I S A A C
The further we went north, the whiter everything became. At first, the snow covered only the peaks of the mountains on the horizon, then the slopes coming all the way down, and on both sides of the road, the top of every pine tree.
In the last stretch of the ride, there was snow everywhere, the whitest snow I had ever seen. I had been skiing with my family before when I was younger, but there had only been snow on the higher slopes, and not even all of them. This was different. This was very different. I had thought of missing all of this.
Ethan had called last night, saying his mom hadn't been home in the last few days. She hadn't shown up for work either and she wasn't picking up her phone. My mom looked over Ron while Ethan, my dad and I drove around looking for her. Ethan hadn't let us call the police. He never did. Probably because he knew what they would find on his mom.
In any case, we did find her around three a.m. at a bar no one went to for fun. Ethan took her home, as he always did, and insisted I went on the ski trip all the same. This was nothing new, after all, and he knew what to do now that his mom was home, because he had been doing it since he was a kid. My dad insisted on staying with him to help, and mom said she would look after Ron for the whole weekend if needed. Ethan had agreed so long as I went home to sleep a few hours before the bus this morning.
I called him once we made it to the resort and he said everything was fine. His mom was sleeping in his room and my dad was making barbecue chicken in his backyard while my mom made mashed potatoes with Ronny in the kitchen.
"Now get off the phone and go have fun," he hurried me.
I looked up from my shoes, buried in the snow. Coach Sargent was helping us all rent snowsuits, and snowboards, and skis. The guys were all fighting over who got what, except for Eddie, who was laughing at something one of the cheerleaders was saying.
I looked back down at my shoes, "I would rather have fun with you."
"Yeah, I love you too, bye." He hung up. I called him a bitch under my breath and joined the others. Eddie was saying something about some war movie I hadn't watched with that actor everyone was obsessed with these days and the girls were all smiling and agreeing.
I watched him make them smile some more while Coach Sargent went around giving everyone what they needed to hit the slopes, and then disappeared inside a lift to go throw himself off a mountain, apparently. Eddie said Coach went skiing every winter with his family, and that he probably wasn't going to kill himself doing it, and I believed him. He had brought his own skis after all.
Some of the guys probably were going to kill themselves, because they all followed him, even after being told to stick to the easier slopes at first. I had wanted to do the same, obviously, but Eddie had never skied before, and didn't have a death wish like me â his words, not mine â and so I decided I would stay behind with him.
This was a good decision because Eddie was good at absolutely everything he ever did and the next thing I knew he was already racing me down the hills and helping out everyone around him. Mostly Gary, who had followed the others up the mountain, and came back down on a snowmobile, crying, because they had all left him behind with no idea how to come down without breaking something.
Eddie didn't say anything about the crying, but I told Gary I had cried my eyes out too the first time I went down one of the bigger slopes, mostly because a bear had shown up between the trees, and I was barely ten, and had just seen a movie about Big Foot. Gary laughed and followed us around for the rest of the day.
We had lunch at a restaurant in the mountains, courtesy of Coach Sargent, and the guys spent the entire time talking about whether or not they would suck a dick for a million dollars. Next to me, the only thing Eddie did was shake his head, and pretend not to hear them, while eating his vegan burger. Coach, on the other hand, was very invested, sipping from his beer, a large grin on his face.
"Isaac, what about you?" Jacob asked me, sunglasses on, and his smirk, always his smirk. I hadn't seen him all morning. Gary had told us they had taken beers with them up the mountain and that Jacob had been drunk by the time they reached the top. Eddie had said he had been to the French Alps enough times to be able to ski with his eyes closed, but I had seen him look for Jacob all morning. He seemed sober now.
I shrugged at him, and said, "Absolutely, I would."
Jack and Finn started laughing immediately, and Liam asked, "You would suck a dick?"
"For a million dollars? Of course!" I would do it for less actually, but I kept that to myself so as to avoid a hate crime. The twins were chocking on their burgers, and Jacob's smirk was gigantic. Next to me, Eddie was pretending he wasn't smiling by yawning.
"That's fucking gay," Jacob said before taking a bite off his burger.
"It's not gay," Coach said. "It's financially smart. You should all learn something from Isaac. Do you know how expensive it is to be alive?"
"So, Coach, you would suck a dick too?" Liam asked.
"If it would help send my kids to college, yes, I would, and you would too! You're all just lying. Don't think I don't know that."
Needless to say, I fucking loved Coach. After lunch, he went to his room to take a nap and warned us against going back to the slopes right away, would we not throw up the food he had paid for. But then again, he didn't really care, so as long as we could still play tonight.
That being said, we all went back to the skiing. Finn threw up, but Finn had eaten his food, and whatever was left of everyone else's, and also waffles covered in chocolate and whipped cream for dessert.
The girls joined us on the slopes after a while, which meant the guys got more and more competitive with each other so as to impress them all. Kylie Green, who I knew the name of because I had voted for her to be president of the student body, seemed to love indulging them in their pissing contest. She would tell them to do this and that, and of course, they would, and then she would applaud, like they were little kids, and she was their babysitter.
Eddie found it hilarious. So did Kylie's friend, a black girl I remembered once had a vicious fight with a teacher about the 13th amendment and another time slapped a guy across the face for touching her ass in line for the cafeteria. I was also pretty sure she had made out with Ethan at some party last summer, and, according to the guys, she had made out with Eddie too at a party Jacob threw in the first week of classes. This was to say, I wanted very much to be like her.
Next to me, Liam was trying to catch his breath, bent down over himself, hands on both his knees. When he came back up, there was a grin on his lips. He was looking at Eddie helping Kylie's friend get up.
"He hasn't hit it yet," he said. "He's trying to, but he hasn't."
"What are you talking about?"
"Edward and Allora," he said, putting his hands on his waist, his face twisting in an effort to breathe better. I looked at the girl again, smashing a snowball on Eddie's cheek.
So her name was Allora. I thought it was Adora.
"You think he's interested in her?" I asked Liam.
"In fucking her, yeah," he said.
"What's wrong with you?" I asked, slapping the back of his head. Before he could answer, I asked another question, "How long have you known Eddie?"
Liam shrugged, "Since sophomore."
"And you still don't know him at all?"
He looked at Allora, and said, "Look at that ass and tell me you wouldn't fuck that."
"That's fucked up." He was fucked up.
"Not more fucked up than you sucking dick for money, you whore," he said, breaking out into laughter before pushing himself off the edge and going back to being shit at skiing.
That night, in the locker room, after winning the game, I asked Eddie about Allora. Everyone else had left already. Someone had asked around for a bar that wouldn't card them and gotten an address out of a local. I had just spent hours running around a field in the freezing cold. I wasn't in a hurry to go anywhere just yet.
Eddie was putting on his jeans when I asked him, but he stopped to look at me.
"What about her?"
I was sitting on the bench in the clothes he had let me borrow, all of me smelling like him.
"She seems to really like you."
He shook his head, "Who was it?"
"What?"
"Who told you? Was it Jack?"
"No." I smiled. "It was Liam."
"Please don't believe a word he says."
"So you didn't make out with her at a party?"
He hid his face in his hands, his jeans still unzipped and holding up just barely around his waist, his plaid boxer shorts underneath. He dropped his hands to his waist, water still falling from his hair and dripping down his shoulders.
"I was very drunk," he told me. "And I felt shit about it after."
"Why? She's very pretty. Very smart too."
"Yeah, I know, but I don't remember anything from that night. I don't remember what I said, or what I did â"
"Well, you must have said and done all the right things, because, again, she seems to really like you," I stopped him. "Do you like her?"
"Of course," he said, putting on his shirt and tucking it in his jeans before zipping them up. I watched him get a knit sweater from his bag and put it on. He had given me the one he had meant to wear tomorrow. "She seems so much like she has everything figured out, like she knows exactly what she's thinking, and what she's saying, and what she's doing, all day, every day. She's just so sure of herself, you know? So are you, by the way. It's very impressive."
The door opened. Coach Sargent walked in, a hot dog in his hand, his breath a cloud in front of him from the cold outside.
"What are you still doing here? The bus left half an hour ago."
I looked at Eddie, who shrugged, and said, "We'll just get a taxi."
"Where?" Coach asked, taking a bite off his hot dog. "Jacob said the place they were going for food was almost an hour away. A taxi there's gonna hurt your wallet."
"I'll call Finn," Eddie said, getting his phone from his back pocket and throwing his bag over his shoulder. I got up and grabbed mine too.
"Well, I'm going back to the hotel, if you wanna share a taxi," Coach said, chewing away.
Eddie looked down at his phone, and watched the call go to voicemail, before saying, "Let me just try the others."
No one picked up, so we shared a taxi back to the resort. It was snowing, and we were starving, and Coach wanted to hit the jacuzzi before bed, so we left him to it and got something to eat from a food truck near the slopes. Eddie kept checking his phone to see if someone had gotten back to him, but no one had.
We both knew the place wasn't an hour away. That was just what Jacob told Coach to make up for the fact that they weren't going for food, but for some serious underage drinking. If the place was an hour away, they had an excuse to make it back to the resort way past curfew, which Eddie said shouldn't matter since we didn't exactly have an early morning planned for tomorrow.
We went back to our room and waited for any of them to call us back or text us, sitting on the balcony, and listening to music. To be honest, I didn't really care whether they did or not. I wasn't necessarily looking forward to going for drinks with the same people that spiked my drink and tied me up to a trainline. I would much rather just sit with Eddie.
"I'm not sure of myself at all, you know?" I told him eventually. "You said I was, but I'm not. You are."
He laughed, "I'm a secret to myself, Isaac. That's what I am."
"Not to me, you're not."
He smiled. He knew what I thought of him.
Then he said, "Maybe I'm just a very good liar."
"What would you get out of lying?"
He shook his head, "I can't tell you."
I pushed my knee against his, "Come on."
"I can't," he insisted.
"What if I tell you a secret first?"
He leaned his head to the side in thought, and finally, he said, "Well, I guess it depends on what your secret is."
"Right, let me think then."
He laughed, "You don't have any secrets, do you?"
"I have a lot of secrets," I said as I tried to think of one. "Oh, I know! I didn't say it back then, but I would definitely suck a dick for less than a million."
He smiled like I was an idiot, and then actually called me one. I went on.
"I'm being serious. I would do it for half a million. Probably less actually," I admitted, and then, so he would smile even more, maybe even laugh, "And I would do it more than once too, you know, to keep a steady income."
"You know there's a name for that, right?"
"Yes, it's basic economics."
"No, it's straight up prostitution."
I laughed, "Oh, right, it fucking is. I guess I am a whore."
"There's nothing wrong with that."
"Does that mean you won't tell me your secret?"
"Yeah, that's what it means."
"Right, let me think of another one," I said, except, for some reason, I couldn't think of anything. "I got nothing."
"I know." He smiled, leaning his head back, his eyes on me. "You've got no shame or guilt in you. You have no use for secrets or lies. There isn't anything that isn't true about you."
I smiled back at him, "I swear, if Allora doesn't take you to be her lawfully wedded husband, I will."
"I didn't take you for a relationship kind of guy."
"I've actually never been in a relationship," I admitted. "I had one girlfriend in middle school, but Ethan says those don't really count, probably because he had a lot of them back then. Have you ever been in a relationship?"
He shook his head, "No. They're like psychedelics to me. Fun, but terrifying."
"So you're a coward?"
"I guess so."
"No, you're not," I said. "You'll see."
"Are you pressuring me to do drugs or relationships?" he asked. Then his phone started ringing inside his pocket. We both heard it but pretended not to.
I said, "Both."
He asked, "Have you ever done psychedelics?"
I told him no, but that my dad used to do them a lot with friends when he was in college, and after he met my mom, they would do shrooms together at music festivals all the time. This was to say, I was definitely going to try psychedelics at some point in my life.
"Is that Jacob?"
I stopped looking at him to turn to whoever it was he thought was Jacob. Coming towards our cabin, in the sidewalk, someone could barely walk, but kept a gorilla grip on a bottle of something, probably alcohol.
"It looks like him," I said, because whoever it was had the same sweatshirt I had seen Jacob put on earlier in the locker room. His jacket was nowhere to be seen though, and it was still snowing too much not to be wearing one. He had to be freezing.
Eddie got up, "I think it's him."
"He looks really drunk."
"Why is he alone?"
He was gone from the balcony before I could answer. I followed him. He ran out of the room and down the stairs. I kept on following him. Jacob was still stumbling down the sidewalk, slurring his words in an attempt at singing some song I didn't know.
"Jacob!" Eddie called, stopping right in front of him, his face frowning in worry. "What are you doing? Are you â"
Jacob raised his bottle so fast, it almost hit Eddie in the face, "I'm having fun, bitch!"
"Where are the others?"
He shrugged, "Bar."
I pointed at the bottle of vodka, "Where did you get this?"
He shrugged again, "Bar."
Eddie took off his jacket to give it to him, and then asked, "How did you get here?"
Jacob turned around to point at the road behind him, "Walked."
"You walked from the bar?" I asked.
Jacob kept on moving around, making it almost impossible for Eddie to put his jacket on him. I tried to get the bottle away from him, so he couldn't break it on any of our heads, but he moved it away and towards his lips, even though there was no more vodka inside.
"Did you drink all that?"
"No and no," he told the both of us, stopping suddenly. Eddie took that as a chance to finally zip him up and have a good look at him. His face was red, and his lips were purple, and there was snow all over him. Jacob said, barely, "I got a taxi outside the bar, but I had to get out halfway here."
"Why?"
"Cause I realized I left my wallet at the bar," he said before turning to me, "And I spilled a lot of vodka. It's a fucking tragedy."
"Let's just get you to bed," Eddie said, grabbing his arm and putting it over his shoulder.
Jacob laughed, "I left my room keys at the bar too."
I shook my head, "Let's just take him to our room."
"I'm not having sex with you, bitch," Jacob said.
I laughed, "I wasn't asking."
"Good," he said, dragging his feet through the snow. "Cause I fucking hate you."
Eddie sent me an apologetic look and walked in the cabin when I opened the door for them. I helped him carry Jacob up the stairs and turned on the heating in our room once we all walked in.
Eddie took the bottle from Jacob's hands and threw it away. I watched him take off his shoes too, and his clothes, all of them drenched from the snow, and put him to bed in just his boxers. Jacob closed his eyes halfway through it and fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. Before Eddie threw the covers over him, we both saw the bruises all over his arm and leg.
"What do you think that was?" I asked, scratching the back of my head.
"Maybe he fell on the way here."
"It looks really bad."
"I don't understand," he said. "He never drinks too much. He doesn't like losing control."
"He wasn't very happy with how he played tonight, was he?" I remembered.
"He's never happy with how he plays. Nothing he does on the field is ever enough for him. This is something else."
"Maybe it's you," I said. "I would get wasted too if you were mad at me."
"That's not fair. I didn't want this â"
"I know," I stopped him. "I'm not saying it's your fault. I'm saying if there's a line between what's right and wrong, then it's probably you."
He pressed his fingers against his forehead, and said, "I feel like shit."
"You shouldn't."
"Yeah, right." He shrugged. "I'm gonna go ask reception for some more pillows and blankets so I can pass out somewhere."
"Don't be an idiot. We're sharing my bed."
He looked at it, "It's too small. I'll just sleep on the floor. It's fine."
"I'm obviously not letting you sleep on the floor."
He insisted. So did I. We brushed our teeth trying to convince each other. He said he had been camping before. I said I had shared a bed before. Ethan used to sleep over a lot back before Ronny was born, not so much after, but still, occasionally he would crash at mine.
"So it's not awkward for you?" he asked finally, as he switched to sweatpants and a t-shirt. He didn't have any sweatpants I could borrow, so I was just wearing boxer shorts.
"Why would it be awkward?"
He gave in. We got under the covers. Jacob had been snoring for a while. Outside, the snow was still falling. Eddie laid on his side, his back to me, and I moved closer to him, to the heat coming off of him. He said goodnight, and so did I.
Then, "You're very warm."
He looked at me over his shoulder, "Are you cold?"
"Not anymore, no."
"You can move closer."
I turned on my side too, my face inches away from the back of his neck, our legs touching, both our heads on the same pillow, and closed my eyes. I wanted the night to stretch out, and out, and out, so we didn't have to move at all, so we could stay like this, warm under the blankets, drowsing off, for a good, good while, the snow falling heavy outside.
Except of course, night changed into day, and when I woke up, Eddie wasn't in bed anymore, but in the bathroom, holding Jacob's head as he threw up everything he had in his stomach, and blamed everyone else except himself for it.