This could be the worst idea I’ve ever had, but I’m running out of any good ones at this point. Luka can ski with whomever hewants. He can smile and laugh and pretend I don't exist, but I'm not going anywhere. Not until I finish this job.
The rental shop door chimes as I push it open. I step inside, let the bags drop at my feet, and meet the clerk's curious gaze.
"I need to learn to ski," I say.
Even if it kills me.
Walking in ski boots is like walking in cement blocks. I clump across the cobblestones outside the rental shop, skis balanced on one shoulder, poles clutched in my other hand, moving with all the grace of a baby fawn on ice skates.
A child, maybe seven, walks past me effortlessly, skis over his shoulder, barely noticing the weight as if the universe is mocking me.
The lift looms ahead, and my palms and armpits begin to stress sweat. The chairs swing up the mountain in an endless rotation that suddenly seems a lot faster and a lot higher than it did from the safety of the village. Skiers glide into the loading zone with confidence in the machinery that I don’t dare to share in. They get scooped up by chairs and disappear up the slope.
I can do this, I tell myself.
I have negotiated with angry owners who wanted blood and career-ending headlines, with sponsors threatening lawsuits before breakfast, with boards who needed a scapegoat and didn’t care whose career they burned to get one.
I have stood in rooms where men twice my age tried to talk over me, intimidate me, or dismiss me, and walked out with the agreement I came for, anyway. I can handle a chairlift.
I clomp my way towards the lift to assume my spot in line.
The line moves forward. My heart is doing something in my chair that I should probably see a cardiologist about. A rapid flutter that feels less like anticipation and more like my body's attempt to warn me that this is, objectively, insane.
I swore I’d never ski again after my humiliating attempt in middle school, but quitting isn't an option. Quitting means going back to Phoenix empty-handed. Quitting means the assessment meeting where Carey looks at me with that particular blend of disappointment and inevitability and says, ‘We're going to have to let you go’.
Quitting means my father was right to leave when I was two years old—that I'm not indispensable enough to keep around.
So I won’t quit. Not without a fight.
I shuffle forward into the loading zone, skis scraping, boots locked in their awkward stance. The lift operator, a guy who looks about nineteen and deeply uninterested in my survival, waves me forward with the enthusiasm of someone working a summer job in January.
The chair swung around behind me. I try to sit, but I miss.
The edge of the chair catches me behind the knees, my skis tangle, and I stumble forward, while the chair keeps moving because of course it does, and suddenly I'm half-seated, half-sprawled, one ski still on the ground, the other lifted into the air at a physics-defying angle.
I scramble fully onto the chair. My poles clatter against the metal, and before I know it, I'm airborne.
The thing about ski lifts that nobody tells you, or maybe they do and I wasn't listening, is that they arehigh. Unreasonably high. High enough that falling would be a legitimately bad idea, the kind that ends in helicopter evacuations and phone calls to next of kin.
I grip the safety bar with both hands, knuckles probably white inside my new gloves.
Below me, skiers carve down the mountain as if they came out of the womb like that. I watch one woman navigate a series of tight turns through what looks like a moderately vertical death trap, her form perfect, her speed death-defying in my inexperienced opinion.
I am going to die on this mountain, and I’ll never even get to tell Carey, "I told you so."
The wind picks up, and the chair sways. My stomach launches into my throat as a horrifying thought hits me—Luka is going to be thrilled when he finds out I fell to my death trying to prove a point.
Don’t look down, I ordered myself.
But, of course, I look down.
I try to take my mind off the height and remember what the bored rental shop girl said about getting off. Something about... standing? Skiing forward? There was definitely a motion involved, some kind of coordinated dismount that seemed simple when demonstrated but now, suspended forty feet in the air with the exit ramp approaching, seems wildly optimistic.
A sign appears: PREPARE TO UNLOAD.
My pulse spikes. Oh God, no.
I watch the couple ahead of me. They lift the safety bar, adjust their poles, and as the chair crests the top of the hill, they simply stand and glide off. That’s easy enough… just do what they did. The chair swings away empty and loops back down the mountain.
