The Ex Games

by Jennifer Echols

  “Anyway, those are all my plans so far,” I threw in there despite myself. What I meant was: I am free for the rest of the week, hint hint. I wanted to kick myself.

  “Are you going to the Poseur concert on Valentine’s Day?” He eased his hand out from under mine and put his on top. His fingers massaged my fingers ever so gently.

  Nick was only toying with me. Nick was only toying with me. “That’s everybody’s million-dollar question, isn’t it?” I said. “Or rather, their seventy-two-dollar question. I don’t want to pass up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see Poseur, but tickets are so expensive.” I may have spoken a bit too loudly so he could hear me over my heart, which was no longer skipping beats. It was hammering out a beat faster than Poseur’s drummer.

  Nick nodded. “Especially if you’re buying two because you want to ask someone to go with you.”

  I gaped at him. I know I did. He watched me with dark, supposedly serious eyes while I gaped at him in shock. Was he laughing at me inside?

  We both started as the door burst open. Ms. Abernathy glowered down at us with her fists on her hips. “Miss O’Malley. Mr. Krieger. When I send you into the hall for talking, you do not talk in the hall!”

  “Oh,” Nick said in his innocent voice.

  I was deathly afraid I would laugh at this if I opened my mouth. I absolutely could not allow myself to fall in love with Nick all over again. But it was downright impossible to avoid. He bent his head until Ms. Abernathy couldn’t see his face, and he winked at me.

  Saved by the bell! We all three jumped as the signal rang close above our heads. On a normal day the class would have flowed politely around Ms. Abernathy standing in the doorway. They might even have waited until she moved. But this bell let us out of school for winter break. Ms. Abernathy got caught in the current of students pouring out of her classroom and down the hall. If she floated as far as the next wing, maybe a history teacher would throw her a rope and tow her to safety.

  Chloe and Liz shoved their way out of the room and glanced around the crowded hall until they saw me against the wall on the floor. Clearly they were dying to know whether I’d survived being sent out in the hall with my ex. Both of them focused on the space between me and Nick. I looked down in confusion, wondering what they were staring at.

  Nick was still holding my hand.

  I tried to pull my hand away. He squeezed even tighter. I turned to him with my eyes wide. What in the world was he thinking? After the insults Nick and I had thrown at each other in public over the years, we would have been the laughingstock of the school if we really fell for each other.

  And now he was holding my hand in public!

  He wouldn’t look at me, though I pulled hard to free myself from his grasp. He just squeezed my hand and grinned up at the gathering crowd like he didn’t care who saw us.

  Which was everyone. Davis sauntered out of the classroom and slid his arm around Liz. Unlike the train wreck that was Chloe and Gavin as a couple, Liz and Davis were the two kindest people I knew. They deserved each other, in a good way. But even Davis had a comment as he casually glanced down at Nick and me and did a double take at our hands. “That’s something you don’t see every day,” he understated to Liz. “Usually at about this time, Nick is going around the lab, collecting whatever particulate has dropped out of the solution so he can throw it at Hayden.”

  “We didn’t do an experiment today, just diagrammed molecules. Nothing to throw,” Nick said in a reasonable tone, as if he and I were not sitting on the floor, surrounded by a two-deep crowd of our classmates. They had all filed out of chemistry class and joined the circle, peeking over one another’s shoulders to see what Nick and I were up to this time.

  Then Gavin exploded out of the classroom, and I knew Nick and I were in trouble. He whacked into Chloe so hard, he would have knocked her off her feet if he hadn’t grabbed her at the same time. Over her squeals, he yelled at Nick, “I knew it!” while pointing at our hands.

  “Oooooh,” said the crowd, shifting closer around us, totally forgetting they were supposed to be going home for winter break. If Davis, Liz, Gavin, and Chloe hadn’t made up the front row, the rest of the class would have overrun us like zombies.

  “I was just shaking Hayden’s hand, wishing her luck in the snowboarding competition Tuesday.” Nick stood, still gripping my hand, pulling me up with him.

  “See you tonight,” Davis mouthed in Liz’s ear. Then he turned to Nick and said, “Come on. I’ll fill you in on what Ms. Abernathy said after you got ejected from the game.” Of course Nick didn’t give a damn what Ms. Abernathy said in the last ten minutes of class before winter break. But that was Davis, always smoothing things over.

  Nick finally let go of my hand. “See you around, Hoyden.” He pinned me with one last dark look and a curious smile. Then he and Davis made their way through the crowd, shoving some of the more obnoxious gawking boys, who elbowed them back.

  But a few folks still stared at me: Liz, Chloe, and worst of all, Gavin. One corner of his mouth turned up in a mischievous grin. Gavin was tall, muscular, and Japanese, with even longer hair than Nick. I would have thought he was adorable if I didn’t want to kill him most of the time for constantly goading Nick and me about each other. I certainly understood what Chloe saw in him, even though he drove her crazy too.

  Gavin turned to her. “Give me some gum.”

  “No.”

  Liz and I dodged out of the way as Gavin backed Chloe against the lockers and shoved both his hands into the front pockets of her jeans. You might think the class president would find a way to stop this sort of manhandling, but actually she didn’t seem to mind too much.

  By now the crowd had dispersed. Nick and Davis were walking down the hall together, getting smaller and smaller until I couldn’t see them anymore past a knot of freshman girls squealing about the Poseur concert and how they were working extra shifts at the souvenir shop to pay for the expensive tickets. Go home, people. I resisted the urge to stand on my tiptoes for one more peek at Nick. If I didn’t run into him on the slopes, this might be the last I saw of him for ten whole days.

  “I don’t have any gum!” Chloe squealed through fits of giggling, trying to push Gavin off. “Gavin!” She finally shoved him away.

  He jogged down the hall to catch up with Nick and Davis, holding the paper-wrapped of gum aloft triumphantly.

  “That was my last piece!” Chloe called.

  I never would have admitted that Gavin’s gum theft made me jealous. Nick was bad for me, I knew. He was the last person on earth I wanted to steal my gum. Still, I stepped to one side so I could see him behind the Poseur fangirls. I watched him turn with Gavin and Davis and disappear down the stairs, and I couldn’t help but feel like a little kid on Halloween night, standing in the doorway in my witch costume with my plastic cauldron for trick-or-treat candy, watching the rain come down. Such sweet promise, and now I was out of luck. Damn.

  Chloe stared after the boys too. I assumed she really wanted that gum. Then she looked at me. “Oh my God, did Nick ask you out? It sounded like he was asking you out, but we couldn’t quite tell. Ms. Abernathy finally came to check on you because the whole first row got up from their desks and pressed their ears to the door.”

  I answered honestly. “For a second there, I thought he was going to ask me out.”

  “But he didn’t?” Liz wailed.

  To hide my disappointment, I bent down to stuff my chemistry notebook into my backpack as I shook my head.

  “At least you got a see you around,” Chloe pointed out. “Normally if he bothered to say good-bye to you at all, he would do it by popping your bra.”

  “True,” I acknowledged. And then I realized what was going on here. Chloe and Liz had been hinting that I should go out with Nick now that they were dating Nick’s friends, but at the moment they seemed even more eager and giddy about it than usual. I straightened, folded my arms across my chest, and glared at Chloe and then Liz. “Please do not te
ll me you put Nick up to asking me to the Poseur concert.”

  Chloe stared right back at me. But Liz, the weakest link, glanced nervously at Chloe like they were busted.

  “Come on now.” I stamped one foot. “Even y’all aren’t going to the Poseur concert with Gavin and Davis. It’s too expensive.”

  “Nick has more money than God,” Chloe pointed out.

  I turned on Liz. “You really want me to go out with him after I told you he made that fire-crotch comment about me?” Liz was all about people being respectful of one another. We were in school with teenage boys and this was asking a lot, I know.

  “That did sound disrespectful,” she admitted. “Are you sure he didn’t mean it in a friendly way?”

  Incredible. Even Liz’s sense of chivalry and honor was crushed under the juggernaut called Wouldn’t It Be Cute/Ironic If Nick and Hayden Dated Again.

  “What if he did ask you out?” Liz bounced excitedly, and her dark curls bounced with her. “Oh my God, what if you saw him on the slopes over the break and he asked you to the Poseur concert? What would you say?”

  I considered this. Part of me wanted to think Nick had changed in the past four years. I would jump at the chance to go out with the boy I’d made up in my head. In real life Nick was adorable, funny, and smart, but in my fantasies he had the additional fictional component of honestly wanting to go out with me.

  Another part of me remembered his dis four years ago as freshly as if it were yesterday. When I recalled that awful night, the image of Honest Nick dissolved, even from my imagination. That Nick was too good to be true. I couldn’t say yes to Nick, because I was scared to death he would hurt me again.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I declared, “because he’s not going to ask me out. If he really liked me, he wouldn’t have treated me the way he did back in the day. So stop trying to throw us together.”

  “Okay,” Liz and Chloe said in unison. Again, too eager, too giddy. The three of us turned and made our own way down the hall. We discussed how low Poseur tickets would have to go before we sprung for them, but the subject had changed too easily. I was left with the nagging feeling that, despite their promise, they were not through playing Cupid with me and Nick.

  fakie

  fakie

  (f k) n. 1. a trick performed in the stance opposite the one natural for the snowboarder

  2. a trick performed by Nick on Hayden

  I know what you’re thinking. Girlfriend has fallen out of the stoopid tree and bonked her head against every branch on the way down. If Nick had such beautiful dark eyes and a low rumbly voice and a perfect ass (did I mention his ass?) then why would I hold a grudge for something he did in the seventh grade?

  Well, there was no mortification like seventh grade mortification—just like my mom said there was no hunger like pregnancy hunger. Normal people got hungry, but pregnant women were driven toward food like starving wild animals, and a Big Mac never tasted so decadent to anyone. Clearly my mother had completed her research on this topic way before I broke my leg and my family turned health-conscious and vegetarian.

  Not that I planned to find out about pregnancy hunger myself before I turned thirty. I had too much snowboarding to do first. But I was an expert on seventh-grade mortification. At that age you already worried that every step you took and every word out of your mouth would send your so-called “friends” into fits of laughter, because they hadn’t quite outgrown the cruelty peculiar to sixth graders. If something truly mortifying happened to you on top of this, your heart began to shrink. And if, in addition, you were the new girl at school who wanted desperately to fit in, then in eleventh grade you would still be mad.

  I moved to Snowfall about this time of year, terrified I’d make some blunder and everyone would hate me for the rest of high school. Or that these strangers would hear about the broken leg I’d just completed rehab for and would view me as the crippled girl and feel sorry for me, just like the kids did back in Tennessee. Snowfall—funny name for a ski resort town, at least the falling part. It made me worry I would take my dog for a walk one afternoon and slip into an icy crevice, never to be heard from again. The only evidence that I’d ever existed would be Doofus the Irish setter, trotting happily home, dragging his leash.

  Instead, the opposite happened. Seconds after I handed my enrollment slip to the teacher and snuck into an empty desk in the back of English class, Nick picked up his books and moved to the desk beside mine.

  I remembered every detail of that first five minutes with him, as if each minute were packed with a whole day’s worth of emotion and color. Even back then, Nick was a head taller than most of the other boys in the class, and so handsome. He looked vaguely familiar in a way I couldn’t quite place.

  But what struck me most was how comfortable he seemed with me. The thirteen-year-old boys I’d known in Tennessee were split down the middle: Either they wouldn’t make eye contact because they weren’t interested in girls yet and played way too much Nintendo, or they were interested in girls and expressed this by making comments about their boobs. Unlike those immature boys, Nick talked to me like a friend. And he was funny. And he was hot. And I was the vulnerable new girl. I never had a chance.

  Back then we weren’t very mobile, of course. A seventh-grade “date” looked exactly like every other seventh grader’s weekend outing: pizza at Mile-High Pie, the dive for locals only, and then whatever movie was playing at the theater down the street. Only, if you were on a little baby “date,” you did all this while hanging with a boy, and the rest of the seventh-grade girls gazed at you in awe. And if your relationship were truly serious, you sat in the back row of the theater and kissed. I’d been on three “dates” with Nick. The girls in my class squealed every time they saw me, beside themselves over the possibility that our fourth time might be sealed with a kiss.

  That night, Mile-High Pie was packed with teenagers wearing hip winter sports gear even if they didn’t ski or board. February in Tennessee was cold and brown, but Snowfall sparkled with excitement at the height of the ski season, like a beach town in summertime. I sat in a booth with Nick, surrounded by colored lights twinkling in the windows and decades of teen graffiti layered on the walls: VIOLET LOVES RANDY. ZACH + KAREN. That’s what Nick and I were: Nick + Hayden. He watched me attentively, smiled at me, laughed at my jokes, and ignored Gavin elbowing him.

  After a while we moved with the teenage crowd to the movie theater. Do you remember a Will Smith romantic comedy about a player who makes all the right moves to sneak into a woman’s heart? IRONY. Maybe you could tell me the details sometime, because I wasn’t paying much attention.

  A tall, beautiful blonde named Chloe, obviously the prima donna of the class, was having a very public argument with two different boys who liked her. Because I was new, I had a hard time puzzling it out. There was a lot of high drama before the film started, middle schoolers yelling accusations at each other, like a Disney Channel version of COPS, and Chloe was comfortable at the center of it. I thought the attention had finally moved away from Nick and me, and we were safe from everyone’s eyes in the back row.

  The second the lights dimmed, he put his arm around me. We weren’t wearing poofy parkas, either—we’d draped them over the backs of the seats when we’d come in—so the heat and weight of his arm imprinted themselves along my shoulders and the back of my neck. By the first love scene in the movie, he was leaning toward me.

  I figured he wouldn’t really kiss me. He would want to. He would mean to. But I couldn’t possibly be lucky enough for this to happen for real, even though I was wearing my four-leaf clover earrings. The fire alarm would sound in the theater, or the roof would collapse under the weight of the snow. (I hadn’t gotten used to two feet of snow blanketing everything.) The fact that we were hot for each other would be obvious to everyone, but like a pair of unfortunate saps on a TV sitcom, we wouldn’t kiss for another two seasons.

  And then he kissed me. His arm tightened around my shoulders,
his other big hand cradled my cheek, and his warm lips touched mine. We kissed for a long time. I didn’t make him stop. If this had happened in Tennessee, I would have known the boy just wanted to brag to his friends afterward. Nick made me think he honestly liked me and wanted to touch me.

  My first kiss.

  Obviously not his. He knew what he was doing.

  I blink away tears thinking about this now. Such a perfect night, the sweetest reward after two years of embarrassment at school in Tennessee and excruciating pain 24/7. I’m feeling sorry for myself, I know, but I can’t help crying for poor little thirteen-year-old me at the moment Nick kissed me. Because the castle in the air he’d built for me over the past month was about to come crashing down in the snow.

  A girl named Liz bounced into the seat beside me and whispered that I should come to the bathroom with her and Chloe. This surprised me, because I’d never heard Liz’s voice before—she was a quiet little librarian in class—and also because I’d begun to think no one dared disturb the mature teen bliss that Nick and I embodied. But I really did need to pee. I had needed to pee since the movie began. In seventh grade you do not admit to boys that you need to pee, so this was the perfect excuse to relieve myself while retaining my image as a peeless goddess.

  When I came out of the stall, Chloe was peeking under the other doors to make sure the bathroom was empty. Liz stood in the center of the tiled room with her arms folded. I felt a flash of panic that maybe Colorado middle schools traditionally welcomed new students with a swirly. Or that Nick was on the list of boyfriends Chloe was balancing. I’d had my fun with him in the back row, and now she wanted payback. But Chloe didn’t look bent on revenge. For the first time all month, she was silent, waiting, deferring to Liz.

  By junior year Liz let her dark curly hair float around her shoulders. But back in seventh grade, she was still pulling it off her face with combs and clips with little monkey faces on them. The monkey faces laughed at me as she dropped the bomb. She told me Nick was from a famously rich family. Hadn’t I seen the TV commercials last year in which Nick and his parents stood beside a huge rock fireplace and his father invited the camera to try Krieger Meats and Meat Products, from their family to yours?