The Ex Games(22)
Author: Jennifer Echols

Then they were gone. Snowflakes sparkled in the air where they’d been.

Nick reached out and pulled my hair. “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “I won’t tell Gavin and Davis about your incident with the jump just now.”

I laughed shortly. “You mean you won’t embarrass and belittle me? Thanks, Nick. It’s too late. You took care of that last night.”

He studied me for a second. At least, I thought he did, though all I could see were his mirrored goggles. Then his waterproof fabric zipped against my waterproof fabric as he slipped his arm around my shoulders. “Have fun out here with your boyfriends.” He nodded across the slope to Josh and his posse, who were taking turns jibbing on the trick rail while the others pelted them with snowballs. Chloe protected her hairdo with both arms over her head.

I shrugged off his arm. “That’s right. Fourteen-year-old boys have better taste than you. They think I’m hot.” I licked my fingertip and stuck it on my butt. “Tsssss.”

And with that, I propelled myself across the slope and skidded to a stop at one end of the trick rail. “Quick,” I told the boys, “act like you think I’m hot.”

Chloe cracked up. Josh stared blankly at me. His friends blushed deep red, but they weren’t claiming it.

“Thanks for your support,” I told them. “Look without looking like you’re looking. Is Nick gone?”

Chloe gazed past my shoulder to watch uphill. “He’s hiking farther up so he can get some air. Here he goes.”

“Nice speed,” Josh murmured. All the boys tracked Nick behind me with their eyes. “Nice air.” Josh turned to me. “You’re toast.”

I felt like toast, burning with anger inside my waterproof layers. “I am not,” I insisted. “I might be lightly browned on one side. But it’s only Wednesday. The comp isn’t until Saturday. Right now let’s go to the half-pipe and end this on a high note. Okay?”

I turned and boarded through the trees beside the jump without waiting for them. My enthusiasm was stretched to the limit, having to cheer on my own cheerleaders. Behind me Josh broke into a rap about me. His friends joined in with beats and sound effects. I wasn’t sure whether this was supposed to boost my spirits or not.

Hayden, she’s a red-haired lass

Doing nose-grabs by the score

Gonna kick some Krieger ass

Maybe she needs one day more

Wants to snowboard off the jump

Not today, she’s filled with sorrow

Scared she’ll lose her steeze and biff

Gonna kick some ass tomorrow.

This was not exactly the vote of confidence I was looking for. I was already angry at myself for being chicken. I was glad I had something else to concentrate on—staying on the trail and not skidding into a tree—because otherwise, I might have burst into tears.

As soon as we cleared the woods and emerged onto the wide slope down to the half-pipe, Josh boarded even with me. “Your bet is only for Poseur tickets, right?” he called.

And for my self-esteem, but that was splitting hairs. “Yeah, that’s all.”

“Because if it was for more than that, I’d be sweet-talking Nick right now and doing everything I could to pull out.”

“Oh, no you don’t!” Chloe squealed. I think she meant to board between us and shove Josh away for effect. However, she didn’t have enough control to do this, so she just crossed in front of him and fell in his path, which was somewhat anticlimactic. She shouted up at him, “You need to decide whether you stand with your sister or with the sexist pigs.” Even on her butt in the snow, Chloe was a formidable force.

“Yes, ma’am.” Josh saluted with his mitten to his goggles, then slid around us to catch up with his friends, who had moved farther down the slope to the half-pipe. This was the part of the ski resort where everyone from my school came to see and be seen. The ski lodge sat at the foot of Main Street, the main wide slope. The half-pipe ended another big run on one side of Main Street. Kids busting ass in the pipe served as aprèsski entertainment for adults drinking beer (and teenagers sneaking beer) on the deck at the lodge.

I stopped at the bottom of the half-pipe with twenty or thirty other skiers and boarders who were watching the show. Then I turned to catch Chloe as she came down the hill. Over the years, on the rare occasions when she came boarding with me, catching her had proven a more effective method of stopping her than teaching her to stop herself, which she could not seem to get the hang of.

In front of us, the guy who’d come in second place in the older boys’ division yesterday sped through the pipe, which was basically the bottom half of a tube buried in the snow—an enormous tube with eighteen-foot sides. He boarded up one wall, launched into the air, and rotated his body in a backside 720. Then he landed easily and slid like butter down the wall, accelerating across the flat to launch himself up the opposite wall, back and forth until he ran out of pipe. He boarded out toward us. Seeing me on the edge of the crowd, he called, “Hayden O’Malley! My girlfriend and I have a bet for Poseur tickets on you and Krieger. Be sure you lose that comp for me!”

Now that I looked around, there were a lot of people from school hanging out here, and all of them seemed to have heard about Nick and me. They murmured behind their hands or called out, “Dis!” and “Drama!” I even heard some girls close by discussing whether Nick and I were hooking up, as if I were deaf.

“You might as well fork over your seventy-two dollars right now!” Chloe yelled after the offending guy, but he was already halfway to the lift back up to the top of the pipe. To me she murmured, “You go almost as high as he does in the half-pipe. I don’t want to scare you or anything. But you’re sliding up the wall and going way up in the air, upside down half the time, and you’re not the least bit scared of that. What’s so different about the jump?”

I knew exactly what was so different, because I’d discussed this at length with Josh years ago when we first discovered I Did Not Do Jumps. “In the half-pipe I’m starting out in the flat, going up the wall and into the air, and then coming back down,” I explained. “To me that’s a lot different from the jump, which is basically a controlled fall off a very high wall. It sounds a little too much like equipment failure when you’re rappelling.”

“But you’re not rappelling,” Chloe pointed out, “and you don’t have any equipment to fail you. Well, you have your snowboard, maybe, but no ropes or pulleys or whatever’s supposed to hold you up. I have studied this in great detail today. While you were not going off the jump, everybody in Snowfall did go off it. My dentist. My mailman. An entire second grade class.”