The Ex Games

by Jennifer Echols

  “The Poseur concert is tomorrow night, so Sunday will be too late for the bet,” I cried. “Plus, the boys would never let us do that. They want me to fail anyway, so why would they give me another chance to succeed? Plus, it would just be an extra day for me to screw up, and to lose one more friend. Let’s face it, I’m done.” My goggles had fogged up inside with my tears. I tore them off, along with my hat. The wind was shockingly cold on my bare, wet face. “Totally useless, totally done.”

  “Hayden!” Chloe screamed from somewhere downhill.

  Liz and I glanced at each other for only a second, then whipped around in a rush of powder. Chloe had been headed to the pass through the trees onto Main Street. I feared the worst, and I knew Liz did, too. People around here only half-laughed at Sonny Bono jokes. Skiers and boarders were killed every year running into trees, not just betties like Chloe but also experienced boarders. I slid across the snow as fast as I could, throwing all my weight into it. I stopped sideways at the edge of the stand of trees and sent a wave of snow arcing into the dark trunks.

  Chloe was in the trees all right, way down the slope from us. I picked out her pink clothes right away against the white. She must have hit a mogul in the snowy path and veered into the trees. She was sitting upright, though, and none of her limbs pointed the wrong way. Ugh ugh ugh, I shrugged off that thought and called to her. “Are you okay?”

  “Okay,” she called back. “Just stuck. My board’s buried and kind of pinned against this tree and my boot won’t come loose. Aren’t your boots supposed to pop out of your bindings when you suffer a major biff?”

  This was not the time to point out to Chloe that her “major biff” was likely a low-speed slide of ultrabetty-ness. And if she hadn’t been able to free her boots by now, I wouldn’t be able to talk her through it. I would have to show her.

  “Hold on,” I called, popping off my board. The snow between the trees was piled up much higher than the snow on the slopes, which the sun melted and skiers wore down all day. There was no telling what lurked underneath the snow in the woods. Most likely, it wasn’t safe to board across. Boarding boots weren’t the safest footwear for hiking, either, but I couldn’t leave Chloe. Darkness was falling.

  “You want me to go with you?” Liz asked, stopping on her skis behind me.

  “Nah, but bring my board if I’m able to haul her out the other side. And”—wiping my long hair out of my eyes, I remembered I’d taken off my goggles—“see if you can find my goggles and my hat. I dropped them somewhere.” I put one boot into the soft snow at the very edge of the slope and sank much farther than I’d imagined, up to my hip.

  “Watch that first step,” Liz called.

  I didn’t even retort, I was so focused on Chloe downhill from me. Every step I took was deeper than the last, and it grew harder to bring my other foot around. Once I sank into a snowdrift all the way to the ground and slipped on the rocks underneath, like disappearing under the surface of a frozen lake.

  “Hayden, are you still there?” Chloe screamed.

  “I’m still here.” At least, I thought I was. The daylight vanished even more quickly here under the bare trees, and the white all around disoriented me.

  “Do you want me to call the boys?” Liz suggested from way above me.

  “Do not call Nick Krieger!” I shouted. “God, would he love this.”

  “I’ve got Davis in my cell phone,” Liz called. “Gavin, too.”

  “Absolutely not. If you call Davis or Gavin, Nick will be attached.”

  Chloe squealed, “Yes, please, Liz. Gavin would be excellent right now! No offense, Hayden, but don’t join the ski patrol anytime soon.”

  “Ingrate!” I yelled. “I’ll show you. I’m about to save the day, in just a minute here.” I’d reached a patch where the snow was shallower, only knee-deep again. I seemed to be on an outcropping of rock, because my boots slid around beneath me worse than ever. Luckily, I’d almost reached Chloe. She was ten yards downhill from me.

  “Tick-tock,” she said. Through the low-hanging branches between us, I could see her haughty expression, like she was still angry with me, and she wasn’t half-buried in snow.

  Now I was mad. Even though they were water-resistant, my boarding clothes weren’t meant to be immersed in snow. I was freezing. I expected at least a little gratitude from this diva. “Apologize for what you said to me at the jump,” I demanded.

  “Never!” she cried, sitting up straighter in her snowdrift.

  “You are really testing me, Chloe,” I muttered as I took one tentative step into even lighter snow cover. Now I could actually see the icy rocks underneath. “I am trying pretty hard to remember how nice you were to me that night with Nick in seventh graaaaade!” My boot slipped out from under me and I skidded straight into the claw-like branches in front of me. I managed to turn my head in time to avoid getting an eye poked out, and I waited until my body stopped and settled against the springy branches.

  “Oh God!” Chloe squealed. “Are you okay?”

  “Yep.” I thought so. My face stung, and the thought crossed my mind that I was scarred for life. But I was sure the pain came from skidding across the snow on my cheek, not from a branch cutting me. I had a hard time extricating myself from the tree, though, and my head was getting cold. Finally, slowly, I rose up to kneel in the snow and asked Chloe, “Am I all in one piece?”

  Her eyes flew wide open. I knew it was really bad when she almost screamed, but she slapped her hand over her mouth in time. She said, too calmly, “Hayden, put pressure on your ear.”

  “Put pressure on my ear,” I puzzled out. “Why?” I touched my ear. It was wet, but so was the rest of me by now. Then I looked at my mitten. It glistened with blood.

  “Call Josh,” I whispered before I passed out.

  “Hayden, that’s going to take one stitch.” Thank God for Josh. He sounded far off, even though I could feel his hands on my face. I couldn’t quite make my way back to consciousness. Not while stitches were the topic of conversation.

  “She’s too heavy for me to carry,” Josh said.

  I tried to insult him back, but I didn’t make a sound.

  “Should I call the ski patrol?” Liz asked.

  “No, they’ll make a huge deal, and our parents will wig out and come home. They’re over in Boulder for their first night out of town alone in a year. This is no biggie. She did the same thing when she gashed her arm at the skateboard park last summer. We just need to get her down the mountain. Call Nick.”

  “No!” I tried to exclaim but didn’t. Wait—if Chloe was still lodged against the tree, dying of hypothermia, did it really matter who got called? Any hero would do.

  “Hayden,” said Nick.

  My cheeks tingled with cold, and when I opened my eyes, all I saw was a blue glow. I must have face-planted. “Get Chloe,” I told the snow. “She’s stuck.”

  “Gavin and Davis have her.” Nick’s hands were on my shoulder and my waist. He rolled me onto my back. Now my wet face froze all over again in the cold wind. I opened my eyes.

  Even though he was kneeling beside me in the snow, he towered above me like a movie superhero. Beyond his strong shoulders and the snowy trees, the sky glowed orange, and a few low clouds sugared him with snow. As I watched, he unzipped and pulled off his parka, then unbuttoned and tossed off his flannel shirt. He pulled his T-shirt over his head and shook his hair out of his eyes. Leaning over me with his chest bare, he pressed his wadded-up T-shirt to my ear. It was his Poseur T-shirt that he wore to school at least twice a week, and he was willingly staunching my blood with it. He must be in love.

  More likely, I was having a wet dream. They’d told us during sex-ed week in PE that this might happen to girls as well as to boys. It had never happened to me. And now, just when I’d given up hope because I was seventeen and the puberty thing was pretty much done, here was Nick Krieger tenderly touching my face with the sun setting behind him and snowflakes sliding off his bare shoulders.


  “Hayden,” he said again, gently. “Are you sure you didn’t hit your head?”

  “I don’t think so.” It came out as a whisper. I cleared my throat. “I think it’s just my ear.” Now that his T-shirt was warming my skin, I could tell the insistent sting came from my earlobe rather than from the cold.

  He moved the T-shirt aside and leaned closer, examining my ear. Oooh, it would be so much more romantic if he looked into my eyes rather than fixating on my ear. Shouldn’t I be able to make this happen? What was the world coming to, that I couldn’t even control what Nick did in my own wet dream?

  He poked my ear.

  “Ow, ow, ow!” I squealed, and then felt faint again, out of breath. This was no wet dream. It was reality after all.

  He let out a disgusted sigh. “Hayden, Josh is right. The doctor might not even put a stitch in that. What’s the matter with you? Do you faint at the sight of blood?”

  Oh, no. There was no way I would let him get the upper hand, even if I was lying on my back in the snow and he was kneeling over me. I laughed. “Of course I don’t faint at the sight of blood. I jump onto the dance floor and do the Soulja Boy. Get the hell off me, Dr. McDreamy.”

  He sat back in surprise. I rolled over to all fours and stood up slowly, letting his T-shirt slide off my ear, since my injury was so minor. The woods seemed to tilt sharply to the left.

  “Hayden,” said Nick. “Take it easy.”

  “What for? This would never have happened to a boy, right? A boy could break his leg and keep on boarding. So could I.” Or maybe not, but at least I could hike out of the trees on my own power after I scratched my ear. It wasn’t until I looked down to check my footing that I realized I was still bleeding. Plop, plop, plop, neat red circles that burrowed warm holes into the snow.

  “Well?” Chloe called from far off. “Is she okay?”

  “No, but is she ever?” Nick lifted me. One of his arms cradled my head against the wad of his T-shirt. He hooked his other strong arm under my knees. His chest felt intensely warm against me. I opened my eyes and saw his chest was still bare. He’d put his flannel shirt and parka back on without fastening them.

  He seemed good for a few steps. Then he hit a soft patch of snow. His foot sank, and he staggered. Josh trudged forward to help, struggling with three snowboards—his, Nick’s, and mine, I supposed. If Nick fell while carrying me, even if it was due to loose powder, he would blame it on my unwieldiness or my girth. Together with Josh’s joke, I would never, ever live it down.

  “Let go,” I said. “I can walk.” At least, that’s what I meant to say, but it came out slurred.

  “Shut up.” Nick took a few more steps. Now we were on Main Street, where the snow pack was solid. His strides were more sure.

  “We can’t leave the snow all bloody,” I told the underside of his chin, shadowed with stubble. “It will scare the tourists.”

  “The new snow will cover it up.” He looked down at me. “Shhh.”

  Something in his shhh tugged at my heart. He kept watching me, not examining my ear for medical emergencies but looking into my eyes, for a few more steps. I couldn’t read his look. He was kind of blurry, for one thing, and I was kind of dizzy. I thought he looked … concerned. Sympathetic. Determined to rescue me from danger. I wished that was what he felt. But it couldn’t have been. I was misreading him.

  What did he really think of me? He probably assumed I was faking loss of consciousness. Maybe he even thought I’d cut my ear on purpose, all to get out of the comp without admitting defeat. If he hated me, so be it, but I’d be damned if he hated me by mistake.

  “I broke my leg,” I breathed.

  He stopped short in the snow and glanced down at me again, alarmed this time. His eyes traveled across my body. “I don’t think so, Hayden. Where does it hurt?”

  I shook my head, which made him squeeze me more tightly to his chest.

  “I mean, when I broke my leg before. I broke it in four places. It bled a lot. I didn’t walk for a year.” I said all this in one gasp, rushing through so I didn’t pass out again just from thinking about the way my leg had looked when I’d hit the rocks. I hadn’t felt anything at first. I was scared I was paralyzed. When the pain hit me a few seconds later, I was actually relieved. And then, not. I’d never felt pain like that, or seen that much blood.

  “Hey, don’t cry.” He sounded horrified. I couldn’t see him anymore through the tears, and I was glad.

  “Is she crying?” Gavin called from behind us. “Let me see.”

  “Just go,” I sobbed to Nick. “Get me out of here.”

  “Gavin, be a little more sensitive,” Nick grumbled. “Jesus.”

  “You’re telling me to be sensitive?” Gavin called, and then Chloe was scolding him. The snow was heavier now. The clumps of snowflakes were so big that they squeaked as they hit the ground, like rubber-soled shoes on a gym floor. I hated snow like this, even though it would mean wicked boarding in a few days. Snow like this reminded me of a Laura Ingalls Wilder book I’d read when I was little, about plucky Laura stranded in the Western wilderness when the locusts descended, a cloud of millions of locusts stripping the crops clean in a manner of hours. Nothing had filled the air like this in Tennessee.

  “You’re shaking,” Nick said gently. “Are you cold?” He hugged me closer to his warm skin.

  “Is she going into shock?” Davis suggested.

  “No,” I said, “I just … I know we’re headed to the gondola.” In answer, the groans of metal cable against metal gear reached me from across the slope. “I don’t ride the gondola.” I tried to stop shuddering.

  “It’s the best way to get you down the hill. You’ll have to walk, too, or they’ll call the ski patrol.” Nick eased me down from his arms, and I stood against him as he buttoned his shirt and zipped his coat. “Okay. Lean on me. Hide that bloody T-shirt and move your hair over your ear.”

  As we hiked across the snow to the gondola station ahead, I stuffed the Poseur shirt into my pocket, then reached up and tentatively touched my ear. “Oh my God, what happened to my luck?”

  “Your clover earring?” Nick asked. His low voice sounded even deeper with my head on his chest. I caught a little chill at the nearness of him, shiver upon shiver.

  “It got pulled out of your earlobe, Hayden,” Chloe offered. “That’s why you’re bleeding.” As we continued to walk, I felt Nick move. I didn’t have to look. I knew he moved his hand across his neck, telling Chloe to shut up.

  Good idea. A new wave of dizziness hit me. I wasn’t sure anymore whether it was the thought of blood or the fear of heights. Either way, I was going to pass out again, here in front of the gondola station for the park officials to see. “I lost my luck,” I murmured, waiting with Nick for the next gondola, watching the huge cable slide through the huge gears, listening to the shriek of the machine. “My dad gave me that luck.”

  “You can make your own luck,” Josh called from behind us in line.

  “Right!” I exclaimed with new purpose. I needed to get my mind off my phobias and act like a halfway sane person on the gondola. The gondola car slung around the curve of the station and paused just long enough for all of us to pile on. I had my eyes closed and let Nick guide me, but I did step on and slide beside him onto the plastic bench. Like we were a couple.

  sick

  sick

  (sik) adj. 1. good 2. cool 3. gnarly 4. Hayden

  The nurse knocked softly on the door of the examining room and wheeled in a shiny silver tray displaying neatly arranged instruments of torture. She handed me a paper cup of water and then a smaller paper cup, shaking it to rattle the pill inside. “Mmmmmm, guess what I okayed with your mother? It’s to calm you down. Take that, then stare at this tray, and call to me when stitches seem like a good idea.” She bustled out. I was left staring at the smiling photos of other patients on the bulletin board across the room. Clearly they did not need stitches.

  Sometimes I was glad my doctor and his staff had a s
ense of humor. This was one of the times when I was not. Still, I took the pill. Anything was better than yo-yo fainting and waking up to a new humiliation. And after five minutes, or perhaps five hours, I realized I was counting the smiling faces of patients on the bulletin board for the three hundredth time. “Nurse!”

  Nick grinned at me from across the wide cab of his SUV, then glanced back at the snowy road, then smiled over at me again. He looked so handsome and mature as the glow of streetlights passed over him and faded.

  He said, “You’re loaded.”

  I remembered being carried into Liz’s den. If I hadn’t talked to my mom on the phone pre-pill and agreed to spend the night with Liz so her mom could watch me, I might not have known where I was. It occurred to me that I should be embarrassed, sleeping in a room full of awake boys. But I wasn’t embarrassed, and that was delicious. To hell with teen angst. I went back to sleep.

  Then I heard gunshots. An action movie was playing on Liz’s TV. I recognized Will Smith’s voice. Funny, I must have associated the sound of Will Smith with the smell and sensation of Nick. I could have sworn Nick was with me, just as in seventh grade when we’d snuggled together during that fateful romantic-comedy movie. I inhaled him, sighed happily, and sank back into wistful dreams of him.

  I woke, but I didn’t want to be awake. I kept my eyes closed and listened for what had changed to wake me. The gunshots and explosions in the movie had grown surprisingly soothing after a while. Now they’d given way to the sweeping theme song as the credits rolled, and soft voices around me.

  “Is she still asleep?” Liz asked from somewhere across the room.

  Closer by, Gavin answered, “If she wasn’t, there’s no way she could have been quiet this long.” A smack sounded as Chloe slapped him for insulting me.

  Nick’s voice was closer still, down at my feet. He was sharing the sofa with me. There must have been nowhere else for him to sit in the room. “I knew she broke her leg before she moved here, but I never realized it was that big a deal.”