Читать книгу The Luckiest Scar on Earth - Ana Maria Spagna - Страница 11

CHAPTER FIVE

This is how it should work: the better you are, the more attention you get. But everyone knows that’s not the case. Take Kaylee Corser. She wasn’t the best snowboarder in the Pacific Northwest—third to fifth in the rankings on any given day—but she had the best sponsor: Denton Boards, the biggest seller of snowboards, skateboards, and surfboards on the entire West Coast. Why? Because she rode at Sparkle Mountain, close to the city, where the guys from Denton’s ride. If that sounds bitter, honestly I wasn’t. Or I hadn’t been. Up until now. No one that rich came to Timberbowl. They’d never even heard of it. That didn’t matter unless you needed a sponsor. And me? I needed a sponsor. A sponsor would pay the cost of my pass. A sponsor would buy my gear. A sponsor would allow me to keep training. I needed a sponsor bad.

I sat at the ancient desktop and scanned through the profiles on the rankings to see, besides super-fancy gear shops, what kind of sponsors the girls had. Some were sponsored by their private schools—academies, they were called—but I couldn’t picture Midland High pitching in. They hadn’t even replaced our textbooks in, like, five years. Other girls had sports drink companies or photographers or, the funniest one, an office of orthopedic surgeons as sponsors. I googled a bunch of companies like that (all except the surgeons) around the Northwest, and made a list.

I read the list over and over. Could I really do this? Just write to businesses out of the blue asking for money? I pictured the way Kaylee Corser punched the air rapid-fire after a big race, all bluster and glitz.

I could do it.

I tried to begin a short email,

Dear Sirs …

Greetings Snowboard Fans…

Finally I settled for Hi …

I bragged a little—I finished in the top five in every regional age-group championship for the past seven years—and begged a lot—financial circumstances will prevent me from racing without sponsorship. Wait. Scratch that. My family situation won’t allow me to compete without a sponsor. Much better. Then I attached a video of myself from a race the year before. I re-played it on the screen: this skinny thirteen-year-old—tall, yes, but not yet ridiculous, maybe five seven—her hair a bright fringe under her helmet, her turns smooth and rhythmic, her expression so intense it’s frightening. That couldn’t be me. I didn’t look like the same person. I didn’t feel like the same person. But whoever that girl was she looked like she deserved a big-name sponsor. I re-read each note, took a deep breath, and hit send. Over and over and over.

The next morning I sat in biology class talking with Rose, my lab partner and the only ninth grader quieter than me. Rose had also lived more places than anyone I’d ever met: Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, even North Dakota.

“So your dad is going to stop the condos,” she said.

“How do you know about that?”

“I saw him at the courthouse. Is he a lawyer or something?”

“Larry? Hardly. He’s a truck driver. What were you doing at the courthouse?”

I regretted it as soon as I said it. There are a thousand reasons a kid could be at the courthouse, and not one of them is good.

“My dad’s testifying,” Rose said.

Rose’s dad worked at one of the apple orchards at the base of Goat Peak. When you looked down on them from Timberbowl, the rows of trees without leaves looked stiff as bristles on a brush. I didn’t know for sure where Rose’s family came from. Mexico? Central America? I never dared to ask.

“What’s your dad testifying about?” I asked.

“Fish.”

I looked toward the whiteboard. Ms. Russo’s back was turned and she was in the middle of a long explanation of cellular structure: the nucleus, the cytoplasm, the organelles, stuff I’d learned in middle school.

“¿Pescado?”

Rose laughed. “No, pescado’s food, Charlotte. You mean peces.” She held her hands together in praying pose and swam them back and forth. “My dad says there are endangered salmon in the creeks that run down from Goat Peak. Your dad says so, too.”

“Larry doesn’t know anything about fish. He just gets an idea in his head and can’t shake it. ‘Get obsessed, stay obsessed,’ he always says.”

“Well, if there are salmon up there on Goat Peak, they can’t build condos up there. Development would wreck the habitat.”

“Goat Peak. ¿Montaña del Cabrito?”

“No, no. Pico de la Cabra. Cabrito’s baby goat, Charlotte. It’s food, too.”

“You eat baby goats?”

She kissed her thumb and forefinger. “Delicioso.”

“Stop that,” Ms. Russo snapped.

She’d gotten away from the cells and went back to her usual routine, telling us how we have to recycle and ride bicycles and write to our congressmen or the whole planet will over-bake like a pan of brownies. Ms. Russo was describing the polar ice cap melting when she noticed Rose and me giggling.

She glared at us, and I glared back.

“Girls, you will quit visiting or face detention like anyone else.”

Ms. Russo pursed her lips and drew her eyes tight. The class turned toward us. Here we were, the two quietest girls in ninth grade: the too-tall shoulder-stooped girl in jeans with a hammer loop and the Mexican girl so small she still shopped in the kids section at Target.

“Now let’s talk about your final project.”

Ms. Russo had told us at the beginning of the school year that the project would be a poster. I thought that would be a breeze. Pick up colored markers at the dollar store, spend a couple hours online, pour a large cocoa, and—voila!—you’re done. But, no. She passed around a description that ran a full three pages, single-spaced. The first piece of bad news appeared front and center on page one: choose a partner. I’d only been in town three months. I hardly knew anyone besides Rose, and since she was the smartest girl in class, everyone would want to be her partner. I stared at my desk while Ms. Russo droned on.

“This is comprehensive research,” she said. “You’ll need to cite credible sources—no, Wikipedia is not credible—and include relevant graphics.”

I flipped through the description. This was definitely not something we did in middle school.

“Most importantly you need to include some field-based research. That means you’ll have to actually go outside.”

That didn’t sound so bad. I looked up from my desk and saw Rose giving me a silent thumbs-up under her desk. Maybe she knew I liked being outside. Maybe she meant she liked being outside. I glanced at the clock. Only three minutes until the bell. Kids started stuffing books in their backpacks, so Ms. Russo had to yell to be heard.

“So be thinking about it.”

When the bell finally rang, kids sprang from their chairs and charged the door. Rose raced out ahead of me hunched under a backpack twice her size. She stopped in the hallway.

“So what topic do you think we should do?”

We were partners. Just like that.

On Saturday, I got up before the soft pink light crossed the east flank of Goat Peak and went out for a run while Mom slept in. I needed to stay in shape, and I’d already decided that boarding the backcountry with Larry was not the way. He broke his promise to me—Mr. Always Keeps His Resolutions. He signed the petition and made us both lose our passes. I ran along the half-shoveled sidewalks, through melting slop and across side streets, and as I jogged in place at the last stoplight, a passing car sped through a puddle and splashed me head to toe. I walked up the stairs, my sweats thoroughly soaked, and into the apartment just in time for Mom to hand me the phone.

“Hey, guess what I just finished doing?” Larry asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Shaving.”

I’d never seen Larry without his beard, ever. I could still picture strands of frozen snot stuck to it like tinsel.

“Shaving?”

“Yeah, I had to do it if they’re gonna take me seriously in the courtroom. I even bought a suit, had it custom tailored at the Big N’ Tall store.”

“You’re telling me you shaved off your beard?”

I stood in my sopping clothes and tried to picture this. No chance.

“Yup. And I cut my hair.”

“All of it?” I asked.

“Buzz cut,” he told me over the phone. “You won’t even recognize me.”

“There’s still the scar, Larry.”

“Well, other than that, you won’t even recognize me.”

I almost laughed, but I reminded myself not to. I figured he was about to ask me if I wanted to head out to the backcountry, and I wasn’t going to give in no matter how hard he tried. I wanted to punish him. A broken promise is a broken promise.

“Listen,” he said. “I can’t make it over to see you today. I’m showing the lawyers around on the snowmobile.”

“Showing them what?”

“The backcountry, Charlotte. They gotta see the scenery if they’re going to understand what’s at stake.”

I pictured them riding up the mountain on the snowmobile, the one I’d already started thinking of as our snowmobile. I’d thought I wouldn’t give in no matter how hard he tried, but I hadn’t expected him not to try at all.

“You know what they say: the best defense is an offense.”

“Sure, sure, claro,” I said and hung up.

My mom put her hand on my shoulder.

“He’s trying his best,” she said.

“He’s wasting his time. You said so yourself in Colorado. People sign petitions and march around with signs, but it makes no difference. Remember what you used to call those people?”

She sighed. “Woody goodies.”

“That’s what Larry is.”

Mom gazed down at the counter that separated the tiny apartment kitchen from the tiny living room and tapped a ballpoint pen on the worn Formica. She was still wearing the T-shirt she’d slept in, and though she stood shorter than me, she looked thin and fit, much fitter than most moms I knew. She’d had me young, so she was younger than some parents, too, and a lot younger than Larry. In the beginning, part of me thought she moved us here to get back together with him, but I was slowly realizing the truth. She moved us here to get me back together with Larry. Which felt a little like she wanted to get rid of me.

“I hate when people take sides,” I said.

“It’s not always about taking sides, Charlotte. Sometimes it’s about defending what you love.”

“Yeah, well, some of us still have to figure that out.”

“Figure out what?”

“What we love.”

The phone rang again, and Mom handed it to me. Maybe she thought it would be Larry calling back, but it was Geoff.

“Why aren’t you up on the hill today? Snow’s perfect.”

As if he would know.

“Long story,” I said.

“Well, I’m going to take your mom out to dinner, do you want to come this time?”

“No, thanks.” Did this guy never give up? As if I didn’t have enough problems with Larry making me lose my place on the team, with a stupid biology project to worry about, with my slush-sopped sweats dripping onto crappy old carpet.

“I’ve got a new job,” he said. “I want to celebrate.”

“You guys have fun.” I hung up and headed down the hall for a shower. I stood face-first in the hot stream until the water turned cold.

All afternoon Mom sat at the computer job searching yet again. As long as she did I couldn’t check for email replies or the rankings. I worked on homework and tried not to think about Larry or condos or snowboarding or New Year’s resolutions. By three o’clock, clouds had moved in, drawing a stark line across the trees, like thick foam on a root beer float: white above, dark below. Rain would surely come next. Mom stood up at last.

As soon as she left, I took over the computer again.

Email: nothing.

Rankings: trouble.

Kaylee Corser wasn’t the best snowboarder in the Pacific Northwest, but she was now ranked higher than me.