Winter's Kiss (14 page)

My feet felt like they had boots and bindings and two separate snowboards attached to them as I dragged myself closer and closer to the table of doom. Nick looked up at me. He didn’t sneer at me and turn away to make a joke about me to the table at large. He watched me coming, dragging my phantom snowboards across the room. I held his gaze. I knew he was about to humiliate me (again), but I would hold my head high while he did it. I slid onto the bench next to Davis, across the table from Nick.

“Hayden!” Chloe said. “Where’ve you been?”

I jerked my head in the direction of my brother. “Josh.”

Here it came. Nick offered another explanation with a smug grin. “Hayden’s having gastrointestinal issues.”

“You are?” Liz asked with real concern.

“Must be the tofu,” I muttered. When Liz continued to stare at me with wide eyes, I reached around Davis and patted her hand. “No, I’m not. Nick is kidding. Isn’t he hilarious?” I gave him a sickly smile.

He pointed at himself like,
Who, me?

Conversation at the table went on without us. Gavin related the details of the trip to Japan his family was planning for next summer to visit relatives they hadn’t seen in years. Even if Liz and Chloe hadn’t completely made up with Davis and Gavin, it was so obvious they were couples, because they sat next to each other in the booth. I felt a flash of jealousy. Maybe it was just that the bet for Poser tickets loomed over me, but I couldn’t shake the idea of all six of us triple-dating.

What if Nick and I were a real couple for once, out in the open? Nick and I would slide together onto the bench on one side of the booth, and all our friends would take it for granted. He’d been cruel to hint around at asking me out when he didn’t mean it, because now I couldn’t get it off my mind.

As if he knew what I was thinking, he startled me by pushing the big plate of community nachos in front of me. “No wonder you’re so skinny,” he said quietly. “Why aren’t you eating?”

“Hayden’s a vegetarian,” Liz called across the table.

“Oh yeah, I forgot.” Nick gave me a perplexed look, like he’d just found out I was a nun or a spy.

“How can you have gone to school with her for four years and not known that?” Liz challenged him. “Why do you think she’s the only person who brings her lunch on pepperoni pizza day at school?”

Davis could not get his brain around it. “Is it some Tennessee granola health club thing?”

“Just a granola health club thing,” I explained. “My family didn’t go vegetarian until right before we left Tennessee.” Luckily, I wasn’t the least bit self-conscious about being a vegetarian, because I knew it was good for me. If I’d been self-conscious, I might have begun to get uncomfortable right about then. With one short, unpainted fingernail, I traced a heart carved into the thick wooden table.

It was Gavin’s turn to look perplexed. “You’re from Tennessee?”

“Of course she’s from Tennessee,” Nick said. “Why do you think we always make fun of her accent?”

Gavin shrugged. “Because it’s there?”

Davis laughed and choked on his water. Liz pounded him on the back while Chloe commented, “Somebody’s being made fun of and you come running, no matter who or why, right?”

Gavin and Davis simultaneously said, “Right.”

“But I forgot you were a vegetarian,” Nick repeated to me. “I offered you nachos exactly like that in seventh grade, at this very table. You said you were a vegetarian and I nearly died of embarrassment for offering you meat.”

“And meat products,” Gavin couldn’t help chiming in.

But after Gavin’s comment, conversation stopped, and everyone stared at Nick. Nick? Dying of embarrassment?

He must have realized he’d blown his suave cover, because his face turned bright red.

Nick? Turning red?

“Excuse me,” I said, sliding off the bench. “I’m going to the ladies’ room.” I was a peeless goddess no longer. That was so seventh grade. Now I was in eleventh grade, and I peed. Though of course I didn’t need to at the moment. I needed to confer with my girlfriends.

“Me, too!” Chloe and Liz both said. The boys stood to let them out. Gavin and Davis grumbled about girls always having to go to the bathroom together. Nick never took his eyes off me. He knew my need to pee was a total put-on.

jib

(jib)
v
. 1. to board around and over obstacles 2. such as Nick

Without waiting for the girls, I rushed between the booths and down a dark hall to the tiny women’s bathroom, which was wallpapered with women’s wipeouts. Big photographs cut out of the newspaper, pictures cut from magazines, and snapshots showed women on skis (and a few more recent shots of women on snowboards) taking hard spills and kicking up snow. Usually I found the bathroom highly amusing. Today, as soon as I opened the door, I stopped short. The walls were sending me a message.

But I didn’t stand there in awe for long, because Chloe burst through the door behind me. I hollered at her, “You’re trying to set me up with Nick again!”

“We are
not
,” Chloe insisted, moving over to let Liz through the door. “We thought about what you said last night. You’re right. We don’t want to throw away what we have with Gavin and Davis. So we thought we’d meet them here and reconcile.
Without
giving up those Poser tickets.”

I folded my arms. “And you just happened to forget about that when you invited me, too? And Gavin and Davis just happened to forget they were meeting you when they invited Nick?”

Chloe tossed her blond hair and said, “Yes.”

“No,” Liz sighed, “we
are
trying to set you and Nick up.”

Chloe glared at Liz. “Remind me never to embezzle any funds with you. The least bit of pressure and you crack!”

“It’s not right to hide it from her.” Liz turned to me. “I definitely have misgivings about you getting together with Nick after that fire-crotch business in the lunchroom on Thursday.”

“Ah, update,” I said, turning a bit red myself. “He said I was wrong about that. I didn’t believe him at the time, but …” Something in Nick’s dreamy expression when he’d mentioned the seventh grade just now had made me wonder. Was it possible that he
had
defended me against Everett Walsh? It was all sort of medieval and chivalrous and romantic if I didn’t think too hard about it.

Liz nodded. “See, we may have been underestimating Nick. I feel responsible.” She leaned back against the wall. Her shoulders just covered an enlargement of a girl snowboarder in the midst of a spectacular face-plant. “Gavin and every other boy in school ribbing Nick about you … that all started in seventh grade. Remember that awful night at the Will Smith movie, right after you’d moved here?”

“Vaguely.” I rubbed my thumb across two chicks crashing into each other on skis as if I were getting bored with this convo.

“
I
remember,” Chloe called out. “I was trying to balance a couple of boyfriends at once. I had a
lot
to learn about cheating.”

Liz stared blankly at Chloe for a moment, then turned back to me.

“Will Smith movie,” I reminded her.

Liz shook her curls. “Right. I’ve always regretted telling you that Nick and Gavin had a bet about you. Nick had asked everyone not to tell you. Nobody wanted to go against what Nick said. But I couldn’t leave you out there alone, not knowing.” She shifted uncomfortably against the wall, like the snowboard in the picture was jabbing her between the shoulder blades. “I’ve been the butt of jokes before.”

I looked from Liz to Chloe and back to Liz. “Then why do you regret telling me?”

“I’m not sure anymore that he meant it as a joke,” Liz said.

“How else could he have meant it?” I shrieked. I looked to Chloe for help in talking Liz out of this insanity. But Chloe just poofed up her blond hair in the mirror, almost as if she agreed with Liz about this.

Liz shrugged. “I know Nick has a funny way of showing it, but I honestly think he’s got it bad for you. Chloe thinks so, too.”

Chloe nodded her affirmation. “So do Gavin and Davis. Seventh grade to eleventh grade—that’s a long time to go out of your way to be mean to somebody you can’t stand.”

I didn’t say it, but surely Liz and Chloe felt what I felt: a vibration shaking the bathroom and speeding up my heart rate at the thought that Nick really liked me. I could
not
fall for this and get hurt again, but Nick was so tempting. I wished it were true.

Feeling dizzy, I backed against the wall beside Liz for support. “This is why I wanted to talk to you chicks in here. I’m sure that, against my instructions, you told Davis and Gavin to tell Nick that I didn’t know his parents were separated, right?”

They eyed each other and nodded.

“But has he apologized for calling me a bitch? No. He came to my mother’s yoga class just now, and we argued about that. Then we argued about the fire-crotch business. Now he’s sitting across from me at a booth in Mile-High Pie, waxing poetic about the seventh grade. He’s basically followed me around all day and poked at me, without an apology in sight.” I whacked the back of my head on the pictures of snowboarders in mid-fall.

Liz gazed at me, wide-eyed and awestruck. “Wow. He’s
definitely
smitten. He wants to apologize, but he doesn’t know how to approach you because
you’re
mad, which makes him madder and madder.”

“You know what I think?” Chloe asked. She was going to tell me whether I wanted to know or not. “I think you’ve both built up enormous amounts of sexual tension since your session in the sauna was cut short last night, and you won’t get along until you let it out. You need to make out with him. Take control.”

Before I could pursue this astonishing idea with her, three senior girls pushed through the bathroom doorway and squealed when they saw me. “Hayden O’Malley!” one of them said. “I had a huge fight with my boyfriend about you, and we both joined the bet over Poser tickets. I think every couple in the school has made that bet with each other. You’d better show that boy up.”

“I heard you and Nick are actually hooking up,” another girl said. “Is that true?”

Chloe nodded at me encouragingly. Liz motioned with her head toward the door.

“I’m not sure. Let me get back to you.” I swung open the bathroom door and walked into the restaurant again. This was my evening out: bopping back and forth, away from whichever convo made me the most uncomfortable.

I walked back to the booth and stood next to Nick. He was leaning forward, listening to what Davis and Gavin were saying. I waited for them to finish. I stood naked beside him—wearing
BOY TOY
jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and a short-sleeved PowderRoom.net T-shirt over that, but feeling naked nevertheless—for several long seconds.

When he finally noticed me, he looked up quickly like he’d been waiting on edge for my return. He set down his pizza, crumpled his napkin in his hands, and even slid his half-filled plate toward the center of the table like
I
was the main course now and he was making room for me. “So, Hoyden.”

I noticed the Christmas lights glinting in his dark hair again, reflecting in his dark eyes. It took me a moment to remember I had something to tell him. Nick had that effect on me.

I bent down and cupped my hand around his ear—such an intimate gesture on its own. The coarse strands of his hair brushed my fingers as I whispered, “Chloe and Liz think we need to make out.”

I jumped away at his sudden movement. He leaped up from the table and grabbed my hand. “I’ll get my coat.”

“What’s your hurry?” Gavin called after us, but Nick didn’t stop pulling me through the room. Booth after booth of loving couples flashed by, along with the wooden columns that divided the booths, each covered in years of graffiti:
ALEX LOVES TAYLOR. CATHY + DAN. SYDNEY♥S BRANDON
. We flew at light speed through the restaurant, going back in time to that magical seventh-grade night, and I couldn’t help giggling.

I did have some misgivings as we approached the door. But Fiona had left the Galaga machine. I never should have felt jealous about her. If Nick went out with her again, that would have been
four
dates, which was unheard of for him. And Josh and his posse had left their table. They must have gone down to the movie theater, where they could humiliate middle school girls with the whoopee cushion. I made a mental note to explain to Josh that this would not bring him any closer to a date with Gavin’s sister, either.

Nick looked for his coat on the rack. I snagged mine and shrugged it on without stopping. I swung open the front door of the restaurant. The frigid night wind blew snow into my eyes.

“Hayden,” Nick called to me.

“Close the door!” hollered the couples in the booths nearest us.

I let go of the door handle, then turned to Nick in the warm room. When he just stood there, staring down at me, I walked back to him.

“On second thought,” he said, “I don’t know about this.”

I was
not
going to get dissed again. I said brightly, “Oh, don’t be scared. It’s easy!” I jerked his puffy parka down from the rack and held it open for him. “Try one arm at a time.”

Glaring at me, he took the coat and shrugged it on. “Close the door!” shouted the couples around us as we walked outside.

Now that my eyes were used to the lights indoors, the night was black, except for the streetlights glowing yellow, and the dark blue mountain looming over the downtown buildings. Blinking the snowflakes out of my eyes, I took Nick’s warm bare hand in mine and dragged him along the narrow path down a sidewalk that had been cleared of snow. I turned in at the alley between Mile-High Pie and an antiques store next door, closed for the night. The snow was deep here, and the alley was empty and dark.

“Hayden,” he said softly. He slumped a bit against the brick wall and—oooh—did the pinkie-flick to his hair. But it wasn’t to get me hot. In fact, he’d cooled quite a bit since I’d first whispered in his ear.

“Let’s talk.” I reached up to touch his shoulder, showing him I had no hard feelings that he’d lost the mood. “Gavin and Davis told you I didn’t know about your parents when I made those comments last night, right?”