The Children Read Free Page A

word, I’m certain.”
    â€œOkay,” Sally said. “Listen, Lottie, stop watching it.”
    â€œI can’t.”
    â€œYes, you can. It won’t change anything.”
    â€œAlso, at the beginning, she turns and flashes that smile at him. But it isn’t really him she’s smiling at. It’s the camera, up on top of his helmet.”
    â€œYeah, I know,” Sally said. She was smoking a cigarette, I could tell. She told me she had quit.
    â€œHe was always so cautious, that’s what gets me,” I said. “We used to make so much fun of him. I mean, I know he’s a great skier, but the way they were speeding through those trees … They were flying. He would never have done that without her, he was trying to keep up with her.”
    â€œOkay, stop now.”
    â€œJust call me after you look at it.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWatch it when you get home. See if you can see what he says.”
    â€œNo.”
    After we hung up, I watched it one more time.
    It starts with just some shaky whiteness. Spin is messing around with the camera, fastening it to his helmet. Then the world swings into view as he lifts the helmet up onto his head. He’s near the ski lift. You can hear the whirring of the motors, the clanging of metal, all those muffled sounds in that rare air at the top of the snow-covered mountain. For a second or two, there’s a glimpse of the steep white slope below and the wooded valley beyond, but then he’s turned away from the slope and facing Laurel.
    She’s bent over, brushing something off the top of one of her ski boots for the first twenty or thirty seconds, and then she whips her head up and smiles at the camera. She’s wearing goggles. All you can see is a silver helmet, the blue-tinted goggles, the long, wavy blond hair, and that perfect smile, and somehow you have it all. As many times as I’ve watched this, I’m never prepared for her beauty in that instant, when she faces Spin and we see her for the first time. It’s the moment when I feel I can see her most clearly, when I can finally see her for who she really is. But the strange thing is, you really can’t see her face at all. What’s most noticeable is the reflection of Spin in her goggle lenses. There he is, twice, smiling from each lens.
    â€œI’ll race you down,” Laurel shouts.
    â€œOkay, you start,” Spin shouts back.
    â€œOh, you think I need a head start?”
    â€œYou might,” he says.
    And then she turns, stabs the snow with the tips of her ski poles, and she’s gone.
    She’s fast, skipping along the tops of the moguls. It’s a little hard to see here, because it’s so bouncy, but she’s wearing a bright yellow parka, and we never let her out of our sight, perched as we are on Spin’s head. He’s finally gaining on her when, suddenly, she cuts into the woods. He cuts in after her. This is the great part. This is the reason Spin sent us the video the same day that he took it. It makes your heart race. He’s carving little lines into some deep, untouched powder, speeding down a steep, heavily wooded trail. It actually looks fake in parts. Sally noticed that when we first saw it. It looks animated, like a video game, the way the trees are whipping past.
    First they’re in among the evergreens and you can hear Spin laughing. He quietly curses once, when he snags a branch with his arm. He stays up, though. He’s behind her, and then he’s not; she cuts out of sight and he’s slaloming his way around the trees. The evergreens are gone. The trees have become just trunks; they’re in the deciduous trees now. If they had stopped, Spin would have been able to identify each tree for Laurel. He can tell a maple from an ash, just by the pattern of the bark. Even in the dead of winter, he knows one tree from another. He can closely estimate their ages; he probably would have if they