Girl Overboard (5 page)

“Nice,” I say, blowing out an admiring whistle. Age has always made it look so easy. There’s a real prettiness and elegance to his riding, though he’d blush if I ever described it in those terms. The way he rides, confident and smooth, leaving a few strokes, reminds me of the priceless Chinese paintings and scrolls my parents collect. Three deft brushstrokes, and a crane miraculously takes shape, floating off a canvas of white just like Age is doing now.

At the last second, when I approach the same car-sized boulder, one I would have flown over before the Accident, I veer to the right, take an easy chute down instead and skid to a stop. Shivering in my jacket, I wonder if I’ll ever look or feel like I belong to the snow again. I make a big show of cranking up my tunes as though that’s the reason why I stopped.

Age is waiting for me, but he doesn’t pull any of that “you can do it” pep talk or “what’re you scared about?” crap. He knows that there’s nothing worse than having second helpings of pity when you’re already stuffed from feeling bad about yourself. After his mom died, he’d stare anyone down who made the mistake of labeling him as “that poor motherless boy.”

“So you think this place is haunted?” he asks now.

“Yeah, right,” I say, rolling my eyes. Last year, a skier got lost around here, didn’t carry any supplies, and was riding by himself. Three strikes, and Mother Nature threw him out. Just the way I should have been hurt more seriously up at Whistler. Now, even with the avalanche transceiver and shovel in my backpack, a small part of me questions why
I’m
out here, tempting the mountains again.

Age breaks into creepy moaning right when the wind rasps as if it’s the dead dilettante’s last breath. We look at each other, nervous as eleven-year-olds, when we used to scare each other with grisly stories about snapping ropes and other gondola disasters. That was before I knew I could break without warning, too.

Suddenly, Age takes off.
Chase me,
his riding practically dares, but he’s going fast, too fast, and I lose him in the trees.

Another wind rattles the evergreens, sending shivers through the boughs and freezing my exposed cheeks.
Ghosts are on the move,
I can almost hear Bao-mu mutter. She is so Chinese-superstitious; if I took her seriously, Age and I would be cursed for the next couple of lifetimes since we’ve disturbed so many trees that supposedly harbor souls of the dead.

A gust blows snow off the upper limbs of a tree, showering me in feathery dust. I hate to admit it. The branches aren’t the only things quivering on this mountain. I used to think that a little nervousness while riding was a good thing. It means you’re pushing yourself. But as sweat collects between my breasts and I stare at all the trees I need to weave around, I know I’ve traversed beyond “scared” and am well into uncharted “scared shitless” territory.

A moment later, my walkie-talkie crackles in my chest pocket, and I pull it out of the boy’s jacket I’m wearing.

“Syrah, easy ten-foot drop ahead. Do not speed-check,” Age says. “Do you copy? Do not speed-check.”

I can do this,
I assure myself. Petrified or not, I have to go down this line and claim it as mine again. My palms are slick inside my mittens. There are so many butterflies in my stomach, I half-expect to levitate. The thing is, if I can’t fly on these mountains, then there is no place on Earth where I am completely free. Where I can be me. Or at least the me I used to be.

Resolved, I point my board toward the cliff, but my memory does a Benedict Arnold and auto-replays the Accident. The twang I felt when my ACL tore. The pain that even two doses of Percocet couldn’t dull after my surgery. The way I had to lie on my back for two weeks, strapped in a torture device that bent and straightened my right leg.

I narrow my eyes in concentration, trying to ignore the wind that’s blowing me toward another accident. The snow-bent trees around me look skeletal enough to be ghosts incarnate. “Do not speed-check,” I hear Age warn again over the walkie-talkie. But I can’t help it. I can’t get hurt again.

And that’s the problem with snowboarding. You need to commit to your speed, to your jump, when you ride. Hesitation costs you on the slopes. That moment of doubt, that deliberate braking, is how accidents happen. I’m too slow going into the jump. When I should be floating in air, challenging gravity, I’m flailing and dropping to the earth way too soon.

“Watch out, Syrah!” Age yells, I barely make out his army green jacket below as he scrambles to get out of my accident-in-progress.

God, how much is it going to hurt this time?
I wonder before I hit the ground. Without any time to flatten out my snowboard, I catch an edge and lose my balance. I slam hard on my shoulder, tumble a couple of times, a human snowball. Finally, I stop, face up. Branches from the surrounding trees are shaking snow onto my face, ghosts trembling with laughter.

Who am I kidding? I don’t belong here any more than that dead dilettante did.

The cold seeps through my beanie, chilling my neck. All I can think is,
Oh, my God, did I hurt my knee again?
But it’s not my knee that’s throbbing. It’s my shoulder. And my pride.

“You okay?” Age asks, hovering over me, wearing his concern the way most guys wear their machismo.

No, I’m not okay. The sad truth is I don’t know if I’ll ever be okay. At least not the okay I was before my accident. Even as I touch my tender shoulder and force out an “I’ll live” and sit up, I realize the most dangerous falls aren’t the ones involving cliffs, missed jumps, snowboards and surgeries. They’re the ones where your heart free-falls in disappointment.

L
ike a good little
Cheng-ling, I get to my feet, ready for round two. My shoulder could be sprouting a second head, it’s throbbing that much. But I brush the snow off my limbs, trying not to wince when I rotate my arm gingerly, and nod at Age as if I’m still one tough snowboard chick.

“Race you to the bottom,” I tell him.

“You are
loco,
” he says, shaking his head at me.

Age is right. I’m crazy to be up here, but not crazy enough to speed down, heedless, the way I would have once.

By the time we reach the chairlifts, the lines are so long we could be at Disneyland, except everyone’s sporting parkas and snow pants. The hardcore riders are clustered around the vendors’ booths, not to learn about the latest and greatest snowboards, goggles, and bindings, but to score free product and the ultimate prize, a coveted sponsorship.

“Hey, there’s the crew,” says Age, pointing toward the fray around RhamiWare.

B.J. is easy to spot, all long neck and longer arms, and as usual, he’s engaged in a lengthy conversation with the rep who once upon a time thought I had what it took to be a Snowboard Girl. Next to B.J. is Mobey, better known as Mobey Dick for obvious reasons. Some study reported that guys think about sex once every fifteen seconds. If the researchers had included Mobey, I swear he would have knocked a good three to four seconds off that average.

After my dismal performance, the last thing I need to hear is how the guys are “this close” to getting sponsored. Before I can make a break for the bathroom, B.J. lopes over with Mobey trotting beside him to keep up.

Apparently, Mobey’s got more than sex on his brain this morning because the first thing out of his mouth is, “Let’s session a kicker.”

I lift an eyebrow at him, since it’ll take a couple of hours to build the ramp, even with four of us shoveling. “On a powder day?”

“Some of us need to add footage to our video résumés,” Mobey retorts. He spreads his thumbs and forefingers to frame the mountain behind the guys, leaving me out of his Kodak moment. “You in, Age? Syrah can shoot us, right?”

Before the Accident, I would never have been the de facto videographer. “Yo, Cro-Magnon Boy,” I say, “Age doesn’t need a video, and I’m riding today.”

Mobey drops his hands, now assuming what our crew calls his Only Child negotiating stance. With his chin sticking out obstinately, his mom usually buckles. “You are?”

“That would be why I’m wearing my gear.” Witness the superwoman effect of wearing snowboarding gear. If only I could bottle up this all-powerful feeling, and stomp on anything and anyone in my snowboarding way. Too bad a girl just can’t go through life clomping around in her snow boots.

“Why do you need to add to your video?” Mobey asks belligerently, his tone signaling that I’m just moments away from his usual riff on why my wanting to be sponsored is basically stealing food out of a needier person’s mouth—say, his.

“I’ll shoot you guys,” says Age, intervening.

While B.J. and Mobey compete in their usual testosterone game of one-upping each other about the sick tricks they’re going to pull, Age lifts my goggles so he can look me in the eye. He says softly, “It’s your first day back. It took you almost six weeks to learn how to walk without a limp. So cut yourself some slack today, will you?”

Whatever Age says, I choked on the mountain. I nod,
yeah, yeah,
but he won’t let me go until I say the words out loud.

“Get a room, you guys,” says Mobey.

Guiltily, Age drops his hands off my arms, and I step back from him. Without another word, I head toward the bathrooms down the hill. My legs are moving so slowly, I might as well have gained fifty pounds. Mama is right about one thing. Cellulite is impossible to lose, especially when it’s dimpling your self-confidence.

My skip to the
loo is stopped by the reigning empress of Viewridge, Chelsea Dillinger. Banish all those images of blue-eyed, size-nothing baby dolls who rule the high school roosts in movies. Chelsea is Barbie after bingeing on a one-month ice-cream diet. The heiress to an old-time Seattle real estate empire, her last name might as well be tattooed across her plump shoulders the same way it’s chiseled onto the new library downtown.

“Syrah Cheng!” Chelsea sings down the line of girls waiting in the hall for the bathroom. Her brown ringlets bounce, she’s waving at me so hard. The curious and the envious turn around as I clomp down the stairs.

God, what does she want now?

I kick myself for not keeping my goggles on to conceal my face. Too late, too late. Girls stare at me with that mixture of awe and envy I’ve been used to seeing since Baba hit the Big Time. Someone in front of me says, “Oh, my God, do you know who that is?” A meaningful pause, then: “Ethan Cheng’s kid,” my father’s name filling in all the blanks about me. “I heard her dad makes her ride with bodyguards ever since that avalanche.”

If it weren’t for needing a toilet desperately, I’d have run for the great outdoors and escaped these stares, especially Chelsea’s hungry one. For a time, I hoped that Chelsea and I would be friends, she being the one person who might actually understand my life and all. There just aren’t many people who’d commiserate when you complain about your mother’s couture shopping spree for your school wardrobe because you’d rather dress in Old Navy than Narcisco. Or who understands that having parents perpetually missing on business is better in theory than reality.

That was before I knew Chelsea wanted to display me—and all nine zeros of my dad’s net worth—the way her father mounts deer and moose heads in his living room: a trophy for all to admire.

Naturally, Chelsea gives up her place in front of the bathroom door to slum it in back with me. “Your dad’s birthday party was so great, Syrah!” she says, standing so close to me, I swear, her perfume seeps into my pores. “That
Attila
screening was so cool, didn’t you think?”

“I missed it,” I grit out quietly.

“Really?” says Chelsea, who obviously didn’t miss me in my home theater. She grips my arm as if confiding a girlfriends-only secret, but the just-you-and-me effect is blown when she booms not-so-secretively, “Well, I was telling my dad,
Attila
is so cool, he ought to take all the people at Dillinger Development to see it.”

A dull ache centers in my abs, too low to be mistaken for indigestion from Chelsea’s company. I look around for anyone I could beg a Midol off of, but all the girls are bent together in the kind of static electricity that only gossip generates. Just once, I’d love to be on the gossiping side with girlfriends instead of the one being gossiped about. While Chelsea does her “my dad this” and “my mom that” monologue, I keep my eyes on the flyers tacked to the scuffed wall. That’s when I spot the snowboarder on the Wicked in Whistler poster, catching such big air, helium must run through his veins. There is no mistaking Jared’s sultry come-mess-with-me stare.

“Omigod,” I murmur. Damn it, the only reason why I was excited to go to Wicked in Whistler was because I had checked and Jared wasn’t listed, which meant that I wouldn’t run the risk of bumping into him.

“I know—I’d compete if he was the grand prize,” says Chelsea.

Me, too,
I echo, and then chagrined, shift my gaze to a different flyer, because I can’t stand looking at Jared and remembering how he made me believe that I had jumped off Whistler and landed in Wonderland. The counselor assigned to my group of four girls wrote us off as no-ops: girls with no promise, no potential, no opportunities. He might as well have been a babysitter for all the tricks that he taught us. Then a snowboarder flew over our heads as we iced our butts on the side of the mountain. And just like that, Jared rescued us.

Eighteen and already pro for three years, Jared was back from filming in Europe. “Come on, dude,” he told the counselor. His hair, sandy brown, glinted in the sun. “They’re here to ride, not catch rays.” And he looked at me. “Follow me.”

None of us needed more than that invitation, even as he took us down a fifteen-foot drop that came out of nowhere. How could I have been scared of falling when I was already flying? No one was more surprised than I was when Jared lifted my goggles at the end of the first run and told me, “Syrah Cheng, how many kids here have the grace of a girl and the guts of a guy? One.” He tapped me gently in the middle of my chest like he didn’t want me ever to forget. The problem is, I learned his lesson so well, now I can’t forget the teacher.