Wired (2 page)

“Keegan Bishop.” I waited for her to say something about me being a great skier. Everyone who skied here had heard of me.

“Keegan,” she said. “I like that name. Are you a racer?”

I grinned. “You've heard of me?”

“No. I see the racing number on your back. And you just told me you were on a timed run.”

How dumb did I feel? I tried to change the subject. “Are you from around here? Or are you on Christmas vacation?”

“My name's Cassie,” she told me. “Cassie Holt. Thanks for asking.”

Again I felt dumb. She probably thought I didn't care enough to know her name.

A couple of skiers appeared. They didn't say anything and just skied past.

I wondered when one of the ski officials would show up to see why I hadn't made it to the bottom yet. I was going to wait right here. I wanted them to see why I had fallen. That way, I would get another chance to run my time trial.

It seemed like Cassie and I had gone a long time without talking.

“Well,” Cassie finally said. “If you didn't put the wire there, who did?”

“I'd like to know. Just so that I could strangle them.”

She smiled. “You're too cute to be that mean.”

I didn't know what to say to that.

Cassie stepped out of her snowboard. She carried it under her arm and started to climb back up the hill. I stood there staring at her purple ski suit and the blonde hair that hung down her back.

“Come on,” she said.

“Where?”

“To the other tree.”

“We'll just pull the wire out of the way,” I said. My hands hurt badly. The cold did not help either. “We don't need to untie the other side too.”

Besides, I needed the wire around the tree so my coach and the timekeepers would believe my story.

“Who said anything about untying it?” she asked.

She walked all the way up to the other tree. She propped her snowboard in the snow and looked at the base of the tree without moving. I finally walked up and stood beside her.

“Look at that,” she said, pointing at marks in the snow.

“What?”

“Tracks. Whoever tied the wire to this tree stood right there.”

“Maybe we should get a bloodhound,” I said.

“Very funny, Keegan Bishop. Notice anything about that track?”

“Belongs to a snowboard,” I told her. It was a single, wide track. From the marks in the snow, I could see where someone had walked around the tree and tied the wire. I could see that the person had stepped onto a snowboard and gone down a trail through the trees. There was no way of finding the person now.

“Snowboard,” Cassie repeated. “So already you know something about the person who did this.”

“That doesn't help much,” I said. “There's only about a thousand people who snow-board on this hill. Of course, not all of them are as good as this person. Whoever it was chose a tough trail to get away.”

“Probably didn't want to be seen.”

“And if the person wasn't seen, there's no chance of proving who did this.”

“Not quite,” she said. She pointed at a branch a little higher than my head. I saw some blue fuzz stuck to the end of the branch. “The snowboarder who did this wears a blue knitted hat—one that rubbed against that branch. Which means were are looking for someone as tall as you.”

She put her hands on her hips and grinned at me. “A snowboarder who wears a blue hat, is tall and good on a snowboard. There, now you know four things about the person who did this.”

She paused and pulled out her cell phone again.

“You have a cell phone?” she asked.

I nodded. My parents didn't have a lot of money. But that was one thing they were willing to buy me. In case I ever had an accident, or needed them in an emergency or if they worried about me and just wanted to call.

“What's your number?” she asked.

I gave it to her. “In case you need someone to hang with on the slopes?” I asked.

“In case I find any information you might find helpful. I'll send you a text message.”

“Oh,” I said. I grinned. “What are you? A detective?”

Her grin turned into a frown. “I've got to go now.”

“What did I say?” I asked.

She grabbed her snowboard.

“Cassie?” I tried again. “What did I say wrong?”

She didn't answer. She left without looking back.

This girl had punched me in the face. She had wiped blood from my nose. She had insulted me. And she had left without saying goodbye.

This was some kind of girl. I hoped I would meet her again soon.

In the winter, I put knobby tires on my mountain bike. What I do, when the weather isn't bad, is take it up to the ski hill with me. Well, not with me—with the person who gives me a ride. Most of the older skiers on the team drive. With the bike at the top of the hill, I've got a way to get home at the end of my training, and I don't have wait for anyone else. Usually, the roads are cleared
of snow, and when they are not, I leave the bike at the top of the hill and catch a ride with someone.

I didn't ride my bike straight home after finishing the day on the slopes.

I wanted to, but I knew I had to force myself to go to the one place in town that brought back the worst memories of my life.

That would be the hospital.

From the ski hill, there were two ways to get to the hospital: the short way and the long way.

I couldn't take the long way because I didn't want to be late for supper. That meant I had to take the short way. I had to take the one road in to town that I always did my best to avoid—the road with a railway crossing. The crossing that now has warning lights and cross bars that come down when a train is coming. When I was a kid, there were no warning lights.

I came to a stop at the tracks.

Someone behind me honked, angry that I had stopped for no reason.

Maybe it was no reason to them, but I couldn't help myself.

I looked both ways to make sure that a locomotive wasn't bearing down on the crossing, horn blaring, huge bright headlight like the eye of a monster.

No train. Only the memory of something terrible, bearing down on me with the same force as a locomotive, a memory I couldn't escape.

I gritted my teeth and rode my bike across the tracks.

Ahead was the hospital.

Garth was in a room by himself in a big bed. His legs were in casts up to his waist. He wore a pajama top. There was a bowl of Jell-O on a tray in front of him. He didn't look happy.

“Keegan,” he said. “This is a surprise.”

It probably was. Garth Norwood was not exactly my friend. He was a little bigger than I was, and he was the kind of guy who tried to push other people around. Right after I
had joined the ski team, I'd heard him yelling at one of the younger skiers. When I'd told him to stop being a bully, he'd thrown a punch. Which I ducked. Then I'd thrown him to the ground and told him if he did something like that again, I would punch back. He hadn't tried anything since.

“How are you?” he asked. He had long blond hair and a moustache.

“Almost not good,” I said. “That's why I'm here. I nearly ended up in the hospital too.”

“Really? During time trials?”

“Yes.” I told Garth what had happened with the wire.

“Wow!” he said. “That sounds terrible.”

“What happened to you?” I asked. “All we've heard is that the coach found you knocked out in the snow. With your legs broken. Do you think maybe you could have hit a wire or something?”

“Nope,” he said. “I crossed my skis. It's a stupid thing to do at the speed of a rocket.”

“That's true,” I said. “Very stupid.”

“How's everyone else on the team? Did anything happen to anyone else?”

“No,” I said. “Except for a mix-up in jerseys, nothing else happened.”

I told Garth how Budgie McGee had accidently switched numbers with me before the time trials.

We both laughed at that. Budgie was Garth's best friend. Everyone called him Budgie because his name was Bud G. McGee, and he had a tiny nose that made him look like a budgie bird.

After laughing about Budgie, Garth and I couldn't find much more to talk about. It was like when we traveled on the bus to ski races. Garth and I didn't like being around each other.

“Well,” I finally said. “Time to go. I've got to get my homework done.”

“Sure,” he said.

I stood up. I got halfway to the door.

“Keegan.”

I looked back at him.

“Yes, Garth?”

“Could you take this stupid meal tray?” he asked. “Maybe set it on that table over there by the door?”

I walked back to his bed. He took his tray and leaned forward to give it to me. For a moment, his pajama top fell open. I was looking down at the tray, so I saw his chest and stomach. I didn't say anything about it, though. I set the tray on a table and said goodbye again.

As I walked down the long hallway, I thought about Garth's stomach. I didn't like what I was thinking.

When his pajama top fell open, I saw that his entire stomach was black and blue. It looked like a giant bruise. It looked like the kind of bruise a wire cable would make if a skier hit it at full speed.

If Garth had hit a cable stretched between two trees, why had he lied to me and everybody else about it?

Mom's back was to me as I walked into the kitchen for supper. I could see from the side that she was stirring meat sauce into a bowl of spaghetti noodles.

Dad was at the kitchen table, staring at the clock on the wall. All the place settings
were ready for us to eat. I'd barely made it on time. Whenever I was late, my parents panicked. It hurt them most when I was late for supper though, because it reminded them of something that was always hiding beneath the surface of their lives.

Mom and Dad had been married for nearly twenty years. Their grad photos showed them bright and smiling, but now they mainly looked tired.

Dad looked from the clock to me. He shook his head and frowned when he noticed I was limping. He put a finger to his lip, silently telling me not to say a word about it. Like I needed that reminder.

“Hi, Keegan,” Mom said, putting the spaghetti bowl in the center of the table. “How did everything go today on the ski hill?”

I sat down. I knew the answer she wanted. And I knew the answer Dad always wanted me to give.

“Great,” I said.

“No falls?” she asked.

“None,” I said. My leg was beginning to hurt, but I would force myself not to limp
when I left the table, in case she was watching. “You know me,” I said. “I never push too hard.”

“That's my boy.” She leaned over and kissed my forehead. “You know how I worry.”

I did not feel bad about lying to her. She wanted me to lie. She wanted to believe my lies. Really. She always seemed so breakable, and I think that's how she dealt with life.

“Well,” Dad said, “Didn't your mom make another great meal today?”

“She sure did,” I said. Mom patted my hand. I patted her hand back.

Yes. We were the perfect family in the perfect household. The laundry was always clean and folded. The floors were always vacuumed. The dishes were always done as soon as we were finished eating. No one yelled at anyone, ever. We only watched PG movies.

We were the perfect household.

So what if it had taken me years of begging and fighting with my parents for permission to ski? So what if the only reason my dad allowed me to ski was that I had promised
never to tell Mom about anything dangerous that happened during my runs?

Yes. We were perfect. Except for one thing. There should have been a fourth person eating with us.

The next morning I took the chairlift to the top of the mountain. The sun was out again. The sky was bright blue, so pretty it almost hurt my eyes. There was no wind. And it was warmer than usual. It was a perfect day to ski.

But I wasn't thinking about skiing.

As the chair moved up the mountain, I hardly noticed the skiers and snowboarders going down the hill below me. All I could think about was the cable wire between the trees.

Somebody had tried to hurt me.

I needed to find out who and why. If I didn't, that somebody might try again. The next time, though, I might not be so lucky. I was fifteen. I wanted to make it to my sixteenth birthday. And then to many more until I was an old man. Running into cable wire at high speeds would not help my chances.

I needed to be a detective, only I knew a lot more about racing on skis than I did about looking for bad guys.

I grinned into the sunshine, thinking about something else. All of this would be more fun if Cassie Holt was helping me.

What had she said to me? The person who did this was a tall person with a blue hat who could snowboard really well.

That meant the first place I should look was where the snowboarders hung out. Which was where I was going. All the good snow-boarders liked a run called the Pipeline.

When I got off the chairlift, I skied over to that hill.

From the top, the run did look like a huge pipe with the top half cut off. Both sides of the run curved downward into the middle. I thought of the curved walls that skateboarders use to do their tricks. There were trees on either side of the run.

I took my skis off and stuck them into the snow. I watched the snowboarders. They did look like skateboarders as they went up and down the walls of the pipeline. They did flips and turns. They did jumps and wipeouts.

I heard the crunch of snow. I turned my head and looked upward. For a second, I couldn't see who had moved beside me. The sun was too bright.

“Hello, Keegan Bishop.”

The voice belonged to Cassie Holt.

“Hello,” I said.

“Thinking of becoming a boardhead?” she asked.