“All set to move in with your boyfriends?” she said, leaning on the doorframe. Her posture was made stiff by the new back brace she was wearing. She’d slipped a disk in her spine, and the doctor had her wearing a strange contraption that resembled a plastic corset. I was worried about her; the specter of back injuries haunted all skiers who’d been doing it long enough to see one of their peers be taken out of the sport permanently, as I had when fourteen-year-old Monica Friend had broken her spine at the Junior Alpine National Championships the previous year. Penny’s injury wasn’t that serious, but she’d been talking to the doctors about surgery, and it scared me. At least the bald patches on her head had filled in by then and were hardly noticeable when she wore her hair in a ponytail, as she did now.

I rolled my eyes at her. “You know we’re just friends. Besides, Blair has a girlfriend.”

“And Luke?”

“Who’d sign up for that?” I smiled.

“Um . . . you? Don’t tell me you’re not, like, saving yourself for him.”

“Gross.”

What I couldn’t bring myself to tell even Penny was that somewhere in the year we’d lived away from each other my feelings had changed. The less I saw of Luke and Blair, the more I longed for them in a way that began to feel subtly, amorphously romantic. I still couldn’t fathom that either of them would be interested in me; they’d had their own awakenings in my absence. Blair had Sabrina the snowboarder, and Luke’s new friends seemed to come with a harem of heavily made-up groupies. At that moment, I was hoping that being near Luke every day once again would squash these flutterings of alien girlish feelings. It wouldn’t, but it would be years before I did anything about it.

My first year in Sun Valley flew by. My skiing improved quickly and drastically, just as Tad had promised. I turned sixteen and joined Blair in FIS races, making it a year before Luke, which—as I’m certain Tad had hoped—lit a fire in him and refocused his efforts on downhill. Soon, all three of us were skiing NorAms all throughout the season and competing against people a decade older, skiers we idolized in some cases. Luke, accustomed to being dominant, loathed getting his ass kicked at the higher level, but I relished it. At last, I was surrounded by female skiers who gave me a new bar to rise to.