The Ex Games

That night, Mile-High Pie was packed with teenagers wearing hip winter sports gear even if they didn’t ski or board. February in Tennessee was cold and brown, but Snowfall sparkled with excitement at the height of the ski season, like a beach town in summertime. I sat in a booth with Nick, surrounded by colored lights twinkling in the windows and decades of teen graffiti layered on the walls: VIOLET LOVES RANDY. ZACH + KAREN. That’s what Nick and I were: Nick + Hayden. He watched me attentively, smiled at me, laughed at my jokes, and ignored Gavin elbowing him.

After a while we moved with the teenage crowd to the movie theater. Do you remember a Will Smith romantic comedy about a player who makes all the right moves to sneak into a woman’s heart? IRONY. Maybe you could tell me the details sometime, because I wasn’t paying much attention.

A tall, beautiful blonde named Chloe, obviously the prima donna of the class, was having a very public argument with two different boys who liked her. Because I was new, I had a hard time puzzling it out. There was a lot of high drama before the film started, middle schoolers yelling accusations at each other, like a Disney Channel version of COPS, and Chloe was comfortable at the center of it. I thought the attention had finally moved away from Nick and me, and we were safe from everyone’s eyes in the back row.

The second the lights dimmed, he put his arm around me. We weren’t wearing poofy parkas, either—we’d draped them over the backs of the seats when we’d come in—so the heat and weight of his arm imprinted themselves along my shoulders and the back of my neck. By the first love scene in the movie, he was leaning toward me.

I figured he wouldn’t really kiss me. He would want to. He would mean to. But I couldn’t possibly be lucky enough for this to happen for real, even though I was wearing my four-leaf clover earrings. The fire alarm would sound in the theater, or the roof would collapse under the weight of the snow. (I hadn’t gotten used to two feet of snow blanketing everything.) The fact that we were hot for each other would be obvious to everyone, but like a pair of unfortunate saps on a TV sitcom, we wouldn’t kiss for another two seasons.

And then he kissed me. His arm tightened around my shoulders, his other big hand cradled my cheek, and his warm lips touched mine. We kissed for a long time. I didn’t make him stop. If this had happened in Tennessee, I would have known the boy just wanted to brag to his friends afterward. Nick made me think he honestly liked me and wanted to touch me.

My first kiss.

Obviously not his. He knew what he was doing.

I blink away tears thinking about this now. Such a perfect night, the sweetest reward after two years of embarrassment at school in Tennessee and excruciating pain 24/7. I’m feeling sorry for myself, I know, but I can’t help crying for poor little thirteen-year-old me at the moment Nick kissed me. Because the castle in the air he’d built for me over the past month was about to come crashing down in the snow.

A girl named Liz bounced into the seat beside me and whispered that I should come to the bathroom with her and Chloe. This surprised me, because I’d never heard Liz’s voice before—she was a quiet little librarian in class—and also because I’d begun to think no one dared disturb the mature teen bliss that Nick and I embodied. But I really did need to pee. I had needed to pee since the movie began. In seventh grade you do not admit to boys that you need to pee, so this was the perfect excuse to relieve myself while retaining my image as a peeless goddess.

When I came out of the stall, Chloe was peeking under the other doors to make sure the bathroom was empty. Liz stood in the center of the tiled room with her arms folded. I felt a flash of panic that maybe Colorado middle schools traditionally welcomed new students with a swirly. Or that Nick was on the list of boyfriends Chloe was balancing. I’d had my fun with him in the back row, and now she wanted payback. But Chloe didn’t look bent on revenge. For the first time all month, she was silent, waiting, deferring to Liz.

By junior year Liz let her dark curly hair float around her shoulders. But back in seventh grade, she was still pulling it off her face with combs and clips with little monkey faces on them. The monkey faces laughed at me as she dropped the bomb. She told me Nick was from a famously rich family. Hadn’t I seen the TV commercials last year in which Nick and his parents stood beside a huge rock fireplace and his father invited the camera to try Krieger Meats and Meat Products, from their family to yours?

That’s why Nick looked familiar!

Liz said that at the beginning of the year, Nick and Gavin had argued about whether Nick’s family money was the only reason he got any girl he wanted. So a month ago, when the English teacher let the class know a new girl was starting school, Nick bet Gavin he could get a date with the girl that weekend, sight unseen, without her knowing anything about his money. To make it fair, Nick and Gavin swore everyone in the class to secrecy.

I was not, as I’d thought, a cool teen. I was not Nick’s dream girl. I was a bet.

And Liz and Chloe, feeling guilty, thought I should know. Now that Nick had kissed me, the bet had gone too far.

They also thought I would respond to this info by hugging them and crying in the bathroom, I’m pretty sure. They didn’t expect me to flounce back into the theater and scream at Nick for what he’d done to me.

In the flickering light of the movie screen, he looked horrified. I held out hope that he would apologize and explain it was all a misunderstanding. Maybe I was a little starstruck after all. I couldn’t believe the heir to the Krieger fortune had actually come on to me, even if his heart wasn’t totally in it. He’d been so sweet to me for the past month. His kiss had felt real. I wanted him to like me for real.

After he’d gaped at me and I’d held my breath for a few moments, Gavin prompted him, “Well?”

Nick blinked and said in his fauxinnocent voice, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Hoyden. I mean, Hayden.”

The theater burst into laughter, and not at Will Smith.

I stomped out. Liz and Chloe followed me, which sealed our friendship forever. Liz had told me what was up when no one else would, and Chloe was willing to leave her own intrigue behind, at least for the moment, to comfort me. We all trudged through the snow back to my house, made hot chocolate, and bitched about boys.

But the second the girls weren’t looking, I escaped to my room, opened my dictionary, and looked up hoyden.

And here we still were. In the four years since, every date I’d been on, every party, every school field trip, I remembered on two levels: how it went with my boyfriend at the time, and what Nick was doing in the background, with another girl, on the other side of the room or the other end of the bus. In other words, I was addicted to Nick.

Now the stage was set. I’d been boyfriendless for about a week, ever since the Incident with Everett Walsh’s mama. Nick had dumped Fiona Lewis last week after three dates, which was one more date than he usually lasted in a relationship. I’d been watching him in class: check. I’d been dreaming about him at night: check check. He’d flirted with me in class for the past four years, but he’d never sat down with me in the hall and treated me to the low rumbly voice and hinted about the Poseur concert. Now I wished I could resist him, especially since I suspected he’d started the fire-crotch discussion in the lunchroom on Thursday just to see if he could seduce me after insulting me. Exactly how easy was Hayden, anyway? Nick’s inquiring mind wanted to know.

I was afraid he was about to find out. Despite myself, and despite Liz’s lectures about disrespect, my blood raced through my veins every time I thought about his hand on my hand in the hall (not to mention my thigh). I didn’t think I would answer yes if I ran into him during winter break and he asked me out. I couldn’t answer yes. Still, I hoped against hope that he’d ask the question.

But I also hoped he’d wait until after Tuesday, because he was distracting me enough already. I had more important things to worry about than Nick. Tuesday I had an appointment with a snowboard.

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

I exhaled through my mouth and felt gravity pull the energy from my heart down through my legs, through my boots and snowboard, through the snow, to the rocks below. I was one with the mountain.

“Good luck, Hayden!” Liz squealed. I opened my eyes to find her in the crowd of spectators behind the ropes on one side of the snowy course. I spotted her right away because she was bouncing. Her dark curls flew into the eyes of people around her.

Chloe put one hand on Liz’s shoulder to hold her down. “Hush, Hayden’s doing one of her yoga things. Let her concentrate.”

No chance of that now. Bouncing friends tended to break my concentration. At least my brother, Josh, and his friends weren’t around. I’d checked in on them between my events, and all four of them were kicking butt in the fifteen-and-under boys’ competition held on another course at the same time as my eighteen-and-under girls’ contest. If they’d been here, they wouldn’t have squealed like Liz. They would have made up a rap with beatboxing and very embarrassing pushing-up-the-house hand movements.

It’s Hayden

What?

She’s a maven

What?

On the ski slope

What?

Give it up, folks

What?

Got the board slide

What?

Got the frontside

What?

Got the mad skillz

What?

For a sick ride

What?

It was sad that I could predict their lyrics. I boarded with them way too much.

The warning buzzer sounded. In a few seconds I would begin my slalom run in my first-ever official competition. I’d run hundreds of casual races against friends and challenged my brother to comps in the half-pipe, but nothing like this. It was so strange to stand on my board as a competitor rather than as a spectator. I recognized the sensation of adrenaline bubbling through my veins. I felt it every time I stood behind the ropes and watched someone else start a slalom. The feeling was magnified by a thousand now that I didn’t have to picture myself in the racer’s place. I was really here.

And all because of Liz and Chloe. They’d told me I was good enough to compete. When I’d seen this competition advertised, I’d ignored it as usual. They’d pointed out to me that this one had no jump, nothing higher than the half-pipe wall, so I had no excuse not to try it. I wouldn’t have been here without them. I winked at them on the sidelines, lowered my goggles, and slid my board forward to the starting line.

Deep breath. One with the mountain.

As a final touch, I twisted one of my four-leaf clover earrings. My dad had given them to me the day I got the cast off my leg, as an amulet for better luck in the future.

And then I was flying down the slalom course, staying tight and tucking in, dodging around the gates as fast as possible. I knew my time would be good because I was in the zone. My body went on automatic, feeling exactly what to do when. I enjoyed the bright sparkling day, the white snow, the spectators in crazy-colored gear lining both sides of the course, the too-blue sky. There was no feeling in the world like this, having a body that worked.

Then I hit my usual snag. For most people, the hardest part of this course was the moguls. For me, it was the straightaway past Nick’s house. His parents’ mansion had an enormous frontyard and a daunting front gate to scare away paparazzi and beggars. But the backyard bordered the slopes so the Kriegers could sit on their deck and watch the skiers. Every time I boarded past, no matter what trick I tried or who I was with, I glanced over at the deck while attempting to look like I wasn’t looking, just in case Nick was there. He never was.

Until now. I thought I couldn’t feel any more adrenaline than was already pumping through my body in my first boarding competition ever. Apparently my body kept some adrenaline in reserve, because I flushed with a new rush at the realization that he was watching me. I could not let Nick distract me. It probably wasn’t even him but his father. Or was it? I’d seen Mr. Krieger at my parents’ health club. He had blond hair, not dark hair like Nick. And why would Mr. Krieger wear Nick’s puffy parka?

Okay, Nick probably didn’t recognize me from a distance. Though my red hair and hot-pink snowboard made me hard to miss. Okay, he might recognize me, but he hadn’t meant to watch me. He was out on the deck to fetch a few more sticks of wood for the fire inside. The fact that he’d come outside at exactly the moment I took my turn in the competition was just a big coincidence. An almost impossible coincidence, actually.

Believe it or not, every bit of this flashed through my mind in one second. My questions about Nick (Is he looking at me? Is he looking at me on purpose? What does it meeeeeeeean???) were familiar to me after four years. I had become very efficient. I thought them and then pushed them to the back of my mind before they made me fall down. I was one with the mountain. My body worked perfectly. I skimmed around the gates, torn between excitement that I could see the finish line and disappointment that I’d finished so fast. I always hated for a run to end.

I made a wide circle to slow down and skidded to a stop. Almost before the final curtain of snow I’d kicked up had fallen out of the sky, I was squinting at my time on the scoreboard.

“Holy shit,” I whispered. I was in the lead! Three chicks waited to take their turns, but I was so far ahead of them after my half-pipe score, they’d have to really hightail it down the mountain to beat my overall score now.

What if I won? I’d dreamed about placing, but I’d never expected to win!

And then, so predictably that I wanted to hold myself down and rub my face with snow as punishment, I glanced way up the slope at Nick’s deck to see if he was still watching me.