The Ex Games (9 page)

Chloe’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t you dare.”

Liz’s eyes got big as she wailed, “Hayden, you can’t!”

“I want to call it off.” I took a deep breath before I warned them, “Otherwise, plan to buy Poseur tickets for the boys. There’s no way I’ll win.”

“Of course you’ll win!” Chloe exclaimed. “You’ll probably beat Nick in that race thing—”

“Boardercross,” I corrected her. Chloe owned a snowboard, and that’s about as far as her knowledge of the sport went.

“—and you’ll blow him away in the trick part.”

“Half-pipe. And then there’s the jump.”

They both just stared at me with their arms folded. They’d been pushing me to get over my fear of heights and go pro, so this was no way to argue myself out of my new corner.

I started over. “Okay, here’s the real deal. I regret what I lost with Everett Walsh—”

“Come off it,” Chloe said. “Tell us another.”

I swallowed. “—and I want to make sure y’all aren’t making a huge mistake. I mean, I’m mad, too, but I’m always mad at Nick. Maybe you’re blowing this out of
proportion with Gavin and Davis. I know both of you looked forward to seeing them tonight. Your evening with them got off to an excellent start. And now you’re sending them home early, all because of this stupid challenge? I wish I’d never said anything.” At least
that
part was the truth.

“Gavin told me a dumb-blonde joke last week when he made a ninety-eight on the chemistry test and I made a ninety-seven,” Chloe said.

“That’s just Gavin.” I couldn’t believe I was defending that jerk, but I really did think Chloe was overreacting. “Gavin would make fun of you for a hair out of place. He’s just feeling around for material.”

“He can’t feel
there
,” she said vehemently. “He can make jokes, and I’ll giggle and pretend he’s actually funny, up to a point. But if he tries to tell me I’m less of a person because I’m a girl? Or
you
are? That’s where I draw the line.” She pulled her bag from a locker and slammed the metal door.

“But you can’t blame Davis,” I reasoned, turning to Liz. “He didn’t start it.”

“He didn’t stop it,” Liz said, not looking up from tying her boots. “He was so disrespectful of you on your big day.”

“But he didn’t mean anything by it,” I pointed out, “unlike Gavin, and definitely unlike Nick. Davis is naturally a sweet-natured person. He’s just been hanging around Nick and Gavin too long. It’s a wonder they don’t have him stealing candy from babies, or blasting rap music out of his car stereo in front of the retirement home.”

Liz stood, shaking her head. For a moment I hoped some water had dripped down her face from her damp curls—but no. She had tears in her eyes. “My boyfriend can’t treat my friends that way.”

“Oh God!” I exclaimed, really desperate now. “Look at me.” I stood in front of both of them. To Liz I said, “You and Davis are adorable together.” I moved to Chloe. “And you and Gavin are—”

She raised her eyebrows at me.

“—
interesting
together. You can’t let my fight with Nick ruin your relationships with your hot boyfriends. Come on, now. My fight with Nick has been going on for years. It’s like this black hole, with gravity so strong that not even light can escape, sucking in winter breaks and dates and whole relationships, until the world—are you listening to me?” When I’d started
waxing poetic, Chloe’s attention had wandered around the room. I grabbed her chin and turned her face to me again. “Until the very world is devoid of love!”

“It’s not
that
bad,” Nick’s voice came faintly through the locker room wall.

We all looked at one another.

“Let’s go up to my apartment,” Chloe said. “Forget them. I have something in my room that will cheer us up, and it’s
much
better than boys.”

Chloe was serious about putting the boys in Time Out for the time being, and Liz seemed serious, too. Now that I knew Nick was in the locker room next door, I listened for him and wondered whether the boys would eventually follow us to Chloe’s family’s apartment at the back of the building, overlooking the ski slopes. Chloe and Liz clomped up the stairs like they weren’t giving the boys a second thought.

I slowed on the steps. Chloe and Liz reached the top of the staircase and pushed into the hall above me, leaving the door to close slowly and bump shut behind them. I was alone. I turned around and watched the door at the bottom of the staircase, waiting for Nick to appear. Wishing he would mate
rialize so I could yell at him and get this weight off my chest.

I’d been so in love with him for that magical month in seventh grade, and I was so devastated to find out I was a joke to him. He must have sensed that I still liked him more than I was letting on, and now he was acting mean about it.
Why?
What had I ever done to him? I wanted to be furious with him about the girl snowboarder comments, the jump challenge,
everything
, but it just didn’t make any sense.

I stood there so long, staring a hole in the closed door at the bottom of the stairs, willing it to open and Nick to walk in and explain himself to me, that I got dizzy in the long white room. The dread of snowboarding off that jump came back to me in a rush. I clung to the railing to keep from falling down the stairs.

“Hayden,” Liz called from the hall.

“Coming!” I shook my head to clear it, then ran up the stairs to my friends without looking back again.

When I reached Chloe’s bedroom, she and Liz sat up on Chloe’s fluffy pink king-size bed, waiting expectantly. Uh-oh. Sure enough, the second I closed the door behind
me, they both squealed, “Did you and Nick make out?”

I sighed. “For a second there, I thought we were going to.”

“But you didn’t?” Chloe wailed.

I flopped onto the foot of the bed and stretched out on my back. “No. We had an argument, and he called me a bitch.”

“What!” Liz exclaimed. “That’s so disrespectful!”

“That doesn’t sound like Nick,” Chloe said. “What exactly led up to this?”

Thinking back, I sat up with an enormous groan. The whole evening had been so confusing and frustrating and
mortifying
. Not like the seventh grade, but close. “I walked in on him in the sauna. We joked around. You know how we do.”

Liz and Chloe nodded. Chloe motioned for me to hurry up with my story.

“I thought he was going to kiss me, and I stopped him.” I put up a hand to Chloe’s chest just as I had to Nick’s. Then, when I realized what I was doing, I hastily jerked my hand away. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to feel you up.”

“It’s quite all right,” Chloe said.

“Why did you stop him?” Liz shrieked
impatiently.

I rubbed my temple. My headache from the cold shower hadn’t quite dissipated. “I don’t know. It seemed like that was all he wanted, and I couldn’t let him take advantage of me.”

“Maybe he thought that’s all
you
wanted from
him
,” Chloe suggested.

I frowned at this disturbing possibility. “Maybe. It’s hard to have a heart-to-heart with someone who throws stuff at you and calls you a fire-crotch and a bitch.”

“Is that all that happened?” Liz prompted me. “You stopped him from kissing you, and he called you a bitch?”

“No,” I admitted. “I told him I didn’t want to kiss him because he hadn’t asked me to the Poseur concert. He hadn’t asked me about winning the competition. He acted like I was just a convenient catch because all of y’all are dating. I told him we had irreconcilable differences.”

Chloe gasped. “Like in a divorce? Hayden, why did you say that?”

I supposed it
did
sound ugly, now that I thought about it. But not
that
ugly. “We were both making divorce jokes in the hall last Friday. He started it.”

“Hayden.” Liz leaned forward and took me by both shoulders, bracing me for the bad news she was about to break. “Nick’s mother left his father on Sunday.”

“What!” I hollered, jumping off the bed to pace the floor.

“He told Gavin and Davis,” Chloe said, “and they told Liz and me. Nick must have thought you knew. If
I
were him, and you blew me off and made divorce jokes, I guess I would have called you a bitch, too.”

I stopped pacing and put my hands in my hair to keep from throttling her. “Jesus, Chloe! Why the hell did you invite him over here in the middle of his family troubles?”

“He’s friends with Gavin and Davis,” she said. “He needed to get out of the house and forget about it for a night. He needs all our support right now.”

Guilt trip.

“And you didn’t have a date tonight because you broke up with Everett,” Chloe said.

I took my hands out of my hair so I wouldn’t tear it out. “Everett and his mama broke up with
me
, thank you very much.”

“You shouldn’t have made out with him in his mother’s scrapbooking room,” Liz said
sagely.

“We’re seventeen,” I snapped, “and Everett and I had been dating for two months when that happened. What were we supposed to do, eat dinner with his family and keep our hands on the table where everyone could see them? I mean, you and Davis are Mr. and Mrs. Polite Reserve, and even you were macking in the hot tub an hour ago.” I picked up a pink fuzzy pillow that had fallen from the bed onto the floor and threw it at Liz.

“You
were
?” Chloe gushed. “You
what
? Hello, I need the details of Liz and Davis.”

“Hayden!” Liz squealed, ducking behind Chloe. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t have made out with Everett. I’m saying you shouldn’t have done it in his mother’s scrapbooking room. Location, location, location. You might have disorganized her supplies. Some people are very particular about their chipboard getting mixed up with their cardstock.”

I closed my eyes, inhaled through my nose, and felt my lungs fill with air. My blood spread the life-giving oxygen throughout my body.

“Watch out,” Chloe whispered to Liz.
“She’s doing yoga.”

My eyes snapped open. So much for controlling my temper. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me Nick’s mother left before I went into the sauna with him?” I hollered at Chloe.

“We didn’t know he was here!” Liz came to Chloe’s defense.

“And if we’d warned you about him
before
he got here,” Chloe explained, “you would have known he was coming. We didn’t want you to leave. The two of you are surprisingly hard to throw together, let me tell you.”

“I’m not buying it,” I informed Chloe. “You were distracted. You had your mind on taking inventory.”

Liz giggled, turned red, and fell back on the pillows.

“Taking inventory requires enormous concentration!” Chloe said with a straight face, but she was blushing, too.

I was glad for them, really. I was happy they’d had fun with their boyfriends, at least for a little while, and I hoped they didn’t push this bet too far.

At the same time, I was very angry with them for contributing to this terrible
mix-up with Nick. As supportive as Chloe and Liz usually were to me, I couldn’t help thinking at that moment that I had Very Bad Friends.

Liz sat up again and wiped her eyes. “Do you want me to tell Davis to tell Nick that you didn’t know anything about his parents when you were in the sauna with him?”

I shook my head no. “It sounds too much like a debauched game of Telephone. This whole thing seems very seventh grade. Besides, it’s actually good this happened. Nick is a smooth talker. It took him getting furious for me to find out how he really feels about me. I don’t want or need a boyfriend who thinks so little of my snowboarding skills and questions the very relevance of women’s athletics. I’ll admit, I may have carried a torch for him all these years. He just blew it out. So consult me the next time you want to play Cupid for me. And don’t choose me a boy with four or five girls in a holding pattern. Nick Krieger is all wrong for me. Stop throwing us together.”

Chloe and Liz stared at me from the bed.

“Okay?” I prompted them.

“Okay,” they agreed, way too agreeably.
Even after tonight’s disaster, I got the feeling they were not through with Nick and me yet.

“I’m glad this happened, too,” Liz said quickly. “It’ll give you the push you need to get over your fear of heights.”

“Yeah, about that bet.” I rubbed my temple again, massaging away the headache that throbbed harder than ever. “I’m sorry, y’all, but there’s no way I’m going off that jump. I’ll buy the Poseur tickets for you.” I had been saving for another snowboard—they didn’t last forever, the way I abused the half-pipe—but fair was fair.

“Oh,” Liz cried sympathetically, “you don’t have to do—”

“You will not lose this bet!” Chloe insisted. “We are showing up those boys, and you are going off that jump. I’ll board with you tomorrow and coach you.”

Now
there
was some motivation to get over this problem quickly. Chloe was a notorious betty. On the rare occasion when she graced the slopes with her presence, boys zoomed toward her because she was so cute in her pink snowsuit, then zoomed away again as she lost control and threatened to
crash into them. She’d made the local snowboarding news a few years ago when she lost control at the bottom of the main run, boarded right through the open door of the ski lodge, skidded to a stop at the entrance to the café, and asked for a table for one.

“I’m working at the city library tomorrow,” Liz said, “but I’ll ski with you and coach you on Thursday.”

“Have you actually tried to go off the jump and failed,” Chloe asked me, “or do you not even try?”

“I don’t even try.” I didn’t like to look at the thing. I averted my eyes when Josh and his friends jumped off.

“So, now you’ll try,” she decreed. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

I opened my mouth to describe the worst that could happen. I could freeze up ten yards from the precipice, and all four spots where my leg had been broken would throb deep inside, even though I’d been healed for years. I would relive my accident. A series of sickening jerks as every belt and harness designed to keep me safe while rappelling had failed, one by one, and let me fall.

“Hayden, what’s the matter?” Liz called.
“You look like you saw a ghost.”