Winter Fire Read online

  “Let me guess,” she said with the last of her breath. “Bren Bergan.”

  “Who?” I kept my voice even, but she wasn’t buying it.

  “The Scandinavians?” She said, ignoring my attempt at ignorance.

  My exaggerated shrug probably looked more like a cringe. “I don’t know them.” I said. “Anyway, have a good night, Sydney.” I smacked the desk once with a flat hand and spun toward the elevator.

  “Hey listen,” she called. I turned, my brows arched with drama. She seemed to struggle for a minute.

  “I started working here a few years ago, right out of high school. And Mr. Neil - you’ve met him, right? Operations Manager?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, he gave me some advice then that was pretty good, so I’m going to give it to you.”

  “Okay,” I said. I felt a crease forming between my brows. I did not like advice. It usually meant someone had screwed up and was now assuming that you would too.

  “The guys who work here…not the locals, but the ones who live here and work…they used to call them ski bums. Mr. Neil calls them transients. Anyway, you never know how long they’re going to stay or what. They go wherever they can get a roof over their heads and a place to ski or ride, and that’s all they’re concerned with. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  “I think so,” I said. No, not really.

  “So what Mr. Neil said to me was, ‘it’s best not to get involved with them, because there’s no future in it. By nature, they’re people who’ve learned not to get attached.’”

  I frowned. “They just live here? They don’t go to school at Little Woods?”

  “Nope. Maybe they’ve graduated. I don’t know when kids finish school in Norway.” She said Norway like it was The North Pole and waved a dismissive hand. “They go wherever they can work and ride, and this year they ended up here. They probably won’t even stay to work the water park this summer.”

  “Hm,” I said.

  “And I can tell you one thing,” she went on. “The guys? Not so much the uncle or the tall one with the girlfriend, but the other two? I have seen quite a few girls with them already. Especially over break. But I haven’t seen the same girls with them twice. Do you get what I’m saying?” She lowered her head but kept her eyes on mine, waiting to be sure.

  I got it. She was saying that the same guy who took the fear out of a little girl who wanted to snowboard, who made her laugh and held her so she wouldn’t fall, who was ignited by the sun and slept in the sky, was just a homeless slut.

  Image crushed. Thank you Sydney.

  “Thank you, Sydney,” I said sweetly.

  “Sorry,” she said. And I knew she meant it.

  Chapter 3

  The sun’s gleam felt sarcastic this morning. It was too nice a day to be starting a new school. My stomach was jittery so I skipped the coffee, but munched on half a dry bagel hoping it would sop up some of the acid. It worked until we stopped in front of the building. I squinted against the morning light streaming in through the windshield. Kids were everywhere…getting out of their parents’ cars, weaving through the student parking lot with their backpacks hoisted onto their shoulders, laughing and stumbling into each other as they unloaded from the buses. I wondered why teenagers always looked and sounded drunk. Maybe for the same reason people actually got drunk.

  “Do you remember where all your classes are?” My mother asked. She slid her huge brown sunglasses up onto her head and fixed her worried eyes on mine.

  “Yeah.” We took a tour just after we moved into the resort, but she had slipped a map into one of my folders just in case. I reached into my sweatshirt pocket and curled my hand around the schedule they gave me. “Don’t worry.”

  “I know it’s different,” she said, “but you’ll get used to things quickly.”

  The familiar, heartbroken apology in her expression made my chest tight, so I reached out and shook her forearm, tried to smile. “I just wish I could drive myself.”

  “A few more months.”

  “And no car.”

  My mother sighed. “We’ll see if we can work something out. Listen,” she curled her hand around mine, her nails pearly in the sunlight. “Everything’s going to be fine today. Try to make some friends. Be agreeable. People are generally decent if you give them a chance.”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t give them a chance.”

  “No, but I know you’d rather be with your friends in Hope.”

  At this, the energy I had mustered to raise my mother’s spirits dimmed.

  “Well.” I sighed, heaving my backpack off the floor and opening the door, “we don’t live in Hope anymore.”

  Lunch came too quickly, but I was relieved when a pretty girl with dirty blond hair broke from a crowd of kids and made a bee line toward me as soon as I had paid for my salad. The others stood by their table and waited.

  “Hi,” she said, the word short and chipper. Her smile was determined. “You’re new, right?”

  “Yeah.” I said.

  “Wow, you’re tall.” She craned her neck in an exaggerated way, then shrugged, apparently willing to accept any Amazon genealogy I might possess. “I wish I was taller.” I was on the tall side, 5’6’’, but it was mostly that she was short. I did not point this out.

  “I’m Brianna.” She put her right hand over her heart, pledging allegiance to herself, the good deed doer of Little Woods High. But I didn’t blame her for it. I’d done it myself, back in New Jersey, when I was secure in my place and could afford to take opportunities to feel good about myself.

  “Do you want to sit with us?” She motioned behind her to the rest of her group. Some of them were settling into the table now.

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  The truth was, Brianna could have been a toothless hunchback and I would have agreed to sit with her. I had discovered that there were few things more potentially lonely than lunch on the first day of a new school. Maybe Gym. But that was next period.

  “Jenna right?” She asked.

  I nodded again and let her lead me to her table.

  The seats were almost full. I sat across from Brianna at the end, and next to a girl with glasses and chestnut hair only slightly lighter than mine. Sitting very close to Brianna was a tall blonde kid, cute, with shaggy hair. Further down were three girls in soccer jerseys. Beyond them, four boys in varsity jackets capped the far end. The boys were loud and as I glanced over, one had just finished throwing something at the next table. His hand still hung in the air as he waited for the response.

  “Stop it, Tyler.” I heard a girl whine just before a cherry tomato went sailing over his head. Tyler ducked in a flash of reflex, then gave a short, mocking laugh and stuffed a bunch of fries in his mouth. When he turned and focused his attention on me, his fingers groping absently for more fries, I slouched in horror. He redirected his hand through his spiky brown hair and arranged a confused look on his face. I glanced down at my tray.

  “Who are you?” I heard him ask.

  “She’s Jenna,” Brianna said. I felt everyone at the table turn toward me and briefly considered sliding onto the floor.

  “Jen-na,” Tyler repeated, like a talking ape trying to pronounce a civilized word. “Where did you come from?”

  There was no getting away from it. Best just to get it over with. I raised my head and looked at him.

  “New Jersey.”

  “Joisey,” he said. “Do you have that accent? You know, do you to-ahk on the phone and swim in the wo-ahta?”

  “Nope.” I said, hoping the simple would satisfy him. It did not.

  “Like, do you drink co-ahffee?”

  “Just ignore him,” Brianna said, and I was grateful that this would be considered an acceptable response.

  “Anyway,” she said, “this is Laura,” she gestured to the girl on my left, who smiled and gave me a tiny wave. “And this is Dillon.” She leaned into the boy on her right and he leaned back. They pretended to struggle for a m
inute and then he picked a cucumber out of her salad. She named the soccer girls, one after the other - Julie, Lexi, Eileen - all of them waving quickly and turning their attention back to each other before I had a chance to respond, and lastly the guys at the end.

  “You’ve met Tyler,” she said rolling her eyes. “The one next to him is Kevin, and the two on the other side are Brian and Matt.” Tyler and Kevin were bigger than average, but Brian and Matt were refrigerator boxes. They barely fit next to each other, and I was suddenly surprised that our end of the table was on the floor. Since there was only one soccer girl on their side and two on the other, I had to wonder if Brian and Matt had eaten one at some point to make room on the bench.

  It was an odd mix. Four jocks, three soccer girls, three…I don’t know what. And me. I threw a few glances down the table while I ate, trying to figure out what this group could have in common. After a few seconds, I realized that they had all been in my classes throughout the day. They were all honors kids. It made sense. They were together all day long. And if they had lived here their whole lives, it had probably always been that way. They would’ve gotten to know each other, felt comfortable together.

  “So where do you live?” Dillon asked. I turned to him and took a minute to register his words.

  “Yew Dales Resort.”

  “Really? You actually live at the resort?”

  I nodded, gulping a sip of iced tea. “My parents split up, so my mother got a job as the hotel manager there. We live in a suite upstairs.”

  “Oh. My God. You. Are. So. Lucky.” Brianna said, her hand on her heart once more.

  Dillon stared at her. “She just said her parents split up.”

  “Oh.” Now her hand was fluttering against her chest. “No, I didn’t mean that. I am so sorry. I just meant I would love to live there. We all ride and ski there. Hey,” she said, her eyes popping as she worked herself up further, “you should join ski club.”

  “She doesn’t have to,” Laura said, speaking up for the first time since I’d sat down. “She lives there. She can meet us.”

  “Then you have to meet us,” Brianna said. “Thursdays after school. Do you get to ski and ride free?”

  “I would,” I said, poking at my salad with my plastic fork. “But I don’t do either.”

  “Seriously?” Dillon said. “That’s ironic.”

  “Dillon likes the big words.” Brianna said. “It doesn’t matter, you can learn.”

  “We’ll see,” I said, planning to set aside some time later to think up excuses.

  “I wish I needed lessons,” Brianna said, grinning at Laura, “those guys are so freaking hot this year.”

  I watched for Dillon’s reaction to that one.

  He tore a bite from his pizza. “They’re weird.”

  Jealous?

  “But,” he went on, pointing his crust at us, “definitely hot.”

  Oh.

  My mother was idling in the same place she had dropped me off when the day ended. I hurried to the car, the weight of my backpack causing the sprained-ankle limp that seemed to plague students everywhere. Squinting against the sun, I fished my sunglasses from my pocket and slid them on.

  “Jen-na.” I heard from behind me. I made a choked sound as I walked around the front of our SUV and grabbed the passenger side handle, standing on my tiptoes to peer over the roof. It was Tyler. He had already turned his attention to the kid next to him. He pushed the kid, watched him stumble, took the kid’s weak attempt to retaliate with a shrug and his mocking laugh, and then turned back to me.

  “Jen-na,” he yelled again. This time he threw in a Jersey Shore fist pump. Yep, I thought, that looks about right. I opened the door, tossed my backpack on the floor, and slid in.

  “I see you’ve met some kids,” my mother said, throwing me an anxious glance as she pulled out into the creep of traffic.

  “I did. But that one’s an idiot. He sits at the end of the lunch table I was recruited to.”

  “See?” My mother said. “I knew it would work out. Tell me about the other kids.”

  “There’s nothing to tell really. They’re just normal kids.”

  “Girls? Guys?”

  “Both.”

  “Well, today probably felt long. Maybe you’ll feel like talking later.”

  “Um hm.” I said. I closed my eyes behind my sunglasses. The day was just too bright.

  That night, after my mother had gone to bed, I sat in our little living room, staring out the picture window and watching the groomers comb out the choppy snow beneath the lights. I hadn’t seen Bren or any of the others since the night I watched them ride the lift up the mountain. Sydney said that they didn’t go to Little Woods, but I admitted to myself now that I had been hoping to see at least one of them there.

  As I watched one of the groomers amble over a steep at an impossible angle, I noticed a flickering light deep in the woods beyond. I thought of the resort’s bonfire, but the light was too far up on the mountain for that, and it was too late in the night. I knew from the trail maps I had seen that the area I was looking at was mostly woods, some too dense to ski, so there would be no groomers there. I opened one of the smaller windows flanking the large one and stuck my head out into the cold, narrowing my eyes to sharpen my view. I was convinced that it was a fire. And then, something else. A scrawling sound. I shifted my gaze. Below the light a white steep swelled amidst the evergreens. After a moment, a shadowy rider rose fast over the top, her hair fanning out around her shoulders as she soared into the air above the peak. She landed hard, crouched, dragged enough snow under one hand to create a small spray, then curved off in the direction of the flickering light and was gone behind the trees.

  I don’t know how long I watched the fire, but when my mother woke me at three-thirty in the morning, my neck stiff from craning over the back of the couch, the woods were dark again.

  Chapter 4

  I ate lunch with Brianna and the others all week, but when Thursday finally came, I still had not concocted any good excuses for sitting out of ski club. They grilled me about it all through lunch; why I had never learned to ski, why I didn’t want to learn now, why I wouldn’t even take a lesson. Brianna asked if I’d had some traumatic childhood event with skis or boards or maybe just snow. Then Dillon challenged her to come up with a traumatic snow event and she had proposed several, including being buried, caved in on, avalanched, and plowed. I had never heard of a plowing tragedy, but I almost agreed to that one. How could you argue with the victim of a plow?

  We arranged to meet on the lodge deck at the top of the bunny hill as soon as they got off the bus. I was watching people spill off the lift when Brianna, Laura, and Dillon came clopping out to my perch on one of the picnic tables and surrounded me.

  “I hate that lift,” Brianna said. “It doesn’t make sense that the hardest lift to get off of is the bunny lift.”

  “Looks horrible,” I said.

  “So you coming with us?” Dillon asked, one eye crushed shut against the sun.

  “Not today,” I said. “I really haven’t had time for a lesson, and my Mom would ban me from the mountain for good if I tried it without one.” This was probably not true, but I was only willing to look so pathetic to these people if I was going to hang out with them. Then, before they could protest, I shuddered dramatically and wrapped my arms around myself. “I still have nightmares about that plow.”

  They all laughed. Then, little by little, Brianna’s face changed, her smile fading, her eyes turning hard as she gazed over my head toward the bunny hill. The others looked up and I turned, searching the top of the hill for a moment before I saw Bren. He was on one knee buckling his boot into his board, his staff jacket open, his hair a russet curtain obscuring his face.

  “You know him?” Brianna said in my ear. I jumped. She had bent so that her head was level with mine.

  “No,” I said. I opened my mouth to say that I’d seen him around, then thought twice.

  “Bren Berga
n.” She said, and waited for my response.

  “I don’t know anyone who works here yet,” I said. “Weird name.” I tried for an amused tone.

  She turned toward me with a cynical smile, the kind that said that I wasn’t now, nor was I ever going to, fool her with the dumb act, but that she’d give me a pass because I couldn’t be blamed. “Weird guy,” she said.

  “Brianna’s been sweating him for weeks,” Dillon said.

  “That’s disgusting. I do not sweat people.” She put a hand on her hip and raised her eyebrows at him. “Can’t I just be friends with a guy?”

  “Yeah, me,” Dillon said.

  She rolled her eyes. “That’s not the same thing.”

  “All I know,” he continued, ignoring her, “is that you went on for centuries about what freaks he and his friends were, then came back giddy after having coffee with him before vacation.” He air quoted coffee. I cringed. It looked like Sydney wasn’t kidding. I hated how disappointed I felt, and the fact that I’d slumped and rested my chin in my hands without noticing. I sat upright again.

  “Giddy is a stupid word.” Brianna said, turning to me. “Dillon loves stupid words. I was not giddy.” She glanced back in Dillon’s direction. “And they are freaks.”

  “No argument there.” Dillon said. Then he gave my arm a shake. “So I guess you can have him, Jenna. Apparently Brianna’s finished with him.”

  “Jenna doesn’t want him.” Brianna snapped. She was smiling at him but her expression was intense, her eyes narrow. “She’s just made new friends here. Normal friends. Why would she want to ruin it by hanging out with them?”

  Dillon grinned at the warning in her eyes, but her smile did not falter. As he opened his mouth to provoke her further, I started to feel like bait.

  “Sorry Dillon,” I said. “But I have more important things on my mind than guys right now. You guys can have them all.”

  This seemed to calm Brianna. She leaned on the railing and gave me a playful glance. “Are there more important things? Like what?”