First Chair

You're at the bottom of the Lantern Express at 5:52 a.m. with frost in your beard and last night's texts still sitting on your phone like a dare you can't stop rereading.

The lift isn't open to the public until eight-thirty. The liftie, a nineteen-year-old named Ziggy who thinks you're a legend because you once landed a backflip at the Spring Splash, waves you on without a question. "She said you'd be here," he says. "She said you'd be late."

"I'm eight minutes early."

"She said you'd say that."

The chair swings around, and you sit, and the cable hums you up into the blue dark. The mountain at this hour belongs to the groomers and the ravens. Below you the corduroy runs are pale ribbons, perfectly combed, and the stars are going out one by one over the Divide.

She's waiting at the top terminal, sitting on her board, a thermos in her lap. White one-piece, white helmet, a pink nose from the cold. When she sees you she checks an imaginary watch on her glove.

"Late, Ethan."

"It's 6:04."

"Exactly." She stands, wobbles, straps in. "Not the Chute. I'm not stupid. Starlight. Blue run. Top to the bottom of the Lantern Bowl sign. First one there wins."

"You can barely turn."

"So go slow, instructor. Give the girl a chance." She points down the run. "On three. One..."

She goes on one.

You actually laugh out loud, the sound bouncing off the trees, and drop in after her.

It isn't a race. It's a chase. She's terrible and fearless, a racer's brain stuck in a beginner's body: she can't link turns yet, so she just picks a line and points it, skidding her heel edge every time it gets too fast, never once letting herself fall. You could pass her in five seconds. You stay behind her the whole way, close enough to catch her, watching her shoulders, and you don't think about why.

She skids to a stop at the Lantern Bowl sign, spraying snow, and throws both arms in the air.

"Loser buys cocoa, Ethan!"

"You cheated."

"I won. Those are different words." She's breathing hard and grinning, a real grin, the first one you've seen, and it changes her entire face. She looks nineteen. She looks like someone who has forgotten for one minute who she's supposed to be. "Say it. Say I won."

"You cheated, and you won."

"Good enough."

Sixten's Hut sits at the very top of the mountain, above the last lift, a squat stone building with a tin roof and a stovepipe. Sixten built it himself in 1961, before the lifts, so he'd have somewhere to sleep while he surveyed. Now it's a warming hut, closed in the early hours, but Liv has a key on a ribbon around her neck.

Inside it smells like old wood and woodsmoke. She lights the stove like she's done it a hundred times. You make cocoa from her thermos and a packet you find in a tin marked in Swedish.

"Farfar," she says, when she catches you looking at the black-and-white photos on the wall. A big man with a jaw like a cliff, grinning on wooden skis. "My grandfather. He came from Sweden with forty dollars and a pair of jumping skis. He built the first lift with money he borrowed from everyone in town. He paid the first lifties half in cash and half in promises." She hands you a mug. "They all thought he was crazy."

"Was he?"

"Completely." Her voice softens in a way you haven't heard. "He taught me to ski right there. On that slope. I was three."

On the wall beside Sixten there's another photo. A woman with Liv's mouth and darker hair, laughing, on a snowboard, in a neon jacket that has to be from the nineties.

"Who's that?"

Liv is quiet for a moment. "My mother. Elin." She wraps both hands around her mug. "She was the only one in the family who rode. Everyone else skied. Farfar called her board 'the cafeteria tray.' She called his skis 'the furniture.'" The corner of her mouth goes up. "She died when I was eleven."

"I'm sorry."

"It was a long time ago." She says it the way people say things they've practiced. Then she looks at you over her mug, gray eyes steady. "Why do you teach, Ethan? You were a racer. I looked you up. Boardercross. You were good."

"I was good until my knee wasn't."

"So you teach rich girls to sit down."

"I teach people to be less afraid," you say. "Sometimes they're rich. That's not my fault."

She laughs. It surprises both of you. It's not the brittle little laugh she uses on waiters; it's low and real and slightly embarrassing, like a sound she forgot she could make.

And then she stops laughing, and the hut goes very quiet, and the two of you are sitting a foot apart by a stove at the top of the world with the sunrise coming in through a frosted window and turning her hair to fire. You notice you're holding your breath. You notice she's noticed.

Outside, an engine growls.

Liv's face changes. All the light goes out of it, like someone flipped a switch.

Through the window you see a snowcat crawling up the last pitch, headlights on, a big red machine with VARNER ALPINE GROUP on the side in silver letters. It stops outside the hut. A man climbs down from the cab.

He's maybe thirty, tall, in a black ski jacket that probably costs what your truck does. Dark hair that the wind has the decency not to mess up. Blue eyes, a jaw from a razor ad, the effortless good looks of a man who's been photographed since birth and has always come out fine. He strolls into the hut like it's his, stamps the snow off his boots onto Sixten's floor, and smiles at Liv.

"There you are," he says. "Your phone's off, sweetheart. Dad's been calling."

He crosses the room and kisses her cheek. She doesn't move. She doesn't kiss him back. She doesn't do anything at all; she just turns into a beautiful statue of herself.

"Brecken," she says.

Then he looks at you. He takes in the instructor jacket, the patched pants, the mug of cocoa in your hand. His smile doesn't change at all, which is somehow worse.

"And you must be the help," he says pleasantly. "The board guy. Liv mentioned she was taking lessons. Cute." He turns back to her. "Photographer's at the lodge at ten. Dad wants the snow in the background. Wear the white."

"I always wear the white."

"That's my girl." He glances at you once more, then back at her, and something sly comes into his face, like a man who's found the one card in the deck that's marked.

"Does he know, Liv?" Brecken asks. "Or were you saving it for the photographer?"