Page 1 of Just Like the Brontë Sisters

Part I

Chapter 1: Skylar

“Come on, Skylar! Keep up!”

I tucked my ski poles under my arms, bent my knees and drove my shoulders forward. That would increase my speed. That would show Jo Beth that I was worthy of being her ski-partner. She wouldn’t always have to urge me on or insist I keep pace with her frenetic energy. But it wasn’t so easy; Jo Beth continued to race down the mountain, and yelling over her shoulder to me clearly hadn’t slowed her down. I exhaled and tried to relax, tried to just enjoy this amazing day, one that I’d looked forward to so much that I could barely sleep the night before. Two feet of powder had dumped down late yesterday evening, so last night Jo Beth and I had shared an unspoken agreement to hit the slopes as soon as the sun was up. With snow like this, if we weren’t skiing we might as well be dead.

But relaxing was hard because all the signs for an avalanche were there: the wind whipped around at high speeds, the early March temperature was on the rise, and a mini-avalanche had occurred at this very spot less than a week ago. I’d learned all about avalanches at school and I knew that they didn’t simply happen by surprise. The mountain will first send out a warning sign. Plus, if one little misstep releases a lethal torrent of icy wrath, usually there’s someone to point a finger at. A human is to blame. But Jo Beth wouldn’t understand. My sister never really thought things through. Her mind was always on a straight path that only went forward and not to the side.

“Jo Beth,” I hollered. “I think I heard a cracking. We need to get out of here!”

She halted and let me catch up. “You’re not afraid, are you?”

I let my skis glide to a stop so that we were standing parallel to each other. The off-slope mountain was deserted except for us as we’d strapped our skis to our back and hiked up to the highest peak, just so we could race down. “Sometimes it’s good to be afraid.”

Jo Beth laughed. “Fear is for the weak, Skylar. If you could ever get your head out of a Brontë novel, you’d realize that.”

Leave it to Jo Beth to mock me for my literary devotion. My parents were impressed with my reading skills, that at such a young age I was already consumed by classic novels. But Jo Beth loved to tease me about it. Even when she called me an “old soul”—something that ought to have been a compliment—she said it in a taunting voice, like I’d just farted or something. Now Jo Beth resumed skiing and I followed, sure that every crack, pop, and whoosh I heard was the beginning of a snow slip that would swallow me whole.

Why had I even agreed to this? I imagined what an avalanche would feel like. Would it be a form of drowning, of getting overtaken by the wet and the cold, of literally surrendering to a force of nature? The blades of ice would pierce my skin, but that would probably hurt less than the strong arm of the snow’s cold, arrogant power.

It would make me disappear.

“Ta da!” When we landed at the base of the mountain, Jo Beth’s gleeful cry rang out like a broken bell. “Everything was fine! We had nothing to worry about.”

I said nothing. I couldn’t yet verbalize what I already knew, that just because something had worked out, that didn’t mean there wasn’t ever reason to worry. Even if everything else was fine, you could still cause an avalanche.