The Ex Games (21 page)

“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

(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 sense 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.”

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
.