Avalanche

by Melinda Braun

  Please stop calling me dude. Matt squeezed his eyes shut, pushing away all thoughts of his dad and Florida, determined to acquire the same enthusiasm as his friend. Fake it till you make it, he thought. He didn’t know who said that, only that it was one of those anonymous quotes everyone uses sooner or later. “You’re right.” He forced a smile at Tony. “This is gonna be great.”

  MATT

  Location: En route to Boulder, Colorado

  The VW bus had seen better days, and all of them happened fifty years ago. Matt figured it was probably built in the late sixties or early seventies. Painted a color somewhere between pea and slime green, its white fenders marbled with rust. The windows were dark and greasy looking; visible fumes belched from the tailpipe, smelling like a combination of sulfur, gasoline, and candy corn. A scent overly sweet and chemical.

  “Yo!” Sid climbed out and waved, and Matt couldn’t decide what was more surprising: that Sid had been driving the contraption, or that Matt barely recognized him. As Tony’s older brother, Sid was slightly taller, sturdier, and now, exponentially better looking than his younger sibling. Tony stood hunched over on the curb, looking somewhat hungover, backpack slung over one shoulder while staring cross-eyed at the bus. He didn’t answer or even acknowledge his older brother’s presence, but wrinkled his nose and squinted in confusion.

  “Let’s go, TB!”

  TB. Tony’s middle name was Bennett. Tony Bennett, just like the singer. His full name was Anthony Bennett Jain, but everyone in his family always called him Tony Bennett. So did everyone in school, up until junior high when he decided to give himself a new nickname, demanding on the first day of seventh grade that everyone must call him TB, not knowing it was the abbreviation for tuberculosis. When he realized his mistake it was too late, which in a way, was sort of like coming down with actual TB.

  “What is that?” Tony blurted. “The mystery machine? Do you drive around solving crimes?”

  Sid grinned, striding forward. “You making fun of me?”

  Tony was, of course. “Does Dad know you bought that hippie pile of crap?”

  Matt laughed, thinking of Mr. Jain—Dr. Jain, actually. Professor of economics at Drake. Watcher of football, DIYer of all things home improvement, ultimate tomato gardener, and in many ways the father Matt never had, even before his own took off when he was twelve. “He would definitely say that purchase is a liability, not even considered a depreciating asset,” Matt said, crossing his arms.

  “Yeah, but it’s not mine. My roommate Carter let me borrow his van to come and pick you douche bags up,” Sid replied. “Good to see you, Matt. You putting on weight?” The way Sid said it almost made it into a compliment, and he made a quick jab forward like he was going to punch Matt in the gut. Matt knew this fake out and didn’t flinch. He had actually lost ten pounds since he’d last seen Sid, his lowest weight in years, but the tops of his ears burned regardless.

  “Losing it.” Matt scooped up his duffel. “Now a whopping one hundred and ninety pounds.” Sid had always given him crap about his weight. Fatty Matty, Sid called him. Or Fat Boy, Chubba, Pork Belly, Butterball, Tubs, Moonpie, or anything else that Sid happened to think of. Matt had actually been thin as a child, only putting on weight when he hit double digits, arriving at the “clinically obese” mark by thirteen. But then he began to grow (vertically), took up basketball, and stopped eating entire boxes of Little Debbie Swiss Rolls and bags of potato chips in one sitting.

  Matt climbed into the van, noting the interior smelled worse than the outside. Dirty vinyl, patchouli and pot, rotten potatoes, and something else he couldn’t quite describe. Old baby diaper?

  Tony jumped in the front. “Dude! It smells like ass in here!”

  Sid started the car—surprisingly turning it over without a stutter, engine humming confidently. “That’s because you’re in it, TB.”

  “Whatever,” Tony grunted. “Someone needs to do some serious Febrezing in here.”

  The VW cruised out of the airport terminal, merging on Peña Boulevard to Highway 470, and north to Boulder. “So what’s the plan, Sid?” Tony was right about the Febreze, Matt thought, the beginnings of nausea creeping in with each breath. He rolled down the window and a dull roar of fresh air filled the bus.

  “That is.” Sid pointed over the dashboard to the distant mountain range. From this distance the mountains appeared fake, shining snowcapped peaks, like a movie prop instead of the real thing. “That’s the plan.”

  “So what resort?” Tony asked. “Breckenridge? Keystone? Snowmass?”

  “Nope.”

  “What do you mean, nope? Where are we going, then?”

  “We’re not going to a resort. We’re gonna do some AT.”

  “Come again?”

  “Alpine touring,” Sid said. “The real deal. Serious back country skiing.”

  “Okay,” Matt said, realizing that even though they’d gone at least ten miles the mountains didn’t look any closer. “But what’s that, exactly?”

  “You’ll love it.” Sid smiled knowingly in the rearview mirror, his teeth perfect white squares. “Don’t worry. It’s something you’re never gonna forget.”

  • • •

  Over steaming plates piled with chicken korma, lamb rogan josh, and shrimp biryani, Sid laid out the spring break itinerary. “So you guys, you know how to downhill, right?”

  “Of course,” Tony said and Matt nodded, taking a bite of shrimp. It was spicy—not scary hot, but it definitely had a kick, the way Tony and Sid’s mom made it. “But we’re used to cross-country,” Matt said. “You know, flat ground?”

  “Yeah. Iowa,” Sid said.

  “Iowa,” Tony replied. “We’ve never skied in the mountains.”

  “It’s better,” Sid explained. “And easier. If you can handle that crap Midwest snow and ice, you can ski anywhere.”

  “Yeah,” Tony said, shoving a gob of lamb in his mouth, bolting it down like a dog. “But these are the mountains, right? We should probably warm up on some bunny hills or something.” Another giant scoop of basmati rice followed; it was almost transfixing to watch how fast Tony could eat. “Well, at least you should, Matt.”

  “I’ve skied more than you,” Matt said.

  “Yes, but who’s the natural athlete here?”

  Matt tore a piece away from the round pancake of garlic naan. “Sinking three-pointers blindfolded doesn’t make you a better athlete. It just makes you a freak.”

  “Says you.” Tony grinned and went back to inhaling his lunch.

  “Yeah, says me.” Matt shook his head, knowing that Tony did have some weird athletic prowess, at least when it came to anything with hand-eye coordination. He almost never missed a shot in basketball, destroyed Matt in ping-pong, beat him in golf, tennis, and racquetball. But if they played long enough and hard enough, Matt would win. Matt knew deep down what he lacked in skill he made up for in stamina. Surely that had more to do with being athletic. He was persistent. Tenacious. That was the word his teachers used to describe him, and for many years he considered it a compliment. Matt is very tenacious. At the same time, he wondered why he couldn’t have been graced with just a little natural talent—to even the playing field. Literally.

  “We’ll see,” Tony said, shrugging.

  “So,” Matt turned to Sid. “What’s this alpine touring, then?”

  “It’s like a combo of downhill and cross-country.”

  Tony frowned. “How?”

  “You hike in,” Sid explained. “You can snowshoe, or use these special skins to put on the skis.” He held up a finger to catch the waitress’s attention, which wasn’t hard for Sid, because all the girls (and at least one waiter) had been glancing at him since they sat down in the booth. “Sid got his mother’s looks,” Mr. Jain liked to joke, “and Tony got my bunions.”

  “Skins?” Matt pictured snake hides wrapped around skis. “Hiking I understand, but I’ve never snowshoed.” Out the window, a few blocks off Pearl Street, the Flatirons we
re visible, rising up from the green field like the back of some gigantic half-buried dragon.

  “The skins go over the skis, so you can go forward but you won’t slip back,” Sid said. “Works great.”

  “And you’ve done this before?” Tony opened his wallet, pulled out a ten, hesitated, and then pulled out another.

  “Yeah, a few times. There’s nothing quite like skiing down pristine virgin powder.” Sid conveniently emphasizing the word virgin just as the waitress arrived with water. She looked at each of them in turn, but kept her smile for Sid.

  “Anything else?” She fluttered her eyes rapidly, ignoring Tony and Matt. The way she said anything started a heated tingle in Matt’s lower intestines. Or maybe it was the chicken korma.

  “No thanks.” Sid flashed his movie star smile. “Just the check, please.”

  The waitress bit her lip with a nod, slid the bill to the middle of the table, and retreated to the bar.

  “Kee-riiist!” Tony exhaled thickly when she was out of range. “I think she wanted to give you a lot more than the check.” He peeked his head over the booth, checking the way her black T-shirt rose up from her jeans as she pulled down a glass from a shelf on the bar, revealing a small tattoo on her lower back, something with wings, or was it vines? “Oh man,” he whispered. “Is that a tramp stamp?”

  “Calm down, boner.” Sid pulled out his own wallet to add money to the pile. “There’s gonna be a party later. Plenty of ladies coming.”

  “A party?”

  “My friend Dylan’s having a party at his house.”

  “College girls?” Tony’s face puckered, both in excitement and fear.

  “They prefer to be called women,” Sid said. “You know, because they are.”

  Matt threw a twenty on the table, knowing there wouldn’t be a girl or woman who’d glance in their direction as long as Sid was around—which Matt found bewildering, since Sid sure didn’t have any girlfriends in high school. At least, none he knew about.

  Tony said as much. “Since when did you become such a stud?”

  Sid shrugged into his jacket. “Since I stopped trying so hard.”

  “You weren’t trying at all,” Matt told him, wondering what combination of confidence and indifference would work on getting (and keeping) a girl’s attention. So far, he hadn’t found it. The indifference he was good at, or at least the impression of indifference. The confidence was another story. He didn’t even know where to begin trying to fake that.

  “That’s the trick, grasshopper,” Sid replied. “That is the trick.”

  MATT

  Location: Boulder, Colorado

  Elevation: 5,430 feet

  “Nice place, Sid.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I was kidding,” said Tony, peering at the ceiling and its collection of mysterious stains. “This place is a dump.”

  Sid tossed his keys on the coffee table, unoffended. “Boulder’s expensive.”

  “It smells like old people.”

  Matt didn’t think it looked all that bad, but he agreed there was an odor hanging in the air that reminded him of the nursing home his grandmother lived in—Cedar Winds Assisted Living, although there was nothing about the place that smelled like cedar, unless you counted pine-scented disinfectant. “So where are we sleeping, Sid?”

  “In my room, I guess.”

  Tony wrinkled his nose. “I’m not sharing a bed.”

  Sid ignored him. “And someone can sleep on the couch.”

  “Ugh,” said Tony, as if that was a worse option, and threw his duffel bag on said couch, narrowly missing a dark gray tabby cat that at first glance was so round and motionless it resembled a fuzzy throw pillow. The cat didn’t move, except to open one jewel-green eye. A low growl rippled out.

  “You can stay in a hotel if you don’t like it, cheap ass.”

  “No way,” said Tony. “I spent enough money on the plane ticket out here.”

  Sid laughed, went into the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator. “You sound just like Dad, you know,” he called back. “He’s a cheapskate too.” He returned holding three cans of beer.

  Tony took one. “I prefer the word frugal.”

  “So how long have you lived here?” Matt asked as he offered his hand to the cat, which sniffed it disinterestedly, and, finding nothing offensive, went back to its nap.

  Sid tossed another beer to Matt. “Since last summer. Carter, my roommate, and his sister, Leah, needed another tenant after the last one moved out.”

  “Sister, huh?” Tony stared up at the ceiling, trying to find her room using X-ray vision. “Hot sister?”

  Sid cracked open his beer. “Too hot for you, punk.”

  “What, she your girlfriend or something?”

  “No,” he said solemnly, sounding disappointed. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Ah, so fair game, then?”

  “Of course.” Sid smiled at his beer, foreseeing the outcome. Matt foresaw it too—if this Leah chick wasn’t interested in Sid, she certainly wouldn’t be interested in his spazzy little brother.

  “Are they here?” Matt asked, feeling as though he should ask permission before making himself comfortable.

  “Nah,” Sid said. “They’re probably already at Dylan’s. He’s the one who’ll hook us up with all the ski equipment tomorrow.” He gave Tony a look, a once-over that seemed to leave him unsatisfied, searching for the right thing to say. “So don’t be a dick, okay. He’s saving us a ton of money by not having to rent all the stuff.”

  “Dylan?” Tony snorted. “With a name like that I bet he’s a total stoner.”

  “You got it.” Sid laughed. “Skis aren’t the only things he can hook us up with. He’s a total TFB with an endless supply.”

  “TFB?”

  “Trust fund baby,” Sid said. “I guess he’s from a wealthy family out in Connecticut. Some richy-rich place in Hartford. Parents bought him a house in Boulder. Never seen the kid work, except he worked for a bit at the same sporting goods store with Carter. But he has an endless supply of money.”

  “Sounds like a douche.”

  “No. Not at all.” Sid shook his head. “He’s a great guy. And he’s smart, too, but he just doesn’t live in our orbit. It honestly never occurs to him not to have enough money.”

  “Wow,” Tony said.

  “The upside is he throws great parties.”

  The clock on the wall read ten to five. “Well, what are we waiting for?”

  “Don’t you want to shower and change?” Matt asked, mainly because he himself wanted to shower and change. He smelled of plane and unwashed masses. Or maybe it was just him.

  “Why?”

  “Girls, remember?” Sid reminded him.

  “Oh yeah. Girls.” Tony snatched his duffel bag, ruffled the cat’s head, and then feigned surprise when it hissed and tried to bite his hand. “Nice cat you got there.”

  “It’s a cat, Tony,” Matt said. “Not a dog.”

  “Shower’s upstairs,” Sid said. “First door on the right.”

  Tony gave them a blank yet defiant stare before heading upstairs. Each wooden step creaked in protest.

  Sid pushed off from the wall to seat himself in a threadbare recliner the color of rust. The cat watched him through slitted eyes and yawned. “Nuance escapes my brother.”

  “Yep, I’ve noticed.” Matt took a swig of beer. It wasn’t particularly cold, but tasted much better than the Old Milwaukee he and Tony stole from the fridge in Tony’s dad’s garage. He sat down next to the cat. “What’s your name, baby?”

  “His name is Marner,” Sid informed him. “It’s Leah’s cat. And from what I’ve seen so far, an excellent judge of character.”

  “Marner,” Matt said, immediately liking the name. He scratched the cat under the chin, and it pressed its head into his hand, purring loudly. “Like Silas Marner.”

  “Who?”

  “It’s a character from a book.”

  Sid blinked, confused. He w
as not a big reader of the classics, not into English literature, Matt realized. Since he was studying aerospace engineering, that made sense.

  “So Tony tells me you were supposed to be going to spring training,” Sid said, getting right to the point.

  “Florida. Yeah.”

  Sid shook his head. “That sucks.”

  “Something came up,” Matt said, wondering why he felt the need to explain. Why on Earth would he defend his dad? Maybe because it was Sid. He felt a quick stab of anger, and took a deep drink, trying to physically force it down his throat. Sid had the kind of dad you could depend on, the kind a kid was supposed to have, and he suddenly hated the fact that Sid and Tony, through no fault of their own, constantly reminded him of it.

  “So,” Matt continued, desperate to change the subject, “only a few more weeks and we’ll graduate.” Saying it out loud shocked him a little. In two months high school would be over. “Maybe things will get better in college.”

  Sid smiled, misinterpreting his meaning. “Of course. In college you’ll be beating off girls with a stick.” He glanced up at the ceiling, hearing a loud thump coming from the upstairs bathroom. “Or, like Tony, just beating off.”

  Matt laughed, but a large part of him refused to believe things were going to change that dramatically. “Some people say the high school years are the best ones of your life.” Matt didn’t know who said that, or why they would say that (especially if they actually had been through high school), but he’d heard it before. It wouldn’t have surprised him if his father thought it; maybe that was the reason for his supreme dissatisfaction with his life. Satisfied people don’t leave their families in search of a better one.

  “Those people are certified morons.” Sid drained the rest of the beer and crumpled his can. “It gets a lot better. Believe me. I know.”

  “One man’s great thinker is another person’s moron.”

  Sid laughed. “Oh man, that’s a great one! Who said that?”

  “Umberto Eco.”

  “Never heard of him. Some sort of genius, I bet.”