“How does she do that?” Abby whispered while I shouted, “He didn’t lock it, Mom, I promise!”
“If any customers can’t get in because of you kids, you’ll be manning the booth tonight, all by yourself, all night!” My mother never issued empty threats, and she knew very well that I’d rather do homework than have to work the booth at the Welcome to Winter Faire.
“It’s unlocked, Mom!” I shouted again while Will and I ran to the door and each fumbled with the lock. I pushed his hands away finally and he looked at me sheepishly and mouthed the word
Sorry
.
“Will, you’ll have to keep an eye out. Stand there and keep watch,” Erin ordered. Her black hair tumbled down her back as she whipped off her dark gray hat. The black color of her hair came from a bottle. Naturally, it was as blond as Abby’s, though she did look kind of striking this way.
“Keep an eye out for what?” Abby asked.
“What’s going on? Whose coat is that?” I asked suspiciously.
Erin nodded her head and pointed a finger at me, an acknowledgment of my observation. “It’s Mean Agnes’s. I had to take it. It was the only coat bulky enough to hide it.”
“Oh God.” Abby put her head in her hands.
“You didn’t.” I said ominously as I sank slowly to the booth’s seat.
Erin pointed at Will. “It was his fault! He made me take it.”
“Hey! You thought she should see too,” Will said lazily from his post at the door. He never got excited about too much.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t the genius who had the idea of
stealing
it. Do you know what Mean Agnes will do to me if she realizes what we did?” Mean Agnes was Erin’s boss at the front desk of the Mount Crow Resort Hotel. She had it out for Erin, ever since Erin got caught lecturing some hotel guests about vegetarianism and how meat was murder. Agnes was old—nobody knew how old—and feisty. She hated all kids generally, and mouthy ones especially. Which was why she hated Erin.
“I was just going to have you come over. But it turns out that Will’s a klepto.” I didn’t say anything to Erin, but if Will was a klepto, why was the stolen item in
her
stolen jacket?
“Erin! It’s her! It’s Mean Agnes!” Will pointed through the door, and Abby and I held our breaths while Erin tried to disappear beneath the table. Then Will shook his head and said, “Nope. My bad. Just a big dog there.”
Erin glared at him.
“Guys, you’re making me nervous,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“Sit down, Jessie,” Will suggested.
“Yeah, sit here.” Erin pointed at the booth seat across from her. “Like I said, this wasn’t my idea.” She unzipped the big bulky parka as Abby admonished, “I can’t believe you stole her coat.”
Erin snorted. “That’s the least of my worries. Mean Agnes’ll have a coronary if she finds
this
missing.” And Erin produced a large, leather-bound, oversize volume from beneath the folds of the mammoth coat. She plunked it onto the table.
“You stole the Mount Crow register book?” I asked incredulously.
“Well, it serves Mean Agnes right for not letting us get a computer. We’re the most exclusive resort in Alaska, and she’s running it like it’s the Middle Ages!”
Abby put a hand on Erin’s arm, to calm her. Abby is very soothing, and once Erin starts ranting about Mean Agnes, there’s no slowing her down.
“Okay, so what do I need to see?”
Erin took a deep breath.
“Just show her already,” Will shouted as a group of skiers walked through the door.
“I’ll be right with you,” I said to the customers as they approached the ice-cream counter. It would take them a while to pick what they wanted. My mother always made sure there were at least seventy flavors a day to choose from, from Almond Apricot to our house specialty, Zebra Stripe, which had chocolate and vanilla ice cream in a striped pattern.
“Hurry up, okay? My mom is going to kill me.”
Erin took a deep breath again and flipped open the pages of the book. It was no easy feat. That book was old and dusty and probably weighed twenty pounds. From my vantage point across the table, I could see neat rows of old-lady-like penmanship, a list of names, checkin dates, checkout dates, and numbers of parties.
“I found it this morning. I didn’t know what to make of it.” She flipped toward the back, to the list of entrants in the Northern Lights Ball. She put her finger on a pair of names and rotated the book so that I could read it.
I saw my own name next to Jake’s. “There
you
are,” Erin stated matter-of-factly as Abby’s face grew more and more red. Abby hates suspense. She’s too emotional to handle it. She always reads the last pages of a book first, she’ll never go to a movie unless she knows the ending ahead of time, and she can’t stand reality television because of all the “confrontation,” as she puts it.
“Yeah?” I asked impatiently. I was getting bored with the cloak-and-dagger business, and I could see from the corner of my eye that our customers were ready to order.
“Will!” Erin commanded. “Take care of them.” She pointed at the customers.
“Erin! He can’t do that. Just show me.”
Erin looked at me solemnly, then flipped the book to the next page. Her finger plopped on another name.
“Evie Stewart? Who’s that?” I asked.
“Keep reading.”
I did. Evie Stewart, of Boise, Idaho, was entering the Northern Lights Ball Annual Best Costume Contest with Jake Reid. My boyfriend. I was too confused to say anything. I looked up at Erin, hoping she could help me figure out what I was supposed to be thinking.
“He’s here, Jess,” Erin said sadly, and flipped back toward the front of the book. “His family got in yesterday.” She pointed to another row of names in the register. Reid. Arrived yesterday at ten in the morning.
Jake had been in town for an entire day and he hadn’t called me. And he’d brought another girl with him.
T
Anyway, the Welcome to Winter Faire had always been my personal favorite, even though there’s no Angel Parade. It marked the beginning of the main tourist time here, which was my favorite not only because it meant Jake-time but because out-of-towners were good for breaking up the monotony of life. I mean, all the same kids had gone to my school since I was in kindergarten (except for Sabrina, who didn’t count). There was nothing to do here but ski and ski and skate and then ski some more. So a few new faces made for a nice change of pace.
The Faire was always held at the resort, in the basin formed at the feet of three of the mountains. There were sled races and skating on the stream behind the two bunny hills and cross-country runs through the pine trees at the edge of the resort. The ski instructors and professional snowboarders from the area would give demos—Will’s demo was always something to see: He would flip and float in the air like a bird in flight and the crowd was always huge because it was well advertised that Will had been on ESPN at the Winter X games.
In the basin itself, there were dozens of booths and stalls selling food, clothing, crafts, and other oddities. Mean Agnes recruited her employees—Erin, chief among them—to decorate the area with white lights, blue-and-silver decorations, strung-up cranberries, and large bales of hay. My dad landed the smallest of his planes at the south entrance of the resort, and for five dollars, he took kids up to circle the bay. My mother went all out for the Snow Cones ice-cream stall. She would make a special Welcome to Winter ice cream (vanilla, star anise, and blackberries—I’m not supposed to share the recipe). Old Man Jones, who lives about a mile from our house off a dirt path that is unmarked and can’t be found by anybody who hasn’t lived in Willow Hill their whole life and knows the woods without needing a map, came down from his yurt in the woods and whittled gifts. I had a handmade sign that said
JESSIE SLEEPS HERE
hanging above my bed. Last year he whittled a heart with our initials in it for me and Jake, and then he sawed it into two pieces, one of which I kept in my locker at school.
Normally I look forward to this day all year. Abby, Erin, and I plan not only our outfits, but the order of stalls we visit, what we are going to buy, how long we’re going to ice-skate, whether we’re going to enter the three-legged cross-country skiing contest (it’s a sordid affair, really), and which of the sledders we’ll root for in the races at the foothills by the stream.
But this year I wasn’t all that excited. In fact, I was upset. The whole mess with the book was weighing on me. After my mother let me leave Snow Cones, I went straight home and called Jake’s cell phone three times. He didn’t answer. Then I called Jake’s cabin three times. Again, nobody answered. I sent two text messages. No answer. The silence became loud.
I tried to calm myself down by whipping up my special Jessie Whitman Cheer-up Shake. It wasn’t working. In fact, it was making me more anxious, both because of the sugar involved (it’s an elaborate concoction featuring rocky road ice cream and Oreos and coconut; made correctly, it’ll make your teeth hurt for two days at least) and because I was standing outside in ten-degree weather and the ice cream was freezing my insides.
I drank the last bits of the shake and looked around at the beginnings of the Faire. The people had begun to stream in. From where I stood in my mother’s booth, I could see my dad climbing out of the cockpit of his canary-yellow-and-white plane. About a hundred yards from that was the stream where little kids, including my brother, Brian, skated in delirious circles, playing ice tag. Skating reminded me of Jake, of last year, when we held hands and spun each other around on the slippery surface of the stream until we fell down. I scraped my hand and Jake got a bruise on his chin, but we were laughing so hard we didn’t even feel it.
I took a deep breath and dumped three scoops of rocky road ice cream into the large, metal shake-container I had just emptied. There was nothing else to be done. I was going to have to drink Cheer-up Shakes until I was cheered up.
Even after Erin had showed me the book, I had trouble believing that Jake could be in Willow Hill already. Jake just wasn’t that kind of guy; he wasn’t like Cam Brock, who had lost interest in Abby overnight. Jake was sweet, he was good-natured. He opened doors for me when we went places, he made Abby laugh. He wasn’t like Will Parker either, who had girls tripping all over themselves to date him but who was more interested in his latest snowboard or how many inches of snow we were going to get.
I reached underneath the table to the box where my mom had packed all the fixings. I grabbed two chocolate chip cookies, and crushed them into my shake-container. This kind of romantic worry called for a secret ingredient.
“Jess!” I looked up out of my reverie to see Abby and Erin walking toward me. Living in Alaska, getting dressed up means wearing your newest flannel shirt and a pair of clean jeans over thermal underwear. That’s why Abby has always been a girl to admire. In twenty-degree weather (and that’s in May!), she has always been able to dress fashionably, as if she were a Lower 48-er rather than a born-and-bred Alaskan. Right then, Abby was bundled up like a light-blue bunny rabbit. Her ski jacket was puffy and sparkly, and there was white fluff from the lining of the hood framing her face. Her cheeks were cherry-apple red and her eyes sparkled. Erin, on the other hand, was in dark gray and black from head to toe. In the dusky starlight—it was only six thirty, but dark enough to seem later—you could barely make her out. She liked to hide, she said, and wearing black all the time helped her do that. She didn’t look happy. In fact, she was hopping back and forth between her feet, trying to keep warm.
“How can you be eating ice cream tonight?” Erin asked as the two of them approached the Snow Cones booth.
“Oooh, it’s pretty!” Abby exclaimed, pointing to the red-and-white crepe paper decorations my mother had hung from the loose wooden framework my father had installed in lieu of a ceiling. “Mrs. Whitman,” she called out to my mom, who was carrying a big heater over from the car. “It’s so warm and romantic in here!”
I ran to help my mother with the heater, and once we got it plugged in my mother turned to look at us. “Here you girls go.” She handed me a twenty-dollar bill. “Now go. Have fun.”
I bit my lip. Erin looked at me plainly. Normally it was Abby who could read my every feeling, but Erin had special radar for sad emotions. “Are you sure you want to wander around tonight?”
“Go,” my mother pronounced. “No working for you.” She kissed the top of my head and pushed me around the counter. “I mean it.”
I could hardly argue with her. Once my mother said to do something, you did it. My mother and father grew up here in Alaska. Her father died in a silver mine when she was thirteen. My father’s plane went down in the mountains by the Arctic Circle once when I was about six, and he lived for four days without anything to eat and only mountain snow for water. In short, they know a bit about dealing with hardship. So even though I had explained everything to my mother over dinner, about Erin and Will and the stolen book, and how Mean Agnes’s handwriting looked like the spindly writing of the devil, and about how it seemed like Jake had already arrived without calling me, my mother didn’t see any reason for me to be hiding out.
“Come on,” Erin said, linking her arm through one of mine. “The best thing to do is to pretend like there’s nothing wrong.”
“Nothing is wrong,” I said. “He probably just hasn’t had a chance to call me yet.”
“That’s what I think,” Abby chimed in. “Come on, let’s go walk through the paper snowflake forest.” All of us conveniently neglected to mention the mystery that was “Evie,” but I like to live in delusion every now and then.
The forest was a tradition—every year people from all over the area contributed paper snowflakes. This may sound silly, but people don’t have a lot to do up here, so the snowflakes get pretty creative. Last year there was an entire section of flakes made from doughnuts and cooked macaroni, and Brian got in trouble for eating them. They hung down from the same sort of lattice my father had made for our booth. Erin’s favorite thing to do was to run through the forest, screaming. I kept wondering if we were getting too old to run screaming through feet of hanging paper art, but Abby and Erin were already half running to get there.
So I decided to just follow them. I wasn’t normally a girl who let my imagination get away from me, and I’d spent an entire afternoon imagining Jake either dead in a ditch or wrapped around a creature named Evie. It was exhausting. And the shakes weren’t working. Maybe playing with my friends among pounds of papier-mâché would do the trick.
“Keep drinking that shake, you’ll have to enter yourself in the Northern
Fat
Ball.”
The three of us stopped dead in our tracks. Erin was the first to whirl around, and Abby followed close on her heels. They stepped up to my side, and together the three of us faced our nemesis, Sabrina Hartley. Of course, only Sabrina would come up with a joke that wasn’t even remotely clever or funny.
Sabrina had her two henchmen with her, Stephanie Bright (Erin called her S-Brat behind her back) and Hannah Landon. Sabrina was a monster of a girl. Taller than most boys in our class, with a loud voice and long hair. Everything about her just seemed bigger to me. When my mother first saw her in the parking lot of Willow High, she assumed she was a student teacher. She was a bully. She kept Stephanie and Hannah on a tight leash. If one of them liked something, Sabrina always either liked it more or first. And she treated Cam like a lapdog, always hurling orders at him, especially if Abby was close enough to hear them.
“Shut up, Sabrina,” Erin snarled at her.
“Erin, you need to seriously invest in a few pastels. You look like the devil’s messenger,” Sabrina shot right back. S-Brat and Hannah just tilted their heads toward her and snickered.
“What do you want?” I asked her, seething.
“Well, the girls and I are headed over to the stream for skating. You’re not going there, are you? We’re afraid that if you’re there, the ice will break.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “You’re the giant freak, not me.”
“Well, at least I’ll have a date for the ball. You’ll be disqualified, and your”—she pointed at Abby—“
dress
”—she pronounced it like it was a dirty word—“will have to be laughed at another time.” With that, she flipped her obnoxious hair and stalked off through the trees, telling her minions loudly that only poor people made their own clothes.
“She’s not even making sense anymore,” Erin snorted.
Abby was sadly quiet.
“Come on, Ab,” I cajoled. “She’s just mean because she hates being stuck up here in Alaska.”
“Yeah,” Erin joined in. “Don’t you know we’re in exile up here?” She adopted a snooty voice, like a Hollywood starlet. “‘Dah-ling, did you know that in San Diego the roads are made of
chocolate
?’” This made Abby smile, and then, because I wasn’t focused on making Abby smile anymore, I started to feel worried.
“So, now can we run through the snowflakes?”
Erin asked the two of us.
“Erin, why would Sabrina say that?” I asked.
“Huh? I thought we just covered this. She’s mean.”
“No, I know that. But why would she say that about me being disqualified for being single? Why would she say that?”
Erin and Abby both looked at me and said nothing. Erin lifted her shoulders and pushed me forward. “She’s just mean, that’s all.”
I walked along, slipping back into that queasy state I’d been in since seeing Jake’s family name in the book. I reached for my cell phone, which was in the front pocket of my coat. Still no messages.
So I paged through the messages I had sent him. As I looked at them, checking to see how desperate they sounded, I began to sift through yesterday’s, then the day before that. I went all the way back a week. I hadn’t sent more than I usually did, and nothing I wrote could have been construed as naggy or needy, which my mother was always drumming into my head. “Be your own woman!” she’d pronounce. “They tell you nobody will buy ice cream in Alaska, you laugh at them and open a store!” Then she’d cross her arms and nod her head and whatever worry I had would be an officially closed topic.
“Hey, you still with us?” Erin asked, knocking on my hat to be funny.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m here.”
Abby took my shake from me and finished it off.
“This is so silly. If he wanted to break up, he would have told me, right?” I turned to Erin for confirmation. The answer to this question seemed kind of dire, and she was my go-to girl for that sort of thing.
“I don’t see why not. Or he would just not come this year,” she muttered.
“Thanks a lot.”
“What? I’m just being a realist.”
“No, he’s here,” Abby said with a squeak, stopping dead in her tracks. Erin and I looked at her in confusion.
“Huh?” Erin asked.
Abby didn’t respond. She just raised her arm and pointed into the snowflake forest.