Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [48]
At the end of the night, Jocelyn held Isabella in a too-long embrace and muttered something about how glad she was to meet her. And then she said, “I love you.” Isabella was in a loony bin.
“Isn’t Jocelyn nice?” Harrison asked. They were standing side by side in the bathroom, brushing their teeth. The floor was freezing and it made Isabella’s feet cold right through her socks. She was drunk and had to close one eye so that the reflections of her and Harrison in the mirror would stop moving.
“She would be nice if she was in therapy,” Isabella said. She stumbled a little bit and leaned on the sink. Harrison caught her arm.
“So judgmental,” he said. He tried to make it sound like a joke, but she knew he was annoyed.
She spit out her toothpaste and rinsed off her toothbrush. “Do you realize that at the end of the night, she said, ‘I love you’ to me? That doesn’t strike you as a little strange?”
“She’s an emotional girl. You just need to get used to her.”
“Did you use to date her?”
Harrison laughed. “I wouldn’t call it dating. It was a long time ago.”
Harrison rubbed the back of her thermal shirt and she leaned her head against him. All she wanted was to be back in the city at one of their apartments, where they could sleep in the same bed.
“Good night,” Harrison said and swung up to the top bunk.
“Night,” Isabella whispered into her pillow.
Isabella didn’t really want to go skiing, but the alternative was staying in the house all day with the few people who weren’t going either. Jocelyn was one of them, so Isabella put on her long underwear and ski pants, her thermal shirt and her puffy jacket. She looked like a marshmallow.
Isabella had skied when she was younger, but lately had realized that she didn’t like it all that much. It was scary—absurd, actually—to climb onto a metal contraption that would take you up a mountain so that you could zip back down again.
It became very clear while talking about this trip that Harrison was an excellent skier. He mentioned winters in Vail and Beaver Creek, and spring skiing in Aspen. He knew the names of his favorite runs, and would say things like “The speed you can get on Pepe’s Face is crazy.” Isabella just nodded.
“You can go ski with your friends if you want,” Isabella offered. She was relieved when he declined.
“The whole point is for us to hang out,” he said, and pulled her hat down over her eyes like he was one of her older brothers.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m just not sure that I’ll be able to keep up with you. It’s been a while since I skied.”
“No problem,” he said. “We’ll start on some blues until you get the hang of it.”
By the second run, Isabella was pretty sure that she’d never get the hang of it. Harrison skied ahead of her, swooshing in the snow like a professional. Isabella made a snowplow and took wide turns down the mountain. Every time she felt like she was going too fast and about to lose control, she let her knees buckle and fell to the ground.
“Just trust yourself a little more,” Harrison advised her. “The fun part is when you start going really fast.”
“Fun until you crash,” she said.
How could she not have remembered how terrifying it was to ski? Even the chairlift scared her as it chugged high off the ground with nothing to keep them from falling out.
“Could you not swing your legs so much?” Isabella asked Harrison. She tried not to sound so panicked.
“Such a little worrywart,” he laughed.
The day seemed impossibly long. The snow was icy and Isabella’s gloves were wet from falling. She sat inside the lodge to warm up while Harrison went on a couple runs by himself. When Harrison came back in to get her, she tried not to look sad and followed him back out to the slopes.
Isabella kept waiting for it to come back to her, but her legs kept buckling and shaking. And when Harrison said, “One more run and then we