IT’S COLD AS HELL, AND colin cups his Hands around his mouth and breathes, trying to warm them up. The wind whips around the side of the library, chilling him through a thermal, two T-shirts, a beanie, and his favorite jacket. Colin shrinks farther into the warmth of his hood and rocks slightly, forward and back on his skateboard, watching Jay buzz his bike down the long flight of stairs. Huge piles of dirty snow line both sides of the stairway, and the sky looks heavy and swollen, like it’s ready to crack open and fall all around them.
The deicer scattered along the sidewalk pops and crunches beneath Colin’s wheels as he rides over to Jay.
“I thought it was supposed to warm up. Why is it so damn cold?” Jay grumbles.
Colin doesn’t answer, not wanting to think about what will happen when the lake begins to thaw. Instead, he relishes the freezing temperatures, the way each breath burns cold in his lungs, and how the other students rush by, practically sprinting up the stairs to get inside.
“Thank God we’re not at the lake today,” Jay says, teeth chattering. “We’d both be freezing our balls off. Literally.”
Colin laughs. “You’re not the one that ends up naked and wet.”
“Yeah. I’m the one sitting on the side of a frozen lake for an hour while you’re having all the fun.”
Colin snorts at Jay’s use of the word “fun.” Their idea of a good time has never made much sense to anyone else, but with Jay, it seems perfectly normal to characterize jumping into a freezing lake in January as fun.
“Think she’ll want to go again?” Jay adds. “She got up and left kind of suddenly today.”
“No clue.” Colin exhales loudly into the cold, the condensation forming a small cloud in front of him. He remembers how, as kids, he and Jay used to think they were cool and pretend they were puffing on invisible cigarettes. He knows the tiny particles in his breath freeze when they meet the icy air, moving from a gas to a denser liquid and solid state, forming ice crystals before dissolving back into invisible particles. He sort of hates that this reminds him of Lucy, like it’s some giant metaphor for what will happen when the days becomes dry and warm in the spring and there’s nothing left in the air to hold her together. Is it possible she’ll vanish along with the cold?
Jay pops his wheel and leans against the railing. “So that’s it, then? We’re done? Just when we’re getting it down?”
“I don’t know,” Colin answers. “She says she doesn’t want me to, but . . .”
“God, I still can’t believe it worked. I mean, for all of my doubts, have you ever really thought about what you’re doing? You’re having an out-of-body experience and making out with a ghost. Never mind how insane that is. It’s like you’re cheating death, Col. Again! It’s totally awesome.”
“Do not say it like that in front of Lucy,” Colin says. He climbs the stairs and looks out across the quad. He hated that phrase growing up—cheating death—as if he were somehow more life-savvy than his parents and managed to pull an ace out of his sleeve at the last minute, leaving him alive but his parents dead. “I’m not cheating anything. People get into cars every day, get on planes, get into boats. People hike and hang glide and ski down ridiculous mountains. Enough people have done those things and survived that we don’t even think twice when we start the ignition on our car and head out on Route Seven with the drunk and methed-out truckers barreling down there every day. But what if what I’m doing isn’t any more dangerous than skiing a black diamond? You don’t know, Jay. No one does it, so you think it’s wild. Maybe it isn’t.”
Jay is nodding almost the entire time Colin is ranting, and he puts his hands up in the air when he’s done. “I get it. Like, at first I was doing this only because it felt like I never saw you anymore. But now I think it’s cool. Leave it to you to find the fun in freezing your nuts off.”
Colin stands on his board and kicks off the concrete, crouching and jumping upward as he leaps, popping the tail so the board leaves the ground. Even being as sore as he is, there’s that singular moment of being airborne, where his head clears and the rush of adrenaline eclipses the wind in his ears and the cold on his face. His front truck makes contact, grinding the rail, and too soon, his wheels slam into the concrete. Colin weaves as he struggles to land steadily, gripping the handrail to stop from falling.
“Nice,” Jay says, leaning back against the railing.
“Borked the landing.”
“Dude, you were hypothermic yesterday. Cut yourself some slack.”
Colin comes to a stop in front of him. “What you said earlier to Lucy about the devil on my shoulder . . . You know I’m not looking to get hurt, right?”
“I know. What I think is you have bigger balls than the rest of us.”
Colin shakes his head. “No, listen. You know that feeling when you ride down a skinny from twenty feet up? Or look over a fifteen-foot drop to flat and think, ‘Let’s do this’? It only works if you never doubt that you can. Standing over that ice, I feel totally safe.”
“Like you’re in the zone,” Jay says.
“Exactly.”
“But you have to convince Lucy of that.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, hurry it up, you lucky bastard. I don’t have a ghost girl. At least let me live vicariously through you.”
