The Ex Games

by Jennifer Echols

  Oh, no, I really had spilled all that to him while woozy! Stupendous. Luckily, I was lying on my side with my face to the back of the sofa, so I wouldn’t give myself away with fluttering eyelashes or a grimace. Chloe and Liz confirmed and cooed, and I felt myself drifting off again.

  Then something moved on my ankle. I nearly jumped out of my skin. And still another wave of adrenaline rushed through me as I realized what was happening. Nick wasn’t just sharing the sofa with me because there was nowhere else to sit in Liz’s den. My feet were in his lap. His hand was around my ankle. He was rubbing my ankle, his fingertips tracing slow circles around my ankle bone.

  Technically, he wasn’t even touching me, unless you counted the pressure of his fingers through my sock. It was ridiculous for me to go tense under his hand, hardly daring to breathe, waiting for the next stroke of his fingers. Except that this meant something. I doubted anyone could see Nick touching me from across the darkened room. Nick wasn’t doing this for his friends, showing them how he could tease me to get the upper hand with me. He wasn’t even doing this for me. He thought I was asleep. He was doing it for himself. He was stroking me, comforting me, putting a protective hand on me, because he wanted to. Even after he’d said he was finished with me.

  The conversation moved on to Will Smith and the movie. The TV switched from teen drama to basketball and back as Chloe and Gavin snatched the remote away from each other. I tried to relax a bit and enjoy Nick’s hand on my ankle while I had it, because I might not ever experience this strangely intense connection with him again. But I resigned myself to the torture of remaining wide awake and perfectly still for a few more hours until everyone went home.

  I started awake, jerking upright this time. The shadowy room was empty. They must have turned off the satellite box but not the TV, and after a few minutes of silence it had burst into static and had woken me. I relaxed against the pillows on the sofa, but the static wouldn’t let me ease back to sleep. It was like my brain, loud and scrambled and panicky.

  I peeled myself from the sofa, switched off the TV, and padded through the silent house to the hall bathroom. I squeezed my eyes shut and flicked on the light. Then I opened my eyes slowly to protect them from the glare, but also because I dreaded seeing what I had looked like to Nick while he lugged me around all evening. I couldn’t avoid the mirror right in front of me.

  My face was pale, my eyes smudged with dark circles underneath, as if I’d spent the last few hours fainting and then sleeping fitfully. Go figure. My normally straight hair had been so teased by hats and goggles and pillows and Nick that it had grown big and frizzy. And my ear—I pushed back my hair to examine the tiny bandage on my earlobe. This had caused all the trouble? I felt like a fool.

  Frowning at myself, I reached up and fingered my other earlobe and the one lucky earring I had left. I wasn’t a fool. Hysterical, yes. Maladjusted, definitely. But not a fool. My broken leg had been a devastating injury. So had my encounter with Nick four years ago. I’d known this, but only now was I realizing just how badly I’d been hurt.

  Sighing, I washed my face. I was squeezing toothpaste onto the toothbrush Liz’s mom kept there for me, because I always forgot mine, when I heard voices outside. I stepped over to the window and pushed aside the curtain, then backed up a pace when the cold night air leaking around the windowsill touched my skin.

  Nick and Gavin were talking at the end of the driveway—or what I assumed, from the tire tracks, was the driveway under a blanket of fresh snow. Streetlights glinted on Nick’s dark and Gavin’s black hair. Then Gavin got into his car, and Nick hiked through the snow toward his SUV.

  “Oh, mo,” I mumbled through toothpaste. I couldn’t let him get away. Not now.

  I swished, spat, and ran for the front door, pausing only to shove my feet into galoshes owned by some unknown member of Liz’s family. Her stepdad, I decided as I tried to run down the snowy front steps. The galoshes were so big, it was like wading in a Tennessee river.

  I was too late anyway. They were gone. Gavin’s tires spun briefly and his car pulled away, taillights reflecting red and long on the snow. But no—Nick’s SUV still sat idling in the street at the end of the driveway. And as I waded closer, I saw he was in the driver’s seat of the dark cab, slowly, repeatedly banging his head on the steering wheel.

  He must not have heard me approach over the hum of the engine. I walked all the way up to the passenger-side window and stood there, watching him, waiting for him to notice me. He would see that I had caught him banging his head on his steering wheel, and this was something I could tease him about and hold over his head for the next few months at school.

  But I was getting cold in my foreign galoshes and only two layers of clothes in the freezing night. As Nick kept hitting his head, I realized the two of us weren’t in that place anymore, the one where we made fun of each other and had a fight and left it at that. We’d been driving in circles, having wrecks and backing over each other, but somehow we’d come way past that place in the last week. I knocked on the window.

  He stopped with his head halfway to the steering wheel for another whack, and he turned to me with his eyes wide behind his dark hair. Immediately, he slid across the seat and pulled the handle to open the door for me.

  Leaving the galoshes outside in the snow, I gratefully slid inside the warm cab and shut the door softly so it wouldn’t wake the neighborhood. Nick took off his parka and draped it around my shoulders. He didn’t have to say, “You shouldn’t be out here without a coat,” or “You shouldn’t be awake now after the terrible day you had.” I could see all this in his eyes. He wasn’t concerned with making a joke at my expense. He was concerned about me.

  “What were you and Gavin talking about?”

  Nick rolled his eyes and let out a frustrated sigh. “He thinks I’ve wanted to be with you all these years, and his proof is the way I acted when you got hurt today. He says good friends shouldn’t lie to each other. He’s really lording it over me, too. Such an ass.”

  “Is he right?” I whispered.

  Nick’s dark eyes drilled into me, and the set of his jaw hardened. He slipped one hand onto my waist, underneath the parka.

  “Uh,” I protested.

  He put his other hand on the opposite side of my waist.

  “Nick,” I said.

  He slid me toward him across the seat.

  “You,” I whispered, looking into his eyes.

  He was about to kiss me. His lips brushed mine. He pressed down on me with his chest, bent me backward until I lay down across the seat, and he lay on top of me. He closed his eyes, and the tip of his nose touched mine in an Eskimo kiss. Then he opened his eyes, stared hard at me, and went still. “You want to make out and then have an argument?” he whispered.

  “Yes,” I said. It would be worth it.

  “You sure?”

  I swallowed. “Absolutely.”

  “Then tell me what happened when you broke your leg, and why you’re so terrified of heights after all this time.”

  I looked up into his dark eyes. I wanted to say something, but his weight was heavy on my chest, and I could hardly breathe.

  “I broke my leg.” Suddenly the story gushed out of me. “I was eleven. I loved outdoorsy sports. My parents let me go to adventure camp up in the mountains in Tennessee. My first day there, I fell.”

  That moment had flashed through my mind so many times since, it was as much a part of me as my lungs or my heart or my red hair, and I couldn’t describe it to Nick. The long fall, with repeated jerks upward as safety mechanisms caught me and then failed. Realizing I was on the ground. Wondering why I wasn’t hurt. Trying to stand. Seeing all the blood, and then my leg. The slowly growing horror that continued to build over the next few days until I reached my breaking point.

  Between our bodies and the seat of the SUV, Nick squeezed my hand.

  I gasped. “In Tennessee I was known as the girl who came in a wheelchair to the Valentine’s dance. The girl
whose friends had to go out of their way to include her when they went to a concert or the mall. At first, I counted myself lucky to have friends like that. But a couple of times I overheard them arguing about why they always had to invite me when it was such a pain to find the wheelchair ramps everywhere we went. They said it would be so much easier to flirt with boys if they weren’t always worried about me.

  “And then, one day when I’d made it out of the wheelchair and onto crutches, I gimped into the room and caught them imitating me. I didn’t see enough of it that I recognized myself, but I could tell from everyone else’s stricken expressions that they thought I had. It was so foreign. I used to be in charge of things, like Chloe. I was president of the fifth grade class. And I used to make good grades like Chloe and Liz. Gosh, it’s hard to think back that far. Fifth grade math must have been a lot easier than eleventh grade math.”

  “You think?” Nick’s words were dry, but his tone was gentle.

  “I had never been that girl people made fun of. I didn’t want to be that girl. I am not that girl.”

  He watched me, wishing he had never asked this question, wondering what possessed him to break up with somebody easy like Fiona.

  But no—with tentative fingers, he brushed a strand of my hair away from my forehead.

  And for just a moment, I really wasn’t that girl. I had never been that girl. I was that cool teenager again, who moved to a new town and found a new boyfriend. The girl who started over.

  I sniffled. “By the time we moved here, I was walking without a limp. People had no idea. I was only the new girl, the red-haired girl, the girl who Nick Krieger made a fool of.”

  If Nick hadn’t been holding my hand, I would have slapped it over my mouth. This was what I thought, but it’s not what I’d intended to share with Nick right then.

  His eyes widened in shock. Sorrow moved across his face, and then worry. “I wanted to tell you, Hayden. Yes, I had a bet with Gavin in seventh grade, and you wandered into it. But I really liked you. I wished Liz had never told you about the bet, and we could have stayed together.”

  “Why didn’t you come clean with me when you figured out you liked me?”

  He sighed, a short, disdainful puff through his nose. “I was thirteen.”

  I wasn’t buying it. “You had a bet. You couldn’t lose a bet. If you have a choice between me and winning, you’ll choose winning every time. It’s still true.”

  The worried expression on his face morphed into anger. He let go of my hand and sat up, his chest heavier on mine just before his weight lifted from me completely. “You are not going to put this on me,” he barked.

  “I’m not trying to put anything on you.” I backed across the seat and scooted up to sit against the door.

  “You can blame me or your fall or whatever you want for not being able to go off that jump. But the bottom line is, some people are competitors and some people aren’t. There’s no way you’re suddenly going to decide at age seventeen to become a competitor. You don’t have it in you. You’re just scared.”

  I would have been mad at Nick for saying this to me at any time. But right now, after I’d spent the night fainting and I desperately needed comfort, I was downright bitter. “Me!” I lashed out. “You’re one to talk. You’re scared to tell your father that you made a mistake, agreeing to this challenge with me. You’re the coward.” I opened the door to a swirl of frigid air, remembered I was still wearing Nick’s parka, and struggled out of it.

  “That’s bullshit.” He grabbed the back of the parka, but I got the distinct impression he was not trying to be a gentleman by helping me out of it. He just wanted his parka back. “When you feel cornered, you’ll just fling whatever you’ve got at people, and you don’t care who gets hurt with what.”

  “I am not scared.” I slid down from the truck seat into Liz’s stepdad’s galoshes, then turned to face Nick one last time. “I am not scared of boarding or you, and I will prove it to you tomorrow. If you think I’m going easy on you in the comp just because you have a debilitating injury from yesterday—”

  “That’s what you think,” he snarked. “I’ve been doing yoga.”

  “—you have another think coming. You will buy me those Poseur tickets. And I’m not even taking you. You will hand the tickets over to me, and I’ll take someone else.”

  “Who? Your little brother’s friends?”

  “No, Everett Walsh.” I closed the door softly behind me so as not to alarm sleeping adults, because I was that mature.

  Even through the door and the rolled up window, I could clearly hear every filthy word Nick uttered, ending with, “Everett [cuss word] Walsh.”

  I opened the passenger door. “Ask not for whom the fire-crotch burns; it burns for thee!”

  “Shut up,” Nick said. “I’m waiting for you to go in the house.”

  “Fine.” I slammed his door, forgetting all about courtesy to sleeping adults this time. But as I hiked back through the yard to Liz’s front porch, I was so proud of myself for not crying. I never shed a tear.

  Not until I opened the front door and heard his truck ease away. Just as he’d promised, he’d idled there all that time, watching me, waiting to make sure I got inside the house okay. Like a gentleman.

  I closed the door softly, turned the deadbolt, and managed to slip out of the galoshes and line them up against the wall as I’d found them. Only then, with everything else in order, did the tears spill out of me. I wanted to scream, but there was no way I’d startle everyone in the house like that. Holding the sobs inside hurt my ribs. I collapsed on the floor, hugging my knees, rocking back and forth on the floor. I felt empty, lost, and totally alone in the dark house.

  I wished I could start over in a new town, with new friends. I would do everything right this time.

  No, wait. That’s exactly the chance I’d had four years ago, and now I’d blown it.

  Besides, just thinking about leaving Liz and Chloe and Nick behind, I missed them already.

  I was exhausted, even after so many hours of fainting and drug-induced sleep. My first instinct was to lie back on the floor where I sat. But that might alarm Liz’s mom when she woke up to make breakfast. She would trip over me like I was Doofus. The obvious choice was the den sofa, which I could see from my seat on the floor. But Nick’s scent would linger there. Thoughts of him touching me might have lulled me to sleep earlier this evening. They would keep me wide awake now.

  In the end I dragged myself down the hall and up the stairs to Liz’s room. Chloe snored softly in one twin bed. Liz was sprawled across the other. Lifting Liz’s covers, I tried to coax her over so I could slide in next to her. With gentle prodding, she wouldn’t budge. It was exactly like the last time I’d had a nightmare about falling and had wandered down to get in bed with my mother. Liz finally groaned and rolled over. I lay down beside her, relaxed into her warmth, and felt comforted just lying next to her, even if she didn’t know I was there.

  She rolled back over and spooned against me, fitting her front to my back. She draped her arm across me and hugged. “You okay?” she whispered dreamily.

  I nodded. “I thought Nick and I were going to make out.”

  “Surprise.”

  “And then we had a fight. If you and Chloe could throw us together, I would really appreciate it, because I don’t know how to fix this anymore.”

  “Tell us about it in the morning.”

  I nodded again, then felt myself sobbing, shaking against Liz. She held me more tightly as I cried myself to sleep.

  steeze

  steeze

  (stz) n. 1. style and ease 2. you’ve either got it or you don’t

  After a big breakfast at Liz’s house and more bitching with her and Chloe about what pigs boys could be, I rode the bus home to change into clean boarding clothes. I walked into the mud room—tripped over Doofus—and found Josh stepping into his boarding boots. “Hey!” I greeted him cheerfully. “Thanks for coming to my rescue yesterday, and for c
alling me fat.”

  “You’re going to be sorry you were snide to me when you see what I’ve got for you.” He lifted the folded garment next to him and shook it out.

  The BOY TOY jeans!

  “What do you mean?” I exclaimed. “They’re mine forever?”

  “Yes. They’re to help you make your own luck. The catch is, if you want them forever, you have to wear them to the comp today.”

  “But I’ll get soaked!” I wailed.

  “Don’t fall.”

  I took the jeans from him and hugged them close. “Thank you, Josh. This means so much to me. I know you’ve kidded about me going pro and taking you with me, but are you actually for me in this comp? I figured you’d have a bet with Gavin’s sister that I’d lose.”

  He shook his head. “I went ahead and bought her and me both a ticket. Might as well. That’s one bet I know I’d lose.”

  “Aww, Josh, that’s so awesome of you!” I wrapped my arms around him and hugged him hard.

  He didn’t hug me back. He stiffened and said, “Ew, ew, ew.”

  I let him go and stepped back to look him in the eye.

  “Ew,” he said again. But one corner of his mouth crooked upward in a smile.

  It was nice to have at least one boy behind me.

  “Hayden O’Malley!”

  I looked up from the sink and peered around the women’s bathroom in the ski lodge. Chicks stood inside and outside stalls, in various states of undress. Waterproof layers were hard to get in and out of, and snowboarders definitely were not peeless goddesses. Finally I saw the girl who had called my name. She stood in the doorway, long blond hair twisted into hippie twirls and braids.

  “Daisy Delaney!” I hollered.

  “I’d recognize you anywhere,” she yelled over the chatter in the bathroom. “They’re playing your steeziness over and over on local TV! Girl, you’re famous!” She crossed the room and leaned forward to hug me by way of introduction.