time, to not have people commenting on it or hashtagging or reposting it all the time. To just do it for the sake of doing it. Too bad more people aren’t like that.” His eyes drift over my shoulder and his face darkens.
Logan appears next to our table. “You ready to head up?” He nods, almost curt, to Beck. “Hey.”
I gather up my books and binders, stuffing things out of order into my backpack. Something in the air changed when Logan came in, the heat from the café evaporating around us. “Logan and Isabel are attempting to teach me how to ski — wish me luck.”
“Luck,” Beck echoes, his chair scraping the floor as he pushes it away from the table, but before I can say anything else, he’s leaning on the counter, his back to us, laughing at something Natalie is saying as she makes a latte behind the gleaming espresso machine.
Outfitted in some old red ski pants of Isabel’s, my parka, and what feels like twenty pounds of random gear from Neverland, I follow Logan toward the funitel building. “Isabel said she’d catch up,” he told me. “She’s still over at Northstar talking to our coach.” Logan wears a pair of tan ski pants and a green plaid jacket. I clomp after him, my ski boots like cement blocks, noticing he clomps much less than I do. He motions for me to follow him through a gate, his goggles pushed up on his helmet, his hair curling around his ears.
“Is Northstar another resort?” I ask, moving up to the gate. It beeps as it reads the pass Logan’s dad got for me, then lets me through.
“Yeah. We take turns racing at the different resorts around Tahoe.” We step into the next available funitel car, the wide-windowed enclosed pods that carry skiers to the upper part of the mountain where we can catch some easier lifts.
“Your first funi ride,” Logan says, stashing our skis and poles next to him in an empty slot by the bench, and scoots over so I can sit next to him.
My stomach lurches as the funi swings out and up, and I try not to think about being suspended from a cable high above snow and rock. We soar over people lounging by a fire pit at an outside bar, over hotel tops, and as we climb, I can see the Village parking lot and the valley beyond. We climb higher. Logan doesn’t seem to notice my terror, pointing out the long, sweeping curl of the Mountain Run and, as we pass especially close to a jut of granite, three plastic flamingos someone has twisted into the netting on the rock. Two are pink, but the one in the middle is a sort of washed-out gray.
“Wave at the flamingos,” Logan says. “The pink ones are Primp and Preen. I named the gray one Stan.”
“Hi, Stan.” I wave lamely at the disappearing flamingos.
“Oh — see.” Logan points at the stretch of view suddenly emerging. From here, we see a triangle slice of metallic lake, the layers of mountains beyond fading into sky.
“Beautiful. Is that Lake Tahoe?”
“Yeah.” He nods as we drop slightly and the lake disappears. Logan shifts on the bench. “Wait until we get up to the top of the Big Blue run. You can see even more of it.”
“Is Big Blue a green run?” I pull off my backpack and extract my binder. “I read a few articles about learning to ski and they all said it’s important to start with the green runs and feel really solid with those before moving to the blue runs. Also, it says there are different levels of green. Is this an easy green?”
He fiddles with our poles, giving me a funny look. “What’s that you got there?”
I look down at the cover, now a snow-covered Swiss alp. Much more thematic than the Hawaiian sunset, I think. “It’s just some research stuff.” I hurry to push it into my backpack. “So is it an easy green?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “I’ll take care of you.”
Right. Don’t worry about it. One of those expressions uttered only by people who already know how to do it. Little does he know I have the ever-evolving worry list. So far on this funi trip alone it looks like this:
the funi car unsnapping and us plummeting to our deaths
getting stuck in this funi car for hours because of a power failure
not being able to get on the chairlift
falling off the chairlift once I manage to actually get on
looking like an idiot in front of Logan Never
“Do I look worried?” I manage to ask. Why do I suddenly care so much what this boy thinks of me?
Before he can respond, the funi slips into a docking station inside an open-walled building. The doors slide apart, and I follow Logan into a blast of cold air, dragging my gear. Other skiers and boarders move past me, their skis easy over their shoulders, their snowboards held casually like you’d carry a library book. I drop one of my skis, my bulky gloves not able to grip it, and it clatters to the ground. Maybe this was a stupid idea.
“Here.” Logan bends to help me, and with a quick flick of his wrist, locks my skis together somehow and sets them gently on my shoulder. “You’ll get used to it.”
I’m not so sure about that.
Outside, the sky is a shock of blue against the blinding white of the mountain. Logan helps adjust my goggles and makes sure my skis clip in properly and that I have a good grip on my poles. Watching him, I’m reminded of babysitting for three-year-old Aiden Simms, who lives down the street from me in San Diego. Whenever I take him outside to ride his Scoot bike on the sidewalk, I have to check him in the same sort of way.
Which, of course, makes me feel idiotic.
“Okay,” he says, pulling his own goggles down. “I’m not sure what you’ve read, but skiing is about balance. To start, though, I want to make sure you know how to stop once you get going.”
Yes, knowing how to stop seems especially important. Biting my lip, I watch people whip down the mountain, barely slowing, even when they’re near the signs that clearly read SLOW. My mind blanks on everything I’ve read and I try to keep my voice even. “You should probably assume that I will most likely be killed today on this mountain.”
Smiling, he slides his skis back and forth in quick scissor-snap moves. “You’ll be fine. Just don’t think so much about it.”
Did he not see the binder?
He takes me through a series of moves with food names, showing me French fries (skis parallel to each other) and how to make a pizza-slice shape with my skis.
“This is your snowplow,” he says of the pizza shape. “It will allow you to stop anywhere, anytime, but you can also use it to slow down and turn. You never have to move faster than you want to.” Looking at the mountain spilling out around me, I seriously doubt that’s true. “We have to ski down just a little bit to catch the Big Blue,” he says, his goggles reflecting the patch of sky behind me, swimming with white clouds. “Ready?”
I wave one of my poles vaguely in his direction. “Yes, yes, go ahead.” He skis down the hill, and I push off, the way I might do on roller skates, and my skis slip across the snow. Pizza slice, French fries, pizza slice, I repeat in my mind over and over while I attempt to follow Logan as he curves down the mountain to the left. Off to our right, skiers zoom toward Gold Coast, a blue lift that glides up the mountain away from us. In front of me, Logan moves in slow, unfinished loops, occasionally skiing backward to check on me. Show-off.
The Possibility of Now Page 6
