Chapter 15
Now that I’m close to the lodge, it is really dark, with shadows everywhere and just the faintest gray glow off the snow to give me a clue about where the walkway is.
I shuffle along at a sloth’s pace toward the oasis of illumination at the side doors, careful on my trembling legs.
It would be so like me to make it all the way down a death-defying ski run and then trip on a crack in the sidewalk and break my arm.
I’ve just started wondering whether anyone can see me doing this strange creeping when I hear murmuring, shushing, giggling.
It puts me on high alert. Other people’s giggling always triggers my paranoia, even though, realistically, the odds that some shadowy randos are laughing about me are near zero.
The sounds are coming from a pitch-black corner up ahead.
The other thing coming from that corner is the pungent skunk of weed, which is probably not a coincidence.
Pot smell in an enclosed room makes me gag, but outside it’s intriguing.
I pause at the door to inhale the scent.
I wonder what these ski stoners’ lives are like.
Is it one party after another? Do they ski all winter and surf all summer, except when they’re backpacking around Europe?
Then I hear Richard’s unmistakable chuckle.
I duck inside, my heart pounding. Those aren’t dudes who live on the mountain all season, those are kids from our trip.
Wistfulness overwhelms me. If I could see like everyone else, I might be there with them right now, trying weed for the first time with my more mature boyfriend, feeling like I belong to that group through mutual mischief.
I shake my head. No. A change in my medical status wouldn’t change the fact that Richard is a self-absorbed waste of an Oxford shirt.
Mason was so right. Richard is a massive dick.
Inside the lodge, I think about finding one of our chaperones and telling them I need to get to a doctor and find out what is happening with my eyes.
But I’m so unbearably tired that the thought of all the explaining, all the words I would have to come up with to communicate my situation, makes me start to tear up again in frustration.
Plus, what is a doctor going to say to me if they do examine me?
“Oh my gosh, you’re right, you do have an emergency, it appears that you are going blind?
!” I already fucking know that. And I don’t want to hear it again.
Luckily, my room is empty. I strip off my jacket and snow pants and leave them in a drippy pile on the thin carpeting that looks like it’s been through decades of drippy piles.
I burrow underneath the covers of my bed, arranging the pillows to make my little nest. There aren’t enough pillows, so I borrow some from Amanda’s bed, just for a few minutes.
I stretch my legs out and wiggle my toes through the pinprick sensation of my feet thawing out.
There’s a strange looseness in my jaw, and the skin across my forehead becomes smooth.
Holy crap—I’m calm. This is the first moment in the last twelve hours when I haven’t been performing, trying to do the right thing, trying to say the right thing, trying on top of trying.
Now everything has crashed and burned. There is nothing left to prove.
This afternoon, Richard said my legs got sore because I was fighting the mountain.
But it seems like there are mountains in every aspect of my life. And I don’t want to fight them anymore.
I’m starting to drift off when I hear the sound of someone punching in the door code. Amanda bursts in and flips on the lights. She jumps, surprised to see me.
“What are you doing in here? Everyone’s hanging out,” she says.
I feel self-conscious, hoping she doesn’t notice that I’ve stolen her pillows and tucked them under each knee pit.
“I’m toast. My bed has ordered me to hang in.”
She frowns. “Are you sure? You’re going to waste a night away from parents by going to sleep early?”
It does sound pretty weak when she puts it that way. My instinct is to think that she’s trying to make me feel like a loser, but her tone says otherwise. She’s just pointing out the obvious.
I shrug. “This is literally the first time I’ve felt warm all day.” This is true, but what’s truer is that this is the only place I can think of where the fact that everything appears slightly smudged won’t put me in danger of embarrassment or injury.
She puts her hand on her hip, looking like she’s trying to decide whether to reach under the blankets and pull me out of bed by my ankles. One thing I’m realizing about Amanda is that she is stubborn.
“Hold on a sec,” she says, and disappears back into the hallway.
A minute later, I hear the beeps of the keypad again and Amanda is there holding the necks of two bottles of beer in her left hand. She puts them on the nightstand and starts screwing off the caps.
“Oh, no thanks,” I say before she can open the second bottle. “I don’t really like beer.”
She pauses for a second, then unscrews the second cap anyway. “That’s okay. Neither do I. But my therapist says it’s important to mark special occasions, you know? So let’s toast. To freedom,” she says, holding her bottle aloft.
I hold mine up, too, since that appears to be the only option.
“To freedom,” I say. But I’m not free, I’m trapped.
Trapped on a trip with someone who is now my ex, trapped in unfamiliar surroundings while my eyes shut down on me, trapped inside my head with all my secrets.
I feel more closed in than when my parents make me stay home playing Trivial Pursuit with them on Christmas Eve.
I still haven’t put the bottle to my lips, so Amanda clunks the bottom of her bottle down onto the mouth of mine, making it fizz and overflow. I rush to suck it down before it soaks the bed. She nods and takes a long drink.
“Yep, still gross, but in a good way, you know? Like coffee ice cream.”
I want to say, No, Amanda, I don’t freaking know. But I don’t. Instead, I say, “What made you start seeing a therapist?” Probably too private, but she brought it up.
The bubbles from the beer seem to travel all the way down the length of my body and are now bouncing and tingling in my feet. It’s sort of nice.
“Nothing revolutionary,” she says. She puts her beer on the table, then kicks off her boots and unzips her fleece. “Just your typical ‘parents hate each other, parents get divorce, parents need to feel better about messing up their kids so they put them in therapy’ sort of situation.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I like it. The therapy. And the fact that there’s no more fighting. I like that, too.”
I’ve never thought of Amanda at home before, with her own life and her own problems. “I’m sort of hiding out tonight,” I confess.
“Ooh, from who? What’s going on?” Amanda uses the heels of her hands to hoist her butt up onto the dresser, then sits cross-legged next to the beer bottle.
My eyes start swimming even thinking about saying his name out loud. I can’t cry about something so stupid when Amanda has just told me her parents got divorced. I wave my hand dismissively as I blink back the tears. “Oh, you know. Richard.”
She’s silent for a moment, and I can’t help but wonder if she’s inwardly thrilled. “Wow. You guys seemed so cozy on the bus.”
So she did absorb more of our canoodling than she let on.
Was that really just this morning that I was trying to rub it in Amanda’s face how hot and heavy Richard and I were?
I gulp a few swallows of beer and try to pretend I’m already in the phase where my fiery wreck of a love life is just a memory, material for a funny story. “Things change,” I say.
I can’t make out her exact expression. Is she confused? Inwardly laughing at me? Already thinking about sinking her hungry teeth into him? Whatever. I shouldn’t care anyway, right? I’m so done with him.
“You can have him,” I say before I even realize the words are coming out of my mouth. “I mean, if you want to get with him, it’s fine with me. I know you guys are close.”
I mean for this to sound mature, like I’m evolved and far removed from petty jealousy and territorial tendencies.
Instead, it sounds childish. Like why would dating someone for a few days give me any semblance of ownership?
I start to formulate how to dial this ridiculous statement back when Amanda bursts out giggling.
Then she downs her beer in big, open-throated gulps. She wipes her mouth with her sleeve.
“You are too funny!” she says, shaking her head. “Me and Richard. Richard and me.” She puts up air quotes with her fingers. “Close.”
I search her face. “Aren’t you?” I ask.
She giggles again as she peels the label off her bottle in skinny strips that curl and waft to the floor like snowflakes.
“Strictly geographically speaking, yes, in that we’re neighbors, right?
We’ve been hanging around together since we were both in diapers.
But he does not live in a romantic part of my brain.
Besides, I’ve seen how he does relationships and I’m not a fan.
” She looks up at me, apologetic. “No offense.”
“None taken,” I say. “What do you mean exactly? About how he does relationships?”
“Oh, you know, like someone’s filming him. Like he’s starring in his own romantic comedy. Just over the top.”
She sounds like Mason. I think back to Richard blindfolding me so he could lead me to the ski trip poster down the hall. That was pretty silly.
“God, you must think I’m an idiot,” I say.
“What? Oh no! That’s not what I meant at all. I’m sure it’s exciting when it’s coming at you at a hundred miles an hour. I’ve just seen his whole playbook.”
So that’s what he has. A playbook. And I was just a girl in a line of girls, the next on the assembly line. How did I think it was something special?
So all this time, Amanda and I haven’t been vying for the same guy. We’re not in competition. She’s not my nemesis. What is she to me, then? I look at her without all my misinterpretations for the first time. I drink my beer. This is going to take some getting used to.
“Boys are gross,” I say.
“And love? The grossest,” she agrees.
“This beer is putting me to sleep. I’m going to crash.”
“Crash away. I’m going to go prowl around a little more,” she says. “Suck the marrow out of the night. Is that cool? I’ll be quiet when I come in.”
“Happy sucking,” I say. She snorts. She peeks in the mirror and tucks some blonde hairs that have escaped her braid back behind her ears. Then she stuffs her feet back in her boots and heads out.
I click off the bedside lamp and curl into a ball.
“I’m not going to fight the mountain,” I mumble out loud.
I close my eyes and try to ignore the incessant floaters and flashing that is playing against the back of my eyelids.
I can’t worry any more today. And I don’t.
I sleep a sleep that’s heavy as a weighted blanket and as black as the bottom of the ocean.