“My dad wants us to move to Sun Valley,” Luke told me one day when we were sitting at the lodge in Schweitzer the next winter, waiting for my mom to pick us up. It had been a grueling day on the hill; the slopes were icy, and we’d been pelted with rain on the bottom half of our runs. We’d been talking for twenty minutes about the rotten snow—a topic we could discuss endlessly but that bored anyone else in earshot almost immediately.

“Do you want to go?” I asked, feeling a lump in my throat. I’d been hoping—with thirteen-year-old magical thinking—that if I never mentioned the possibility of them leaving, it might not happen. For the year since the Duncans’ split, Ann had been running herself ragged trying to manage the boys’ schedules as she scrambled to get back into the job market and build a life for herself without her erstwhile husband. With Blair starting to compete in NorAms—meaning he was traveling outside the region to compete against adults—it was becoming impossible. It was alleviated only somewhat by the fact that Blair had turned sixteen and could drive himself to local races and take his brother out to Sun Valley to see their father twice a month. I frequently went along with them and couldn’t help but be impressed by Tad’s chalet, with its giant hot tub, which looked directly out onto the slopes of Baldy.

“Fuuuuck, I don’t know,” Luke said. “I mean the backcountry there is sick. The snow is better. My dad’s all excited about the club there, he says we could quit school. Not like, quit, but get a tutor or whatever so we can just go big, you know? But my mom would be wrecked. And, Bomber, you’d obviously cry your eyes out.” He smiled, and I punched his arm.

“You wish, loser,” I said. “What does Blair say?” Luke had become wilder when their father left—cutting classes, getting caught with a joint on the way back from the Junior Olympics—while Blair had become more stalwart, turning himself inside out to help their mom cope with her sudden single-parent status and taking a more fatherly role with his brother.

Luke shrugged. “He says he’ll go where I go, but I don’t think he wants to leave Mom. God,” he said, suddenly flinging his helmet to the ground. “My dad’s such a dick.”

I felt sick with several things at once: fear that Tad was going to win out and move my best friend eight hours away, dread at being on my own, and deep envy at the idea that Luke and Blair would get to turn their lives over to skiing.