Chapter 28
Cinderella Story
Paisley
I googled “cassowary.” It’s a bird with a red-blue neck and golden eyes. They’re beautiful, but shy, and if someone comes too close, the birds kill them.
I get it. I get it and can even understand the reference, but I don’t like it. I’m a cassowary, and I don’t like it.
Knox watched my program. I know it because my eyes have developed a Knox radar and in between jumps I was able to locate him.
He watched me the whole time, but looked as if I wanted to cause him pain, as if I was a cassowary and would hit him with my wings.
As the last sounds faded and, puffing, I assumed my final position, Knox was gone.
The tandem oracle had started back up, so he had to be back on the slope.
But something tells me that’s not why he left.
After my program, I didn’t have the chance to talk to him.
I had to leave the fair earlier than everyone else in order to clean the tourist section of the resort, put out new towels, and get the fire going in the fireplace before everyone came back.
I have to wait until ten to serve tea, fill up the buffet in the lounge with salad, baked Camembert and lingonberries, and then wait until every single one of them is full and happily goes to bed, so I can then clean everything up and set the breakfast table for tomorrow morning.
My limbs are heavy as lead when I finally make it back to the hallway of the Winterbottoms’ resort.
I consider taking a bath, maybe even with a muscle relaxant.
I’m dreading tomorrow and the sound of my alarm, far too early, so I can go for a jog before heading off to training.
I already know that I’ll be tossing and turning and pressing the pillow to my head to make the annoying beep stop, so that I can fall back asleep to the gentle trickle of snow on the window.
But it won’t stop, and I won’t go back to sleep.
I will get up, as I do every morning, far too tired.
I will have a cup of coffee, think about Knox, jog through the snow, think about Knox, get breakfast ready for the tourists, think about Knox, and eventually head off to iSkate with Gwen.
But first things first. I need sleep. Deep, refreshing, peaceful sleep.
I reach the front door, enter the code, yawn, pull the door open and…
Stop dead in my tracks.
He can’t be for real. This cannot be for real.
My mind doesn’t want to accept what my eyes are seeing as they dart across the room and see all the dancing, groping, drunk people. A few hours ago, I thought something in Knox had changed. I thought he’d become deeper somehow, more mature.
But this here…this isn’t just some après-ski thing. This is a full-blown Project X party.
They’ve set up a zip line. A zip line! I have no idea how that’s even possible, but the thing is stretched across the entire living room and out through the sliding glass door.
They’ve fastened it to a tree and, here inside, to the balustrade.
People are huddled up on the stairs waiting their turn to be so world-weary as to take their chance of climbing over the railing, hopping onto the swing, zipping outside, jumping off at least ten or fifteen feet above the ground, and landing in a screaming pile of limbs in the pool.
The house looks like it’s going to burst, there are so many people. Strobes are lighting up people’s sweaty faces, accentuating the half-naked women’s smeared makeup. Mascara around their mouths, lipstick on their cheeks.
People are everywhere—in the heated pool, in the hot tub—everywhere, like ants on an ice cream cone. Some song or other by Drake is coming out of the speakers, and women are rubbing their asses against dudes’ junk like this was some kind of competition.
I slam the door, but no one pays any attention. No one hears me. Of course, they don’t. This is an orgy, and everyone is writing their own film.
The women eye me suspiciously as I venture into the lion’s den.
They scrutinize my body, wrapped in an oversized woolen sweater that I have to roll up the sleeves of, my skinny jeans, colorful knit socks from Ruth, and slippers.
I can hear their thoughts—so obvious, so loud—as if they were being shouted right into my face.
Seeing as that I’m not half naked like they are, I’m an alien body.
Someone who doesn’t belong because I didn’t follow the dress code.
They look at my wool sweater like it’s the strongest male repellent in the world.
I push myself past a particularly sweaty group of women who are all wearing bikinis as if it wasn’t winter in Aspen but the Hamptons in summer.
One of them stumbles while making room for me and spills the contents of her red cup across my arm.
Judging by the smell, it’s got to be whiskey. I wriggle my nose.
“Oops,” she mumbles, followed by a burp. “Accident.” Which comes out like cinent.
I look at her face and suddenly recognize who it is.
Camila. Wyatt’s sister. Who at the last party let strangers stuff money into every orifice of her body.
Camila, who is clearly completely off her ass.
She can hardly stand. One of her friends has to hold her up, and her head is wobbling strangely back and forth.
“Camila,” I say, reaching out my hand and grabbing her waist to keep her from falling over. “Where’s your brother?”
“My brother,” she repeats. Her eyelids flicker. “Everywhere and nowhere.”
I look at the poor girl and see in her perfect, symmetrical face framed by chocolate-colored waves of beach-look curls how shitty things must be for her.
“Okay, come with me. Come on.”
I pry her loose from her blond friend and lead her through the huge living room, which, if it were a sport, would definitely bring me a gold for my country.
For Camila can hardly walk. She stumbles right and left, is hanging off my arm like a sack of potatoes, and looks like she’s going to topple over at any moment.
Wyatt is leaning against the kitchen counter, pushing his tongue into the mouth of one of the hundreds of bikini gals as if he wanted to melt into her. I lay my free hand on his shoulder and pull him away from his lady friend so that he can see me.
“Yo,” he says. His eyes are blurry. “What’s it going, Paisley?”
“Your sister,” I hiss and have difficulty keeping Camila standing up straight. “Whatever other shit you’ve got to take care of, Wyatt, take care of her first.”
He looks at Camila and blinks a few times as if only becoming aware of her now. Then he lets go of the woman next to him as if he’d burned himself on her skin and is next to Camila in a second.
“Mila,” he says quietly, taking her face in both hands. There is so much affection in his glance, so much love and care, that for a moment I feel a stab in my chest: I wish someone would look at me that way. Just once. “Mila, look at me.”
She tries, I can see her really trying, but at the last second she turns her head and vomits into the sink.
I grab hold of her hair reflexively. Back in Minneapolis, when I was small and helpless and another person, I had to do this often.
For my mother. I was a world champion hair-holder, holding her thin, brittle hair while she threw up into our disgusting trailer toilet following one of her alcohol-drug-whatever binges.
Camila’s retching sounds remind me of that, and those memories are even worse than that toilet was.
Repulsive. Repulsive.
“Jake!”
A tall dude sticks his head out from the refrigerator, a bottle of water in his hand.
“You’re sober, right?”
Jake nods. “Why?”
“Can you drive my sister and me to the hospital?”
Jake’s glance wanders to Camila, whose body is surging up again. I can hear her whimpering.
“Everything’s fine,” I whisper, while moving my hand in calming circles on her back. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
“Of course,” Jake says, coming to our side and handing Camila the water. “Here. Drink this on the way to the car, okay?”
Camila is chalk white, there is vomit on her cheeks, and a single strand of hair has gotten caught there. Her fingers trembling, she takes the bottle while Wyatt puts his muscular arms around her and nods to me. Tense jaw, stony expression.
I watch the three make their way to the door. Camila can hardly walk without slumping, so Wyatt puts his other hand under her knees and lifts her up to carry her.
An annoyed snort tears my gaze away from the front door. Wyatt’s bikini-clad friend is plucking at the skimpy band of her bikini bottom and looking at me like she’d strangle me with it. “You like him?”
“What?”
“I asked whether you like him.” She picks a red cup off the counter, looks inside for a moment, then gulps it down. How stupid, I think, drinking out of someone else’s cup. How stupid. “Wyatt.”
I stare at her. “Why in the world are you asking me something like that?”
She clicks her tongue, tosses her blond hair over her shoulder, and gives an affected laugh. “Why else would you have interrupted us? Intentionally?”
I blink. She can’t be serious. “I have no idea if you had anything but Wyatt’s dick in mind over the last few minutes, but his sister was just…”
“Oh, Camila.” She waves her cup as if I was about to tell her something she’s known forever. “She’s always like that.”
I’m filled with rage. I can feel my blood beginning to boil. “Oh, I see, and because someone’s like that all the time, naturally it’s just fine to leave them to themselves? Even when they quite clearly need some help?”
Her fingers twitch. I wouldn’t have noticed if she wasn’t clutching the cup, which is becoming slightly dented. “It’s Camila,” she repeats as if there simply wasn’t any response. “She does that every time.”
“For God’s sake.” I take the cup out of her hand before she can have another drink and dump it in the sink. “You ever wonder why? Did it ever occur to you that she feels far too much and so takes any opportunity to not feel at all?”