by Susan Juby
“Then we’ll all be even,” said Neil. “I love it when things are even.”
“You nervous?” Dusk asked me.
“No. I think it’ll be okay. I mean, everyone knows about her.”
“About them,” said Neil.
“About them,” agreed Dusk. “But you need to be careful with her. Don’t push. There’s a lot at stake.”
“Of course,” I said, wondering at this, the first sign of caution Dusk had shown.
Ms. Choo came slippering back into the room. She had on little slides that seemed to be made of paper, and strange pants with a crotch that hung down to her knees and a vest with complicated folds. Ms. Choo was shaking her head. She looked at my canvas and my abbreviated brushstrokes. “You have to use momentum,” she said, and gestured fluidly to demonstrate. “Just so long as the brush doesn’t get away from you and cause a mess.”
Oh, indeed.
Monday, October 15
High Drama Above the Tree Line
Prema Hardwick is G. P.’s token superstar athlete.85
Some readers may wonder why a jock would go to Green Pastures Academy. Why attend a school where you get zero love for your outlier muscle-twitch capacities, when you could go to the Churchill or Dover and get all the special treatment and team jackets your heart could desire?86 Surely, Prema Hardwick was smart enough to realize that the golden children at G. P. are the ones who get opinion pieces published in national news magazines and film shorts in festivals. (Our badminton team, three-legged racers, and hopscotch athletes aren’t about to get a stadium built for them, Friday Night Lights–style. Not even an ironic one.)
The answer to why Prema attends G. P. Academy is this: she takes fabric arts seriously. I’ve seen some of her quilts and yarn installations. She’s a real asset to our traditional arts program, and I mean that in all seriousness, even though it sounds condescending. I am an excellent stitcher, but less skilled with some of the other crafts. For instance, my weaving project was a tragic episode in my art career. Dusk confiscated what she called my “Lump ’n’ Threads” wall hanging for “crimes against eyes,” and took it out to the school sustainability patch to keep weeds down and vermin fearful.
As almost everyone knows, because of all the local newspaper articles and radio announcements and whatnot, Prema and two of her BC Ski Team compadres qualified for the national cross-country ski team. People say she’s destined to win an Olympic medal one day.
Flashback alert!
Dusk’s family has a cabin on Mount Washington (as far as I can tell this is pretty much a requirement for a two-doctor family in the mid-Island region), and last winter her parents invited Neil and me for a weekend. During that visit Dr. and Dr. Weintraub-Lee insisted that Dusk show me how to skate ski.87 They tried to make Neil learn, too, but he told them he was asthmatic, which he is not.
I borrowed Dusk’s eleven-year-old brother’s skate skis and followed her to the trails.
“Skate skiing is just like it sounds: half skating and half skiing. You know how to do both, right?” assumed Dusk.
She shoved off and demonstrated the basic technique. We ended up on a trail that led around the side of the mountain and opened up to reveal the mighty Pacific Ocean sprawling far below through broken cloud cover. At least, that’s what I should have seen. I couldn’t appreciate the view because I was dying. The vapor trail I left in my wake made it look like I was carrying a boiling kettle somewhere on my person.
I collapsed at about the three-quarter mark and lay atop the crust of snow, waiting for the end. It took a good ten minutes for my heart to stop jackhammering in a fatal-seeming way. Dusk finally noticed I was no longer behind her, and by the time she doubled back to check on me, I was past caring about small matters such as life and death.
“You may need to radio down to the lodge and get some medical support staff and a defibrillator,” I told her. I’d sweated through my tights and woolen jersey and the sweat had dried, gluing me to the snowbank. “My body may be frozen here until spring,” I added. “It will actually be a relief. Anything’s better than trying to skate ski any farther.”
“Come on, get up,” said Dusk with the bedside manner of a dingo. “You’re fine.”
She jammed her poles into the bank, leaned over, and helped me into a sitting position.
That’s when we heard the shooshing noise that indicated that a good skate skier was approaching.
I watched in awe as Prema Hardwick flew by, poling and skating with the ease and grace of . . . well, an elite skate skier.
She was followed by two ultra-lean guys. All three of them wore the colorful, boldly patterned, aerodynamic unitards of the Mount Washington Ski Team.
Among the three of them, they had perhaps one-half ounce of extra fat, which would probably be used up by the time they got back to the lodge.
Prema smiled graciously at us as she passed and inclined her head. She appeared entirely unaffected by the effort of pushing herself up a mountain on a pair of Popsicle sticks.
“That’s disgusting,” I said when they were gone, which took about two seconds.
Dusk laughed. “I think she’s propelled along by the drama of the triangle,” she said.
“Triangle?”
“The captain of the Nordic team is Luke. He’s twenty. He loves her. Tony, her other teammate, also twenty, is in love with her, too. The three of them spend every minute together. It’s a sordid-yet-compelling love triangle. High drama above the tree line.” Dusk slid her hands back into the straps of her poles. “Everyone is holding their breath waiting to see which guy she’s going to choose. It has the potential to destroy the team. It’s a code red love situation up here at Mount Washington.”
“She’s torn between two lovers,” I said. “It’s like The Hunger Games but with Nordic skiers.”
“In other words, it’s nothing like The Hunger Games.”
“Right,” I agreed.
The thought of Prema’s hyper-athletic love triangle was enough to sustain me until we made it back to the lodge, where we found Neil enjoying a large plate of fries and gravy.
“Come on in!” he said. “The fries are fine!”
Once we were settled with hot chocolate and our own fries, we watched Prema and her suitors at the ski team table. The two boys leaned close each time she spoke. Then they caught sight of each other and quickly leaned out, like wooden pecking-hen toys. The whole lodge seemed filled with low-grade tension. Prema, for all her ferocious perfection and outdoorsiness, seemed anxious, looking from Luke to Tony and back. Part of me wondered if she was trying to tell them apart. They were extremely similar—high cheekbones, sandy curly hair, eyes bugged out from a bad case of love.
“You getting a load of those three?” asked Neil.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You and the rest of the world,” he said, and swiped another fry through the gravy. “What, oh what, is going to happen?”
And that’s where we left it. Prema Hardwick, superstar athlete on whose talents and affections rest the dreams of so many people. End of flashback.88
At the end of last year, she and both of her would-be lovers joined the National Ski Team. Meanwhile, her smile became less frequent and her jock-perkiness wilted.
Every time we saw her, I whispered my standard line, “Torn between two lovers,” and shook my head sadly.
Dusk said, “It’s like Romeo and Juliet plus another guy.”
“That would be Paris,” I told her.
“I thought the problem in that story was the parents,” she said. “Then again, I suppose I would think that.”
Of the three of us, Dusk seemed the most genuinely worried about Prema. After all, Dusk spent a lot more time on the mountain than Neil and me. Two days after I talked to Brian and a little less than a year after I saw Prema in her natural element, I was ready to get to the bottom of her romantic tribul
ations. I decided to approach her during the period designated, but only occasionally used, for physical activity. I knew that Prema would be running laps. Ski season hadn’t started yet, but Prema worked out about four times a day. When the weather allowed it, she did fartlek on the track. Fartlek89 is this running technique where you run at your normal pace and then every so often, when the spirit moves you, you run as fast as you can. Then you return to your regular pace. It’s pretty fun. Not as fun as saying the word fartlek, but what is, really?
“I’m sure she’ll appreciate your interest,” said Dusk. “She’s probably just waiting for an excuse to talk about it.”
“I agree,” said Neil. “Norm, I think you should tell her that the neurologists have done studies and they’ve discovered that secrets are hard on the body. They affect health and athletic performance.”
Only a few days before, I would have replied that was a good reason for us to stay out of other people’s business. If we ended up learning a bunch of secrets, our health could be negatively affected. But the boost I’d gotten from my meeting with Brian Forbes was still clear in my mind.
As we walked outside into the cool, clear October afternoon, already scented with wood smoke, Neil massaged my shoulders like I was heading into a boxing ring, which made me feel kind of dumb and kind of great at the same time.
“Just be yourself,” he said.
When we were near the track, Dusk said, “Maybe I should do it.”
I turned to her.
“I know her, and it feels wrong to . . . outsource it.”
“You don’t think I can handle it?” I said.
“I just feel responsible. If everything goes to hell, it’s better if it’s my fault.” Dusk wasn’t usually one to admit that anything could go wrong with one of her ideas. Her reaction wasn’t making sense.
“My dad is so excited about the ski team,” she continued. “He’s planning to take the whole family to the nationals in Banff. He’s even planning to take us to the Olympics if Prema or any of our skiers make it.”
“But then isn’t it better if one of us messes things up? Your parents already think we’re morons,” said Neil.
“They do not think you’re morons. They just see you as low achievers. It’s not the same. Anyway, my parents are used to me doing stupid, disappointing things. I don’t want them to get mad at you guys. If anyone’s going to be responsible for dashing their dreams, it should be me.”
“Would you like a shoulder massage?” Neil asked her.
“No, Neil. I do not want a shoulder massage. You and Norm can do bodywork on each other while I get this thing done.”
“We don’t have to—” I started, but Dusk was already striding off.
Soon, she’d reached the area of track on which Prema, lean and dark-complected, was stretching. Dusk began to do a pale imitation of the same stretches, and when Prema began running, Dusk hustled along behind. She looked extra unathletic because she wore men’s brogues, a pair of lace pantaloons, and an oversized Celine Dion T-shirt.
Prema was apparently so depressed and distracted by her romantic difficulties that she didn’t notice or didn’t care that she had company. Her warm-up pace was similar to that of a coursing greyhound. Dusk was able to keep her in sight, but only barely. Then Prema found her next gear and began covering ground like a barn swallow.
When Dusk reached the spot where Neil and I stood, long after Prema had sprinted by, her brogues sounded like they were filled with concrete.
She slowed, then stopped, her hands on her knees.
“Go! Go!” said Neil.
I took Dusk’s place on the track and hurried after Prema, who by this time had gone around at least twice.
I ran as fast as I could, but Prema was doing something else entirely. “Looking good out there,” said Neil when I panted my way back within earshot. Dusk said she thought she needed to barf and that she’d give me encouragement later.
I realized that I was going to tear something if I didn’t stop or slow down. Also, I had no idea why we were racing after Prema Hardwick.
“Can’t we just wait until she finishes?” I gasped.
“It wouldn’t be fair. We have to meet her in her natural environment,” said Dusk.
“Oh, God,” said Neil.
He stepped gingerly onto the track in his dark blue suit. He began to trot gingerly along the track, looking like a man chasing after his handkerchief on a windy day.
“Our boy is exercising,” she said. “In a suit.”
“I’m so proud,” I agreed.
We stood with our arms around each other as we watched Neil trot his way uncertainly around the track while Prema hurtled by him again and again as though it was one-hundredth rather than a quarter mile. His burgundy tie flapped out behind him.
“How much do you love him?” I asked Dusk.
“As much as my own breath,” she said.
“Me too,” I said.
He made it all the way around, but just barely. Dusk limped onto the track to replace him. Fortunately for our newly formed shin splints, Prema finally slowed to a human jog and then stopped and began stretching on the bleachers.
Out of respect, Neil and I backed away as Dusk walked up to her. We saw her say something. Prema turned to stare at Dusk and we could hear the fateful words: “Mind your own business.” Then Prema walked away.
“Not good,” I said.
“Definitely not worth the exercise,” said Neil.
Wednesday, October 17
Just the Three of Us
We still felt shaken the next day. Prema wasn’t the first person not to tell us the truth, but she was the first one to get upset that we’d asked. Dusk, in particular, was unsettled when I picked her up for school.
“I could hardly sleep last night,” she said. “My dad will have a coronary if he finds out I did something to ruin the team dynamic.”
“Wasn’t that the point of asking her which boy she likes best?” I asked. “To sort out the dynamic?”
“Yeah, I guess. But it’s obviously working the way it is.”
I sort of liked seeing Dusk being neurotic. Usually, I was the indecisive one.
When we arrived at school, Neil and I patted her on the hand and told her she’d tried her best, and Prema and her two men would probably continue to skate ski like the wind. Dusk slumped off to make tiny trailer furniture in her tabletop installation class.
Neil went off to European art history and I decided to skip social studies and head into the library for a bit of a read and maybe a short writing session. I’d just opened my notebook when I felt someone standing over me.
It was Prema Hardwick.
My heart rate picked up and I wondered if it was because I felt anxious from guilt or from excitement.
“You guys were following me yesterday,” she said.
Our whole mandate was truth so I suppressed the urge to lie. “Yeah.”
“Because of your Truth Club?”
“Commission,” I said. “We’ve formed a Truth Commission.”
“This place,” said Prema, disgusted. “It just never ends. Can’t anyone just . . . just be normal?”
“I’m not sure art school is the place to go looking for normal.”
Prema radiated wiry strength. I have this theory that all elite athletes are beautiful thanks to fitness and focus, but mostly from figuring out what they’re really good at. Just like the best writers often have amazing faces and great musicians are transformed by their talent, even if they’re meek little people in plain sweaters.90
Her eyes were large and, like Brian Forbes, she had long dark lashes, which were probably good for keeping snowflakes out of her eyes when she was racing. She wore no makeup. There was no excess to her at all, which you can’t say about many people.
“Here’s what I have to say to a
nyone who wants to know,” she said. Again, no niceties. No taking a stick to the bushes and beating around. “Tony and Luke are amazing. I love them both. And I’m going to keep loving them both. Our relationship is no one else’s concern. The three of us are going all the way.”
I felt my jaw drop and she seemed to realize what she’d said.
“With our skiing,” she added.
There was a pause while we both digested her words.
“Are you going to tell everyone?” she asked.
“No. We just ask people their truth. We don’t talk about it.”
“You know something?” said Prema, pulling a chair over to my cubicle and sitting down with the unfamiliar movements of someone who doesn’t like to be still.
She crossed one skinny-jean-clad leg over the other like she was really getting into this relaxation thing. “I feel better. It’s funny. I know everyone wonders about us. I wonder about us, too. But I also don’t. I love both of them and we’ll figure it out eventually. In the meantime, our feelings for each other make us train harder, race harder.”
“That’s good,” I said. “There have been successful threesomes throughout history,” I added. As I spoke, I realized I should have done some research before saying that.
She made a wry face at me. I didn’t blame her.
“What about you guys?” she said.
“Us guys?”
“You and Dusk and the guy with the outfits.”
“Neil?” I said.
“Yeah. What about the three of you? Are you going to ask yourselves the same question? Because I think you should, if truth is your thing.”
“I, uh, well,” I said articulately.
“Tell Dusk I’m sorry I got upset at her. I don’t like people in my business. Also, you are all such bad runners. You know how it hurts a person with perfect pitch when they hear a tone-deaf person? Well, watching you and your friends do athletics is like that for me.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Yeah. I definitely feel better after talking about this,” said Prema. “Now I have to decide whether to tell Luke and Tony. I’m ready to acknowledge our truth, but I don’t know about them.”