Winter's Kiss Read Free Page B

of me wanted to think Nick had changed in the past four years. I would jump at the chance to go out with the boy I’d made up in my head. In real life Nick was adorable, funny, and smart, but in my fantasies he had the additional fictional component of honestly wanting to go out with me.
    Another part of me remembered his dis four years ago as freshly as if it were yesterday. When I recalled that awful night, the image of Honest Nick dissolved, even from my imagination. That Nick was too good to be true. I couldn’t say yes to Nick, because I was scared to death he would hurt me again.
    “It doesn’t matter,” I declared, “because he’s not going to ask me out. If he really liked me, he wouldn’t have treated me the way he did back in the day. So stop trying to throw us together.”
    “Okay,” Liz and Chloe said in unison. Again, too eager, too giddy. The three of us turned and made our own way down the hall. We discussed how low Poser tickets would have to go before we sprung for them, but the subject had changed too easily. I was left with the nagging feeling that, despite their promise, they were not through playing Cupid with me and Nick.

fakie
('fā kē) n. 1. a trick performed in the stance opposite the one natural for the snowboarder 2. a trick performed by Nick on Hayden
    I know what you’re thinking. Girlfriend has fallen out of the stoopid tree and bonked her head against every branch on the way down. If Nick had such beautiful dark eyes and a low, rumbly voice and a perfect ass (did I mention his ass?), then why would I hold a grudge for something he did in the seventh grade?
    Well, there was no mortification like seventh-grade mortification—just like my mom said there was no hunger like pregnancy hunger. Normal people got hungry, but pregnant women were driven toward food like starving wild animals, and a Big Mac never tasted so decadent to anyone. Clearly my mother had completed her research on this topic way before I broke my leg and my family turned health-conscious and vegetarian.
    Not that I planned to find out about pregnancy hunger myself before I turned thirty. I had too much snowboarding to do first. But I was an expert on seventh-grade mortification. At that age you already worried that every step you took and every word out of your mouth would send your so-called “friends” into fits of laughter, because they hadn’t quite outgrown the cruelty peculiar to sixth graders. If something truly mortifying happened to you on top of this, your heart began to shrink. And if, in addition, you were the new girl at school who wanted desperately to fit in, then in eleventh grade you would still be mad.
    I moved to Snowfall about this time of year, terrified I’d make some blunder and everyone would hate me for the rest of middle school and high school. Or that these strangers would hear about the broken leg I’d just completed rehab for and would view me as the crippled girl and feel sorry for me, just like the kids did back in Tennessee. Snowfall —funny name for a ski resort town, at least the falling part. It made me worry I would take my dog for a walk one afternoon and slip into an icy crevice, never to be heard from again. The only evidence that I’d ever existed would be Doofus the Irish setter, trotting happily home, dragging his leash.
    Instead, the opposite happened. Seconds after I handed my enrollment slip to the teacher and snuck into an empty desk in the back of English class, Nick picked up his books and moved to the desk beside mine.
    I remembered every detail of that first five minutes with him, as if each minute were packed with a whole day’s worth of emotion and color. Even back then, Nick was a head taller than most of the other boys in the class, and so handsome. He looked vaguely familiar in a way I couldn’t quite place.
    But what struck me most was how comfortable he seemed with me. The thirteen-year-old boys I’d known in Tennessee were split down the middle: Either