Chapter 7 Breathing in Snowflakes
Breathing in Snowflakes
Paisley
Dear God, my legs! What is this? I’m nothing but pudding. A pudding in the making. Stirred to a nice creamy consistency.
With a groan I toss myself onto my bed, spread out my arms and legs, and decide never to move again. This here will be the rest of my life. Just the bed and me. Forever in intimate togetherness.
Do you, Paisley Harris, take Aria’s bed to be your lawfully wedded partner for life? To love and to cherish, in sickness and in health?
I do. God, yes. I do.
My eyelids grow heavy. The dreamcatcher above me begins to lose shape. I feel my blood pulsing through my veins. It’s like the mattress is a magnetic field, pulling me to itself.
The training center in Minneapolis was a joke compared to what I had to do today.
I was on the ice until noon, and it felt like Polina had something to say about every single one of my moves (“Pull in your leg! It’s flapping about like an old rubber hose!
”). I did manage to spend my lunch with Gwen, Levi, and Aaron—they are so incredibly nice to me and took me into their circle right away—but I’d hardly gotten my avocado sandwich down when I had to get back to the fitness program. And at its finest.
Now, it’s almost six and I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. Tired… So tired… Just a little bit…
David Bowie’s “Starman” is ringing in my ears.
“Mmm.” I roll onto my stomach and pull the pillow over my head. “Not now.”
But my phone won’t give up—it drones on continually. Without opening my eyes, I reach out and run my hand over the nightstand before finding it. I turn my head to the side and sluggishly attempt to make out the name on the display.
It’s Gwen. We exchanged numbers during lunch. I press the green icon and put the phone to my ear. “Yeah?”
“Oh. You join the mafia or something?”
“What?”
“Your voice. You sound like Don Corleone.”
“Don Corleone?” I pull at a strand of hair that’s somehow made its way into my mouth.
“The Godfather. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen it.”
“Oh, right. Sure.” With great effort I heave my leaden torso up to lean back against the headboard. “I am totally fucked.”
Gwen chuckles. “Yeah, iSkate is heavy. But you’ll get used to it. What are your plans for tonight?”
“Plans?”
“Yeah. Oh, no no no… Shit.” In the background I hear something clatter to the floor. Gwen curses. “Mom and her stupid Yankee Candles! Why are they in glasses on top of it all? They’re everywhere. A new cloud of scent greets my every step.”
“Well, they’re nice.”
“I guess. Anyway, we were talking about plans. What do you intend to do?”
“Nothing,” I reply, without being able to hide the disbelief in my voice. “I feel like I went through bootcamp with Rocky Balboa today. How can you still walk?”
“Like I said, you’ll get used to it. I’ll pick you up. Be downstairs in ten, yeah?”
“What? Gwen, really, I…”
“See you soon!”
I want to protest, but she’s already hung up. For a moment I sit there motionless, staring at my phone. I consider simply sending her a message telling her not to come, but somehow, I just don’t manage. We just got to know each other, and I don’t want to screw things up.
Exhausted, I crawl to the edge of the bed and shake my limbs. What the hell. If I’ve already made it this far today, I’ll manage this, too.
I don’t make the effort to put on makeup again.
Instead, I fish my dirty training clothes out of my bag and toss them into the laundry basket that Ruth put in my room.
Pulling out my wallet, my fingers graze the folded iSkate contract.
My heart skips a beat, just like before when Polina put it in front of me and my eyes got caught on the astronomical sums. That’s right.
Sums. Plural. Three, to be exact. Membership fees to iSkate, Polina’s training fees, and the remaining costs for a choreographer.
Before I’ve proven myself and won championships, I’m on a probationary period and have to pay for everything myself.
That’s the disadvantage. At some point, they’ll be the ones to pay, but I’ve got a long way to go before that happens.
While signing I thought that, with every stroke of the pen, I was signing my own doom. I really need a job if I don’t want to have to sneak out of town, bankrupt, in the dead of night.
“Paisley,” Ruth says over the clacking of her knitting needles. She is one of those women whose dimples turn red when they smile. It automatically gives her that tender expression that I otherwise only know from little Christmas elves. “You weren’t at dinner. Everything okay?”
“Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, but training…” Instead of finishing, I put on a suggestive expression.
Ruth nods. “Got it. Well, there’s still a bit of apple cake on the sideboard. In case you’re hungry…”
“We’ll get something at the fair,” Gwen interrupts, standing up from the sofa and stretching. “Mom’s blueberry cheesecake is to die for.”
“Fair?” I ask as Gwen puts her fingers around my wrist and tugs.
“Yeah. Today is the half-pipe show, a little foretaste of the X Games. The town fair today is a tradition.”
I pull my cap farther down over my ears as we step outside the B&B. “You didn’t tell me that.”
Gwen shrugs. “Forgot.”
As if. She hid it from me, knowing that in my current state I never would have had the strength for something like that. My new friend is pretty clever.
We take Gwen’s military-green Jeep to the Aspen Highlands where a considerable crowd is waiting.
“Wow,” I say as I get out of the car, closing the door behind me, my eyes directed toward the many stands and the half-pipe behind them. “Were these folks hiding all day long? Where did they come from all of a sudden?”
Gwen laughs. Her boots crunch in the snow as she makes her way around the car to me. “Those are tourists. They want to see the show.”
She grabs my arm, which triggers a feeling of well-being in me, and with her other hand points to the different little huts and stands.
“Souvenirs and all that. Ridiculously overpriced. Every year I ask myself what kind of person pays twenty dollars for a magnet of a green-haired troll on a snowboard. Totally whack. Oh, back there’s where Malila knits her beloved bracelets.
She lives near the Colorado River and only comes here for the fairs. ”
I nod in the direction of a little red hut, behind which a fire is burning underneath a cauldron. “What’s that?”
“Mulled wine with rum.” Gwen casts me a conspiratorial glance. “It’s strong. Wanna drink a mug? I’ll invite you.”
Thinking it over, I gnaw on my lip. “I don’t know.”
“You’ve got to!” Donning the look of a terrier, Gwen tugs my arm. “It’s practically your baptism. Every one of Aspen’s inhabitants has to be familiar with Dan’s punch!”
I’ve never had much of a taste for alcohol, which has on the one hand to do with my permanently plastered mom and, on the other, training. But I imagine one mug of punch with Gwen will be okay. We’re not getting smashed, just toasting to this new phase of my life.
“Well, all right,” I say. “A little something to warm us up can’t do any harm.”
Gwen claps her gloved hands, and we stomp over to the little hut.
It’s interesting to see the man in the thick winter sweater—Gwen referred to him as Dan—ladle some of the red-wine-and-rum mixture into cute Christmas mugs, lay two slices of orange on top, and then place a sugar cube in a spoon on top before covering them both with rum and setting them on fire.
“Don’t burn yourselves,” he says, grins, and places the mugs in front of us.
“Exotic,” I say, my eyes fixed on the dancing flames burning amicably atop both of our mugs.
Gwen runs a finger down the handle. “You’re here without your parents, right?”
I acknowledge her question with a curt nod, without looking at her.
Clearly she understands that I don’t care to talk about my past, because she changes the topic immediately. “Do you already know what’s next? Do you have a job?”
“No.” The flame above my mug has gone out, and the sugar dissolved. “Yesterday out on the slopes I applied for a position as an endurance trainer.” I glare into my punch. “I could have saved myself the trouble.”
Gwen sips from her mug, her eyes looking at me over the rim. “What do you mean?”
I shrug. “Dunno. Because that snowboarder Knox is an ass?”
Her lips open in surprise before she asks, “You met Knox?”
“Yeah.” I carefully take a sip and have to keep myself from spitting it right back out. That stuff is burning my throat out. God is that terrible. “You know him?”
“You’re asking me if I know Knox?” She gives a bitter laugh but doesn’t seem to want to add anything. She points to my mug. “Drink. The second sip’s better.”
And indeed, she’s right. The more I drink, the better the horrible stuff tastes.
“You should see about a job with the Winterbottoms,” she says after a little while. “They’re looking for a new chalet girl and they pay well. Maybe that’d be something for you.”
“A chalet girl?”
“Yeah. The Winterbottoms live in a ski resort close by. In one half of the place are the guests, in the other themselves. You’d take care of the tourists, clean up around the place, that kind of thing.”
“I can do that,” I reply with the beginnings of giddiness welling up. “Where do they live exactly?”
Gwen takes another gulp from her mug. “I can bring you over there tomorrow after training, if you want.”
“I’d be eternally grateful, really.”
She grins and points at a french-fry stand next to us. “What you should really be grateful for are the thousand-and-one ways you can eat a potato.” She starts counting on her fingers. “Mashed, baked, fried, roasted…”
I laugh out loud.
Once we’ve finished our mugs, we have Malila knot two color-coordinated bracelets around our wrists, and we meander over to the slope to see the next show. My head is smoking from the punch.
It takes a little while for us to make our way past all the people standing next to one another, eying the slope. A snowboarder jolts forward and does a bunch of tricks that make me gasp, as with every jump I’m afraid he’s going to crack his head open.
Gwen casts me an amused glance. “Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen to him.”
“How do you know?”
She nods. “Because Knox doesn’t fall. He’s a real pro.”
“That’s Knox?” I ask in surprise, staring wide-eyed at his quick silhouette.
“Yep.”
The crowd around us cheers and shouts when he comes to a stop in the middle of the slope before sliding down toward us so that we can see how his speeding board whirls the snow into the air.
“He’s good, right?”
Gwen nods. “One of the best. Aspen loves him. But he wasn’t always the snowboarder type. In high school, he was the star hockey player. We all thought that, after school, he’d take up his scholarship in Canada.”
“Oh.” In my head the images from this morning show back up. Knox at the frozen lake, how he was crying without really being able to. His pained expression has burned itself into my mind. “What happened?”
She bites her lower lip. Gwen’s brown eyes are watching Knox who is now almost next to us.
The butter-yellow reflection of the spotlights lights up her pupils.
“No one really knows. After his mom died, it was like he was someone else. The unofficial hypothesis in Aspen is that he just wasn’t able to leave his dad alone.
And that he wanted to take away some of his pain by switching sports.
” Her eyes dart briefly to mine. “Back then, his father was a snowboarder, you see. Knox probably wanted to give him something he could focus on. But,” Gwen shrugs, “none of us really knows.”
I bury my hands into my jacket pockets and look toward him. His board stops before the barrier, and the crowd around us breaks into loud applause. Girls are screeching his name.
Knox slides his protective eyewear over his helmet and gives his audience a wide smile. Then he bends over to undo the bindings from his feet. When he is back upright, his eyes meet mine. Inside I brace myself for the condescending look he shot me yesterday, but it doesn’t come.
At the next blink of an eye, he’s already turned his back on me.