Snowed In

RACHEL HAWTHORNE

For Amber Royer,

librarian extraordinaire,

who convinced me

this story needed bats

Contents

1

“It’ll be fun!”

1

2

I felt my eyes widen and my jaw drop.

“Seriously?”

13

3

“You okay?” Nathalie asked.

25

4

I am so not a morning person.

And early morning?

44

5

The next morning, I threw on baggy sweats before leaving…

57

6

Why was I always saying idiotic things around Josh? I’d…

66

7

Only, we weren’t kissing. I was amazed by how much…

81

8

Okaayyy…I had not expected that.

94

9

“Are you ready?”

108

10

We climbed up a short embankment, leaving our skis and…

124

11

I shoved Josh’s shoulder, breaking us apart.

130

12

I know some girls load up on ice cream when… 137

13

The next morning I woke up and could barely move…

149

14

I figured the best way to stop thinking about Josh…

154

15

The next morning when I woke up,

Tara wasn’t in…

172

16

In the end, Nathalie’s boyfriend didn’t talk Shaun into wearing…

186

17

“What was going on back there?”

Tara asked when I…

201

18

As Tara explained it, from the time they’d arrived on…

212

19

It was harder than I thought it would be to…

225

20

The next two days were hell.

Mostly because I didn’t…

234

21

The next morning, I slept late,

snuggled beneath the blankets,…

242

22

For our first date, we didn’t exactly

“go out.” Technically,…

254

About the Author

Other Books by Rachel Hawthorne

Credits

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

“It’ll be fun!”

Those were my mom’s words.
It’ll be fun!

At the time, I’d thought so too.

Her idea of fun was to pack up her divorced middle-aged life and move up north. Way up north. Where winters are cold, snow and ice exist in abundance, and my dad could become a distant memory.

Not that I blamed her for wanting to get away from it all. Dad recently announced that he planned to remarry, and I’m not exactly thrilled with the prospect of having a stepmother. Marsha isn’t wicked or anything. Actually she asked me to be one of her bridesmaids, but I told her that I needed to think about it. I’ve never been a bridesmaid before, and I’m not sure I want my first time to be at my dad’s wedding. Because it’s totally weird thinking of him with a wife who isn’t my mom. And okay, I resent that he’s going to marry 1

someone else. It feels like he’s not only betraying Mom, but betraying me.

So when Mom told me she wanted to move and asked, “What do you think?” I replied, “Let’s do it!”

Of course, that was before I was standing in the front parlor of our new digs, shivering, with my parka zipped up tightly and my gloved hands tucked beneath my arms, searching for a little extra warmth.

It was, like, negative one thousand degrees outside. You think I’m exaggerating, but Mom’s idea of fun included moving to an island on the Great Lakes—in the middle of
winter
, when the surrounding water was starting to freeze. It was that cold. Although cold doesn’t adequately describe it. It was much, much colder than cold.

I was going to have to pull out my thesaurus and learn a whole list of adjectives for
cold
.

We’d flown into the small airport about an hour earlier. Our luggage had been loaded onto a taxi, only this taxi was a wagon with runners instead of wheels, because, oh, yeah, the island is covered in mounds of white glistening snow.

I’d actually been excited when Mom mentioned the snow, because arcticlike weather was a totally new experience for me. I’ve spent most of 2

my seventeen years living in north Texas. When it snows half an inch, schools and businesses shut down, and the local news interrupts the regularly scheduled programming to provide up-to-the-minute progress reports on the trucks dumping sand on the expressways. The reporters stand on overpasses explaining that it’s
really
cold, while showing footage of fishtailing vehicles, people slipping (yes, falling down on icy streets is newswor-thy in north Texas), and children sliding down hills on baking sheets because we don’t, as a rule, invest money in sleds.

I’m pretty certain that kids here have sleds, and that the news isn’t going to include roving reporters asking people how they’ll deal with the half inch of snow forecast to arrive by nightfall.

Here snow is measured in feet—possibly yards—

and freezing is clearly a way of life.

Cars, motorcycles, and trucks aren’t, however.

Did I forget to mention that? The island has a ban on motorized vehicles. They’re left on the mainland.

Mom thinks this is “quaint.”

I haven’t quite decided, although I’m trying to be open-minded about it. I was hoping to guilt Dad into buying me a red Ford Mustang when I graduate from high school. So I either need to guilt him 3

into buying me something else, be content to drive only occasionally when I’m on the mainland, or move off the island permanently. Something to think about later. Right now, I was suffering from brain freeze.

“There, I think I can feel warm air blowing out now,” Mom said. She was standing on a chair, her one bare hand—the other was still gloved—

pressed against a vent in the ceiling.

She’d adjusted the thermostat on the heater as soon as we walked through the door. Then she’d lit a fire in the gas fireplace in the parlor. I discovered that a gas-burning fire with fake logs doesn’t generate as much heat as a wood-burning one. But then it’s not as much trouble to start and keep going, either.

Mom stepped off the chair, faced me, and grinned. But it wasn’t her natural grin. It looked fake, painted on, forced, as though she didn’t want to acknowledge that we’d made a huge mistake.

My mom is the most honest person I know, but this smile had the makings of a con—like the one you get when your mom takes you to the doctor and tells you that whatever the doctor is going to do, it won’t hurt. But it does—always. And so you start to recognize that smile and dread it.

Mom removed her woolen cap and static elec-4

tricity made her short blond hair stick up at various angles. I figured my own blond hair—which hangs just past my chin and, under normal circumstances, which these were not, curls at the ends—would do the same thing when I removed my cap. But I’d read somewhere that a huge amount of body heat escapes through the head, so I kept my hat snugly in place, trying to trap as much heat as possible inside my five-foot-two-inch frame.

“It just takes the air a while to warm up, which makes sense if you think about it, since the air is so cold,” Mom said, rambling, as though trying to convince herself as well as me that everything was going to be all right.

“And once it gets warm, it’ll stay warm,” I said optimistically.

“Oh, definitely,” Mom said, her fake smile shifting into a more normal-looking one. “I doubt we’ll ever turn off the heater.”

“Except during the summer.”

“Maybe not even then. Depends on whether or not we’ve thawed out.” She laughed. “Who would have thought cold could be this cold?”

“It’s an excuse to buy more clothes.”

“Like you need an excuse,” Mom said.

Okay, I was a clothesaholic. I loved buying 5

clothes. I was pretty pumped that I was going to need to stock up on winter clothes that I’d never needed to buy before.

Mom spread her arms wide. “Welcome to Chateau Ashleigh. Our new home and business.” I smiled at that pronouncement. Couldn’t help myself. She’d named our new Victorian bed-and-breakfast after me: Ashleigh Sneaux—pronounced
Snow
. In our present circumstances, the irony of that didn’t escape me.

Mom had kept the name a secret, so when we arrived, I was totally stunned to see the carved wooden sign hanging on a post near the white picket fence surrounding the Victorian house. It’s so like Mom to do something special for me, and I have to admit that I think the name sounds a bit romantic, which would go with Mom’s goal to create a romantic atmosphere for guests.

Mom’s a romantic at heart, in spite of the fact that things for her and Dad didn’t last forever. I admire that about her—that she isn’t bitter about being part of a statistic. She still wants to go in search of better things, something she didn’t have a chance to do when she was younger, since she and Dad got married the summer after they graduated from high school.

Mom’s always advising me to wait. “Have fun, 6

enjoy life, get married later, much, much later.” Not a problem. Quite honestly, I wasn’t even interested in having a boyfriend. I know that sounds strange. Every girl I knew was obsessed with having a steady guy. Not me. I was, however, obsessed with guys—plural. I liked dating guys.

Lots of guys. For short periods of time. It’s sorta like going to a wine tasting, I guess, where you taste samples of wine until you find one that you really like. Then you buy it in abundance. Not that I’ve ever been to a wine tasting, but I’ve heard things.

Anyway, that was sorta my attitude when it came to guys. Try them all. Don’t settle, because as soon as you do, someone else might come along and then you have to go through the whole breakup thing before you can go out with him.

Better to keep the options open. Besides, there are a lot of guys to sample!

Or at least there were back home. I’d dated several guys at my school, and I was all about exploring possibilities.

Here the possibilities would be severely limited. The island has one school, grades kinder-garten through twelfth. The junior class has five students—six when I enroll after the winter break. So getting married is definitely not in my 7