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Jonny checked the forecast as soon as he woke up that morning a couple of days before Christmas. Clouds, low chance of snow or sleet, depending on the temperature. Typical for the Vermont mountains. He put on his bright-red ski suit, because he knew that Katie would wear black, and one of them ought to be visible up there in the woods.
Johnny loved Katie, his best friend since the first day of middle school. When a couple of bullies had approached him, teasing him for his long hair and calling him a faggot, Katie had stepped in. He’d do anything for her.
Except follow her and her family to Long Island. He was too rooted in Vermont, settled in his apartment and his job. There were some things you couldn’t do, even for a BFF.
One thing he could do, though, was go for one last hike in the Green Mountains with her. He wasn’t much of a hiker; why trod along on foot when you could zoom on skis? He had been a star on the Middlebury ski team, a multi-sport athlete, shifting at will between Nordic and cross-country, snowboarding and ice skating.
She picked him up in the brand-new Subaru SUV her parents had bought her for graduation, part of the bribe to convince her to move to Long Island with them. She was a very talented graphic artist, and she was looking forward to getting a job in Manhattan or Brooklyn, meeting up with other tattooed lesbians, and finding her place in the world.
Jonny already knew his place, and it was in the mountains. He had spent the summer doing trail maintenance and guiding rope climbers, and then, through his coach, he’d gotten a part time job at the ski shop at the Middlebury Snow Bowl. He spent the rest of the week skiing or giving lessons.
He hopped into the SUV, which still smelled new. Katie had already named it Lucy, after Lucy Lawless, her personal role model. There was little resemblance between the two of them; Katie was chunky rather than slim, and had a bright pink streak in her mousy brown hair. Her prized possession was a chakram, the circular weapon that Xena used, which Jonny had bought her for Christmas the year before.
“Our last hike,” she said sadly, as he strapped himself in. “We won’t even get to spend Christmas together. Unless you’ve changed your mind?”
“Not changing,” he said. “But it doesn’t have to be our last hike. You can come visit. You’ll get vacation wherever you end up working.”
“Not for a year at least.” She brightened. “So we’re going to have an awesome time today.”
“We are.” Jonny looked out the window. Strings of colored lights hung from houses, doors and porches were festooned with pine-cone wreaths, and somewhere in the distance he heard the repetitive hum of “The Little Drummer Boy.”
The sky had darkened since he’d looked out early that morning, and he wanted to check the forecast one more time before they set out, but there was no cell service out in the mountains.
Katie had taken an extra term to graduate from Middlebury, because she changed her major from biology to studio art halfway through, following her passion. Jonny had been diligent about keeping up with his classes because he knew that his athletic scholarship depended on his grades, and he had chosen to major in English because reading and writing came easily to him, and the courses, often three-hour seminars once a week, gave him more time on the slopes.
“At least you’re asking for what you want,” she said. “It’s taken you a long time to get to this point.”
“Then you can value my decision. I’m not abandoning you, or our friendship.”
She reached out with her right hand and squeezed his left one. She only had a couple of days between the end of finals and the deadline to leave her dorm. She was determined to “suck the marrow out of Middlebury” before she left, and one of the items on her bucket list was a last hike with Jonny.
He had gone to a therapist once, when he was new at Middlebury and having trouble making friends, and she had diagnosed him as a caretaker personality. He was too busy looking after other people, she said, and not spending enough time doing what he wanted for himself.
It was true. He was always helping other guys on the team when he should have been practicing, partying with Katie to help her over a series of broken hearts when he should have been studying. So when Katie wanted to take one last hike through the mountains, he agreed, though he’d rather be skiing.
She drove expertly up the mountain to the Nordic Center, where one of the tall pines had been festooned with strands of white lights that shone in the gray afternoon. There were only a few other cars in the lot, but that was understandable given the time. Students had already returned home, and the locals were too busy shopping and preparing for the holidays.
A couple of saggy gray clouds hovered over the tops of the spruce and pine trees, but that was winter in Vermont. Cloudy days were better for hiking than sunny ones, anyway, because of the glare and the heat that bounced off the snow.
The temperature dropped as they climbed, but Jonny hardly noticed, insulated in his red suit. They talked about the companies Katie had already submitted resumes to, the way she’d jump into job hunting with both feet in the New Year.
He found it hard to empathize with her. She was leaving him, for Christ’s sake. Yes, he wanted her to be happy. He wanted her to find a terrific job and a loving girlfriend. He just wanted her to stay in Vermont with him, too.
“You’re really upset I’m leaving, aren’t you?” she asked, as they paused at a bend in the trail to look down at the valley below. An icy river tumbled over jagged rocks, and the hillside below them was covered with scree. Not a good place to take a tumble.
“I am. But you’re going, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“You can still come with me. My parents have a spare room.”
“I can’t be a ski bum in Brooklyn,” he said. “And I don’t want to be anything else. At least not right now.”
“It’s because you had to take care of your mom when she got sick, isn’t it?”
Jonny looked over at her. “What do you mean?”
“All through high school you had to give up what you wanted so you could do the housework and the cooking, drive your mom to her doctor’s appointments. The only time you got for yourself was when you went skiing.”
“I knew that we didn’t have money for me to go to college unless I could get a scholarship,” I said. “Skiing was the only way to do that.”
“So you’ve come to associate skiing with freedom,” she said. “With being able to do what you want. It’s not that you love to ski so much, it’s just what it means to you.”
Katie’s words hit Jonny too hard, and he stood up to start hiking again. “I thought you majored in graphic design, not psychology.”
She hurried after him. “Jonny, I’ve known you nearly my whole life. It’s doesn’t take a doctorate degree to see how you operate.”
“Then how do you figure I managed to stay here when my family moved to Florida?”
Two years before, his father had taken early retirement and his parents had moved south, to a climate better for his mother’s MS. His sisters were already finished with college and starting their own families.
Katie hurried to catch up with him. “Because they wouldn’t let you come,” she said. “Remember, I was there? They were determined that you finish at Middlebury. Your dad thought you could go to the Olympics.”
“My dad was a fool,” Jonny said. “I was nowhere good enough for that.”
“Sure you were. You just spent too much time at home with them and not enough time practicing. Your dad wanted to give you that shot and the only way for him to do it was to leave you behind.”
“And you’re doing the same thing,” Jonny said. She was walking beside him on the narrow trail, though there really wasn’t enough room for both of them.
“Which is exactly why you should come with me. Find the right path for you, now that you’re free enough.”
“I have found my path, thank you very much,” he said. “And it’s right here in the Green Mountains.”
As if to emphasize his point, they saw a lightning strike across the valley, followed only seconds later by a thunderous boom.
Both of them had grown up in the mountains, and knew how to count time between a lightning strike and the sound of thunder. “That was less than five seconds,” he said.
“So the storm is less than a mile away. We should turn around and head down.”
The squall seemed to come out of nowhere. One minute the sky was leaden and gray, the next it had opened up, dropping billows of snow that swirled in the air currents. The lightning was on top of them, and as they hurried down the trail it struck a tree beside them.
With a massive roar, the tree fell across the narrow path of beaten dirt. Jonny saw it coming and pushed Katie forward. He didn’t get out of the way himself in time, though, and he was knocked to the ground.
“Jonny!” Katie screamed. She was on the other side of the tree, which had landed directly on his leg. He couldn’t move, and pain radiated from his right leg, ramping up his heart rate and making him gasp for breath.
She fumbled her phone out of her snow suit. “I can’t get a signal up here!”
Jonny struggled to speak. “Head down the trail until you can. There’s a pocket where you can get reception, at that curve where we stopped earlier.”
“I don’t want to leave you!”
“You’re going to have to. Don’t worry, the search and rescue guys are great. I’m sure they’ll be here right away.”
Then he blacked out.
