Page 54 of American Royals
Teddy smiled beneath his wool neck gaiter. The tip of his nose had gone red from the cold. “Did I misunderstand, or did he just challenge you to a race?”
“Jeff and I always race down Revelation Bowl. The winner gets to make the loser complete a dare.” She chuckled. “Last year after I won, I made him freeze Daphne’s long underwear out in the snow overnight. She was furious the next day.”
They were above the tree line now; the landscape raced along below them in an unbroken sheet of white.
“I’ve heard the ski team at King’s College is surprisingly good given that they aren’t in the mountains.” A smile ghosted Teddy’s lips. “Granted, it is East Coast skiing, but you could still look into it.”
“Why does everyone always assume I’m going to King’s College?” Sam struggled to check her irritation. “Who knows, maybe I won’t go to college at all.”
“You don’t mean that,” Teddy countered, with surprising conviction.
She gave a disinterested shrug. “What’s the point, for someone like me?”
“Someone like you, meaning one of the most influential people on the planet? Someone who actually has the power to make the world a better place?”
“You’re confusing me with my sister. Which is understandable, given that you’ve made out with both of us.” Sam ignored Teddy’s sharp inhale. “Beatrice is already part of Cabinet meetings, is helping to set the national agenda and negotiate treaties. She has power, not me.”
The wind picked up, swaying the chair lightly back and forth. Teddy raised his voice to be heard over it. “Don’t you realize that millions of people look to you for inspiration? You have such a unique position, Samantha—you can use it to drive people to action, to spotlight issues you care about—”
“You’re talking about advocacy, not policy-making or governing,” she cut in. “Which means being a glorified cheerleader. Throwing a bunch of fancy parties and asking people to donate to my cause of the week? I don’t think so.” That was the type of thing Daphne wanted to do with her life. Not Samantha.
“It’s more than glorified cheerleading if it causes real change,” Teddy countered. “Or what would you rather do?”
Sam started to deliver some flippant, incisive comment, to mock Teddy for his starry-eyed idealism—but the truth came out instead. “I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t even know what I would be good at.”
“Maybe if you went to college, you would figure it out.”
Suddenly they were lifting the safety bar and sliding out onto the windswept peak. Sam snapped out of her board and lifted it onto her shoulder, not waiting for Teddy, who had pulled a nylon strap from his jacket pocket, to loop his skis behind him like a backpack.
She wordlessly started along the ridge, following the icy footprints etched into the snow by previous skiers and snowboarders. To her left, every several yards, wooden stakes were anchored in the snow with red DANGER tape looped between them—not that the tape would do anything to help, if someone slipped. Past the tape, the mountain fell off in a sheer vertical drop.
At last they reached the top of the Revelation Bowl: a wide expanse of snow that funneled off the side of the mountain. Sam reached to unzip her jacket, feeling warm from exertion. The sun had finally dispersed the clouds. She tilted her face upward, letting its rays kiss her brow.
“You ready to lose?” Jeff asked, still breathing heavily. He flashed her his usual cheeky grin.
“Bring it on.” Ignoring Teddy’s quiet presence behind her, Sam strapped back into her snowboard. Then she edged over the lip of the slope and dropped in.
The air whipped at her, tore mercilessly at her clothes. Knee-deep powder flung itself to each side of her board in a spray of white. Sam felt like she’d been stagnant every minute that she wasn’t on her snowboard—that only now when she was falling off the side of a mountain was she alive again.
Jeff had shot ahead, and she felt Teddy nipping at her heels, the whoosh of his skis a softer sound than the boards’ loud carving. Sam curled her ankles and threw her weight forward with more blind force than usual, as if spurred on by what Teddy had said. What right did he think he had, to pass judgment on her?
Her board slipped out from beneath her.
Once, at five years old, Sam had tried to escape her private instructor and barreled straight down the mountain. She ran out of snow, skidding across twenty meters of mud before she crashed into a bush. When Ski Patrol finally dug her out, she’d lost two teeth and was grinning ear to ear.
Sam felt that way now. She was careening ever faster down the slope, trying desperately to slam her back foot onto her edge—
She flew forward, hitting the snow with a thud and tumbling head over heels downhill. The world was reduced to a spinning whirl of white.
She curled her body in on itself, waiting until everything finally fell still.
“Sam!”
To her surprise, the voice wasn’t Jeff’s, but Teddy’s.
He grabbed her elbow to pull her upright. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine.” Sam fumbled for her board in the drifts and fastened herself back in, one foot at a time. She felt suddenly embarrassed—not for falling, but for the reason it happened. Because she’d been thinking about Teddy.
