The phone was ringing—and ringing and ringing. I wasn’t going to answer it. I heard some mumbling and a gruff “hello” from the living room.
I rolled over and looked at the alarm clock. It was 11:22 AM.
Dad kicked my door open and clunked the phone down near my ear without saying a word. I caught a good whiff as he left. Cigarettes, beer and a bad case of BO. Gotta love how he didn’t even care I wasn’t at school.
“Yeah?” I mumbled into the phone.
“Mr. Longridge. You’re not at school today. Are you sick?” It was Lardface, of course. Who else would it be?
“No.” Darn, why did I say that? “Uh, maybe a bit.”
“Unless you’re puking your guts out and have a fever of a hundred and one, get your butt down there. You know the rules.”
Sometimes I wondered if Officer Lardface had been in the army.
I shoved one leg out of the blankets. No, I couldn’t do it. The thought of going to Explore after the whole “injured birds” scene on Friday actually did make me want to puke.
I hadn’t left my room all weekend, not even for a run. I kept thinking about Lisa leaping around on the volleyball court. Her team had probably won the game. I imagined her ponytail swinging as she did a perfect serve.
I’d thought about her all weekend. I bet she hadn’t thought about me.
She didn’t like me. Well, she liked me “as a friend.” And I still had to look at her every day and mentally drool over her. Now I really had no chance with her. I wondered if there was some way to get her to like me. Like if I suddenly got really good at everything sporty and outdoorsy. No, Mike, don’t be an idiot.
I groaned. I had to get up. As if I was going to let Lardface come and rip me out of bed again.
I heard screechy giggling from the living room. Big Lips, Dad’s new “lady friend,” was here. Her name was Angie. She had this giant mouth on a pale face and wore tons of globby red lipstick. Sometimes it was on her teeth. You looked at her and the first thing you thought was big, huge, crazy lips. If Dad and Big Lips were going to be doing their thing all day, I definitely had to get out of there.
I dragged myself in to Explore just before tracking class. We were learning how to identify wild animals by their paw prints and poop.
“Hey, Mike, nice to see you. Glad you could make it. I tried calling you this morning, but when you didn’t answer, I had to pass it along the chain of command.” Rick shrugged apologetically and gave me a playful punch on the shoulder. A few of the Granolas gathered around and gave me an are-you-feeling-okay? welcome. Couldn’t a guy just be miserable in peace?
Lisa didn’t talk to me all afternoon. She, Kayla and Jen walked around glued together like a single-celled organism. What were those things we learned about in science last year? Oh yeah, paramecium. They were a really good-looking paramecium.
I stood at the back of the group, hood up.
“You okay?” Good old Tim.
“Yeah, just not feeling so good.”
“You still into going up to the hill tomorrow for a little practice?” asked Tim.
“Oh, uh, yeah.” Tim had offered to show me the ropes before our big five-day backcountry ski trip. Ugh. My guts tossed and turned just thinking about it.
The next day was wilderness skills. We were going to learn how to make fires using bow drills.
“In your hands you have everything you need to generate friction, heat and then fire,” Maggie said. I looked at the bow with the rope attached to it. I also had a stick and a board. I was supposed to make fire with a stupid twig and a piece of rotten wood?
Rick gave us the instructions and said, “Remember, guys, it can take a while to get the fire going. Don’t give up. Just keep trying.”
I found a spot away from the group. I sat with my back to everyone and tried to figure out how the heck the bow and the stick worked together. A couple of minutes later I heard footsteps crunching toward me. I was pretty sure I knew who it was.
I didn’t look up. I was starting to get the hang of spinning the stick with the bow to get the burn going. My heart was beating like crazy and I could feel my cheeks going red.
“Mike, I want to talk to you.” Lisa’s voice didn’t sound all fun and perky like usual. It was deeper, more serious. “Can you look at me for a sec?”
I didn’t say anything.
Lisa lifted one edge of my hood. “Michael Longridge, are you in there?” She took a deep breath. Whoa, is the great Lisa Park actually feeling nervous? “Look, I’m sorry about Friday. I didn’t know what to do when you asked me out. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. But I’m just not interested in you that way.”
I kept sawing away with my bow and stick, a little faster.
“But I really want to be friends.”
Part of me wanted to chuck the bow drill down and shake Lisa by her pretty little shoulders, have a big freak-out over the unfairness of it all.
“I think we have a really good friendship,” Lisa said. “I don’t want to mess with that.”
Actually, you’re too ugly and dumb for a goddess like me, but I still want to torture you by hanging out with you. That’s what she really meant.
She didn’t know that I’d already heard all of this.
“Mike, aren’t you going to say something?”
I thought I might be getting close to getting some smoke with my bow drill. I sawed even harder. I could see the steam of my breath in the cold air.
“Yup, whatever.”
“So we’re friends? You’re okay?”
“I guess.” She still had my hoodie edge lifted up. I didn’t look at her. She sighed and ran back to her paramecium.
I tried for what felt like five hours to get a fire started. No spark.
At the end of the day, Rick and Maggie gathered us all together to talk about our big backcountry ski trip the next Friday. Five days in the Cascade Mountains. We got to go up there by helicopter. That part sounded pretty cool. Usually heli-skiing is mucho expensive, but Rick’s brother owns a helicopter so he takes the Explore kids up the mountain every year.
All I knew about telemark skiing was that it combined two of the worst things known to man: downhill skiing and hiking. I had never been downhill skiing, but I already knew I wouldn’t like it. Telemark skiing was way too much work, in my opinion. You have to ski down these crazy backcountry hills and then hike right back up the hill and do it all over again. Yeah, looked like two tons of fun.
Rick and Maggie showed us a video that looked like it was from 1982, with a dude in a bright pink ski suit demonstrating all the moves. Unlike regular downhill skiing, in telemark skiing you have to bend your knees one at a time as you go down the hill. I didn’t get it. The Granolas had probably all been skiing and hiking since they were out of diapers—probably when they were in diapers. Once again, I would be left out in the cold. Literally.
“It’s a good thing you’ve got that ski thing going on tonight,” my dad said when I stopped home after school for my ski stuff. “Me and Angie have been looking forward to a little alone time.” He looked at Big Lips and wiggled his eyebrows in that sick way he does.
A stack of bills caught my eye as I opened the door: bank, credit cards, phone, hydro, gas. My stomach twisted.
“Dad!” I called into the living room. “You’re going to pay these, right?” Things were lousy right now, for sure, but I didn’t want to run away from yet another town.
There was no answer, just the TV and Big Lips’s giggle. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Tim and his older brother were waiting outside. I told him to just pull up and honk. I didn’t want Tim to see the hole I lived in. Tim, Bryce and their crappy 1989 Chevette were the best things I’d seen all day.