The Sugar Mountain Snow Ball (15 page)

“Huh? You mean, like the rich kid who's been spying on us at the playground?”

Eleanor nodded.

“But he doesn't go to our school. And you've never even met him.”

“No, not him, Ruby, but the same description. This boy, the one who wrote the notes and probably also the one spying on us,” Eleanor paused and squeezed her eyes shut, “had his right arm in a sling.”

“A sling? But the only person who . . .”

And then it hit me.

JB Knox.

22

I walked even slower on my way home from school that cold, blustery afternoon.

Soon, I would be crawling home.

Nothing seemed to make sense to me.

Nothing.

The world had turned upside down and inside out. Somehow, I needed to figure out how to make things right again. But I didn't know if I cared enough anymore.

Back in the nurse's office, Eleanor told me about all the “Nameless Admirer” notes she had received from JB over the winter—thirty-five in all! She had stored them in that round box in her bedroom, the one she told me to put down because it contained something special. She confessed she had lost one note, but wasn't surprised as she dropped them all the time. They made her nervous for tons of reasons, but mostly she knew she would get in big trouble if her parents ever found out about them.

That's when I remembered the folded piece of paper under our couch, signed
NA
.

“Something about a yellow or red shirt?”

Eleanor's eyes bugged out of her head.

“How did you know?!”

“I found it on the floor at my house, but thought it was a note Pop had written before a road trip. What did it mean?”

“I was to wear a yellow shirt if my answer was yes, that I liked getting the notes. And a red shirt if I wanted him to stop writing.”

“Oh,” was all I could say, still in shock by what it all meant.

“Do you still have it—the note?” Eleanor asked.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I threw it away.”

She touched my arm.

“Good. I threw them all away too.”

“You did? Why?”

“After the way he treated you, Ruby, in front of all those Outers? I burned the notes in our fireplace as soon as my parents went to bed on Sunday.”

I tried to smile, touched by Eleanor's loyalty, but inside I felt miserable about it all . . . especially the part about Eleanor not telling me. She said she'd enjoyed receiving the mysterious notes, as if they were clues in a game. And that she preferred imagining who could be writing such nice things rather than having their secret identity revealed. But she knew if she told me about them I would insist we figure it out . . . which I probably would have. Most of all, she didn't want to hurt my feelings, worried that I'd be jealous. I told her that was silly, that I would have been happy for her. But the truth is, she was right. I couldn't have dreamed up anything
more romantic than receiving tiny secret love notes at the bottom of my locker.

Eleanor said she had assumed all along that one of the Math Squad boys, one of the quieter ones she didn't know that well, was her nameless admirer. Never in a million years did she believe it could be anyone popular or older, or both.

But as she had hurried down the long road to Sugar Mountain to meet NA, she knew the person waiting under the old Sugar Tree couldn't be anyone from the math team. For one thing, this boy was taller than anyone in our grade, but more than that, there was something about the way he casually leaned against the tree, facing the other way, that made him seem confident and cool.

Eleanor approached as quietly as she could—but when she stopped, the crunching of her boots also stopped, which made the boy turn around. The first thing she noticed was his arm in a sling . . .

“Surprised to see me?” JB asked her.

Eleanor couldn't speak, so she nodded.

He pointed at his broken arm.

“Had a little mishap on the slopes yesterday, but I wanted to keep our date.”

“A little mishap?” she managed to say. “You mean, the accident? With Ruby?”

“Is that her name?” he asked. “I knew she looked familiar. Your friend needs skiing lessons.”

At this point in the story, I had to interrupt Eleanor.

“Wait. Are you saying that JB doesn't even know who I am?”

Eleanor looked down at the floor of the nurse's office and shook her head.

“But I don't get it,” I said. “Why has he been so friendly to me lately?”

“I told you,” she replied, “a person like that uses everyone else as a mirror, seeing only his own reflection. A total narcissist.”

I was still confused.

“Then what about the secret notes? You said they were sweet and funny and kind!”

She shrugged and replied, “They were. But now I know they were also manipulative and opportunistic.”

“Oh, Eleanor, in English,
please
.”

She rubbed her forehead as if trying to find the right words.

“JB says what he needs to say in order to get what he wants. He pretended to be nice to you at the time, only because he wanted to see me.”

“But . . . he never even talked to you.”

Eleanor tilted her head. “In a way, he did.”

That's when everything changed and my whole body, still sore from the crash, ached even more.

Eleanor stood.

“Sorry. I shouldn't have told you, Ruby. Let's go back to gym class.”

“No,” I said, and took a deep breath. “I want to hear the rest of the story. What happened after that?”

She looked away. “Let's just forget about it, Ruby.”

“Tell me, Eleanor,” I said. “I need to know everything.”

So Eleanor said she suddenly suspected JB was playing some kind of mean prank on her. That there had to be an explanation for why the most popular boy in the entire middle school had a crush on
her
. She had scanned the entrance to Sugar Mountain, looking to see if some of his friends were also in on the joke, hiding nearby.

But then JB had touched her hand and slipped something into her palm, a small folded note just like all the others. He waited while she read it to herself.

Will you please go to the Sugar Mountain Snow Ball with me?

Neither Eleanor nor I said anything for a moment. We were frozen in place. I even felt a little dizzy, like maybe I should lie down on the cot now. But as soon as I noticed Eleanor's eyes filling up again with tears, I wrapped my arm around her shoulders.

I told her that I could easily believe her nameless admirer was someone as incredibly popular and hot as JB. Because she was the nicest, smartest, prettiest, most interesting girl in the whole school. And that I knew a lot of other people thought so too.

She wiped her eyes and gave me a hug, which she had never done before.

“So are you going to go to the Snow Ball with him?” I asked.

“Oh, Ruby, of course not—that was your dream. I would never,
ever
take that away from you.”

I smiled. “Believe me, it's not my dream anymore.”

Even though I was relieved that everything was okay between Eleanor and me, I still felt dreadful inside as I plodded down the icy
sidewalk through the freezing wind. Nothing in my life had been as it seemed. Or had I just not been paying close enough attention to everything and everyone around me? Could I only see my rosy version of how I wanted things to be, which wasn't the way things really were?

Maybe it was a bad thing to be glass-half-full Ruby.

The cold wind blew so hard I had to stop and turn away from it to catch my breath. My entire body felt numb. I bent over to try and adjust my socks that had slipped low in my snow boots, but I couldn't reach them with my thick gloves. I realized that was exactly how I felt. Like a cold, lonely sock crushed at the bottom of a boot.

But then I remembered this was my favorite pair of socks, my extra-thick striped socks I had lost months ago, the same day Eleanor and I had met Madame Magnifique. Mim had discovered them hidden behind the dryer on Sunday, the morning after my doomed ski lesson. In a weird way, these socks felt like long-lost friends. And knowing that I still had them, that they hadn't been lost forever, made me feel a teensy bit better about my life.

“For your information, I WAS IN FLORIDA!”

The rich kid was standing behind the black iron fence, gripping two posts with his hands, like a trapped gorilla behind bars at a zoo. His binoculars were swinging back and forth from his neck against his green jacket. His messy hair stuck out of his hat. Until he'd yelled at me, I hadn't noticed I was in front of his mansion at the corner of Maine Street and Bon Hiver Lane.

“Yeah, I know that now.”

He dropped his hands down by his sides.

“And I wasn't spying on you.”

I nodded. “Yep, you weren't.”

I definitely didn't have the strength to deal with one more upset person, but deep down I knew I had to apologize to this kid. I had been as mean to him as everyone else had been to me.

“It turned out to be a seventh grader, JB Knox, who happens to have a jacket like yours. Believe me, JB is about the last person I could ever imagine spying, but he wasn't spying on me. He was watching my friend, Eleanor, because he has this huge crush on her. Anyway, I'm sorry about all that . . . umm . . . whatever your name is.”

I could tell he hadn't expected me to apologize, because he stared at me, still tensed up, like he had a long list of stuff to complain about.

Then he mumbled, “Lance.”

I pulled my hat above my ears to hear him better.

“What did you say?”

“My first name,” he spoke a little louder, “is Lance.”

“Oh.”

The frosty wind suddenly stopped blowing and a slice of purply-blue sky peeked through the clouds.

“Did you have fun in Florida, Lance?”

He kicked lightly at the fence post.

“I hate Florida.”

“You do? But how can anyone hate warm, sunny Florida with all those beautiful beaches? I'm so sick of being buried alive in this snow.”

“The bugs are enormous and disgusting,” he muttered, “and I don't know anyone in Florida.”

“You don't know anyone here either,” I said, then felt bad the second after I said it.

He didn't reply as he continued to kick at the fence.

“Well, I better go before I say any more stupid things,” I added. “Sorry again about the whole spying thing, Lance.”

I turned left and continued my boring, dreary walk toward the Petites' house to pick up the twins and get on with my boring, dreary life.

But just then, I heard a scraping noise. I glanced back over my shoulder as the tall black gate slowly swung open, like magic, pushing back the snow. When it stopped, Lance stepped through and stood on the icy sidewalk facing me.

“Ruby LaRue?” he said. “Would you like to come inside my house?”

23

I had never been inside a mansion before, except for the fake one at Nuzzlenook Farms, where you can have a wedding in the summer by the fake moat filled with fake swans. I followed Lance across the massive snowy front yard over to the giant door.

“I can't stay long,” I explained as we stepped inside and removed our boots, “because technically I'm grounded, but also I have to get my little brothers over at the—WHOA!!”

When Lance flipped on the lights, I couldn't believe my eyes. It
was
exactly like a castle! Or what I imagined the inside of a castle would look like. We entered the front area, which was as wide and high as the main hall in our middle school, except this place was a thousand times more amazing, with a floor made out of flat pink stones and walls covered in fancy wallpaper and
four
enormous fairy-tale chandeliers hanging from the ceiling.

“WOWZA!” I exclaimed, way too loudly, then clamped my hand over my mouth.

“You can make noise,” said Lance. “No one's here. Not even my governess.”

“What's a governess? Is that like a lady governor?”

“She's my teacher, but she also lives with us and eats dinner with me, because my parents are usually busy working or traveling.”

Since he'd been so unfriendly for so long, I was surprised Lance was sharing details of his life. He still looked away from me when he spoke, but maybe he just needed new glasses.

“Your teacher lives with you? Why don't you just go to our school?”

“The answer to that is complex,” he said, and then crossed his arms.

I wondered what had made him open up like this, and actually invite me inside his mansion. Especially since I had been mean to him. Whatever the reason, I couldn't wait to tell Eleanor all about it.

“My parents had the basement remodeled before we moved in. Do you want to see?”

“Sure,” I said softly, like I was dreaming out loud and didn't want to wake up.

I couldn't stop twisting my head around to check out all the awesome rich stuff, like gigantic gold-framed paintings and dark shiny furniture and fifteen-foot-tall windows and statues and vases and a fountain full of water and exactly what you would think a rich family would have in their mansion.

“This is your
basement?
” I said, after we'd taken the stairs to the lower level.

The room was so long I couldn't make out anything on the wall at the other end. Never in my life had I seen so many incredibly fun things to do. There was a pool table and foosball game and two
flat-panel televisions. It was like being inside a department store, except it all belonged to one kid.

Lance threw off his jacket and hat, dropped down onto the far end of the cushiony couch, which reclined, and hit a button that made it shake.

“It's a heat-and-massage sectional sofa,” he said, his voice jiggling along.

“Cool! Can I try?”

I slipped off my jacket and sat on the opposite end of the L-shaped couch, where a lever released the seat. I found the massage button on the side and pushed it.