“Antoinette wants to go snowboarding,” Kai told me one day after school. “She wants to know what all the fuss is about.”
“How open-minded of her,” I said.
“Will you take us?”
“Sure I’ll take you.”
“And Antoinette says you can’t make fun of her.”
“I will try not to make fun of her.”
I had not seen much of Antoinette since winter vacation. She had two independent studies that term, and a study hall, so she barely came to school on some days. It was impressive how she had turned her rebelliousness and bad behavior into extra off-campus privileges.
When I did see her that spring, she was reading. Sometimes novels, but usually memoirs of famous women or artists or people you wouldn’t expect, like Eleanor Roosevelt. Antoinette told Kai that for girls, reading biographies of famous women was the only way to learn how to succeed in the world. And how to get what you want. They sure weren’t going to teach you that stuff in school.
The main thing I’d noticed about Antoinette as a senior: She’d calmed down. She’d quit smoking. She was vegan for a while. She still wore her weird clothes, but she didn’t do it with the same attitude. She didn’t do it at you like when she was younger. She was more contained now, more under control. She was biding her time. Bigger things were coming for her. So she lay low and stayed out of trouble. And read biographies of Lady Gaga.
I thought that big things were coming for me, too. Cars at Night was turning out great. I would have liked to talk to Antoinette about it. I felt she might give me good feedback. But that was the problem with Antoinette. She was never going to take a guy like me seriously. Not after I dated Grace Anderson and Krista and was still friends with Claude and Logan. These sins were unforgiveable, I guess. Once a popular jock, always a popular jock.
But if she wanted to go snowboarding, I would take her snowboarding. Of course I would. I would have taken her anywhere.
• • •
Kai pretended she didn’t know anything about snowboarding because that would have marked her as boring and suburban. But when I went to her house the next day to see what equipment she had, her garage was full of skis, boots, snowboards, and every kind of accessory you’d need. So we had plenty of gear. Kai and I then drove to Burrito Express for dinner to discuss how best to introduce Antoinette to snowboard culture, which devolved into a conversation about Antoinette in general: what books she read, what she thought about high school, what she thought about us.
“She thinks I’m an idiot,” I said. “That’s pretty obvious.”
“No she doesn’t.”
“Then she thinks all my friends are idiots.”
“Well, they are, kind of.”
“She never gives me any credit.”
“Maybe that’s not her job. You have to have your own confidence. You can’t get it from her.”
I shrugged. It was always a little awkward, talking about Antoinette with Kai.
But now, though, for some reason, I brought it up. “Did she ever say anything to you about Berlin?”
Kai became anxious. “Just that you guys fooled around a little, because you were so jet-lagged. . . .”
That was the official story. Which was true enough.
Kai sighed. “You can’t pine away for her for the rest of your life.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s not like that anyway. I know my place with her.”
“What is that, exactly?”
I thought for a moment. “I’m the guy who can teach her how to snowboard.”
• • •
The three of us slept over at Kai’s on Saturday night—Kai and Antoinette in Kai’s large bed and me on the floor on an air mattress. At five thirty a.m. Kai’s mother woke us up and had a huge delicious breakfast waiting downstairs. Then we piled into the prepacked Subaru, with the snowboards on the roof, and drove to Mount Hood.
Antoinette was somewhat athletic, but she had a terrible time with the snowboard. We started her on the bunny slope, but she couldn’t figure out the balance. She face-planted multiple times. When a bit of blood appeared on her lower lip, we decided to take a break.
So then we had lunch and sat in the lodge, watching people. I had been snowboarding my entire life, but with Antoinette there, I saw the ski-lodge crowd in a more critical light. Like how much status was being expressed by the different clothes and equipment people had. And how vain and full of themselves everyone was, tromping around in their French ski boots and thousand-dollar parkas.
“This is quite a scene,” said Antoinette, with her slightly swollen lower lip, which she was dabbing at with an ice cube wrapped in a napkin.
• • •
After lunch Antoinette insisted that Kai and I go snowboard ourselves. She didn’t want to hold us back any more than she already had.
So Kai and I rode the big chairlift to the top and came down together. Kai was not as good a snowboarder as Rachel and Ingrid, but she was still pretty good, and we carved gentle turns back and forth together, zoning out on the dazzling white snow, in the brisk mountain air.
At one point Kai got caught in some deep snow beside the trail and wiped out. She did a serious tumble in the snow. I skidded to a stop and hiked up to get her hat and goggles, which had fallen off above her. I then scooted downward on my butt, until I slid into her back where she was sitting. I stayed there while she rearranged her hat and scarf. I helped brush the snow out of her hair. Then, since we were off the trail and tangled up together anyway, we just sat for a while, enjoying the view of the mountains in the distance and the trees and the snow.