by Cynthia Hand
“So, I thought we could meet Monday at my mom’s theater, the Pink Garter. There’s no show being rehearsed right now so we have a lot of space to work,” says Angela.
“Sounds terrific,” I say with about a teaspoonful of enthusiasm. “So, after school on Monday?”
“I have orchestra. It gets out around seven. Maybe I could meet you at the Garter at seven thirty?”
“Great,” I say. “I’ll be there.”
She’s staring at me. I wonder if she calls me Bozo, too, with her friends, whoever they are.
“You okay?” she asks.
“Yeah, sorry.” My face feels hot and tight as a sunburn. I manage a wooden smile.
“It’s just been one of those days.”
That night I dream of the forest fire. It’s the same as always: the pines and aspens, the heat, the approaching flames, Christian standing with his back turned watching it.
Smoke curls through the air. I walk to him.
“Christian,” I call out.
He turns toward me. His eyes capture mine. He opens his mouth to say something. I know what he says will be important, another clue, something crucial to understanding my purpose.
“Do I know you?” he asks.
“We go to school together,” I say to remind him.
Nothing.
“I’m in your British History class.”
Still not ringing any bells.
“You carried me to the nurse’s office on my first day of school. I passed out in the hall, remember?”
“Oh, right, I remember you,” he says. “What was your name again?”
“Clara.” I don’t have time to remind him of my existence. The fire’s coming. “I have to get you out of here,” I say, grabbing his arm. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I just know we have to go.
“What?”
“I’m here to save you.”
“Save me?” he says incredulously.
“Yes.”
He smiles, then puts his fist up to his mouth and laughs into it.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “But how could you save me?”
* * *
“It was just a dream,” says Mom.
She pours me a cup of raspberry tea and sits down at the kitchen counter, looking serene as ever, if not a bit tired and rumpled, which is only fair since it’s four in the morning and her daughter just woke her up freaking out.
“Sugar?” she offers.
I shake my head.
“How do you know it was a dream?” I ask.
“Because it seems like your vision always happens while you’re awake. Some of us dream our visions, but not you. And because I have a very hard time believing that Christian wouldn’t remember your name.”
I shrug. Then, because that’s what I always do, I tell her everything. I tell her about the way I feel drawn to Christian and the few times in class when we talked and how I never know what to say. I tell her about Kay, and my brilliant idea to invite myself to lunch at Christian’s table, and how it had backfired big-time. And I tell her about Bozo.
“Bozo?” she says with her quiet smile when I’m finally done talking.
“Yeah. Although one guy decided to go with Hot Bozo.” I sigh and drink a swallow of tea. It burns my tongue. “I’m a freak.”
Mom playfully shoves me. “Clara! They called you hot.”
“Um, not exactly,” I say.
“Don’t go feeling too sorry for yourself. We should think of some other ones.”
“Other ones?”
“Other names they could call you. So if you ever hear them again you’ll be prepared with a comeback.”
“What?”
“Pumpkinhead.”
“Pumpkinhead,” I repeat slowly.
“That was a major insult, when I was a kid.”
“Back in what, 1900?”
She pours herself some more tea. “I got Pumpkinhead many times. They also called me Little Orphan Annie, which was a popular poem back then. And Maggot. I hated Maggot.”
It’s hard for me to imagine her as a child, let alone one that other kids picked on. It makes me feel slightly (but only slightly) better about being called Bozo.
“Okay, what else you got?”
“Let’s see. Carrots. That’s another common one.”
“Somebody already calls me that,” I admit.
“Oh, oh — Pippi Longstocking.”
“Oh, snap,” I laugh. “Bring it on, Matchstick!”
And so on it goes, back and forth until we’re both laughing hysterically and Jeffrey appears in the doorway, glaring.
“I’m sorry,” Mom says, still giggling wildly. “Did we wake you?”
“No. I have wrestling.” He brushes past us to the refrigerator, gets out a carton of orange juice, pours himself a glass, drinks it in about three gulps, and sets it on the counter while we try to simmer down.
I can’t help it. I turn to Mom.
“Are you a member of the Weasley family?” I ask.
“Nice one. Ginger Nut,” she shoots back.
“What does that even mean? But you, you definitely have gingervitis.”
And off we go again like a couple of hyenas.
“You two need to seriously consider cutting back on the caffeine. Don’t forget, Clara, you’re driving me to practice in like twenty minutes,” says Jeffrey.
“You got it, bro.”
He goes upstairs. Our laughter finally dies down. I wipe my eyes. My sides hurt.
“You kind of rock, you know that?” I say to Mom.
“This was fun,” she says. “It’s been too long since I’ve laughed that hard.”
It gets quiet.
“What’s Christian like?” she asks then, offhandedly like she’s just making small talk.
“I know he’s hotness personified, and apparently he has a bit of hero complex, but what’s he like? You’ve never told me.”
I blush.
“I don’t know.” I shrug awkwardly. “He’s a big mystery, and it feels like it’s my job to unlock it. Even his T-shirt today was like a code. It said, ‘What’s your sign?’ and underneath there was a black diamond, a blue square, and a green circle. I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.”
“Hmm,” says Mom. “That is mysterious.”
She darts into her office for a few minutes, then emerges smiling with a page she’s printed off the internet. My hundred-year-old mother can apparently Google with the best of them.
“Skiing,” she announces triumphantly. “The symbols are posted on signs at the top of ski runs to indicate the difficulty of the slope. Black diamond is difficult, blue square’s intermediate, and green circle is, supposedly, easy. He’s a skier.”
“A skier,” I say. “See? I didn’t even know that. I mean, I know he’s left-handed and he wears Obsession and he doodles in the margins of his notebook when he’s bored in class. But I don’t know him. And he really doesn’t know me.”
“That will change,” she says.
“Will it? Am I even supposed to get to know him? Or just save him? I keep asking myself, why? Why him? I mean, people die in forest fires. Maybe not a lot of people, but some do every year, I’m sure. So why am I being sent here to save him? And what if I can’t? What happens then?”
“Clara, listen to me.” Mom leans forward and takes my hands in hers. Her eyes aren’t sparkling anymore. The irises are so dark they are nearly purple. “You aren’t being sent on a mission that you don’t have the power to accomplish. You have to find that power inside you somewhere, and you have to refine it. You were made for this purpose. And Christian isn’t some random boy that you’re supposed to encounter for no reason. There is a reason, for all of this.”
“You think Christian might be important, like he’ll be president someday or find the cure for cancer?”
She smiles.
“He’s terribly important,” she says. “And so are you.”
I really want to believe her.
Chap
ter 6
A-Skiing I Will Go
Sunday morning we drive to Teton Village, a big, famous ski resort area a few miles outside Jackson. Jeffrey dozes in the backseat. Mom looks tired, probably from too many late nights working and too many serious discussions with her daughter in the wee hours of the morning.
“We turn before we hit Wilson, right?” she asks, clutching the wheel at the ten and two positions and squinting through the windshield like the sun is hurting her eyes.
“Yeah, it’s like Highway 380, on the right.”
“It’s 390,” says Jeffrey, his eyes still closed.
Mom pinches the bridge of her nose, blinks a few times, then adjusts her hands on the steering wheel.
“What’s with you today?” I ask.
“Headache. There’s a project for work not coming together as I’d planned.”
“You’re sure working a lot. What kind of project?”
She turns carefully onto Highway 390.
“Now what?” she asks.
I consult the MapQuest directions I printed.
“Just keep going for about five miles until we hit the resort somewhere on the left.
We shouldn’t be able to miss it.”
We drive for a few minutes, past restaurants and business areas, a few dude ranches. Suddenly the ski area opens up on one side of us, the mountain rising behind it cut into big white lanes through the trees, the tram running all the way to the top. It looks crazy steep, all of it. Mount Everest kind of steep.
Jeffrey sits up to get a better look.
“That is one wicked mountain,” he says like he can’t wait another minute to hurl his body down it. He checks his watch.
“Come on, Mom,” he says. “Do you have to drive like a grandma?”
“Do you need some money?” asks Mom, ignoring his comment. “I gave Clara some money for lessons.”
“I don’t need lessons. I just need to get there sometime in the next millennium.”
“Lay off, doofus,” I say. “We’ll get there when we get there. We’re like less than a mile now.”
“Maybe you should let me out and I could walk. It’d be faster.”
“Both of you, be qu—” Mom starts to say, but then we slide on the ice. She hits the brakes and we drift sideways, picking up speed. Mom and I both scream as the car careens off the road and crashes through a snowbank. We come to a stop at the edge of a small field. She takes a deep, shaky breath.
“Hey, you’re the one who said we’d love the winters here,” I remind her.
“Perfect,” says Jeffrey sarcastically. He unbuckles his seat belt and opens the door.
The car is resting in about two feet of snow. He glances at his watch again. “That’s just perfect.”
“What, you have an important meeting you have to get to?” I ask.
He shoots me a disgusted look.
“Oh, I get it,” I say. “You’re meeting up with someone. What’s her name?”
“None of your business.”
Mom sighs and puts the car in reverse. The car moves back about a foot and then the tires spin. She pulls forward and tries again. No luck. We’re stuck. In a snowbank. In plain sight of the ski hill. It really can’t get more humiliating.
“I could get out and push,” says Jeffrey.
“Just wait,” Mom says. “Someone will come.”
Right on cue, a truck pulls off to the side of the road. A guy gets out and tromps through the snow toward us. Mom rolls down the window.
“Well, well, well, what have we here?” he asks.
My mouth falls open. Tucker leans in the window, grinning from ear to ear.
Oh yes, it can get more humiliating.
“Hey, Carrots,” he says. “Jeff.”
He nods to my brother like the two are best buds. Jeffrey nods back. Mom smiles up at him.
“I don’t think we’ve met,” she says. “I’m Maggie Gardner.”
“Tucker Avery,” he says.
“You’re Wendy’s brother.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“We could really use some help,” she says sweetly as I slump down in the seat and wish I was dead.
“Sure thing. Just sit tight.”
He jogs back to his truck and returns with tow cables, which he hooks to the underside of the car quickly, like he’s done this kind of thing a million times before.
He gets back in his truck, pulls up behind us, and attaches the cables to his truck.
Then he tows us smoothly onto the road. The whole thing takes all of five minutes.
Mom gets out of the car. She gestures for me to do the same. I look at her like she’s crazy, but she persists.
“You need to say thank you,” she says under her breath.
“Mom.”
“Now.”
“All right.” I get out. Tucker is kneeling in the snow unhooking the cable from his truck. He looks up at me and smiles again, revealing a dimple in his left cheek.
“In case you couldn’t tell, that was my rusty truck towing you out of a snowbank,” he says.
“Thank you so much,” says my mom. She looks pointedly at me.
“Yes, thank you,” I say through gritted teeth.
“You’re very welcome,” he says cordially, and in that moment I see that Tucker can be charming when he wants to be.
“And tell Wendy we said hello,” Mom says.
“Will do. Nice to meet you, ma’am.” If he’d been wearing his cowboy hat, he would have tipped it at her. Then he gets back in his truck and drives off without another word.
I look toward the ski hill, the same direction Tucker went, rethinking the whole skiing thing entirely.
But Christian’s a skier, I remind myself. So a-skiing I will go.
“That Tucker seems like a nice young man,” says Mom as we walk back to the car.
“How come you’ve never told me about him before?”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later I’m standing in the area where students are supposed to meet their instructors, which is teeming with little, screaming kids wearing helmets and goggles. I feel completely out of my element, like an astronaut about to take his first steps on an alien planet. I’m wearing rented skis, rented ski boots that feel weird and tight and make me walk funny, plus every other kind of snow gear my mom was able to convince me to put on. I drew the line at goggles, and I stuck the unflattering wool hat into my jacket pocket, but from the neck down every inch of me is covered and padded. I don’t know if I can move, let alone ski. My instructor, who’s supposed to meet me at nine a.m. sharp, is already five minutes late. I just watched my pain-in-the-butt brother jump on the ski lift like it’s no big deal and carve his way down a few minutes later like he was born on a snowboard, the blond girl by his side. Life sucks.
That and my feet are cold.
“Sorry I’m late,” says a rumbly voice from behind me. “I had to drag some Californians out of a snowbank.”
It can’t be true. Fate is not so cruel. I pivot to meet Tucker’s blue eyes.
“Lucky for them,” I say.
His lips twitch like he’s trying not to laugh. He seems like he’s in a good mood.
“So you go around pulling idiots out of the snow and teaching them how to ski,” I say.
He shrugs. “It pays for the season pass.”
“Are you any good at it?”
“Pulling idiots out of the snow? I’m the best.”
“Ha-ha. You’re hilarious. No — teaching them to ski.”
“I guess you’ll find out.”
He starts right into a lesson on how to balance, position my skis, and turn and stop.
He treats me like I’m any other student, which is great. I even relax a little. It all seems fairly simple when you break it down.
But then he tells me to get on the rope tow.
“It’s easy. Just hold on to it and let it tug you up the hill. When you get to the top, let go.”
He apparently thinks I’m a moron.
I make my way awkwardly over to the line, then shuffle up to the edge, where the greasy black cable drags through the snow. I reach down and grab it. It jerks at my arms, and I lurch forward and almost fall, but somehow I manage to get my skis in line and straighten up and let it tug me up the hill. I dart a quick look over my shoulder to see if Tucker is laughing. He’s not. He looks like some Olympic judge getting ready to mark a scorecard. Or some guy about to witness a horrific accident.