Of Fur and Ice

by Andrea Marie Brokaw

  “Your meat, sweetie.” Her smile is kind. “Do you want it cooked or not?”

  Uh... Okay... Not the sort of choice I was expecting to make. “Yes, please?”

  The lunch lady, who I will take this opportunity to note is a lot prettier than the lunch ladies I am used to, shrugs as she starts to load a plate. “I have to ask the new students. Most people do like it cooked, but there are a few who just can't stand it.”

  Trying not to look appalled at this information, I nod and take the plate she holds out to me – potatoes, carrots, and a huge slab of steak, cooked. The steak's not very cooked to judge by the little pool of blood that sloshes around the plate as I move it, but my stomach rumbles anyway.

  When I first started craving extremely rare meat, I thought something was seriously wrong with me. But this was before I lived in a world in which saying, “Actually, I would like my steak raw, please,” happens often enough people ask beforehand if you want it that way.

  I wonder if the raw meat crowd eats the carrots or not, and if theirs are steamed like mine are.

  Bryce the Polar Bear waves me over towards him when I look up from the meal, his motions big, as if he's worried I'm somehow not going to notice a mountain trying to get my attention. Grabbing a jug of chocolate milk from the beverage fridge, I start towards him, glancing to make sure Sam and Aliah are coming this way too.

  There's another guy across the table from Bryce. He doesn't seem to notice my arrival, being too absorbed in his tablet. Judging from the bright red hair, I am guessing this is Sam's brother, a senior by the name of Tod. Sam told me last night that it's a family name always given to the oldest male in the generation, but she looked confused when I asked her why her name wasn't Vixen.

  Aliah and I sit on either side of Tod, leaving the seat by Bryce free for Samantha. Giving me a shy smile, she takes it. Instead of talking to Bryce though, she directs her first words to her brother.

  “Tod, stop staring at that stupid machine and say hello to Mike.”

  “Hello to Mike.” He doesn't even glance at me.

  “Lyly just broke up with him again,” Bryce says softly, apologetic for his friend's behavior.

  “Oh, is that all?” Sam sounds bored.

  “It's nearly two weeks early.” Tod doesn't sound heartbroken, merely confused. He glances at me finally, doing a mild double take but then going back to his display. “She wasn't supposed to break up with me until the Saturday after next.”

  “She has a schedule,” Sam tells me with an eye roll. “He's programmed it into that thing so he can better predict her behavior.”

  “Seriously?”

  That is so messed up.

  “Yes.” Sam cuts a bite of her meat, chewing it while I turn to stare at her brother's profile. Why on earth would anyone put up with being dumped on schedule?

  “I might know what it is?” Aliah whispers, sitting up suddenly, unbalancing her soda in the process. Sam grabs it before it can tip all the way over and Aliah smiles gratefully. “Remember prom last year?”

  This school has a prom? I would have thought it was too small. Even assuming it's all grades, I don't know how they manage.

  Tod scowls at his tablet. “Yes.”

  “Oh!” Sam claps. “You're right!”

  Looking between the two, Tod makes an impatient gesture.

  “She stayed with you an extra week so you'd be together for prom?” Aliah prompts.

  How sweet of her.

  Tod spreads a hand in confusion. “And you think she's making up for it now?”

  “No.” The albino shakes her head. “But it indicates she'll change the schedule for special events, doesn't it?”

  “Oh, right!” Smiling suddenly, Tod turns off the tablet, puts it down, and grabs a huge bite of potato.

  “There's a dance right after the next moon,” Sam fills me in. “If she stayed with the schedule, they'd be in the middle of their breakup for it. Then she'd have to go to the trouble of making someone else take her.”

  “Oh.” I use my steak as an excuse not to say anything else because I really don't know what to say to that.

  “So, how's your first day?” Bryce asks me.

  Shrugging, I swallow my food and tell him, “Just got the tour so far.”

  “Is it a lot different from your old school?”

  I laugh, then take a drink before answering him. “You could say that. Some of my classes back home had more people in them than this whole school. And we definitely didn't have our own ice rink.” I add the second part quickly, lest they think I was complaining about the school's size.

  “You probably had a football team though,” Tod guesses, much more attentive since the mystery of his girlfriend's abandonment has been solved.

  “Yeah, we did.” I shrug. “I prefer the NFL though.”

  Tod smiles. “Well, you had the Seahawks then.”

  I'm going to respond to that, but a series of chills down my back makes me start to shiver. Thoroughly distracted by the sensation, I look around, finding the source of my unease sitting near the windows.

  Warren is there, alone. His eyes are on me, cold and hostile.

  When he sees me looking, his eyes narrow for several seconds before he looks away. Staring now at the plate before him, he cuts a piece of meat.

  It would seem Warren belongs to the raw camp.

  I shiver again.

  “What's wrong?” Bryce asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “He really is staring at you.” Sam raises her eyebrow towards Warren. “Are you sure you don't know him from somewhere else or something?”

  I glance back toward him, watching as a drop of blood falls from the huge chunk of flesh on his fork. “Positive.” My head snaps back as he starts to look up again.

  “Who are we talking about?” Bryce asks, squinting.

  “Warren,” Sam answers thoughtfully.

  Tod makes an interested noise. “He's been moody all day. I thought he and Seth were going to get into a serious fight in class.”

  “They're always fighting,” Sam dismisses.

  “Yeah, but usually it's play fighting. This would have been the serious throat ripping sort of fighting.”

  “So what's wrong with him then?” I ask. “Does he just hate me that much?”

  “Why would he hate you?” Tod gapes at me in astonishment.

  I fill the others in on what happened last night. “Weird,” Tod echoes his sister's sentiment. “And he's still staring at you. Extremely weird. Even for a wolf.”

  Well, that's just great. I'm weird enough to turn normal people into freaks. Go me.

  Chapter Six

  Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, everyone has the same class. If you want to call it a class. What happens is this: we are all dragged up a mountain and told to either ski or snowboard.

  Of course, in my case, this is an actual class because I ski about as well as I ice skate. I've done it before. I can usually get down the bunny slope without falling. But show me a slope that isn't aimed toward absolute beginners, and I tremble in fear. Then I fall down.

  Everyone else has their own equipment, which they keep in a locker room at the slope. Mr. Atherton takes me to the slope-side store, where the employees fit me for boots. While they're doing that, he picks out a pair or skis for me and tells the workers to charge them, the boots, and any clothing I need to the school account.

  “No!” I protest as I latch onto his arm and pull him away from the sales counter. “I thought I was renting. I can't afford to buy all this stuff.”

  He smiles softly. “They're putting it on the school account.”

  “Right.” I give him a look meant to convey that I'm not lacking in intelligence. “And then you'll bill my dad for it along with my tuition. Do you have any idea how little park rangers make?”

  “Michaela...” He leads me to a more secluded part of the store. “There's no tuition. Your family is paying for your meals and that's it. Anything academic is completely cove
red by a trust, including this. Call it a perk of our curse.”

  I stare at him. “For serious?”

  He raises his eyebrows at the skepticism. “For reals even.”

  I stop arguing and go back to the cash register to tell them to do as Mr. Atherton said.

  While the skis are being adjusted for my boots, I browse the store, picking out a new jacket and a pair of pants with lots of nifty zippers and pockets. I go ahead and pick out some things to go under them too, hoping they'll also be covered by this mysterious trust. An hour later, I trudge out the door into the brisk smell of cold air, clad in my new gear and trying to remember how one carries skis. The things are long and difficult, and I keep dropping them.

  “Need help?”

  I look up from the skis, which lay on the ground again, to see a boy about my age watching me with amused, impossibly light blue eyes – eyes the exact same color as the bright sky above.

  “Do you need help?” he asks again, his voice warm and somehow comforting.

  “I forgot how to carry skis,” I confess, feeling like a complete idiot. If an avalanche rushed down the mountain to bury me right this instant, I would consider it a blessing.

  The boy's smile widens, showing off predictably perfect teeth. “I think I can help with that.”

  Bending gracefully, he stands the skis up, then slides them together so the bindings interweave with each other. “You want to make sure you hold them like this.” He hoists them onto his shoulder and points at where the bindings meet. “Because if you hold them like this...” He turns them over. “Then they'll slide apart like they're doing now.” With an agile motion, he flips them back the right way and aligns them again. “Where are you taking them?”

  “Um... I'm supposed to be having a lesson?” That shouldn't have been a question, but I find myself uncertain about what I am supposed to be doing. Maybe Aliah is contagious.

  Nodding, the boy starts to walk away. I clunk after him, awkward in my boots.

  “Is this your first time?” my savior asks over his shoulder.

  “No.” I smile, wondering if I should have lied so my lack of grace would seem more excusable. “I'm just not very good.”

  He laughs. “No one thinks they're any good.”

  Shaking my head, I laugh along with him. “Yeah, but some of us are right.”

  He grins back at me, and I nearly trip from the impact of it. “We'll get you sorted out in no time, I'm sure. I'm Seth, by the way.”

  Seth. I've heard of Seth. The foxes told me about him at lunch, when I asked who it was that Warren nearly got in a fight with. Seth is one of the snow leopards. And the snow leopards are what passes for the cool clique at North Sky. My friends said he's really not bad for a leopard, he gets along with just about everyone who isn't Warren, and he's one of the best skiers in Alaska. But why the heck didn't anyone warn me that he's got the most amazing eyes on the planet? A girl needs to be prepared for that sort of thing.

  “Mike,” I hear myself say back. I didn't think about speaking, of course, because Seth is still looking at me, and I am finding it difficult to form coherent thoughts when he does that. “But I guess you figured that out already, huh?”

  “I had a hunch,” he admits, his amazing eyes sparkling like snow in the sunlight.

  He walks me up to a chalet-like building with several people lounging on its porch. “Good,” he tells me. “Claire's here. You'll like her.”

  Claire is in her early twenties, athletic in build, and scented like a cat. She doesn't seem at all chilled despite standing around outside, but I don't know if that's because she's a were or because ski instructors develop cold weather tolerance. Her companions, who all smell human, don't seem terribly bothered by the conditions either.

  Seth leaves me with her, and she goes through a series of questions about my experience before asking if I'm comfortable going up the lift on the beginner's slope or if I think I need some work before that. Feeling cold enough to just want to get this over with, I opt for the lift.

  The first decent isn't great. I fall and everything. “Don't worry about falling,” Claire tells me as she helps me up. “If you go through a day without falling, you just went through a day without learning anything.”

  Easy for her to say. She isn't dying of hypothermia.

  Claire gives me several tips on the lift back up, and several runs later she takes me over to one of the more advanced green slopes. By the time we're done, I'm feeling comfortable and thinking maybe one day before I graduate, I'll be able to tackle the blue intermediate slopes. The difficult blacks are still outside of my dreams, let alone the double black diamonds or the out-of-bounds stuff a lot of the kids from school are into, but I'm starting to think Claire can achieve anything, so maybe...

  Seth grins at me as I complete my last descent of the day. “Hey, that run looks two hundred percent better than the one I saw earlier.”

  “Thanks. I think.” Blushing warms my cheeks, and for once I'm grateful to be turning pink, since it means my face no longer feels like its coated in ice.

  “He's right,” Claire agrees. “You're doing a lot better. You should work some more on your own Thursday, then I'll see you again next Tuesday.”

  “Okay.” Rubbing my gloves against each other in the hopes of warming my hands, I nod in response to her wave goodbye.

  “Want some coffee?”

  I blink stupidly. I'm not sure, but I think the most amazing pair of eyes on the planet just asked me to have coffee with them. Not trusting myself to speak, I nod dumbly.

  The responding grin sends my stomach reeling. “This way then. I'll show you where to store those skis first.”

  I may make a sound acknowledging that, but it's more of a gurgle than a word.

  He takes me to the building I left my street shoes in and helps me struggle out of my boots. He hangs the skis from a rack behind me while I put on my sneakers. The only people allowed in the room are people who can swipe a school ID to get in, so leaving things out here is as safe as leaving them in a school building.

  My feet rejoice to be back in real shoes and tingle happily as I follow Seth over to yet another little building, this one housing a deliciously scented coffee shop. Dozens of people stop what they're doing to watch us as we walk in, but I try not to let it get to me. Seth ignores everyone completely, striding confidently to the counter to order a large cappuccino before asking what I want.

  “Mocha?” I ask the barista. “That size?” I point at a cup on the display, not sure what they call the medium size here.

  “Medium.” She smiles and enters the order into her computer.

  “And half a dozen brownies,” Seth adds, handing over a debit card before I can even remember what pocket my wallet is in.

  He takes the brownies and his cup to an empty table near the windows, where we have a great view of the terrain park. “Hey, look!” He jerks his chin toward outside. “Tod's trying to kill himself.”

  “What?” Alarmed, I slam my drink onto the table, send coffee sloshing over the sides, and gaze with frantic urgency out the window.

  Seth laughs at my panic. “Sorry to scare you. He was just inverting off a jump. And there's Ski Patrol to yell at him for it.” I follow the highly visible red jacket to Tod. His helmet covers his hair, which was what I was trying to use to identify him.

  “Why would he want to do something stupid like that?” I ask, grabbing some napkins from the dispenser in the middle of the table to lap up my spill.

  After a shrug, Seth starts to take his jacket off. “Probably because he saw me doing it earlier.” He grins wickedly. “I'm a corrupting influence.”

  My mouth opens to try to say something witty and flirtatious to that, but all that comes out is a little gasp as Seth takes off his hat and shakes out his hair.

  Okay, to not mention his eyes to me had been a major oversight. But the fact that no one said anything about his hair is just criminal.

  There are two very obvious things about S
eth's hair. The first is that it cascades nearly all the way down his back with a healthy enthusiasm my hair will never achieve. There's not a single girl on the planet who wouldn't kill to have hair of that texture.

  The second thing is... His hair is the color of a raven's wing. And his hair is the color of pure opal. At the same time.

  “Should have warned you.” Self-consciously, his finger touches a strand of hair. “It's sort of freaky.”