Never Evers Page 8

  After about forty-five minutes of giggling and boring chat, me and Max finally crawled back out the window, both still very much on zero. As we trudged back to our room through the snow, Max had muttered about how we needed to keep trying with them because they were so fit, but I was much more interested in seeing Mouse again. Even as I’d fallen asleep, her long hair and big grey eyes were the last things flickering through my head.

  I sat up and stretched out in the sunlight. I opened the curtains and saw the Alps properly for the first time. Under the blazing sun, the massive white mountains were actually sparkling. They looked like huge scoops of melting ice cream. The idea that we would be trying to snowboard down them in about an hour suddenly felt real and properly terrifying. I shook my head and told myself to get a grip. This trip was supposed to be about finally getting some guts, after all.

  I heard the splash of the tap from the bathroom, and Toddy emerged through the door.

  ‘Ah, finally! You’re up.’

  ‘All right?’ I croaked.

  ‘OK, so quite a weird thing happened when you two were gone last night. Here, wake Max up – I can’t be bothered to go through this twice.’

  I chucked my pillow at Max, who was just a misshapen lump under his duvet. He groaned and popped his head out.

  ‘What?’ he whispered. ‘Why?’

  Toddy started speaking, slowly, as if he was still trying to piece the story together in his head. ‘OK, so listen. At about midnight last night, I was just about to go to bed, when I heard this sort of scratching outside the door. I looked over and saw this little scrap of paper had been pushed underneath it. So, I walked over and picked it up, right, but as soon as I did, I could hear whispering right outside. I opened the door, and there were three girls just lying on the floor in the corridor, poking a bit of coat hanger under our door.’

  ‘What?!’ Max was now fully awake. More awake than I had ever seen him in my life. He was sat bolt upright in bed, his eyes burning a hole in Toddy. ‘What girls? What did they look like? Did they mention me? What happened?’

  ‘They were like … quite pretty, I suppose,’ said Toddy. ‘One had, like, really long brownish hair, one had sort of wavy black hair, and one had curly hair.’

  Me and Max swapped open-mouthed grins. ‘Oh my god!’

  ‘So, what happened next, Toddy?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I said, “Is this yours?” because I was holding the note. And the black-haired one said, “Yeah.” And then the curly-haired one said, “Can we have it back, please?”’

  There was silence.

  ‘And then what?’ urged Max, slapping his own face in frustration.

  Toddy looked at us blankly. ‘Well, I gave them the note back and then they left.’

  More silence. Max’s left eye was twitching. He looked like a malfunctioning robot.

  ‘You …’ His knuckles were white from gripping the bedsheet. ‘You … gave them the note back?’

  Toddy nodded.

  ‘Did you read the note first?’

  Toddy shook his head.

  ‘So, you have no idea what the note actually said?’

  Toddy shook his head again. ‘They asked for it back,’ he said simply. ‘What else was I gonna do?’

  Max jabbed his finger at the window, furious. ‘So, if I ask you to throw yourself off that mountain, will you do that, too? Because that is literally what I am now asking you to do, you absolute, absolute div!’

  Before Toddy could defend himself, Flynn banged on the door.

  ‘Breakfast time, lads! Make sure you have a sizeable one – we’ve got a big day ahead. Snowboarding all morning and afternoon, and then we’re going ice skating in the evening. Chop-chop!’

  Max was still fuming as we got dressed and headed out. He was even too busy moaning at Toddy to enjoy everyone laughing at the Roland poster he’d defaced.

  To be honest, I didn’t care that Toddy hadn’t read the note. Just the fact that Mouse and her mates had put a note under our door was something. Notes under doors are generally a good thing, I figured. Surely you wouldn’t put a note under someone’s door unless you liked them? Notes under doors should be added to the curriculum, along with giggling.

  Breakfast was a bustling, shouting, every-man-for-himself type of thing. You grabbed a tray and loaded it up with strange French cereal and slightly stale croissants and weird, horrible tea that tasted wrong no matter how much milk you put in.

  As we ate, we told Toddy what had happened last night.

  ‘Basically,’ said Max, ‘we had two different dates with six different girls in the space of one night! That’s probably never been done before in the history of dating. We could probably get into the Guinness Book of Dating Records.’

  ‘No such thing,’ said Toddy, through a mouthful of cereal.

  ‘Yeah, well, you wouldn’t know about it even if there was,’ sniped Max. ‘The only way you’d get into the Guinness Book of Dating Records is through being the least dateable bloke in history.’

  Toddy swallowed his cereal and nodded thoughtfully. ‘OK, cool. Well, as soon as someone invents the Guinness Book of Dating Records, I’ll start to worry about that.’

  Max thumped Toddy’s arm. ‘Oi! So, that’s the note-girls, right? Those three?’

  I turned, and my stomach fluttered a bit at the sight of Mouse’s long hair swishing as she walked into the canteen with her friends.

  Toddy nodded. ‘Yup, that’s them.’

  Max was squinting at Keira. ‘Actually, that Keira girl is well fit.’ He turned to me. ‘We should go and talk to them, Jack. Try to find out what was in that note.’

  Before I could answer, Ed Deacon, who was sitting further down the table, jumped in. ‘As if you lot met all these random girls last night,’ he laughed.

  ‘We did, actually, Ed,’ sniffed Max. ‘Like I said – six girls, two rooms, one night.’ He added, ‘You do the maths,’ even though there wasn’t really any maths to do.

  Jamie, who was sat next to him, cracked up. ‘How many did you get off with, then?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t … “Getting off” is a broad term, isn’t it?’ Max spluttered. ‘We were basically just laying the groundwork for some serious getting off tonight.’

  ‘So, in other words, you got off with zero girls?’ sneered Jamie.

  ‘Same as every other night of their lives, then,’ said Ed, and the two of them burst out laughing.

  ‘Shut up, Ed,’ seethed Max.

  ‘I don’t believe you even talked to those girls, let alone sneaked into their room,’ Jamie shot back.

  Max stood up, scraping his chair loudly across the floor. ‘Right. Fine. Jack, let’s go.’

  I had no idea what he meant. ‘Go where? What you on about?’

  He nodded over at Mouse, Connie and Keira, who were now sat on the other side of the busy hall. ‘Let’s go and talk to those hot girls, who we know really well, and who we spent last night with, and then maybe these absolute idiots’ – he indicated Ed and Jamie – ‘will shut up.’

  ‘I don’t know, man …’ I said. I wasn’t sure I was ready to speak to Mouse again yet. Especially in front of half my year group. I felt like I needed more time to prepare.

  ‘Of course the lead singer of The Bottlers doesn’t want to go over there,’ Jamie cackled, and I felt my cheeks flush slightly.

  Max gave me a stern, let’s-prove-them-wrong type of look. I sighed and stood up. ‘Fine.’

  As we walked over, I could feel Jamie and Ed’s eyes on our backs. I thought I saw Mouse smile at me, but as we got right up to their table they didn’t seem to have even clocked us.

  ‘Hey!’ I said brightly. But Mouse didn’t look up from her cereal.

  Max added, ‘How’s it going?’

  None of them answered. Something was definitely wrong. Then Keira stood up with her tray and said, ‘Yeah, we were just going, actually.’ She didn’t even look at us.

  Connie and Mouse both stood up, too, and the three of them walk
ed over to the counter, dumped their trays and left the hall.

  I could hear the laughter from the other side of the room. I felt that same hot, sticky humiliation I’d felt at Sarvan’s party and on Band Night. What had happened? What did we do wrong?

  ‘What. The. Hell?!’ hissed Max. He shook his head, and ran a hand across his stubbly hair. ‘Girls are mental.’

  I was about to agree when a tap on my shoulder spun me round.

  ‘Hey, guys,’ smiled Lauren. She was dressed all in white – white furry bobble hat, thick white scarf, white ski suit. She looked seriously amazing. I noticed the laughter on the other side of the room had stopped.

  ‘Er, hi, you all right?’ I offered. Melody and Scarlett were either side of her, and Max was not-very-subtly boggling his eyes at Scarlett, who also looked pretty unbelievable with her hair pulled up in to a topknot through a bright red headband.

  ‘So, listen, Jack,’ Scarlett said to me, with a weird, twinkly grin on her lips. ‘We were just saying last night, after you guys left … You look a bit like that Roland guy. The one on all the posters.’

  Max suddenly found his voice and burst out laughing. ‘Yeah! We were saying that, too!’ He whacked me on the shoulder. ‘Poor guy. Must be tough, being a dead ringer for the biggest loser in the whole of France.’

  Scarlett answered him, still looking at me. ‘I don’t know … Lauren quite fancies Roland, actually, don’t you?’

  She nudged Lauren, who smiled at me and shrugged, innocently. I got the sudden sense that they’d rehearsed this whole thing.

  Scarlett carried on, ‘And if she fancies him, and you look like him, that must mean …’ She wrinkled her nose in mock confusion.

  Lauren grinned and pinched Scarlett on the arm. ‘Yeah, don’t make it too obvious, Scar …’

  All three of them giggled, while me and Max stood there trying desperately to follow what was going on.

  ‘Anyway, maybe see you tonight if you’re going to the ice rink, too?’

  ‘Yeah!’ said Max. ‘We’ll be there.’

  ‘Cool, see you then.’

  They glided off to get breakfast, and I tried to process what had just happened. I turned to Max, but he was busy flicking highly insulting hand gestures in Jamie and Ed’s general direction.

  ‘We should have brought our food with us,’ Keira said as we marched purposefully out of the dining hall.

  ‘Shall we run back in and get it?’ Connie glanced back. ‘I was going to get a coconut yogurt.’

  ‘You can’t let the team down now for a yogurt.’ Keira linked arms with us, dragging us down the corridor and out in to the brilliant sunshine. Seeing an awe-inspiring mountain range right there made me feel like I was on a film set. Home and White Lodge felt like an alternate universe.

  Connie lay down in the snow and started making an angel, and after watching her for a couple of seconds, Keira did the same.

  I stretched out next to them and stared up at the massive expanse of blue. I felt tiny next to the mountains and under the endless sky.

  ‘I sort of wish we had stayed to see what Jack was going to say,’ I said. The snow was deeper than I thought and with all my padded clothes I felt cocooned in it and even a bit sleepy. ‘Now we’ll never know.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Keira said from inside her snow-angel outline. ‘Now we’ve done it, I do kind of wish we had let him say loads of stuff and then walked out.’

  ‘No way.’ Connie was indignant. ‘We don’t need to hear what he has to say. He’s a two-timing love rat. And a hamster-hater.’

  ‘Connie, he didn’t two-time me,’ I laughed. ‘To do that you have to be going out with someone. Or at least have kissed them. I think we’re being a bit harsh. I mean, we spoke to him for about five minutes and that’s it. Does that mean Alfie is—’

  ‘I love you, Alfie,’ Keira shouted randomly at the sky like he had appeared there. Like for someone to say his name without her affirming her love for him was unlucky.

  ‘Yeah, but he’s not two-timing you, is he?’ I felt like I had proved my point.

  ‘I wish,’ Keira said. ‘Then he would have to have one-timed me.’

  I had gone over it a million times in my head since last night. Whether Jack had really been looking at me during the film. Why he had come to our room, why he had gone to their room. What he was thinking. What he was doing. Whether or not he liked me at all. Whether he had liked me and then just liked Lauren better.

  Keira and Connie had talked about it loads as we fell asleep. I didn’t mind them going over it, but I didn’t know what to say. The whole thing was so confusing. Jack must fancy Lauren. And who could blame him really? I would choose Lauren over me. It felt like I had landed a role in a film without even auditioning. It was weird being one of those girls. One who is always in the drama. One who flounces out of places, all Scarlett O’Hara. It was so far away from who I was.

  Last night I dreamt I was dancing. It was the first time I’d dreamt about ballet since leaving White Lodge. In my dreams I had danced and danced and then when I woke up I had felt tingly and alive and wanted to dance again.

  I had wriggled out of my sleeping bag carefully, passed Connie and Keira and gone in to the bathroom. I’d closed the door and looked at myself in the mirror, wound my hair in to a bun and rolled my pyjama bottoms up. I had warmed up properly, the same way I have done for years. As I’d stretched I felt my body elongating and waking up. I still had bruises from falling, but they were fading. And the callouses on my feet and weird bumps on the ridges of my toes were less cracked. But it felt good. To be totally consumed again, to be blank apart from that. In the mirror there was a little fleck of toothpaste. I’d focused on it and started to turn in the tiny space, catching my eye as I came back round. Spinning. Dancing.

  We lay encased in our snow angels, staring at the sky, until the others came out of breakfast. We got our stuff and snaked down behind Miss Mardle to the ski-hire shop.

  ‘It feels crazy to be doing this,’ I said staring up at the mountains. ‘I wonder who invented skiing? They just look so … huge. Surely it’s dangerous. It’s weird they even let us do it. They won’t allow fizzy drinks but they’ll let us throw ourselves down a mountain.’ Everyone just presumed I would be good at it because of ballet. But it seemed like the opposite of ballet. So imprecise and wild and dangerous.

  ‘Forty-five people a year die skiing,’ Connie said matter-of-factly and then told the girl behind the counter her shoe size.

  ‘So, what, if only forty-four have died one year, do they, like, push a random off a mountain?’ Keira said, as she was handed her boots.

  ‘It’s an average,’ Connie shot back haughtily.

  I chewed on my coat cord and took deep breaths as I was handed a ginormous pair of boots. Everything felt so heavy and restricting. The thought of wearing them and being locked into skis made me feel a bit sick. I like being in control of my body. I didn’t want to give it to a mountain and weigh it down with all these things.

  ‘Well, if anyone’s dying, it’s not you,’ Keira said to me. ‘You’re gonna be amazing. You can balance on your toes. You’re strong and uber-coordinated. If anyone’s gonna be dying, it’s ol’ crazy bones.’ She pulled at Connie’s ponytail of curls and it sprang back. ‘She can’t even make it through Uno uninjured.’

  Keira seemed so sure that I would be good at it. But what if I wasn’t? And she didn’t even know that I wasn’t the dancer I had made myself out to be. What if it was going to be another thing that I just didn’t quite realize my potential in? My life was just a series of ‘not quite good enoughs’, really.

  ‘Maybe we should have done a “don’t-die-skiing spell”,’ I said, as we filtered into a room to get the boots on.

  ‘Do you think skiing’s popular in the witchcraft community?’ asked Connie, wandering over and picking up a random souvenir pen and flourishing it to see if it had wand potential.

  ‘Connie, you really don’t seem to be taking the coven seriously. But
, I dunno,’ Keira said, ‘I can’t really see Professor McGonagall and Winnie the Witch bombing down a mountain in all-in-one jumpsuits. Plus, they could just fly to the bottom.’

  Walking around felt unnatural, heavy. Like I was in a spacesuit getting ready for a moon landing.

  ‘She’s more likely to be one of the forty-five,’ Connie whispered quite loudly.

  Lauren was wearing all white. Even her bobble hat was white, trimmed with a white furry pom-pom. Only her sunglasses were black, framed by her blonde hair. She looked like a celebrity. ‘If she’s caught in an avalanche they’ll never find her.’ Connie hissed.

  ‘Here’s hoping,’ Keira said. ‘Is that why you’re dressed as a massive highlighter pen?’

  Connie was impressively orange. Keira was all in black, as usual. I looked down at myself: a hotchpotch of random things my mum had borrowed or bought in the bargain bin at TK Maxx. It hadn’t crossed my mind that looking cool while skiing was a thing.

  ‘OK, OK, let’s do this.’ A girl shouted and clapped her hands above her head. ‘I’m Tania, your instructor,’ she said. ‘Let’s head on over to the bunny slope.’ Her accent was harsher than French. German, maybe.

  She wasn’t that much older than us but she didn’t look like anyone I’d ever seen in real life before. She had cropped hair dyed bright blonde with silver glitter running through it. She looked like she’d just walked out of a club.

  The bunny slope didn’t exactly sound top-of-a-mountain scary, but I felt sick. I looked back at the ski-hire hut and wondered if I should ask to go to the toilet and then just not come back. Would they even notice I wasn’t there?

  Maybe it would be OK after all.

  We all got in to a line and were kind of conveyor-belted to the top of the slope. When we got there, we huddled around Tania, and then out of nowhere she said, ‘Right, I’m gonna put you in pairs.’

  My stomach tightened because we were a three. I didn’t have a natural pair. Girls shuffled closer together, showing Tania who they wanted to be put with. Making the decision easy for her. Connie and Keira stayed close to me, but I looked down to try and melt in to the background.