She grabs my arm and jumps up and down at my side, shouting something about “fate,” her breath smelling of sandwiches and jawbreakers, and then I see Levi conspiring with her, patting her on the back again and again as if the two of them had won something.
My eyes drift over to Aaron because his sympathetically contorted mouth gives me hope that he’ll tell me what’s going on.
He shrugs and points his thumbs to the silhouettes at the top of Buttermilk Mountain. “You’ve been chosen,” he calls.
“What?”
“By the tandem oracle.”
It is so loud that I can hardly understand him. So I try to read his lips but what reaches me is “tan-demo-racle,” and I don’t really know if I’m all that interested in any kind of demonstration.
I want to tell him as much, but then I see the great big black spotlight, in whose sphere of light I’m standing, which was the reason for my temporary blindness. Suddenly everyone starts yelling things like, “Tandem oracle!” “It’s on the tandem oracle!”
What in the hell is the tandem oracle?
The people push me across the square with them, past the tinsel folding tables, past the monster reindeer, until I find myself in front of some red-and-white barricade tape, behind which there’s Knox standing in front of a gondola.
Next to him a snowboard. A…tandem snowboard.
Now it’s clear what the tandem oracle’s all about. I put two and two together. I’ve been chosen. The happy chosen one who gets to stand on this thin board with the snowboard star and take a death-defying ride down Buttermilk Mountain.
I think my diaphragm is starting to cramp, but before I can listen to my body more closely, William and Wyatt are putting pads on every part of me they can think of and pressing a helmet into my hand. I stumble over Knox’s snowboard and stagger toward him, and he grabs me with an arm.
He doesn’t look at me. He hasn’t since we were in the store together. He’s holding onto me but looking at my boots.
I’m standing right in front of you, I think.Lift your head and look at me.
He doesn’t. Instead, he opens the gondola, waits until I’m sitting on the bench and then gives a signal to have it start up. He gets in and sits right next to me, two inches away at most. I can smell him; he smells of snow and vetiver andKnox. The fairy lights shine in and envelop him in color, orange on his ear, green on his neck. I don’t want to touch him, even though my fingertips tingle and crave it.
The gondola begins to move. Knox doesn’t look at me. He keeps on looking at the floor—right where all the unstated words are.
27
The Ice Is Burning
Knox
This oracle—one of William’sgreat ideas, naturally—could’ve chosen anyone. Truly anyone.
Now I’m sitting here with Paisley, crammed into a tiny nutshell attached to a cable, and I have no idea what to say. Or if I should say anything at all.
I don’t like her sitting so close to me and her breath fogging up the window. It forces me to think about her, and I don’t want to think about her. Because if I do, I’ll start imagining her breath wetting my skin instead of the windowpane, her lips gently brushing my ear…
“Do you want to act as if I don’t exist from now on or something?”
She asks this amusedly, with a soft laugh in her voice, but she doesn’t really find it funny, and neither do I. I don’t want to pretend that she doesn’t exist, but I don’t want to look at her either, I don’t want my heart to suddenly make unnatural movements, I want to pull her close to me, even though hugs have never been my thing. I don’t want something if she doesn’t.
I finally look up. Ouch. I wasn’t prepared for her hurt expression. It makes me choke up. Her eyes are big and full of hope, two little pieces of heaven set in her face.
I look away again. “Don’t be goofy.”
She flares her nostrils. “You’reignoringme, Knox. You’ve been ignoring me for days.”
I try to move away from her a bit, but it’s impossible. I lean back with a sigh and run a finger over the corrugated ankle strap of my board. “You’re my chalet girl. Nothing more. And that’s how I’m treating you.” I turn to face her.
Paisley looks like I’ve smacked her. “I’m your chalet girl andnothing more?”
“You didn’t want to be anything else,” I remind her. “It was your decision.”
