The Ex Games (20 page)

“Isn’t this great?” Liz prompted me gently, patting my padded arm.

“No pressure,” I growled.

“Honestly, you need to get used to it,” Liz said ominously. “A professional snowboarding career is nothing but pressure.”

“Honestly,” I yelled so loudly that she released my arm in surprise, “the two of you are not helping!” I turned on Chloe. “Didn’t you advise me to take control? Well, how am I supposed to do that if the two of you
manipulate every facet of my life?”

“Another excuse,” Chloe declared. “I can’t
believe
you made me
snowboard
today for this. My cheeks are chapped, and for what? Come on, Liz.” Under her wooly rainbow hat, her blonde ponytail flipped around, dissing me, as she boarded away.

I turned to Liz. “Well? What are you waiting for? Go on, Liz.”

Liz reached out to pluck her ski pole from where Chloe had poked it into the snow. “I think you’re just tired,” she said gently.

“How could I be tired? I haven’t done anything. That’s the whole problem.” Actually, I was bone-tired, just as I’d felt a few times this week when Nick had made me feel bad about myself. I hadn’t gone off the jump, but
thinking
about going off the jump and gathering all my energy only to pull out at the last second had totally drained me.

And then I started to cry.

“I’m sorry, Hayden,” Liz said instantly. “I shouldn’t have let Chloe pick those judges.” She skied over to hug me.

“No, I’m sorry,” I sobbed. “I’m making everybody mad at each other and now at me,
and for what? For nothing!”

“It’s not for nothing,” Liz said soothingly. “Let’s ask the boys for an extension. We’ll do the comp on Sunday instead of tomorrow. Daisy won’t care that she missed it, since she’ll get a free hotel room anyway. Chloe and I will come back to the mountain with you tomorrow and work with you until you go off the jump. We’ll figure something out.”

“The Poseur concert is tomorrow night, so Sunday will be too late for the bet,” I cried. “Plus, the boys would never let us do that. They want me to fail anyway, so why would they give me another chance to succeed? Plus, it would just be an extra day for me to screw up, and to lose one more friend. Let’s face it, I’m done.” My goggles had fogged up inside with my tears. I tore them off, along with my hat. The wind was shockingly cold on my bare, wet face. “Totally useless, totally done.”

“Hayden!” Chloe screamed from somewhere downhill.

Liz and I glanced at each other for only a second, then whipped around in a rush of powder. Chloe had been headed to the pass through the trees onto Main Street. I feared
the worst, and I knew Liz did, too. People around here only half-laughed at Sonny Bono jokes. Skiers and boarders were killed every year running into trees, not just betties like Chloe but also experienced boarders. I slid across the snow as fast as I could, throwing all my weight into it. I stopped sideways at the edge of the stand of trees and sent a wave of snow arcing into the dark trunks.

Chloe was in the trees all right, way down the slope from us. I picked out her pink clothes right away against the white. She must have hit a mogul in the snowy path and veered into the trees. She was sitting upright, though, and none of her limbs pointed the wrong way. Ugh ugh ugh, I shrugged off that thought and called to her. “Are you okay?”

“Okay,” she called back. “Just stuck. My board’s buried and kind of pinned against this tree and my boot won’t come loose. Aren’t your boots supposed to pop out of your bindings when you suffer a major biff?”

This was not the time to point out to Chloe that her “major biff” was likely a low-speed slide of ultrabetty-ness. And if she hadn’t been able to free her boots by now,
I wouldn’t be able to talk her through it. I would have to show her.

“Hold on,” I called, popping off my board. The snow between the trees was piled up much higher than the snow on the slopes, which the sun melted and skiers wore down all day. There was no telling what lurked underneath the snow in the woods. Most likely, it wasn’t safe to board across. Boarding boots weren’t the safest footwear for hiking, either, but I couldn’t leave Chloe. Darkness was falling.

“You want me to go with you?” Liz asked, stopping on her skis behind me.

“Nah, but bring my board if I’m able to haul her out the other side. And”—wiping my long hair out of my eyes, I remembered I’d taken off my goggles—“see if you can find my goggles and my hat. I dropped them somewhere.” I put one boot into the soft snow at the very edge of the slope and sank much farther than I’d imagined, up to my hip.

“Watch that first step,” Liz called.

I didn’t even retort, I was so focused on Chloe downhill from me. Every step I took was deeper than the last, and it grew harder to bring my other foot around. Once I sank
into a snowdrift all the way to the ground and slipped on the rocks underneath, like disappearing under the surface of a frozen lake.

“Hayden, are you still there?” Chloe screamed.

“I’m still here.” At least, I thought I was. The daylight vanished even more quickly here under the bare trees, and the white all around disoriented me.

“Do you want me to call the boys?” Liz suggested from way above me.

“Do
not
call Nick Krieger!” I shouted. “God, would he love this.”

“I’ve got Davis in my cell phone,” Liz called. “Gavin, too.”

“Absolutely not. If you call Davis
or
Gavin, Nick will be attached.”

Chloe squealed, “Yes, please, Liz. Gavin would be excellent right now! No offense, Hayden, but don’t join the ski patrol anytime soon.”

“Ingrate!” I yelled. “I’ll show you. I’m about to save the day, in just a minute here.” I’d reached a patch where the snow was shallower, only knee-deep again. I seemed to be on an outcropping of rock, because my boots slid around beneath me worse than ever.
Luckily, I’d almost reached Chloe. She was ten yards downhill from me.

“Tick-tock,” she said. Through the low-hanging branches between us, I could see her haughty expression, like she was
still angry
with me, and she wasn’t half-buried in snow.

Now
I
was mad. Even though they were water-resistant, my boarding clothes weren’t meant to be immersed in snow. I was freezing. I expected at least a
little
gratitude from this diva. “Apologize for what you said to me at the jump,” I demanded.

“Never!” she cried, sitting up straighter in her snowdrift.

“You are really testing me, Chloe,” I muttered as I took one tentative step into even lighter snow cover. Now I could actually see the icy rocks underneath. “I am trying pretty hard to remember how nice you were to me that night with Nick in seventh graaaaade!” My boot slipped out from under me and I skidded straight into the claw-like branches in front of me. I managed to turn my head in time to avoid getting an eye poked out, and I waited until my body stopped and settled against the springy branches.

“Oh God!” Chloe squealed. “Are you okay?”

“Yep.” I thought so. My face stung, and the thought crossed my mind that I was scarred for life. But I was sure the pain came from skidding across the snow on my cheek, not from a branch cutting me. I had a hard time extricating myself from the tree, though, and my head was getting cold. Finally, slowly, I rose up to kneel in the snow and asked Chloe, “Am I all in one piece?”

Her eyes flew wide open. I knew it was
really
bad when she almost screamed, but she slapped her hand over her mouth in time. She said, too calmly, “Hayden, put pressure on your ear.”

“Put pressure on my ear,” I puzzled out. “Why?” I touched my ear. It was wet, but so was the rest of me by now. Then I looked at my mitten. It glistened with blood.

“Call Josh,” I whispered before I passed out.

“Hayden, that’s going to take one stitch.” Thank God for Josh. He sounded far off, even though I could feel his hands on my face. I couldn’t quite make my way back to consciousness. Not while stitches were the
topic of conversation.

“She’s too heavy for me to carry,” Josh said.

I tried to insult him back, but I didn’t make a sound.

“Should I call the ski patrol?” Liz asked.

“No, they’ll make a huge deal, and our parents will wig out and come home. They’re over in Boulder for their first night out of town alone in a year. This is no biggie. She did the same thing when she gashed her arm at the skateboard park last summer. We just need to get her down the mountain. Call Nick.”

“No!” I tried to exclaim but didn’t. Wait—if Chloe was still lodged against the tree, dying of hypothermia, did it really matter who got called? Any hero would do.

“Hayden,” said Nick.

My cheeks tingled with cold, and when I opened my eyes, all I saw was a blue glow. I must have face-planted. “Get Chloe,” I told the snow. “She’s stuck.”

“Gavin and Davis have her.” Nick’s hands were on my shoulder and my waist. He rolled me onto my back. Now my wet face froze all over again in the cold wind. I
opened my eyes.

Even though he was kneeling beside me in the snow, he towered above me like a movie superhero. Beyond his strong shoulders and the snowy trees, the sky glowed orange, and a few low clouds sugared him with snow. As I watched, he unzipped and pulled off his parka, then unbuttoned and tossed off his flannel shirt. He pulled his T-shirt over his head and shook his hair out of his eyes. Leaning over me with his chest bare, he pressed his wadded-up T-shirt to my ear. It was his Poseur T-shirt that he wore to school at least twice a week, and he was willingly staunching my blood with it. He must be in love.

More likely, I was having a wet dream. They’d told us during sex-ed week in PE that this might happen to girls as well as to boys. It had never happened to me. And now, just when I’d given up hope because I was seventeen and the puberty thing was pretty much done, here was Nick Krieger tenderly touching my face with the sun setting behind him and snowflakes sliding off his bare shoulders.

“Hayden,” he said again, gently. “Are you sure you didn’t hit your head?”

“I don’t think so.” It came out as a whisper. I cleared my throat. “I think it’s just my ear.” Now that his T-shirt was warming my skin, I could tell the insistent sting came from my earlobe rather than from the cold.

He moved the T-shirt aside and leaned closer, examining my ear. Oooh, it would be so much more romantic if he looked into my eyes rather than fixating on my ear. Shouldn’t I be able to make this happen? What was the world coming to, that I couldn’t even control what Nick did in my own wet dream?

He poked my ear.

“Ow, ow, ow!” I squealed, and then felt faint again, out of breath. This was no wet dream. It was reality after all.

He let out a disgusted sigh. “Hayden, Josh is right. The doctor might not even put a stitch in that. What’s the matter with you? Do you faint at the sight of blood?”

Oh, no. There was no way I would let him get the upper hand, even if I
was
lying on my back in the snow and he was kneeling over me. I laughed. “Of
course
I don’t faint at the sight of blood. I jump onto the dance floor and do the Soulja Boy. Get the hell off me, Dr. McDreamy.”

He sat back in surprise. I rolled over to all fours and stood up slowly, letting his T-shirt slide off my ear, since my injury was so minor. The woods seemed to tilt sharply to the left.

“Hayden,” said Nick. “Take it easy.”

“What for? This would never have happened to a boy, right? A boy could break his leg and keep on boarding. So could I.” Or maybe not, but at least I could hike out of the trees on my own power after I scratched my ear. It wasn’t until I looked down to check my footing that I realized I was still bleeding.
Plop, plop, plop,
neat red circles that burrowed warm holes into the snow.

“Well?” Chloe called from far off. “Is she okay?”

“No, but is she ever?” Nick lifted me. One of his arms cradled my head against the wad of his T-shirt. He hooked his other strong arm under my knees. His chest felt intensely warm against me. I opened my eyes and saw his chest was still bare. He’d put his flannel shirt and parka back on without fastening them.

He seemed good for a few steps. Then he hit a soft patch of snow. His foot sank,
and he staggered. Josh trudged forward to help, struggling with three snowboards—his, Nick’s, and mine, I supposed. If Nick fell while carrying me, even if it was due to loose powder, he would blame it on my unwieldiness or my girth. Together with Josh’s joke, I would never, ever live it down.

“Let go,” I said. “I can walk.” At least, that’s what I meant to say, but it came out slurred.

“Shut up.” Nick took a few more steps. Now we were on Main Street, where the snow pack was solid. His strides were more sure.

“We can’t leave the snow all bloody,” I told the underside of his chin, shadowed with stubble. “It will scare the tourists.”

“The new snow will cover it up.” He looked down at me. “Shhh.”

Something in his
shhh
tugged at my heart. He kept watching me, not examining my ear for medical emergencies but looking into my eyes, for a few more steps. I couldn’t read his look. He was kind of blurry, for one thing, and I was kind of dizzy. I thought he looked … concerned. Sympathetic. Determined to rescue me from danger. I wished that was what he felt. But it couldn’t
have been. I was misreading him.

What did he really think of me? He probably assumed I was faking loss of consciousness. Maybe he even thought I’d cut my ear on purpose, all to get out of the comp without admitting defeat. If he hated me, so be it, but I’d be damned if he hated me by mistake.

“I broke my leg,” I breathed.

He stopped short in the snow and glanced down at me again, alarmed this time. His eyes traveled across my body. “I don’t think so, Hayden. Where does it hurt?”

I shook my head, which made him squeeze me more tightly to his chest.

“I mean, when I broke my leg before. I broke it in four places. It bled a
lot
. I didn’t walk for a year.” I said all this in one gasp, rushing through so I didn’t pass out again just from thinking about the way my leg had looked when I’d hit the rocks. I hadn’t felt anything at first. I was scared I was paralyzed. When the pain hit me a few seconds later, I was actually relieved. And then, not. I’d never felt pain like that, or seen that much blood.