Never Evers Read online

  ‘This is amazing!’ I shouted across the snow.

  We started to walk up again but the wind had got stronger and it felt almost impossible to take just one step. I couldn’t see more than a few paces ahead and even then all I could see was snow.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Jack shouted.

  ‘Yeah, but maybe we should go back and come again tomorrow.’

  ‘OK,’ he yelled. Even though he was next to me I could barely hear him. We turned to go back down the slope. The snow was really deep and picking up a foot and moving it forward seemed to take for ever.

  ‘Which way is back?’ I said.

  We both stood looking around us but everything had turned white and it was impossible to see which way the nearest lift was.

  ‘I think it’s this way,’ Jack said, pointing, so we started to walk. The wind was freezing and it was hitting my face so hard it hurt, as if I was being punched every time. I couldn’t feel any of my body any more.

  We stopped and looked around us again. And I think we realized at exactly the same time how frightened we both were.

  Jack

  The amazingness of the last hour was being replaced quickly by a feeling of nasty, cold dread.

  I tried to act a bit like that Bear Grylls bloke my mum fancies off the TV; he never looks scared – he just seems confident and totally in control. But then, that’s probably because he always has a camera crew with him. Anyone can look hard when they’ve got tons of people and equipment around them. I’d like to see Bear when he’s on his own in a blizzard armed only with a tea tray. Then we’d see how tough he really is.

  I looked back up the slope we’d just sledded down. I could barely even see the top of it. The only people around were bobbing along on ski lifts way above us. But there was no sign of where the lifts started or finished.

  The snow was making everything look fuzzy, thick white blotches blurring my vision at every turn. A chill was spreading fast from my fingers and toes to the rest of my body. Mouse was staring at me, eyes wide, her nose and mouth buried under her jacket collar. I guessed it was up to me to make a suggestion.

  ‘Erm … We should keep going down, maybe?’ I said. ‘I mean … down is the definitely the right way when you’re on a mountain, isn’t it?’

  ‘I guess so …’ She didn’t look convinced. ‘Is that, like, a survival motto or something?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so,’ I lied. I hugged my arms round myself. I was starting to feel seriously cold. ‘Can I get Roland’s leather jacket back? I’m not trying to look cool or anything. I’m just absolutely freezing.’

  She handed it to me, smiling, but there was no humour behind it. ‘What do you think we should do?’ she said.

  I had literally no idea. We started traipsing downwards, each footstep more difficult than the last as the snowy ground steadily grew underneath us. I could feel freezing water squelching in my right boot.

  ‘We’ve definitely seen that tree before,’ said Mouse, after a few minutes.

  ‘That could be any tree.’

  ‘No, it’s all bent and buckled, like the Whomping Willow in Harry Potter. I remember seeing it before.’

  ‘So, your navigation method is based on fictional trees?’

  She didn’t even crack a smile. Which was fair enough, as the situation was far from funny.

  ‘Jack, I’m serious. I think we’re just going round in circles. Are we even going down?’

  It was hard to tell when the snow was so thick. I could barely see three metres ahead of me. ‘I’m not sure,’ I yelled over the wind. ‘We might be going sideways.’

  My teeth were chattering from the cold. I didn’t want Mouse to know how frightened I was. We’d spent most of the afternoon trying to get lost, and now all I wanted was for us to be found.

  It was getting steadily darker, and the huge white floodlights above us started to flicker. A few came on, dragging long spidery shadows off the trees and across the ground. But most of them just sputtered pathetically and went out again.

  I looked up and instantly felt another dull thump of fear in my throat. The ski lifts had stopped. There was no one on them now, and they just hung eerily in mid-air, creaking in the swirling snow. We couldn’t even follow them down to safety; the cable stretched across two slopes, leaving the chairs dangling over a ravine that must have been fifty metres deep.

  ‘Jack, do you think we’re in trouble?’ Mouse shouted.

  ‘What, you mean, like, with our teachers?’

  ‘No, I meant more than that.’ She bit her lip. ‘Like … real trouble?’

  She tried to step towards me, but stumbled and fell into the deep snow. I rushed to pick her up and felt her trembling even through her thick ski jacket.

  ‘We need to keep going,’ I said. ‘We’ll be all right.’

  We kept walking. I had no idea where, or even in what direction. It just felt better to move than to stand still and actually think about how terrifying the situation was.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a dark, round shape on the edge of the slope. ‘What’s that?’ I said, pointing.

  Mouse squinted at it through the flakes. ‘Oh my god … is it? Wait. I think …’ She started marching off towards the shape. ‘I know where we are!’

  ‘Hang on!’ I stomped after her. The snow was now spilling in over the top of my boots. I couldn’t even feel my feet.

  ‘Yes!’ Mouse turned round, beaming at me. ‘I was here yesterday – this is the igloo we built.’

  The blurry shape was indeed a rickety, not-very-stable-looking igloo. It was about the size of a two-person tent, and its entrance was half blocked by snow. Mouse dropped down in front of it.

  ‘Let’s get in here and wait till the snow stops. It’ll be warmer.’

  ‘How will it be warmer? It’s made of ice!’

  ‘Just trust me!’

  She started digging at the snow around the entrance. I got down and helped her. We knelt there, shivering and shovelling. Soon, we’d got rid of enough snow that Mouse could crawl in through the entrance. I followed her, and scrambled in to the weird, echoey cavern inside. The ice blocks tinted us a glassy, light-blue colour. The wind was muffled. It was warmer in here.

  ‘If we get out of this alive, I’m going to google “Why is it warm in an igloo?”’ I said.

  ‘At least we’ve got some shelter. What are the other things you’re supposed to do in a snowstorm?’

  I thought about it. ‘I think you’re supposed to grab hold of someone, for the body heat and stuff.’

  Mouse smiled awkwardly and stared down at the floor. I immediately felt my cheeks get hotter. There’s a good tip for Bear Grylls’s next series: if you’re ever worried about freezing to death in the Alps, just say something unbelievably embarrassing to a girl you fancy. Your face will warm up in no time.

  ‘We don’t have to do that, obviously,’ I said.

  ‘Sure,’ she grinned. ‘I don’t think things are that desperate yet.’ Then she winced. ‘Not that it’d have to be desperate for us to … I just meant …’ She shook her head. ‘Oh, sorry. You know what I mean.’

  I nodded, but I had absolutely no idea. I wish girls were just a tiny, tiny bit easier to understand. I looked around us and saw there were loads of names scratched into the ice blocks.

  ‘What’s with all these names?’

  She seemed like she was thinking carefully about how to answer. ‘Erm … it was just, some of the girls thought it’d be funny to write the names of people they fancy on the walls. That’s all.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  There was silence while we listened to the wind whistling outside the entrance. From somewhere, I got the nerve to ask ‘Did you write anyone?’

  More silence. ‘No. Not everyone did it.’

  I spotted ‘ROLAND’ scratched in massive capitals near the entrance. Maybe Mouse had written it. I suddenly remembered how we’d got in to this mess – because Roland had wanted to speak to her. He liked her, too. He liked he
r enough to basically risk his whole career by running out into a crowd to find her. How could I compete with that?

  ‘Not surprising that someone wrote Roland’s name,’ I said quietly. ‘Everyone seems to love him. Unless it’s another Roland.’

  ‘There’s only one Roland,’ Mouse laughed. Then she nodded at my jacket. ‘Well, two, actually.’

  She stared back at the same spot on the ceiling. I followed her gaze and saw that, among the jumble of boys’ names up there, one was written very neatly and carefully in the centre – ‘JACK’.

  I felt a little rumble in my chest. It could have been written by anyone, about any Jack in the world, but seeing her stare at it the way she was felt weirdly great.

  ‘I guess you’ll be able to become a proper Roland fan when you’re living in Paris,’ I said. ‘You can join the fan club and everything.’

  She looked at me, and her face was suddenly heavy with worry. ‘The thing is, Jack … the Paris school …’ She breathed out slowly. ‘I’m not really going there. I lied.’

  There was a pause. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, that’s all right.’ Another pause. ‘So, where are you going?’

  She was staring blankly at her ski boots, stretched out in front of her. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’m back at Bluecoats now for good. I got assessed out of my old ballet school. I wasn’t good enough. I guess I just wanted to … pretend that hadn’t happened.’

  I kept silent. I could feel that she wanted to say more.

  ‘I guess … My mum thought coming on this trip would be good for me. Like dancing was interchangeable, and I could just get in to skiing instead. Or if not skiing, then, I don’t know, tennis or chess or whatever. The thing that gets to me the most is that I know she is gutted too.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘She framed my first pointe shoes and put them in the kitchen. And going up the stairs there are these pictures of me dancing. At the bottom it’s me in a tutu when I was three and you get to the top and it’s just blank wall. And I know what she wanted to put there. Me dancing at the Royal Opera House. Her daughter, the ballerina. And now she doesn’t know whether to take them all down or whether to leave this blank wall to remind us that it’s not going to happen.’

  She was breathing quickly, angrily.

  ‘What do you want her to do?’ I asked.

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ She didn’t sound angry any more, just sad. ‘I just want it to still happen. So badly.’

  ‘Is there any chance it still could?’

  She shook her head and opened her mouth to speak but then didn’t. Instead, she started to cry.

  It was soft at first; it was like she didn’t even realize she was doing it. I sat there beside her, blinking, paralysed by panic. My first thought was: What if someone found us now? It wouldn’t exactly look great. Me and a crying girl, alone in an igloo.

  I shuffled closer to her and put my hand on her shoulder. I could feel her whole body shaking. I wanted to put my arms around her so badly, but I knew I would never have the nerve. I just wanted her to not feel like this. I wanted to somehow take the sadness out of her.

  She didn’t even seem to notice my hand. She just gave this long, heavy sigh and said, ‘The worst thing is, I feel like I don’t even belong in my own house. I haven’t lived there properly for two years. It’s like I’m a guest.’

  I squeezed her shoulder a bit tighter. Without looking at me, she put her hand up, on top of mine.

  ‘You must miss your friends,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘I shared a room for over two years with the same girls and now I think they feel weird about it. Embarrassed that I had to leave. There is this day just before Christmas when everyone gets a new colour leotard to show they are going up to the next level at school. And I just didn’t get one. And they all put theirs away so I couldn’t see. And I knew they wanted to start dancing in them but they couldn’t until I left.’

  There was another silence while I felt her shoulder shivering.

  ‘That’s why I said that stuff about Paris. I wanted to pretend, I guess. To pretend I was still good at dancing.’

  ‘What are you on about?’ I said. ‘You are good at dancing! I saw you with my own eyes this afternoon, Super-Mouse. You were amazing. And that was with ski boots and a massive jacket on. So I can only imagine how amazing you’d be in a proper leotard thingy and those tiny pointy shoes.’ Her frown started to melt a bit at the sides, and she looked up at me. ‘Plus, you started a dance party in the middle of a ski slope! I bet no one in the history of ballet schools has ever done that. So who cares about what anyone thinks? No one can stop you dancing, if that’s what makes you happy.’

  She laughed, and pushed her long hair back behind her ears. The tears had stopped. Her eyes were twinkling now as she smiled at me. She looked so fit. ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right,’ she nodded. ‘Thanks, Jack.’

  ‘Trust me, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re great at the thing you love. Think about me … I’m supposed to be the frontman of our band, but I’m totally useless. We were down to play our school’s Band Night a couple of weeks back, and I totally bottled it. How can I play in a band when I can’t even get up on stage in front of people?’

  She sniffed and wiped her eyes. ‘Well … you kind of just did. I mean, you stood up in front of pretty much every journalist and crazy super fan in France.’

  I laughed. ‘Yeah, but I was pretending to be someone else.’

  ‘Well, maybe that’s it,’ she shrugged. ‘When you’re on stage with your band, just … pretend to be someone else. That way, all your worries and fears and stuff don’t matter. Because you’re not you.’

  I thought about it. It wasn’t a bad idea. She carried on. ‘Pretend to be Roland, if that helps. Just think: I’m not me, I’m Roland … What would Roland do?’

  I knew exactly what Roland would do in this situation. I wanted to do it, too.

  Mouse was looking up at me, a little smile tugging at the right-hand side of her mouth. Her eyelashes were still damp from the tears, making them seem longer and darker as they fluttered around her big, grey eyes.

  Almost without thinking, I buried all my worries and fears deep in the snow, and leant in to kiss her.

  Was he doing what I thought he was doing? I closed my eyes. It felt like I had become my heartbeat because it was so loud. My shivering had turned to nervous shaking. It was going to happen.

  And then we heard the noise.

  Muffled and far away, but definitely there. The wail of a siren.

  Jack pulled back slightly and we both looked at the entrance to the igloo. It had snowed even more since we had dug our way in, and we were going to have to dig our way out even further.

  ‘I feel like we are going to have to climb out of it,’ I said. ‘What if they pass us before we make it?’

  We both scrambled at the snow urgently. I climbed out first and gave Jack my hand and pulled as hard as I could to help him out. My legs were so cold they hurt. Sharp, stabbing, intense pain from being so freezing for so long. It was really dark, even against the brilliant-white backdrop. And it was still snowing, but a more gentle, Christmas-card snow.

  The siren’s screech was almost deafening now. A torch danced over me for a second and disappeared before coming back and fixing its gaze. It was on top of a huge, red snow-plough. It charged through the powder like a tank and stopped. A man and a woman in uniform got out and ran towards us.

  ‘Are you Matilda and Jack?’ the woman said. I nodded. ‘Was there anyone else with you?’ she asked, and we both shook our heads.

  Before we knew it we were being wrapped in huge foil blankets and bundled into the back of the plough. The inside was exactly like an ambulance.

  The woman took my temperature and asked me lots of questions about how I felt. Realizing we were OK was followed by an awful, gut-wrenching horror about the trouble we would be in when we got back. I wondered if I would be expelled. I had run away. We had run away.
It was probably very, very bad indeed. I could tell Jack was thinking the same thing. He was nodding to himself and taking deep breaths. The paramedic man was prodding him and then he nodded to the paramedic woman.

  ‘You’re both very lucky,’ he said, almost crossly, like we had meant it to happen and now he was missing his toasted teacakes or something.

  I didn’t know if I wanted to go back down the mountain and face Miss Mardle.

  I wondered if Lauren knew I had run away with Roland. Or maybe Roland had now told everyone that in fact I had run away with Jack. He pulled the foil blanket really tight; he must have been even colder than me. I wondered whether he was thinking about Lauren. Did he think about her the way I thought about him? I want to think I’m the kind of person who wouldn’t have kissed him. Who would have leant away dramatically and said I couldn’t possibly when he was with someone else. But I would have kissed him, I know I would. I was scared but I wanted to. I wondered how many girls Jack had kissed, and then I realized I had been staring at him for ages and I looked down.

  ‘Do you think they’ll phone our parents?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know. How long were we lost for?’

  Jack shrugged. ‘I mean, we’re fine, so nothing bad has actually happened.’

  ‘I know, but that’s never the point with teachers. It’s always much more about what might have happened. They are obsessed about that. What-if scenarios.’

  I was a bit obsessed by what-if scenarios myself, to be honest.

  We both got out of the plough slowly, knowing what was coming. But that’s the thing about getting in to trouble. It never happens when you expect it to, always when you are sailing along thinking everything is fine.

  Miss Mardle and Jack’s teacher were waiting together, side by side like a mum and dad. But then, like a mum, Miss Mardle hugged me and I could tell she was relieved. Us dying wouldn’t have looked very good for her really, I suppose.

  They spoke to the paramedics and took some forms and we walked back to the hotel, still wearing the ridiculous blankets.