The Ex Games(14)
Author: Jennifer Echols

Liz’s dark hair had kinked into tight curls from the hot tub, and Chloe had carefully pinned up her long blond hair to keep it from getting wet in the pool. Chloe and Liz looked so adorable in their own ways, and so happy to be celebrating my victory, that I remembered for the first time in an hour this night was for me, not them, and definitely not Nick. I should enjoy it. Like Josh had warned me, my little baby snowboarding career might end in a stupendous crash when I took my first lesson with Daisy Delaney and she discovered I was afraid of heights. This night was all I knew I had.

“Thank y’all so much,” I said, meaning it. I ignored Gavin echoing y’all, making fun of my Tennessee accent. I also ignored the fact that Nick was not echoing y’all like he usually would.

“You’re-hur-hur welcome,” Chloe said, teeth chattering as she set down the cake at the edge of the pool. Liz set down the plates, too. They waded into the pool, cut the cake from there, and passed around big slices. White cake with white icing, a pure sugar rush—not something I normally would have included in my health-conscious diet, but exactly what I needed when, frankly, this strange episode with Nick had gotten me down.

Liz handed me a plate, careful not to drip pool water on it. I was just taking my first bite when Nick spoke to me in a voice so kind, I knew something ugly was coming. “So, Hayden. What was your time on the slalom?”

“A minute seventeen,” I told him, stuffing the next bite of cake into my mouth while watching him warily.

“That’s funny,” he said between bites. “Didn’t you come in first in the girls’ division? Because that’s three seconds slower than the third-place time for the boys’ division in your age group.”

Everyone in the pool looked at me. They expected a rebuttal.

For once, I didn’t have one.

Chloe extended her hand toward Nick. “Give me back that cake.”

He held it away from her. “No, it’s good.”

“Give it. I don’t like where you’re going with this.”

“No, I’m hungry.” Wisely, he waded into the deeper end of the pool, where Chloe would not follow him if she wanted to keep her hair dry. Holding his cake and fork at chest-level above the surface of the water, he looked straight at me and said, “I just think that unless you compete with everyone, it’s not really a competition.” His dark eyes dropped to his plate, and he shoveled a big bite of cake into his mouth. He had basically told me my win today didn’t even matter, and I was not quite as important as cake.

I opened my mouth to holler at him. I was so angry, I had no idea what I would have said.

Luckily all I got out was a noise like nyah before Chloe interrupted me. “That’s ridiculous. Girls and boys compete separately in almost every sport. You don’t have girls on your football team.”

“That’s because girls would suck,” Gavin offered. Nick waded back across the pool so they could bump fists. As he passed, the movement of his big body splashed water on my cake.

I slid my plate onto the pool deck and opened my mouth to lay into Nick with the insult he deserved.

But all I got out was something that sounded like yerg before Liz talked over me. “Basic physics. The average boy is bigger than the average girl. Girls don’t play football with boys because they’d get crushed. Girls have slower times than boys in the slalom because they’re not as heavy. You should have seen Hayden’s 900 in the half-pipe. Not a single boy did a 900 today, not even the guy who came in first in the oldest boys’ division.”

“That’s because he’s not that good,” Nick countered. “Even I could beat that guy.”

“Besides,” Davis spoke up, “this was a local competition. You never know who’ll show up for those. It would be different if she stepped up to a higher level. The men’s Olympics are an event. The women’s Olympics are a bathroom break.”

“They are not!” I gasped, instinctively coming to the defense of snowboarding chicks, my idols. Et tu, Brute? I thought. This was getting ugly if even Davis, usually such a gentleman, was making light of my win.

Liz must have been thinking the same thing. After her big logical speech, she just gaped at him like she couldn’t believe he’d said this.

Chloe was the one who shouted, “The three of you really mean Hayden didn’t accomplish anything today? You weren’t even there to watch her!”

Nick was, I thought. He was there on his deck. He’d made note of the slalom times. Now he cut his eyes at me, letting me know this had flashed through his mind, too.

“We didn’t have to see her,” he said. “Any snowboarder knows this about the sport. Women aren’t anything compared with men. Hayden won lessons with Daisy Delaney, right? Pit Daisy Delaney against Shaun White. He’d crush her. Hell, pit Daisy Delaney against Mason Aguirre.”

“Yeah!” Gavin took up the challenge. “Did you see the X Games on TV a couple of weeks ago? The guys stick 1260s on the slopestyle. They throw down back-to-back 1080s in the half-pipe or it’s not even considered a run. The girls are lucky if they land a 900.” He then created a range of Daisy Delaney slap-downs with every famous male snowboarder he could think of. Davis laughed, and he quietly offered suggestions when Gavin ran out of ideas. Chloe kept breaking in with protests, and Liz kept saying, “But …” From their separate places around the pool, all four of them waded closer as the talk got more heated, until they surrounded Nick and me on all sides.

But I didn’t really hear them anymore. I stared at Nick in front of me. He stared back. We’d set this argument in motion, and now it kept rolling without us. No one seemed to notice we’d dropped out. I watched him, hoping I’d get some sign he was just kidding.

He watched me, too. But he never winked or made any move to break the tension. Everything he’d said about girls versus boys, he’d meant.

“So, you think you could have beaten the first-place guy?” I asked Nick.

He knew I’d said something. But he was listening to Gavin, and he couldn’t hear me over the guffaws. With a last dark look at me, he turned toward the other boys and laughed.

I was angry now, truly angry. I’d worked hard to win that competition, and it did mean something. I slogged through the warm water and cold air, stopping right in front of him, my tummy only inches from his knees where he sat on the stairs. I said again, “Nick, you really think you could have beaten the first-place guy today if you’d only bothered to enter the competition?”