The Ex Games (8 page)

He didn’t take the opportunity to leap across the pool and push me under, as he usually would have. He just stared me down, frowning, and flicked his wet hair out of his eyes with his pinkie. When I was little I’d spent a lot of time at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. Now it was like Nick and I were separated by one of those foot-thick walls of specially tempered glass. We could see each other. We could even long for each other. But even if we both had put our hands up to the glass, we could never have touched. The glass between us was smooth and cold.

“Congratulations to you,” the voices of the others sang from behind the slowly moving door. Gavin held it open for Chloe, who paraded out with the cake, and Liz, who carried paper plates and forks and napkins. As soon as everyone was clear of the door, Gavin and Davis made a run for the pool and jumped in to avoid the frigid air just like I had, but the girls sang on.
“Congratulations dear Hayden, congratulations to you!”

Liz’s dark hair had kinked into tight curls from the hot tub, and Chloe had carefully pinned up her long blond hair to keep it from getting wet in the pool. Chloe and Liz looked so adorable in their own ways, and so happy to be celebrating my victory, that I remembered for the first time in an hour this night was for
me
, not them, and definitely not Nick. I should enjoy it. Like Josh had warned me, my little baby snowboarding career might end in a stupendous crash when I took my first lesson with Daisy Delaney and she discovered I was afraid of heights. This night was all I knew I had.

“Thank y’all so much,” I said, meaning it. I ignored Gavin echoing
y’all
, making fun of my Tennessee accent. I also ignored the fact that Nick was
not
echoing
y’all
like he usually would.

“You’re-hur-hur welcome,” Chloe said, teeth chattering as she set down the cake at the edge of the pool. Liz set down the plates, too. They waded into the pool, cut the cake from there, and passed around big slices. White cake with white icing, a pure sugar rush—not something I normally would have
included in my health-conscious diet, but exactly what I needed when, frankly, this strange episode with Nick had gotten me down.

Liz handed me a plate, careful not to drip pool water on it. I was just taking my first bite when Nick spoke to me in a voice so kind, I knew something ugly was coming. “So, Hayden. What was your time on the slalom?”

“A minute seventeen,” I told him, stuffing the next bite of cake into my mouth while watching him warily.

“That’s funny,” he said between bites. “Didn’t you come in first in the girls’ division? Because that’s three seconds slower than the third-place time for the boys’ division in your age group.”

Everyone in the pool looked at me. They expected a rebuttal.

For once, I didn’t have one.

Chloe extended her hand toward Nick. “Give me back that cake.”

He held it away from her. “No, it’s good.”

“Give it. I don’t like where you’re going with this.”

“No, I’m hungry.” Wisely, he waded
into the deeper end of the pool, where Chloe would not follow him if she wanted to keep her hair dry. Holding his cake and fork at chest-level above the surface of the water, he looked straight at me and said, “I just think that unless you compete with everyone, it’s not really a competition.” His dark eyes dropped to his plate, and he shoveled a big bite of cake into his mouth. He had basically told me my win today didn’t even matter,
and
I was not quite as important as cake.

I opened my mouth to holler at him. I was so angry, I had no idea what I would have said.

Luckily all I got out was a noise like
nyah
before Chloe interrupted me. “That’s ridiculous. Girls and boys compete separately in almost every sport. You don’t have girls on your football team.”

“That’s because girls would suck,” Gavin offered. Nick waded back across the pool so they could bump fists. As he passed, the movement of his big body splashed water on my cake.

I slid my plate onto the pool deck and opened my mouth to lay into Nick with the insult he deserved.

But all I got out was something that
sounded like
yerg
before Liz talked over me. “Basic physics. The average boy is bigger than the average girl. Girls don’t play football with boys because they’d get crushed. Girls have slower times than boys in the slalom because they’re not as heavy. You should have seen Hayden’s 900 in the half-pipe. Not a single boy did a 900 today, not even the guy who came in first in the oldest boys’ division.”

“That’s because he’s not that good,” Nick countered. “Even
I
could beat that guy.”

“Besides,” Davis spoke up, “this was a local competition. You never know who’ll show up for those. It would be different if she stepped up to a higher level. The men’s Olympics are an event. The women’s Olympics are a bathroom break.”

“They are not!” I gasped, instinctively coming to the defense of snowboarding chicks, my idols.
Et tu, Brute?
I thought. This was getting ugly if even Davis, usually such a gentleman, was making light of my win.

Liz must have been thinking the same thing. After her big logical speech, she just gaped at him like she couldn’t believe he’d
said this.

Chloe was the one who shouted, “The three of you really mean Hayden didn’t accomplish anything today? You weren’t even there to watch her!”

Nick was
, I thought. He was there on his deck. He’d made note of the slalom times. Now he cut his eyes at me, letting me know this had flashed through his mind, too.

“We didn’t have to see her,” he said. “Any snowboarder knows this about the sport. Women aren’t anything compared with men. Hayden won lessons with Daisy Delaney, right? Pit Daisy Delaney against Shaun White. He’d crush her. Hell, pit Daisy Delaney against Mason Aguirre.”

“Yeah!” Gavin took up the challenge. “Did you see the X Games on TV a couple of weeks ago? The guys stick 1260s on the slopestyle. They throw down back-to-back 1080s in the half-pipe or it’s not even considered a run. The girls are lucky if they land a 900.” He then created a range of Daisy Delaney slap-downs with every famous male snowboarder he could think of. Davis laughed, and he quietly offered suggestions when Gavin ran out of ideas. Chloe kept breaking in with protests, and Liz kept
saying, “But …” From their separate places around the pool, all four of them waded closer as the talk got more heated, until they surrounded Nick and me on all sides.

But I didn’t really hear them anymore. I stared at Nick in front of me. He stared back. We’d set this argument in motion, and now it kept rolling without us. No one seemed to notice we’d dropped out. I watched him, hoping I’d get some sign he was just kidding.

He watched me, too. But he never winked or made any move to break the tension. Everything he’d said about girls versus boys, he’d meant.

“So, you think you could have beaten the first-place guy?” I asked Nick.

He knew I’d said something. But he was listening to Gavin, and he couldn’t hear me over the guffaws. With a last dark look at me, he turned toward the other boys and laughed.

I was angry now, truly angry. I’d worked hard to win that competition, and it
did
mean something. I slogged through the warm water and cold air, stopping right in front of him, my tummy only inches from his knees where he sat on the stairs. I said
again, “Nick, you really think you could have beaten the first-place guy today if you’d only bothered to enter the competition?”

“Absolutely,” he told me, still not looking or sounding like himself. He made cocky statements all the time, accepting challenges and taking bets. But his voice always held an ironic tone, like he was half-kidding and didn’t believe it himself. This time he sounded like he believed it.

Or maybe the difference was in me, not him. Maybe after four years, I’d finally fallen out of love with him.

“Let’s do it, then.” I reached forward and poked his bare chest with two fingers like we were actors in a gangster movie. “You and me, on the slopes, head-to-head, the slalom and the half-pipe. I will kick.”
Poke
. “Your.”
Poke
. “Ass.”

“Oooooh,” the boys said. The moaning was so loud that I could have sworn Chloe and even Liz chimed in.

But all I saw was Nick in front of me, not budging a millimeter as I poked him, eyes frowning and lips curled in a tight smile. Quietly he told me, “Remember, you asked for it.”

I did
not
ask for this attack. But I didn’t dare defend myself or even hint at what had transpired between us in the sauna. The madder I got, the more he’d know I cared that he’d called me a bitch, and the worse I would hurt.

“Want to make it interesting?” Gavin asked, wading over. “Let’s do this thing on Saturday. After Nick wins, the girls treat the guys to the Poseur concert that night.”

“You mean when Hayden wins, the boys treat the girls,” Chloe corrected him. “That sounds fair.”

“It’s
not
fair,” Davis protested. “After Nick wins, you’ll just say conditions were different when Hayden came down, and that’s what made her slower. Like, it started snowing.”

“Or it
stopped
snowing,” Gavin said.

“Or the wind was harder,” Davis said.

“Or the wind was
softer
,” Gavin said. “Girls will whine about anything.”

“Fine!” Liz broke in, obviously agitated. She never spoke this loudly, much less broke in. “Instead of a slalom where they come down one at a time, they’ll come down together, like in a boardercross.”

“It’s still not fair,” Gavin pointed out.
“No matter how high Nick goes in the half-pipe, you’ll say, ‘But Hayden landed a 900!’” He ended in a high-pitched voice that none of us girls had used since the second grade.

“Leave it to me,” Chloe said ominously. “I’ll find three impartial judges. Even
you
won’t be able to complain.” She used one finger on her right hand to pretend to scribble a note to herself on the palm of her left hand. Then she put her hands down and glared around the pool. “In the meantime, we’ve had just about enough of you guys and your sexist attitudes. Find your own way out. Come on, ladies.” She picked up the cake, and Liz obediently gathered the plates.

I still crouched in the warm pool in front of Nick, stunned. Whether the girls treated the boys to Poseur tickets or the boys treated the girls, we’d be paired off: Liz with Davis, Chloe with Gavin. Did this mean Nick and I had … a date?

That was
so
not going to happen.

Dazed, I moved past him up the stairs, following Chloe. Nick caught me by the wrist. Our hands were wet and I could have slipped out of his grasp, but I didn’t. I stopped beside him on the stairs, shivering in the cold air, waiting breathlessly for
him to break the date Chloe and Gavin had arranged for us, or to make a snide comment about it.

“We need a tiebreaker,” he said, loudly enough for everyone to hear, but looking only at me. “Not that I’m saying I won’t win the boardercross
and
the half-pipe. But I want to make sure I win fair and square. Just in case, we need to add a third event. Like a big air.”

“Done,” Chloe said quickly. “We’ll bury you. Come on, Hayden.”

Funny, I must have been riding waves of adrenaline the whole afternoon and night. I’d exerted myself on the slopes in the competition, but I hadn’t felt the least bit sore. Now I suddenly felt it. My muscles were sore and tired, my eyes strained, and my brain hurt just thinking about the jump at the slopes, the one stunt I hadn’t tried and didn’t plan to. But Nick was right. This whole argument was about who was the better boarder overall. How could I be better than him if I couldn’t go off a jump, one of the biggest parts of this sport?

“Good idea,” I heard Gavin say as I sloshed out of the pool.

“No problemo,” Davis said knowingly.
The
smack
of their high five echoed against the wall of the hotel.

Before I closed the hotel door behind me, I stole one more glance back at Nick. Maybe he hadn’t meant to set me up to fail. Maybe he’d momentarily forgotten I was afraid of heights. But no, he turned around on the steps and looked straight at me, still wearing that small smile. He flicked his wet hair out of his eyes with his pinkie, as if to show me yet again how little he thought of me. He knew exactly what he’d done.

comp

(kämp)
n
.
1
. an unofficial snowboarding contest
2
. Hayden vs. Nick

Heart racing and mind whirling, I walked into the locker room and changed into my clothes, hardly hearing Chloe and Liz’s discussion echoing against the tile walls about what pigs boys could be. I was calculating how to fix this terrible situation. Maybe I could do the jump this time, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about Daisy Delaney challenging me in the back bowls. Maybe all I’d ever needed to get over my fear of heights was the tall, dark, and hunky heir to a meat fortune to insult me and make fun of me. But gosh, it sure would be easier if I could
talk
my way out of this whole contest. “What?” I said.

Liz was standing in front of me. She looked a bit frazzled with her damp curls in her face. Obviously she’d been trying to get my attention for a while. “I
said
, have you seen your butt?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?” I craned my neck to take a gander at my backside.

Chloe clarified, “She means you have ‘
BOY TOY’
written across the back of your
jeans.”

“Oh.” I nodded. “They’re Josh’s.”

“You say that as if it explains everything.” Liz cocked her head to one side and considered me while buttoning her cardigan. “My stepbrothers don’t write ‘
BOY TOY’
across the back of their jeans. They only say the entire alphabet while burping.”

“That’s nothing. Josh can recite the Gettysburg Address. Listen, y’all.” I pulled my hair free from the collar of my sweater. The long strands were damp, reminding me I’d just been in the pool with Nick. I could
still
be in the pool with Nick if he weren’t such an ass. “I want to call off this contest.”