AllFreeNovel
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I pull one of the flannel shirts off the hanger, watching the hanger swing back and forth as I slip the shirt on. Every moment that is occurring feels like it’s in slow motion, and again, I look around, my eyes wide, wondering if I’m dreaming all of this. I read once that when you die, you get really cold and all I can think is maybe I’m buried somewhere on the Badger Creek Mountain, dying a slow death.
“Laney,” Alex calls, his voice sounding far away and lost, but I can see him standing only a few feet away from me. “Delaney,” he says again, louder this time and I reach back into the closet, pulling another flannel off a hanger. I walk over and hand it to him, my face, my emotions, everything, unresponsive.
Without thinking, I walk over to a small dresser in the corner of the room, opening the top drawer, I find it filled with old wool socks that smell like mothballs and dust, but I don’t care. I grab a pair and collapse on the ground, pulling them onto my feet. I feel Alex’s presence before I see him, the warmth of his body filling the space around me and when I look up, he’s grabbing a pair of socks from the drawer too.
I can’t get up from the floor and just when I feel emotionless, I’m sobbing again. I left my phone on the table in the lounge because I thought I would be right back. I had forgotten my watch in the bathroom of mine and Zoey’s place after my shower, letting it charge since it was almost dead. As I replay all these mistakes in my head, I think about what is being said about Alex and me, skiers everywhere are talking about our stupidity, saying how they’d never hit the slopes without any of these things, but here we are.
“Do you have your beacon?” I finally find the courage to ask, each word coming out on a stuttered sob.
He shakes his head slowly, the guilt washing over his face and I watch his eyes become pools of liquid, each tear spilling down his cheeks in small little rivers. I want to comfort him. I want to tell him we’ll be alright because that’s what we both need right now, but I can’t. I find myself growing angry as I look around this hell hole we’ve found ourselves in.
“I wasn’t even working,” I spit out, my words like venom. “I was fucking helping you clear the mountain!” Every word echoes in the confines of the cabin walls, loud and volatile. “You should have had your fucking beacon! You were working!”
I hate how nasty I sound. I hate that I’m blaming Alex for what is happening to us. He had as much control over this as I did, which is none. But I need someone to blame and he’s here.
“I know, I’m so fucking sorry,” he wails, crying equally as hard as I am. He falls to the floor next to me, pulling me to him, but I push him away.
“Why don’t you have your beacon?” I ask, glaring at him, my hands still pressed against his chest, holding him away from me.
“I did. It fell off when we got swept down the mountain,” he tells me and I vehemently shake my head, not wanting to believe him. He’s fucked up before and this is just like all the other times. He’s irresponsible and careless. He only thinks about himself.
“Whatever,” I mutter, turning away from him.
“What the fuck, Delaney?” he hisses, grabbing my arm, and when I turn back to look at him, I can feel the rage radiating between us. This situation is about to bring out the worst in us. “You don’t fucking believe me?”
“No, I don’t. It’s not like this is the first time this has happened.” I toss my hands up in the air, rolling my eyes.
“Oh my fucking god!” Alex screams. “You think I fucking want to be here? I didn’t forget my fucking beacon. That happened once and now I’m the fucking reason we’re trapped here? Give me a fucking break.”
He pushes off the floor, storming away from me and I couldn’t be happier to have him not sitting next to me. I was on the verge of punching him in the face.
“And if we’re playing the blame game, why the fuck didn’t you have your beacon?” Alex shouts from across the room, his hands on his hips as he stands there, his face bright red with anger.
“I wasn’t fucking working!” I scream back.
“And your phone?”
I let out a hard sigh, trying to come up with a reason why I don’t have my phone or my watch, realizing he’s about to catch me giving a lame excuse just like he did with the beacon.
“Didn’t have a place for it in that suit?” he now says, harshly, clearly accusing me of wearing it just to get back at him. And while I did, that’s not why we’re stuck here now.
“Fuck you, Alex.”
“No, fuck you, Delaney.”
And that’s it. Nowhere to storm off to, nowhere to find solace in the silence of a comforting place. It’s just us, stuck together and getting nowhere by arguing the semantics of which one of us is to blame. The answer is neither. We didn’t cause the avalanche and with how far we were thrown off course, I’m not surprised Alex lost his beacon.
My skis are gone and one of the straps on my boot is broken, along with my helmet, which thank fuck I had the foresight to put that on before heading out to clear the mountain. If only I’d grabbed my phone or a beacon, or anything really. We both know better than this.
Without looking at Alex, I walk back over to the stove, the fire glowing bright orange in the darkness of the cabin, and I collapse on the mattress. Pulling the old wool blanket around me, I replay everything over in my head again. Trying to figure out where it all went wrong.
A storm was coming in and the snow had begun to fall hard, covering everything in a fresh blanket of white powder, but then it turned. The wind picked up and the snow accumulated quickly, falling at more than an inch an hour. It’s not like that’s unusual, but with the blizzard-like conditions, Elissa chose to close the mountain.
It was Elissa who asked me to put on some skis and help clear the mountain. I didn’t hesitate. I understood that leaving anyone stranded out there could result in someone dying. But I’d done it a million times before. Ski the course, corral people to the lifts and get them off the mountain. It’s not rocket science.
But the snow fell too heavy and too fast, and the remote side of the mountain is steep. Both Alex and I heard it before we saw it, the cracking sound of the snow under our feet, the whoosh that whipped across the mountain in the opposite direction, and then there was the giant white wall.
I remember screaming, grabbing onto Alex as we both clung to a nearby tree. And when it got close, Alex yelled for me to swim. I knew what he meant, swim with the snow, keep my arms up, creating a path to allow both of us to dig out if we needed to.
