“Yes.”
He smiles, then puts his fist up to his mouth and laughs into it.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “But how could you save me?”
“It was just a dream,” says Mom.
She pours me a cup of raspberry tea and sits down at the kitchen counter, looking serene as ever, if not a bit tired and rumpled, which is only fair since it’s four in the morning and her daughter just woke her up freaking out.
“Sugar?” she offers.
I shake my head.
“How do you know it was a dream?” I ask.
“Because it seems like your vision always happens while you’re awake. Some of us dream our visions, but not you. And because I have a very hard time believing that Christian wouldn’t remember your name.”
I shrug. Then, because that’s what I always do, I tell her everything. I tell her about the way I feel drawn to Christian and the few times in class when we talked and how I never know what to say. I tell her about Kay, and my brilliant idea to invite myself to lunch at Christian’s table, and how it had backfired big-time. And I tell her about Bozo.
“Bozo?” she says with her quiet smile when I’m finally done talking.
“Yeah. Although one guy decided to go with Hot Bozo.” I sigh and drink a swallow of tea. It burns my tongue. “I’m a freak.”
Mom playfully shoves me. “Clara! They called you hot.”
“Um, not exactly,” I say.
“Don’t go feeling too sorry for yourself. We should think of some other ones.”
“Other ones?”
“Other names they could call you. So if you ever hear them again you’ll be prepared with a comeback.”
“What?”
“Pumpkinhead.”
“Pumpkinhead,” I repeat slowly.
“That was a major insult, when I was a kid.”
“Back in what, 1900?”
She pours herself some more tea. “I got Pumpkinhead many times. They also called me Little Orphan Annie, which was a popular poem back then. And Maggot. I hated Maggot.”
It’s hard for me to imagine her as a child, let alone one that other kids picked on. It makes me feel slightly (but only slightly) better about being called Bozo.
“Okay, what else you got?”
“Let’s see. Carrots. That’s another common one.”
“Somebody already called me that,” I admit.
“Oh, oh—Pippi Longstocking.”
“Oh, snap,” I laugh. “Bring it on, Matchstick!”
And so on it goes, back and forth until we’re both laughing hysterically and Jeffrey appears in the doorway, glaring.
“I’m sorry,” Mom says, still giggling wildly. “Did we wake you?”
“No. I have wrestling.” He brushes past us to the refrigerator, gets out a carton of orange juice, pours himself a glass, drinks it in about three gulps, and sets it on the counter while we try to simmer down.
I can’t help it. I turn to Mom.
“Are you a member of the Weasley family?” I ask.
“Nice one. Ginger Nut,” she shoots back.
“What does that even mean? But you, you definitely have gingervitis.”
And off we go again like a couple of hyenas.
“You two need to seriously consider cutting back on the caffeine. Don’t forget, Clara, you’re driving me to practice in like twenty minutes,” says Jeffrey.
“You got it, bro.”
He goes upstairs. Our laughter finally dies down. I wipe my eyes. My sides hurt.
“You kind of rock, you know that?” I say to Mom.
“This was fun,” she says. “It’s been too long since I’ve laughed that hard.”
It gets quiet.
“What’s Christian like?” she asks then, offhandedly like she’s just making small talk. “I know he’s gorgeous, and apparently he has a bit of hero complex, but what’s he like? You’ve never told me.”
I blush.
“I don’t know.” I shrug awkwardly. “He’s a big mystery, and it feels like it’s my job to unlock it. Even his T-shirt today was like a code. It said, ‘What’s your sign?’ and underneath there was a black diamond, a blue square, and a green circle. I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.”
“Hmm,” says Mom. “That is mysterious.”
She darts into her office for a few minutes, then emerges smiling with a page she’s printed off the internet. My hundred-year-old mother can Google with the best of them.
“Skiing,” she announces triumphantly. “The symbols are posted on signs at the top of ski runs to indicate the difficulty of the slope. Black diamond is difficult, blue square’s intermediate, and green circle is, supposedly, easy. He’s a skier.”
“A skier,” I say. “See? I didn’t even know that. I mean, I know he’s left-handed and he wears Obsession and he doodles in the margins of his notebook when he’s bored in class. But I don’t know him. And he really doesn’t know me.”
“That will change,” she says.
“Will it? Am I even supposed to get to know him? Or just save him? I keep asking myself, why? Why him? I mean, people die in forest fires. Maybe not a lot of people, but some do every year, I’m sure. So why am I being sent here to save him? And what if I can’t? What happens then?”
“Clara, listen to me.” Mom leans forward and takes my hands in hers. Her eyes aren’t sparkling anymore. The irises are so dark they are nearly purple. “You aren’t being sent on a mission that you don’t have the power to accomplish. You have to find that power inside you somewhere, and you have to refine it. You were made for this purpose. And Christian isn’t some random boy that you’re supposed to encounter for no reason. There is a reason, for all of this.”
“You think Christian might be important, like he’ll be president someday or find the cure for cancer?”
She smiles.
“He’s terribly important,” she says. “And so are you.”
I really want to believe her.
Chapter 6
A-Skiing I Will Go
Sunday morning we drive to Teton Village, a big, famous ski resort area a few miles outside Jackson. Jeffrey dozes in the backseat. Mom looks tired, probably from too many late nights working and too many serious discussions with her daughter in the wee hours of the morning.
“We turn before we hit Wilson, right?” she asks, clutching the wheel at the ten and two positions and squinting through the windshield like the sun is hurting her eyes.