Page 182 of On His Mind

Aspen laughs into the mattress.

Penelope stirs against me, laughing before she’s even got her eyes open.

Stanley launches a pillow that misses us by a foot and takes out the lamp, and the day officially starts when Benson materializes in the doorway, fully dressed, dead silent, watching all of us.

“Good,” he says. “You’re up. Time to hit the slopes.”

“It’s a bunny hill, Pers,” Stanley says. “You’re gonna love it.”

Benson smacks the end of my bed, then Stanley’s. “Get up. Both of you.”

Turns out I’m terrible at snowboarding.

Getting off the lift is a humiliation all its own, and I ride most of the run clamped onto Penelope’s arm like a drowning man until I catch Stanley grinning and let her go, because I’d sooner eat snow than embarrass her in front of everyone. Stanley and Aspen carve off down the mountain like they were born on it. Benson’s got Lucy by both hands, snowboarding backward, catching her every time she slides out. Blue’s holding Melly up by the elbows, the two of them wobbling and quiet. Gianna’s just standing there openly laughing at all of us.

I strap my back foot in while Penelope waits — patient, poised, in absolutely no danger of falling over.

I stand up and go.

That’s the one real gift of being an athlete: I pick things up fast, my body learns quick. What I don’t account for is the drag of the wet snow and the whole ordeal of steering around forty other people, so I turn wrong, the nose of the board bites down into the slush, and I go down hard enough to feel it in my teeth.

Penelope slides to a clean stop above me on her skis. Not a hair out of place. Not remotely out of breath.

“Are you okay?”

“Okay,” I say, flat on my back in the snow.

“You said — and I want to quote you exactly here — ‘how hard can it be?’” She’s fighting a smile and losing badly. “You said, ‘I’m athletic, Penelope.’”

“I’m rethinking a number of things.”

And she laughs at me.

She laughs at me for the next full hour. She grew up doing this — some childhood stacked with mountains and lessons and money, a whole life away from the one I had — and she makesit look like breathing, elegant the entire way down while I fall too many times to count. Her cheeks have gone pink. Her hair’s escaping her beanie in pieces. And every single time I drag myself back upright, she’s already waiting there, ready to watch me eat it again.

But I get better. Run by run, I fall less. That’s how it’s always gone with me and hard things — I’m ugly at them right up until I’m not.

Stanley, meanwhile, is having the best day of his entire life at my expense.

“The goalie is down,” he bellows from a chairlift somewhere over my head. “The man stops a puck for a living — and cannot — stop — himself —”

“I’ve got it all on video,” Benson calls from the chair behind him. “Gonna post it. Put it on a loop in the living room. Play it at parties.”

Rowan sprays a wall of snow over me as he flies past. “You’re so bad at this, Pers!”

“You’re all going to kiss my ass,” I call up at them, hauling myself vertical again, “when I lose focus on the net and get into snowboarding––”

“He’sthreateningus!” Stanley clutches the safety bar. “Our baby’s grown up and started making threats! Don’t you dare lose focus on us, Pers!”

“Let’s seeyouski, big boy!” Benson shouts, and the whole chairlift full of them comes apart.

Penelope skis over, unbothered by any of it. “You’re getting better, Pers. Don’t let them get to your head.”

“You’re the only one in my head.”

It lands on her the way I meant it to. She ducks it with a small smile and crouches down and lays her cold hands over mine where they’re braced on the edge of the board, and she talks methrough it — where to set my weight, how to read the give of the snow, how to quit fighting the snow and let it carry me instead.

She did this once before. In a kitchen when we had Hawthorne all to ourselves once upon a time. Her hands over mine on the handle of a knife, standing close at my back, patient, telling me exactly what to do while I did it wrong and she didn’t laugh — or didn’t only laugh. She’s wearing the same face now that she wore then. The focused one. The teacher one. The one she puts on when she’s decided to care about me. And I just look at her. Her hands are freezing. Her nose has gone red at the tip. She’s close enough that for a second the whole loud mountain drops away to nothing, and it’s only her cold hands over mine and the small crease between her eyebrows while she gives me her best tips.