The Space Between Us (11 page)

“For January, yeah.”

“So it got this cold just for us.”

“Think of it as a welcome gift.”

I shivered and tucked my chin to my chest. This was hell.
Hell.
Why hadn’t we brought scarves and hats, and how long until the car warmed up?

I don’t belong here.

The weight of the thought was crushing. It was too late. I was here. I was stuck. I felt hollow, like my insides had been scraped out, leaving just a shell of skin. An empty walnut husk. I unclenched my fists and stared at my white, bloodless fingers.

“I wish it was snowing,” Charly said from the backseat.

“Of course you do,” I mumbled.

Ezra put the car into drive and pulled away from the curb. “It’s too cold to snow. But there’s plenty already on the ground.”

Too cold to snow? What did that even mean? Up ahead, where the covered drop-off lane ended, I could see it, a thick grey crust edging the road, hip high and rising into dirty-white mounds easily taller than me. We were walled in by snowbanks.

“Is it always grey like that?” Charly asked.

“No, it’s just muddy from the road. Wait, you’ve never seen snow before?”

“Only on TV,” I said.

“And from a window at the Chicago airport,” Charly added.

Ezra laughed, then realized we weren’t joking. “Seriously?”

“You’d be surprised how infrequently it snows in Florida.”

“Yeah, but . . . ” He rubbed his hands together, then blew into his fists again while he steered the car with his knees. I knew what he was thinking. We were a couple of hicks who’d never been more than ten miles from home. And if he knew about Charly’s
condition
, then he thought we were a couple of trashy hicks who’d never been more than ten miles from home. At least we weren’t the ones with homeless-man hair.

“Do you need help steering?” I asked. Freezing to death while I waited for an ambulance seemed like a bad way to go.

“No. The wheel feels like ice, but it’ll warm up in a few minutes.”

“Charly, give the guy his gloves back.”

She tossed them up and he put them on. “Thanks,” he said. “Hey, is it okay with you guys if we do a drive-thru for some food before we leave the city?”

“Yes!” Charly called. “Yes, it is definitely okay with us!” Apparently the protein bar had not been enough.

I shrugged. Last year Coach Hershey had sat us down and forced us to watch a disturbing documentary on fast food to scare us away from it, but all that seemed pointless now. It wasn’t like I was in training for anything anymore.

We pulled up to an A&W and ordered three burgers. I fumbled with the zipper on my backpack, but Ezra was faster. He found two purple bills that looked more like
Monopoly money than legal tender, and paid before I could even find my wallet.

“Thanks.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Charly echoed.

Charly scarfed hers, but the meat didn’t taste right to me. Too much like cow. I wrapped mine up and shoved it back in the bag. It was better as a lap warmer anyway.

“So you guys are starting at BPH?” Ezra asked.

It took a moment for the acronym to register. Banff Public High.

“I am,” I said. “Charly’s doing classes by correspondence.”

I stole a sideways glance, but Ezra’s face was expressionless.

“I went to BPH,” he said.

Went. So he wasn’t in high school anymore. Dropout or graduate?

“Don’t miss it,” he added.

“That bad?”

“No. Just cramped my style, you know?”

“I guess.”

Ezra looked like the kind of guy whose
style
was sleeping till noon and playing Xbox for the rest of the day.

“It’s my last semester,” I said, “so it’s not like my classes matter. I’m just here to be crowned prom queen.”

“Good luck with that. There’s no prom here.”

“Oh.” So the prom queen sarcasm must’ve been lost in translation. Mars. I’d landed on Mars. “Do you even know what prom is?”

“Yeah. American TV.”

I took a deep breath and told myself it didn’t matter. If I was at home, Savannah would’ve had to drag me to PHS’s prom anyway. It’s not like I would’ve gone with Will. Probably not, anyway. It would have been extremely unlikely.

Ezra’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “The Southern drawl should win you some points at school. Or at least some laughs.”

Clearly he had no idea he sounded slightly Scottish, slightly Minnesotan, and slightly idiotic.

“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said, listening to my words, trying to hear what he heard. “I’ve never had an accent before.”

“Trust me, you’ve had a Southern accent since the day you started talking.”

“Yeah, thanks, I get it. I just mean I’ve never lived anywhere else. I’ve never been, you know, out of context.”

“Welcome to out of context.”

I stared out the window in silence, and felt the minutes roll by. The city lights were behind us now, leaving just the outline of bleached hills glowing under a heavy black sky. It was eerie. Or magical.

“That’s the color snow is supposed to be,” Ezra said.

I nodded. It was beautiful.

We sank back into silence. It should have been awkward, sitting beside a stranger with nothing to say, but it wasn’t. Maybe because I didn’t care what he thought.

After another few minutes, Ezra spoke again. “We’ve got a Chinook coming.”

“Am I supposed to know what that is?”

“Oh. I guess not. Warm wind from the mountains. Temps are probably up in Banff already. At least I hope they are. I froze at work today.”

“You work outside?” That seemed impossible. Or if not impossible, then incredibly stupid.

“I’m on ski patrol at Lake Louise. The slopes were practically empty today.”

“Any theories why?”

He either didn’t hear my sarcasm, or he ignored it. “Only diehards ski in this kind of cold, but they still have to have people out there clearing for avalanches and on patrol, eh?”

I glanced over my shoulder at Charly, but she was asleep. How was I supposed to make fun of my first “eh”? “And you didn’t get frostbite or hypothermia or anything?”

“No. When it’s this cold I wear a lot of gear. Balaclava, goggles, the whole deal, you know?”

Clearly, I didn’t know. “I hope they’re paying you well.”

“It’s a volunteer thing.”

“You spend all day outside in this and you don’t get a paycheck?”

“I get a free season’s pass for Lake Louise. And the jacket.”

I must’ve looked unimpressed because he shrugged and said, “It’s better than going to university.”

That explained everything. He was a cold-weather Baldwin boy, going nowhere and not caring.

Our next bout of silence lasted longer.

“Have you ever skied?” he asked after a while.

“No, that would have required me to have seen snow, right?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

Charly snored softly in the backseat.

“She didn’t last long, did she?” Ezra asked.

I paused. “She gets tired quickly these days.” There. If he knew she was pregnant, that made sense. And if he didn’t know, he now thought she was terminally ill, which was probably preferable.

Outside, the hills swelled and grew steeper. I stared at my reflection, pale and angular in the glass, and wished I was different. Softer. Less harsh. Ezra was good-looking, even if he was completely devoid of ambition and intelligence. Other girls would’ve at least been friendly, but I couldn’t seem to manage even that. He probably thought I was a total brat.

Except he didn’t know me. He didn’t know how drained I felt, or how horrible the last few months had been. I just didn’t have any pretending left in me. Small talk, making a good impression, being nice, being
cute
—it all took too much energy. It wasn’t like I was going to see him again anyway.

“You don’t want to be here, do you?”

His voice startled me. Of course I didn’t want to be here. “I’m just tired. Long day.”

“You can go to sleep if you want,” he said.

Tears pooled in my eyes and I felt my throat thicken. Why was he being so nice to me? I couldn’t say thank you. He’d hear the tears if I spoke, and think I was crazy. Instead I reclined my seat and closed my eyes.

Like sleep was going to happen. I teetered on the edge of it instead. But everything—hurtling down an icy highway into the mountains of a foreign country, lying in a stranger’s car, closing my eyes—felt wrong.

So I thought about camping with Will. It’d been the single most rebellious act of my life, telling Grandma I’d be spending the night at Savannah’s and then sneaking off to sleep under the stars with him. But worth the guilt. The memory was all warmth, lying in his sleeping bag with his arms around me, feeling completely safe.

W
e met Bree’s apartment before we met Bree. It was a huge, high-ceilinged loft, with dark hardwood floors, white suede couches, and red candles and throw pillows.

“So swanky,” Charly whispered, rubbing a red flower petal between her thumb and finger. It was a poppy. “I’m guessing this didn’t grow outside.”

“Don’t touch that,” I said, my teeth still chattering from the ten seconds we’d spent sprinting from Ezra’s car to the stairwell. “That vase looks expensive.”

“Hmm. Crystal or something?” she asked, letting go of the petal and tapping the vase.

“I said,
don’t
touch it. As in, the opposite of what you’re doing right now.”

“Pardon me,” Ezra said. I stepped out of his way and he rolled the first two suitcases across the main room to the far corner where a spiral staircase twisted upward.

Pardon me?
Charly mouthed to me, then, “You are pardoned, kind sir.”

I gave her the
shut up
head shake. I was all for mocking the Canadians, but not to their faces and not while they were doing our heavy lifting.

Ezra hoisted a suitcase and started up the stairs. “Bree said to take your stuff up to the loft.”

“I thought this was a loft.” We were on top of an art gallery, in a building facing Banff Avenue. I looked up. There was, in fact, a loft. A waist-high wall hid most of the room from this angle, but I could see eggshell-blue walls and the rounded edge of a mirror, then Ezra’s head and shoulders.

“A loft-let,” Charly said. “Cute.”

“Adorable.”

The apartment was warm, thank goodness, so I slipped off my coat while I glanced around, taking inventory. The room was a giant cube, with one brick wall to my left and an open kitchen to my right. The far wall had two doors: bedroom and bathroom?

I wandered through the kitchen, eyeing the marble
countertops, stifling the urge to examine the contents of the shiny stainless steel fridge. This was the kind of kitchen that would have capers and Camembert cheese and weird condiments in it. An array of copper-bottom pots hung from a suspended metal rectangle. I could almost hear Grandma’s voice:
How many saucepans could one woman need?

Svelte barstools along an island separated the kitchen from the living space. Charly was already sitting on the couch with her feet on a glass coffee table beside another vase of poppies.

“I feel like I’m in a magazine,” she said.

I walked to the other side of the room, past the accordion screen with a geisha girl fanning herself on it, past the massive flat-screen TV, over to the window. According to Ezra, Banff Avenue was the main drag, but the restaurants and gift shops looked closed for the night. “Wild West ghost town meets Siberia,” I whispered.

Ezra was on his way up the stairs with the second bag. “Yeah, Richard has a decorator for all his places. I think this one actually was photographed for a magazine last—”

“Wait, what?” I interrupted. “This is Richard’s apartment?”

“Well, no. Yeah. I don’t know.”

He disappeared into our room again. I waited for him
to come back, my mind cartwheeling. Were we moving into Bree and her boyfriend’s little love nest? Grandma was going to freak.

“He doesn’t actually live here,” Ezra said, coming back down the stairs. “He lives in Calgary, but he has a lot of real estate here in Banff, so he’s here on the weekends to ski and to see Bree, I guess.”

A lot of real estate.
People who had
a lot of real estate
had butlers and Bentleys and half-empty tubes of Aspercreme in their medicine cabinets. “How old is Richard?”

“Mid-forties, I think.” He paused. “Yeah, he went to high school with my mom.”

“That’s a twenty-year age difference!”

“You might not want to point that out to Bree.”

“She doesn’t realize her boyfriend is old enough to be her father?”

“Yeah, but you know what she’s like.”

“Actually, we don’t,” Charly said.

I sent her a death glare, but she was too busy making the lights flicker with the remote control in her hand to catch it.

“I’ve been imagining her as a skinny version of my first grade teacher, Ms. Paulson,” Charly continued, dropping the remote and picking up the coffee table book. “Not sure why.”

Ezra squinted at Charly. “You don’t know her?”

“It’s complicated,” I said before Charly could say something else stupid.

He didn’t smirk, but it was in his eyes. They were dark, brimming with things he was too polite to say.

“What about you. How do you know Bree?” I asked.

“Bree and my brother used to be, you know . . . together.”

“Oh.” I tried to construct a mental diagram of the relationships, but having no faces made it hard. Bree had dated Ezra’s brother, but was now with Richard, who went to school with Ezra’s mom?

“It’s complicated,” he added.

“Speaking of complicated, modern art hurts my head,” Charly said, yawning. She chucked the book onto the coffee table, then flopped over onto her side. “Amelia, I’ll give you a million bucks to pick me up and carry me to bed. A million more if you brush my teeth and put my retainer in for me.”

Ezra looked from Charly to me. “I should go get the other two suitcases.” He left.

“Have you considered saving the weirdness until people know you?” I asked, staring out the window. It was dead out there. Dead cold. Dead dark. Dead quiet.