I couldn’t wait until we were done and I could call Emma back and tell her about this private lesson. She would die. If I didn’t die first.
Wait a second, I thought as I tried to push off with my skate. Speaking of dying. I couldn’t feel my feet anymore. “Maybe I—maybe I should get going,” I said.
“Really?” Sean looked disappointed, which I took as a good sign.
“Yeah.” I nodded.
“Come on, stay,” he urged. “You’re starting to get it! Plus, this is fun.”
“The thing is…my feet. I actually can’t feel my toes exactly.” Somehow I hadn’t noticed this fact in all the time I’d been there, but it was suddenly very true, and very painful. I hadn’t felt cold, but now my extremities seemed like they were about to fall off.
“I’ll get Brett, you go inside,” Sean said. “Now. Hurry up.”
I nodded and sort of staggered up the wooden ramp to the building. Inside, the heater was blowing at full blast and I sat on a bench, shivering.
Sean and Brett came in and Sean crouched down in front of both of us. “You guys gonna be okay?” He started to unlace my skates, then Brett’s. “I’m off in like ten minutes. Can you wait for me? Then I can drive you guys home.”
“You can…come for lunch,” I said between chattering teeth.
“Sounds good. Put your feet right there.” He pointed to a heating vent in the floor. “Don’t move them until I get back.”
“So, how were the hockey lessons?” Gretchen asked when we walked into the house. She was sitting on the sofa with her laptop computer.
“The what?” Sean replied.
I coughed and then cleared my throat. It wasn’t such a big lie I’d told, but I definitely didn’t want Gretchen to start harping on me about how I had to be more honest with her. “Brett’s hockey class,” I said. “See, I thought there was a class. But I guess I read the sheet wrong.”
“Yeah, we have a league, for kids of all ages, but no official classes,” Sean told her.
“We learned some things anyway,” I said. “Didn’t we, Brett?” Like how nice it is to skate with Sean and how he’s the perfect height for me. “Until we got a little on the frozen side. Then it wasn’t so fun.”
“Kirsten, you never wear enough clothes,” Gretchen said.
“Oh, really?” Sean smiled at me, as if that weren’t necessarily a bad characteristic to have. “Actually, I did notice that when she ran outside in her pajamas the other morning.”
“And then she wonders why she’s never warm enough,” Gretchen said. “What do you think? Maybe she’s cold-blooded. Does that mean she’s cold-hearted, too?”
“Oh, yeah. In fact not only am I cold and unfeeling, I’m a reptile, basically. Thanks, Gretch.”
“Well, you did fall through the ice when you were two,” she reminded me—not that I had any memory of the event, just of this story being told every year at about the time everyone was asking, “Is the lake frozen yet?” I was like the poster child for waiting for a deep freeze before venturing onto questionable ice.
“Think about it,” Gretchen said. “Maybe that has something to do with the fact you can’t keep warm, Kirst.”
Or, maybe it’s the fact that I am Cursed, I thought.
“You did?” Sean asked. “Let me guess. Were you trying to learn how to skate?”
I glared at him, but I couldn’t help smiling when I saw the look he was giving me. Half amused and half flirty. “It was the pond near our house. I think Gretchen was the one who thought it’d be a nice idea to teach me how to skate even though the ice wasn’t thick enough yet.”
“Oh, no, you’re not blaming this on me,” Gretchen said with a laugh. “You ran out onto the ice. No one could stop you. Then we heard this awful cracking noise.”
“Sounds like something Brett would do,” Sean commented.
“Doesn’t it, though?” I agreed. “We must share the same genetic adventure…ous…ness.”
We both looked at each other and grinned. He seemed interested. Was he, though, or was he just being friendly?
There was no way I’d find out with Gretchen and Brett around. It was hard to really talk with Gretchen sitting right there. Couldn’t she tell we needed some alone time?
But no. She refused to move off the living room couch from the hours of 9 A.M. to 9 P.M., making privacy a little difficult. She was starting to learn all the TV schedules. She knew soap opera plotlines. She’d seen all the TLC makeover shows at least twice.
“I wonder if we could go somewhere maybe like…without Brett sometime,” I said. I looked meaningfully at Gretchen. She didn’t respond.
“You know what would be fun? Before school starts again and I get totally busy, a bunch of us could go skiing at Buck Hill or something,” Sean said.
“That sounds perfect—”
“No way,” Gretchen interrupted me.
“Yes way,” I said, looking at Sean. Did she seriously think I couldn’t have one afternoon off to go out with Sean?
“I’m telling you, Kirst, don’t go skiing. You’ll break something.”
“No, I won’t. What do you think, because you broke your leg skiing at Lutsen, I’m going to break mine?” I asked.
“And if you break your leg, too, we’re going to be in such deep trouble—” she went on, not even listening to me.
“I wouldn’t!” I cried.
“Kirsten. You’re not the best skier. Be honest.”
I couldn’t believe her. Why was she trying to shoot me down in front of Sean all the time? She thought it was funny, but it wasn’t. “What? There’s nothing wrong with my skiing.”
“Remember the time you wiped out going down Lutsen Mountain and you nearly impaled yourself on a rock, and Mom and Dad had a heart attack?”
I glared at her. Did she have to tell every embarrassing story in the world about me to Sean? “Gretch? I was seven. It was the bunny run.”
“Still.” Gretchen started laughing. “Your legs wrapped around you three times. You looked like a pretzel. See, Kirsten was super tall and skinny for her age. Her legs practically went up to here.” She tapped her shoulders.
Sean looked at me and smiled, and I sort of sank down on the sofa, trying to look shorter. I am not all out of proportion, I wanted to say. My body has all the necessary parts now. I went through some major growth spurts, okay?
He was looking at me with a kind of knowing smile. “You still have long legs,” he said.
“Come on, Sean. Let’s go to the kitchen and make lunch,” I said. “You’re probably hungry and I know I am. And so is Brett.”
“I’ll have a salad!” Gretchen called to us before she turned the volume back up on the TV.
“Which you can make yourself,” I muttered. “The great thing about my big sister is how incredibly supportive she can be,” I said as I got some bread, cheese, turkey and other fixings out of the fridge.
“What do you mean?” Sean asked.
I shook my head. “She just—like, she still has to get her shots in. Like we’re still kids or something.” But that didn’t make sense, since we’d never really been kids at the same time, had we? Not exactly, anyway. Was she making up for lost time, since she couldn’t exactly pick fights with me when she was eight and I was two?
“Okay, so if she’s dead set against me skiing, that doesn’t mean we can’t do something else,” I said. “How about tomorrow? I mean, I was going to ask if you were, you know, free.”
“In the afternoon I am,” he said.
“Okay, so how about like, ah…”
“How about something indoors?” Sean said. “Since we don’t want your frostbite to kick in again.”
“That would be bad, wouldn’t it?” I smiled, thinking that I liked the sound of “indoors.” Was I supposed to suggest snuggling on the sofa at his house and watching a movie? There was a fine line between being a flirt and sounding desperate. I’d never had a chance to cross the line, myself, but I’d seen others sprint past it.