Icing on the Lake (18 page)

“Y
ou made it!”

“Kirst!”

“She’s here!”

Everyone screamed as Emma opened the door and Conor and I walked into the log cabin—which was actually more like a big lodge—the next morning.

Well, maybe not everyone, maybe just the girls shrieked. In any case, I felt like a celebrity.

Emma, Jones, Keira and Crystal all gathered around me in a hug. “That’s not Sean,” Jones whispered in my right ear, as Emma said, “Isn’t that goalie guy?” in my left.

I cleared my throat as we separated and said, “Conor, this is everyone. Everyone, this is Conor.”

Fortunately, nobody gasped. At least not that I heard.

Tyler and I exchanged polite nods in greeting, and I said hi to Emma and Crystal’s boyfriends, Donny and Eric. It looked like Jones had come by herself. I admired her for that. Not that I wanted to trade places with her right now, because I was very happy I’d brought Conor along. Maybe I’d started off with the wrong intentions—finding a guy just to bring here—but I’d ended up with something—someone—great.

“Oh, no!” Crystal suddenly cried, and she rushed back to the large, open kitchen. I thought I saw a little smoke coming from the stove, but I ignored it as we sat down on the rustic furniture by the fireplace.

Keira brought each of us a mug of coffee, and everyone gathered around to hear about our trip.

“It’s so great you could finally make it,” Emma said. “Were you scared?”

“Us? No.” Conor shook his head. “Kirsten might have scared some people at the gas station when she started whipping snowballs at them, but—”

“You did what?” Tyler asked.

“It was boring. It’s called letting off tension,” I said.

Crystal came over with a big plate, stacked high with pancakes. “Help yourselves, okay? A couple of these are sort of burned, sorry,” she said. “That stove is weird. All of a sudden it gets really hot.”

We all loaded up some breakfast onto paper plates and sat back down to eat.

“Yum. We’re going to need this energy for when we go skiing—”

“And snowshoeing—”

“And hiking—”

“I don’t know if I should have maple syrup, or jam,” Emma said, tapping her knife against the table. “What do you guys think? I love syrup, but that raspberry jam looks really good.”

Jones looked at me and rolled her eyes. “Emma Dilemma. Have both. Okay? Just have both.”

We both cracked up laughing, and I saw Conor giving me a confused look out of the corner of my eye. Then I turned to him and saw that he wasn’t confused; he was trying to choke
down one of the burned pancakes, and he seemed to be struggling.

“Fear factor: pancake edition,” he mumbled to me after he’d managed to swallow the bite.

Together we managed through our laughter to hide his plate under mine, and we shared the less-done pancake. Which, when you got to the center of it, turned out to be a little raw.

Luckily, we’d bought some donuts at the gas station—they were selling them for a quarter to everyone who’d camped out for the night, and we had sort of a party with coffee in the parking lot as everyone got ready to move on.

“No matter what? We’ll always have SuperAmerica,” Conor had said as we pulled out onto the highway.

“Oh, yes,” I said, laughing as I checked out the photos on my cell phone. “Isn’t that romantic?”

“I guess I picked up a few things from the pigeon scout,” Jones said that night. She’d just managed to start a fire outside, on the snowy beach at the edge of the large lake where the cabin was located. We were right in the middle
of the woods—it was completely deserted, except for a few other big log cabins nearby. No one else was having a bonfire that night.

“Did you guys hear? The groundhog saw its shadow this morning. You know what that means,” Crystal said.

“Six more weeks of winter,” I said. We’d spent the day cross-country skiing, snow shoeing and hanging out. Everyone seemed to approve of Conor—though they were still confused about what had happened with Sean. I’d fill them in later, when we had a chance to talk, just the four of us.

“We live in Minnesota. Like we didn’t know that we had six more weeks of winter already,” Jones said. “More like a
hundred
, probably.”

Crystal groaned. “Don’t remind me, okay?”

“You need a spring break trip,” I said. “In fact, maybe we all do…right?”

“You think maybe you could spend six more weeks in Minneapolis?” Conor asked me.

“Well, Gretchen is really not all better,” I said. “I mean, clearly. Plus, I told her I’d help her get started in her new job.”

I thought of how worried she was when I
got home, and how we’d had that big fight and made up and felt tears welling in my eyes. I’d called her several times already since we’d been gone, just to let her know I was okay.

“You know that movie,
Groundhog Day
? Maybe we could live through this day over and over,” Conor said as I leaned against him.

“Yeah, but then we’d have to eat Crystal’s pancakes of lead again,” I whispered to him.

He rubbed his stomach and said softly, “I think I’ll take over the baking tomorrow.” I nodded.

I looked around the fire at everyone, taking stock of my friends and their significant others.

Crystal and Eric were solid—they’d been together for a year plus. On the other side of the fire, I knew Emma wouldn’t stay with Donny. And I knew Keira and Tyler would barely make it through the weekend, because Tyler was still staring at Emma. He clearly only kept dating her friends so he could be around her.

For some reason, I had a feeling Conor and I would be together next Groundhog Day.

“Come on,” I said. I stood up and held out
my hand to him. “Let’s go to the middle of the lake.”

“Right now?” he asked. “But the fire—”

“Just for a sec,” I said.

“This isn’t some trick where you’re going to pelt me with snowballs again, is it?” he asked. “Or shove me on the ice?”

“Come
on
!” I cried.

We ran to the middle of the lake, laid down in the snow, and made snow angels looking up at the starry sky. When you’re so far out in the country, it feels like you can see a million stars.

“You know how you accused me of seeing stuff, at the bakery. Like, hearts, and smiles? I…well, I made a pattern of my own for you.” I got to my feet and fished a flashlight out of my pocket. “It got dark before I was done, so I couldn’t show you before, and if it snows tonight, it might cover it up, so…”

Conor stood up and held out his hand for the flashlight. “Give.”

I slapped it into his palm and waited while he switched it on. The stars were so bright, I
could almost read the giant letters I’d tracked into the snow without the flashlight.

I
U CONOR.

“All those instant messages you’ve been writing are really paying off. You’ve been working on your abbreviations,” Conor teased me. “What school do you go to again?”

I started chasing him across the lake. “It’s a very good school.
Very!
”

Cover art © 2006 by Sasha Illingworth

Cover design by Karin Paprocki