Snowed In Read online

  Snowed In

  Rachel Hawthorne

  For Amber Royer,

  librarian extraordinaire,

  who convinced me

  this story needed bats

  Contents

  1

  “It’ll be fun!”

  2

  I felt my eyes widen and my jaw drop. “Seriously?”

  3

  “You okay?” Nathalie asked.

  4

  I am so not a morning person. And early morning?

  5

  The next morning, I threw on baggy sweats before leaving…

  6

  Why was I always saying idiotic things around Josh? I’d…

  7

  Only, we weren’t kissing. I was amazed by how much…

  8

  Okaayyy…I had not expected that.

  9

  “Are you ready?”

  10

  We climbed up a short embankment, leaving our skis and…

  11

  I shoved Josh’s shoulder, breaking us apart.

  12

  I know some girls load up on ice cream when…

  13

  The next morning I woke up and could barely move…

  14

  I figured the best way to stop thinking about Josh…

  15

  The next morning when I woke up, Tara wasn’t in…

  16

  In the end, Nathalie’s boyfriend didn’t talk Shaun into wearing…

  17

  “What was going on back there?” Tara asked when I…

  18

  As Tara explained it, from the time they’d arrived on…

  19

  It was harder than I thought it would be to…

  20

  The next two days were hell. Mostly because I didn’t…

  21

  The next morning, I slept late, snuggled beneath the blankets,…

  22

  For our first date, we didn’t exactly “go out.” Technically,…

  About the Author

  Other Books by Rachel Hawthorne

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  “It’ll be fun!”

  Those were my mom’s words. It’ll be fun!

  At the time, I’d thought so too.

  Her idea of fun was to pack up her divorced middle-aged life and move up north. Way up north. Where winters are cold, snow and ice exist in abundance, and my dad could become a distant memory.

  Not that I blamed her for wanting to get away from it all. Dad recently announced that he planned to remarry, and I’m not exactly thrilled with the prospect of having a stepmother. Marsha isn’t wicked or anything. Actually she asked me to be one of her bridesmaids, but I told her that I needed to think about it. I’ve never been a bridesmaid before, and I’m not sure I want my first time to be at my dad’s wedding. Because it’s totally weird thinking of him with a wife who isn’t my mom. And okay, I resent that he’s going to marry someone else. It feels like he’s not only betraying Mom, but betraying me.

  So when Mom told me she wanted to move and asked, “What do you think?” I replied, “Let’s do it!”

  Of course, that was before I was standing in the front parlor of our new digs, shivering, with my parka zipped up tightly and my gloved hands tucked beneath my arms, searching for a little extra warmth.

  It was, like, negative one thousand degrees outside. You think I’m exaggerating, but Mom’s idea of fun included moving to an island on the Great Lakes—in the middle of winter, when the surrounding water was starting to freeze. It was that cold. Although cold doesn’t adequately describe it. It was much, much colder than cold.

  I was going to have to pull out my thesaurus and learn a whole list of adjectives for cold.

  We’d flown into the small airport about an hour earlier. Our luggage had been loaded onto a taxi, only this taxi was a wagon with runners instead of wheels, because, oh, yeah, the island is covered in mounds of white glistening snow.

  I’d actually been excited when Mom mentioned the snow, because arcticlike weather was a totally new experience for me. I’ve spent most of my seventeen years living in north Texas. When it snows half an inch, schools and businesses shut down, and the local news interrupts the regularly scheduled programming to provide up-to-the-minute progress reports on the trucks dumping sand on the expressways. The reporters stand on overpasses explaining that it’s really cold, while showing footage of fishtailing vehicles, people slipping (yes, falling down on icy streets is newsworthy in north Texas), and children sliding down hills on baking sheets because we don’t, as a rule, invest money in sleds.

  I’m pretty certain that kids here have sleds, and that the news isn’t going to include roving reporters asking people how they’ll deal with the half inch of snow forecast to arrive by nightfall. Here snow is measured in feet—possibly yards—and freezing is clearly a way of life.

  Cars, motorcycles, and trucks aren’t, however.

  Did I forget to mention that? The island has a ban on motorized vehicles. They’re left on the mainland.

  Mom thinks this is “quaint.”

  I haven’t quite decided, although I’m trying to be open-minded about it. I was hoping to guilt Dad into buying me a red Ford Mustang when I graduate from high school. So I either need to guilt him into buying me something else, be content to drive only occasionally when I’m on the mainland, or move off the island permanently. Something to think about later. Right now, I was suffering from brain freeze.

  “There, I think I can feel warm air blowing out now,” Mom said. She was standing on a chair, her one bare hand—the other was still gloved—pressed against a vent in the ceiling.

  She’d adjusted the thermostat on the heater as soon as we walked through the door. Then she’d lit a fire in the gas fireplace in the parlor. I discovered that a gas-burning fire with fake logs doesn’t generate as much heat as a wood-burning one. But then it’s not as much trouble to start and keep going, either.

  Mom stepped off the chair, faced me, and grinned. But it wasn’t her natural grin. It looked fake, painted on, forced, as though she didn’t want to acknowledge that we’d made a huge mistake. My mom is the most honest person I know, but this smile had the makings of a con—like the one you get when your mom takes you to the doctor and tells you that whatever the doctor is going to do, it won’t hurt. But it does—always. And so you start to recognize that smile and dread it.

  Mom removed her woolen cap and static electricity made her short blond hair stick up at various angles. I figured my own blond hair—which hangs just past my chin and, under normal circumstances, which these were not, curls at the ends—would do the same thing when I removed my cap. But I’d read somewhere that a huge amount of body heat escapes through the head, so I kept my hat snugly in place, trying to trap as much heat as possible inside my five-foot-two-inch frame.

  “It just takes the air a while to warm up, which makes sense if you think about it, since the air is so cold,” Mom said, rambling, as though trying to convince herself as well as me that everything was going to be all right.

  “And once it gets warm, it’ll stay warm,” I said optimistically.

  “Oh, definitely,” Mom said, her fake smile shifting into a more normal-looking one. “I doubt we’ll ever turn off the heater.”

  “Except during the summer.”

  “Maybe not even then. Depends on whether or not we’ve thawed out.” She laughed. “Who would have thought cold could be this cold?”

  “It’s an excuse to buy more clothes.”

  “Like you need an excuse,” Mom said.

  Okay, I was a clothesaholic. I loved buying clothes. I was pretty pumped that I was going