Winter Fire.

by Laurie Dubay.

Chapter 1.

I should have seen Bren for what he was right away.

I watched the red-gold glint rise over the crest of Lenape Mountain, a tiny point of flame growing larger against the snowline, and at first thought it was the sun. But I knew I was facing west. I was good with direction.

I squinted as the spark morphed into a figure, still on fire and moving fast down the slope. As it got closer, I heard the hard scrawl of a board against the untouched groom, registered the yellow jacket of a resort employee, saw the broad, relaxed shoulders and sleepy stance of a male rider, copper hair flying as he carved a fast, tight scallop into the snow. The sun was just now turning the sky to ash, paling the moon, extinguishing the stars. But it had not quite risen, except to light the rider.

He hit a swell about two-thirds of the way down and I heard his board spring off the snow as he coasted into the air. He seemed to hang there, his gloved hand gripping the board between his feet, his hair streaming out against the hill, and I had just enough time to wonder how a person could fall asleep in the sky like that before he stomped down and took what was left of his run at such high speed that I couldn't make out another detail until he plowed the back edge of his board into the snow at the base.

He rocked back and forth a little to plant himself, then put his hands on his hips, tilted his head back, and closed his eyes. After a minute, he dropped his head and spit.

"Ech." I said. He glanced up. I stiffened. He was far enough away so that I could pretend I was staring straight ahead and see him from the corner of my eye. He didn't move, just stood there with his fists pressed into his hips and stared. I noticed now that his hair was shorter than I thought, and darker. It swung across his face in razor wedges. It was the deep, rusty bark of a cinnamon stick.

Stop looking at me, I thought, and closed my eyes, the way little kids do thinking it's going to make them invisible. But when I opened them, he was still staring, so I huffed out an annoyed white cloud, took too big a gulp of my coffee, and burned the roof of my mouth. When I parted my lips to suck in some cooling air, I choked instead and felt a dribble down my chin. I had to lean over the deck railing to spit out the rest. As I wiped my mouth with my sleeve, I watched the coffee melt little grooves into the ice below.

I heard him chuckle, the sound deep and sarcastic enough to make me want to throw my full cup at him. But by the time I mustered the courage to raise my head, he had already stepped out of his board and was carrying it away. Laughing.

I stormed back across the deck in a ridiculous lurch, my stomps heavy but jerky and small to avoid slippage, one hand fisted and pumping, the other gingerly balancing my coffee, my jaw tight but half open to cool my burnt mouth. Sydney, the night manager, was bent and gathering her things behind the desk when I stumbled in, a spill of red ringlets tumbling down her narrow back the only glimpse I got of her as I bristled past.

My mother was in the shower when I returned to our room. I opened the bathroom door and called to her through the steam.

"You're going to be late. Sydney's already packing up."

"Thanks. Be right out." Her voice was different lately. Sing-songy, as if her wedding ring had been strangling her vocal cords.

In reality, it didn't matter if she was late. Since we lived in the hotel she was never really off-duty, but I wanted her to come out and get ready, drink her coffee, distract me from my humiliation. Moving over Christmas break meant I would have nothing to do until I started school, so I found myself following her around, helping her with paperwork, taking her calls. She didn't seem to mind, liked to keep me close to her lately, but I was annoyed with my own neediness.

I sat on the counter and watched her stroll back and forth between her bedroom and our little kitchenette. She had traded her track clothes and sneakers for suits and heels, and she was growing her hair out, but she still moved and chatted like a soccer mom. Ironic, since the last time I played soccer was the sixth grade. By the time I hit high school, I think they were actually considering euthanizing me for my lack of athletic ability.

I wasn't as talkative as I'd anticipated, so I didn't go downstairs with her when she left. Instead, I poured another cup of coffee and stared out our picture window overlooking the mountain, the snow now a harsh dazzle of jewels. But there were no more traces of red.

Chapter 2.

The next time I saw him was almost a week later. My butt was freezing onto a bench outside the ski lodge as I watched a twenty-something girl pick her way down a beginner run. I spotted him in my peripheral vision. It wasn't the bright yellow instructor's jacket that pulled my focus; there were a lot of those on the bunny hill. It was the sunset glow of him - his cinnamon hair against his coat, the coppery gleam of his mirrored shades, the scarlet bolts streaking his helmet.

He was sliding off a lift chair with a little girl in a pink coat. She was maybe six or seven, and shaky on her small board. He gripped her shoulders as they curved left toward the top of the hill and glided past a few of the lift victims flailing on the ground. He flattened one hand against her back, brought her to a standstill at the crest, and held onto her while she bent and fastened her back foot into the binding. Her equipment looked new and was mostly pink like the rest of her.

Once she was buckled in, she grasped at him until she was clutching both of his arms and then wriggled so she had him directly in front of her. Then she bent her knees, balanced on the back edge of her board, and stared up into his face. Terrified.

"Okay," he said. His voice was deeper than I thought it would be. I wasn't sure it sounded right for him. His face was all strong angles, but his expression made him look like a twelve-year-old with a book of matches hidden behind his back. "Remember how we did it last time."

The girl glanced down the hill and back up at him. "I fell last time," she said.

"You fell because you got scared."

"It hurt, Bren." Her voice broke like a reed and her face flushed. Bren? I hadn't thought of him as someone with a name.

"I know it did." He forced a more gentle tone and gave her a few seconds now to catch her breath. Then he said, "are you sure you want to learn?"

She peered up at him for a moment, not looking sure at all. I didn't blame her. Her little hand, snug in a puffy white glove, drifted to her knee, and I guessed that was where most of the hurt had taken place. Finally, she nodded.

He stiffened his arms and she gripped them with what looked like all of her strength, his jacket billowing out from between her fingers. As he started to slide backward down the hill, she bent her knees and followed.

"Don't look at the ground," he told her. "Look at me."

When she couldn't seem to raise her eyes, he stopped, reached out, put a gloved finger under her chin and tugged until he had eye contact.

"Now keep your eyes on me," he said, "and think. Think about the edge of your board in the snow. Think about what you want it to do, and it will happen."

The girl was too afraid to get a word out, but she gave him a frantic nod and stared at him so hard I thought her eyes might shoot from their sockets.

As they drifted away, his voice trailed off and I couldn't make out his words, but the little girl looked like she was relaxing, and her board stopped stuttering on the snow and began to move smoothly. By the time they were halfway down the hill, they were sliding back and forth, their boards curving up one way and then the other like a falling leaf.

On their next trip up the lift, she was laughing as he talked. It looked like he said something especially funny just before they rose off their chair, and she didn't even notice when they slid down the little ramp past the unfortunate fallen. On this run, she was much braver. She held onto him for a little while, swinging back and forth with him in that falling leaf pattern, then lifted her shaking hands about an inch off of his arms and held her fingers stiff and splayed, bending her knees and leaning further back into her board. He anticipated and mirrored her every move. He kept his arms exactly where she had left them, but she made it all the way down on her own.

For some reason, I felt like crying.

I stood and strode back to the main hotel deck and in through the reception area, looking around for my mother, but I didn't see her anywhere. The resort was busy, and her new job meant she had to deal with things besides my crappy moods and scheduling power walks with her friends. The influx of people who liked to check in when school vacation was just about over were usually either older, didn't have kids, or both, and had all kinds of special requests about their rooms. It was part of my mother's job to take care of them without looking irritated. When I asked her how she was going to put up with that, she said she'd had sixteen years of experience. I imagined her telling that to Mr. Neil during her interview. He must've thought she was a riot.

She wasn't in her office or the kitchen, and I didn't feel like scouring the place for her, so I went back up to the suite, grabbed a book, and waited for dark.

Night was when I loved the mountain best. The evergreens sparkled with snow and diamond bright lights dotted the runs all the way to the summit. I had never been up there. I probably could have gotten somebody to take me up on the lift and back down again, but it seemed like cheating. Anyone who rode up was supposed to come down on his or her own, teetering on strips of waxed planks just like everybody else. There was no way I could do that. I had been fearless when I was a kid. My mother used to send my father to pull me down from tree limbs and pluck me from rocky outcroppings and yank me out of waves that crashed way over my head, but I couldn't remember the last time I had pulled something like that. In fact, I had clamped on one of the rental snowboards a few days after we moved into the hotel -- just to try it out on the flats -- and found that I could either coast in whatever direction the board wanted to go until I crashed, or fall and have to take the board off to get back up. My mother suggested I take a lesson, but some of the instructors lived at the resort, and I did not want to have to face any of them after a disaster like that.

Tonight, snowflakes dropped plump and fast beneath the glow of the lights, concealing the last of the guests' footprints as Yew Dales emptied out. It was almost nine, and as I stood on the lodge deck, listening to the snow land on the wood, on my coat, on the nearby trees, I wondered why I didn't hear the groomers revving for use. Then I caught a group of familiar faces congregating to my left and realized it was an employee night. It wasn't going to be quite as peaceful out here as I had hoped.

As soon as the mountain closed, the yellow jackets hit the lifts. They went up in a swarm and came down in a swarm, and in the lingering lulls between their runs I could almost pretend I was alone. During one of these, when things had just quieted and I could no longer hear them yelling to each other over their lift chairs or see their colors flashing through the trees, I glanced to my right and saw them all together for the first time.

Bren walked a little ahead of the rest. His head was down, his damp hair hanging in his face. He held his board by one binding, in front of him like a shield, and stalked through the snow as if he had a long way to go and didn't want to think about it. The bottom of his board was the color of old bone, with black symbols scattered across it that I didn't recognize. Instead of a jacket, he wore a black hoodie, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows. I shivered and shrunk into my coat as I scanned the others.

A few feet behind him, a boy and a girl about his age - maybe seventeen - walked close together, knocking into each other and away again. The boy was tall and thin, his floppy brown hair shot through with blondish streaks, his long bangs sweeping down over his forehead. He carried his board low and away from him, like he was ready to fling it, and his expression suggested he might. He, too, was jacketless, and wore varying shades of browns and golds like he had a natural sense of what looked good on him.

Or maybe the girl did. Her long, copper-fire hair hung in braids over the quilted shoulders of a white jacket trimmed with feathers around the hood. She wore an emerald green hat with matching gloves and although I wasn't close enough to see, I knew her huge eyes were green as well. And not an ambiguous hazel green like mine. They'd have to be as dazzling as her grin. Her board bobbed against her side with each step she took. As I watched, she laughed and tossed a glance over her shoulder.

I followed her gaze to the boy behind her. Short, dirty-blonde dreadlocks bounced around his face and he had a hint of stubble, but his smile was a child's smirk and his eyes arced into happy half-moons as he laughed. An orange sun sporting dark shades grinned on the t-shirt he had pulled over a thick thermal. He was shorter than the other boys, but solid and muscular, and he kind of sauntered along with his arms draped over the board behind his back. It looked uncomfortable, but he didn't seem to mind.

A moment later, I noticed a man who looked to be in his mid-thirties trailing the group. He peered out from the hood of a thick blue jacket, his expression grave. I had a brief impression of The Ghost of Christmas Future and shivered again. His scruff was dark, and thicker than Dreadlocks's, but it looked like the product of grooming, not laziness. He carried his board the same way Bren did, like a shield, and had the same stubborn gait. His eyes never quite rested on anything. It was as if he were trying to remember something, or could see things around them that no one else could see.

I pulled my focus back, letting them come together as a group again, and noticed that their footsteps were strangely in sync. I watched Bren laugh a moment before Dreadlocks said something a" as if he had anticipated the joke - and felt myself smile a little, realizing a second later what I was seeing. I thought of my best friend Emily who used to finish my sentences and sometimes even start them. I remembered how we would laugh when we caught ourselves walking at the same pace. When we were younger, we had even made a game out of trying to see how long we could keep our footsteps exactly matched. For the second time today, I felt like crying.

As they got closer, I scanned the girl with the braids again, my head turned slightly away so that she wouldn't notice. She was hopelessly pretty. And her eyes were, indeed, green. They were glowing out from her pink, heart-shaped face like tiny drops of lime Jell-O. Tucking a tuft of soggy hair behind my ear, I fixed my eyes on the railing. When I glanced up again, Bren was stomping past me in huge, heavy strides. His eyes shifted to mine and locked.

I froze, felt heat flush into my cheeks and knew that I had turned bright red, but didn't break eye contact. I wanted to. I wanted to look away, turn around, transfer my attention to one of the others, but I did none of that. I just stared. And so did he, until he was too far ahead to hold my gaze and let his eyes slide forward again.

At the lift, he let Jello girl and the tall kid take the first chair and rode up with Dreadlocks and Christmas Future on the second. I watched until they were all out of sight, but he never looked back.

Inside, Sydney was already at her post at the reception desk. I slowed when I saw her.

"You're a little early," I said.

She looked up and smiled. "Ellen asked me to come in. Her son's sick. Just a cold or something."

"Oh. Good. That it's just a cold, I mean."

We continued to smile at each other for a moment.

"So it's a late night tonight?" I said, gesturing to the French doors and the mountain beyond.

"Yep," she said. "Employee night." She rolled a pen beneath her freckled fingers.

I slipped my hands into my pockets. "I wish I skied or boarded or something. Looks like fun." I hesitated, then went on. "I saw a group of kids going up just now."

She didn't say anything, but her smile suddenly looked forced. She abandoned the pen and folded her hands on the desk.

"One girl had braids?" I tried. "And I think there was a guy with dreadlocks."

She raised her brows at me and let the silence roll out for a few seconds, then dropped her expression and sighed a big, airy sigh. It made me wish I hadn't said anything.

"Let me guess," she said with the last of her breath. "Bren Bergan."

"Who?" I kept my voice even, but she wasn't buying it.

"The Scandinavians?" She said, ignoring my attempt at ignorance.

My exaggerated shrug probably looked more like a cringe. "I don't know them." I said. "Anyway, have a good night, Sydney." I smacked the desk once with a flat hand and spun toward the elevator.

"Hey listen," she called. I turned, my brows arched with drama. She seemed to struggle for a minute.

"I started working here a few years ago, right out of high school. And Mr. Neil - you've met him, right? Operations Manager?"

I nodded.

"Well, he gave me some advice then that was pretty good, so I'm going to give it to you."

"Okay," I said. I felt a crease forming between my brows. I did not like advice. It usually meant someone had screwed up and was now assuming that you would too.

"The guys who work hereanot the locals, but the ones who live here and workathey used to call them ski bums. Mr. Neil calls them transients. Anyway, you never know how long they're going to stay or what. They go wherever they can get a roof over their heads and a place to ski or ride, and that's all they're concerned with. Do you know what I'm saying?"

"I think so," I said. No, not really.

"So what Mr. Neil said to me was, *it's best not to get involved with them, because there's no future in it. By nature, they're people who've learned not to get attached.'"

I frowned. "They just live here? They don't go to school at Little Woods?"

"Nope. Maybe they've graduated. I don't know when kids finish school in Norway." She said Norway like it was The North Pole and waved a dismissive hand. "They go wherever they can work and ride, and this year they ended up here. They probably won't even stay to work the water park this summer."

"Hm," I said.

"And I can tell you one thing," she went on. "The guys? Not so much the uncle or the tall one with the girlfriend, but the other two? I have seen quite a few girls with them already. Especially over break. But I haven't seen the same girls with them twice. Do you get what I'm saying?" She lowered her head but kept her eyes on mine, waiting to be sure.

I got it. She was saying that the same guy who took the fear out of a little girl who wanted to snowboard, who made her laugh and held her so she wouldn't fall, who was ignited by the sun and slept in the sky, was just a homeless slut.

Image crushed. Thank you Sydney.

"Thank you, Sydney," I said sweetly.

"Sorry," she said. And I knew she meant it.

Chapter 3.

The sun's gleam felt sarcastic this morning. It was too nice a day to be starting a new school. My stomach was jittery so I skipped the coffee, but munched on half a dry bagel hoping it would sop up some of the acid. It worked until we stopped in front of the building. I squinted against the morning light streaming in through the windshield. Kids were everywhereagetting out of their parents' cars, weaving through the student parking lot with their backpacks hoisted onto their shoulders, laughing and stumbling into each other as they unloaded from the buses. I wondered why teenagers always looked and sounded drunk. Maybe for the same reason people actually got drunk.

"Do you remember where all your classes are?" My mother asked. She slid her huge brown sunglasses up onto her head and fixed her worried eyes on mine.

"Yeah." We took a tour just after we moved into the resort, but she had slipped a map into one of my folders just in case. I reached into my sweatshirt pocket and curled my hand around the schedule they gave me. "Don't worry."

"I know it's different," she said, "but you'll get used to things quickly."

The familiar, heartbroken apology in her expression made my chest tight, so I reached out and shook her forearm, tried to smile. "I just wish I could drive myself."

"A few more months."

"And no car."

My mother sighed. "We'll see if we can work something out. Listen," she curled her hand around mine, her nails pearly in the sunlight. "Everything's going to be fine today. Try to make some friends. Be agreeable. People are generally decent if you give them a chance."

"I didn't say I wouldn't give them a chance."