“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Trying to get your attention.”
I look past him toward the front of the house, where I see his shiny black truck parked in the driveway. “What do you want?”
“I’ve come to get you out of the house.”
“Why?”
“You’ve been holed up here all week, brooding,” he says, squinting up at me. “You need to get out. You need to have some fun.”
“And you’ve appointed yourself as the bringer of fun.”
He smiles. “I have.”
“So where are you taking me? Assuming, that is, that I’m crazy enough to go.”
“The mountain, of course.” The mountain. Like there’s only one. But when he says that my heart automatically starts to beat faster.
Because I know exactly what he means.
“Dust off your gear,” he says. “We’re going skiing.”
Okay, so I can’t say no to skiing. It’s my drug of choice. So that’s how I find myself, about an hour later, perched on the chairlift next to Christian, sucking on a cherry Jolly Rancher, dangling over a snowy slope watching skiers weave lines down the hill. It’s a rush being so high up, the cold air on my face and hearing the scrape of skis on snow. It’s heavenly.
“There it is,” says Christian, looking at me with something like admiration.
“There what is?”
“The smile. You always smile when you ski.”
“How do you know?” I challenge, even though I know it’s true.
“I watched you last year.”
“Yeah, well, when you race you do this funny grimace thing with your mouth.” He makes a shocked face. “Do not.”
“Do so. I watched you, too.”
The wheels rattle when our chair crosses a tower, and a few skiers call to each other below. I turn away from his seeking green eyes. I remember last year, when it seemed like a magical turn of fate when I ended up on the chairlift with him, able to talk to him, really talk to him, for the very first time.
Now I don’t want to talk.
He senses my withdrawal, or maybe he reads it.
“You can talk to me, Clara.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier for you to read my mind?”
His expression clouds. “I don’t just scan your mind whenever I want, Clara.”
“But you could.”
He shrugs. “My power’s unpredictable when it comes to you.”
“It’s amazing that anything in your life could be unpredictable,” I say.
He looks away and knocks snow off his skis. We watch it tumble down to the ground.
“Reading minds isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know. I mean, how would you like it, walking down the hall at school, knowing exactly what everyone thinks about you?”
“That would suck.”
“But with you, it’s different,” he says. “It’s like, sometimes you just talk to me, even if you don’t know you’re doing it. I don’t know how to block that out. I don’t really want to.”
“Well, it’s not fair. I don’t ever get to know what you’re thinking. You’re Mr. Mysterious who knows more about everything than I do, but you don’t tell me.” He watches my expression for a moment, then says, “Most of the time what you’re thinking about, when it comes to me, is that you want me to go away.” I let out a breath. “Christian.”
“If you want to know what’s going on in my head, ask me,” he says. “But I get the distinct impression that you don’t want to know.”
“Hey, I want to know everything,” I protest, even though that’s not completely true.
Because I don’t want to understand what our future would have been if I hadn’t chosen Tucker. I don’t want to feel what he always makes me feel: confused, scared, excited, guilty, yearning, aware of myself and everything I feel and he feels, like he has the power to magically switch on my empathy, even when it’s true — I don’t want to know. I don’t want to need him.
“I want to know what my purpose was supposed to be, for crying out loud,” I go on.
“Why can’t somebody just tell me: here’s your purpose, so go do it? Would that be too much to ask? Or where my brother was that night in the woods? Or about Angela’s secret boyfriend? I also want to know why a Black Wing is in love with my mother, and what her purpose was, and why she still, even when she’s dying, won’t tell me anything about it, and if you tell me it must be for my protection or my own good or something, I think I will push you off this chairlift. And is all this some kind of punishment for not fulfilling my purpose? Which brings me back to what, exactly, is my freaking purpose? Because I would really,
