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team is supposed to be really good this year. The Forrest Connection? Easy! Forrest is
on
the football team.
    Example: Mom says we’re going to Cedar Park ShoppingPlaza. The FC? We will be driving
right by
Forrest’s house. Hopefully, he’ll be out front mowing the lawn.
    Example: I’ve just been selected by a secret society that meets behind pink locker doors. The FC? What if he sees me climbing inside? Or, on the bright side, maybe I could sneak him into the PLS office, just for a quick peek.
    That last one is sooooo tempting, because when you are in love with an eighth-grade boy, you really need to come up with things to talk about. Maybe you already know that eighth-grade boys really don’t talk that much. Oh, sure, you hear them laughing and talking with their friends or sometimes with their coaches. But just put one of them alone with one girl (especially a nervous one who likes him). If, on top of your nerves, you don’t have a single thing to talk about, the silence will bruise your heart and leave you with nothing—absolutely nothing—to analyze later.
    I heard that kind of silence the last time Forrest and I were alone together. We were on the seventh-grade ski trip and accidentally ended up sharing the same chairlift. The pairing was a shock, but I tried to recover quickly and take advantage of our time together. It went about as well as the “Watch your step!” catastrophe on the bus.
    Why is it OK for girls and boys to be friends until third grade, and then everything gets totally weird? That was the year when people started saying that Forrest and Iwere boyfriend and girlfriend, which we were not. Not really. We were just friends who could play knock out on the basketball court at recess, or we’d sometimes play desktop football with one of those folded-up triangles of notebook paper. Maybe he got tired of answering the boyfriend-girlfriend rumors, because he stopped hanging around me and started hanging out only with the boys. Even when he came to our house, he’d hang out with the grown-ups or with his younger brother. And then came Taylor.
    So it had been
years
since we’d really talked when the ski lift brought us together. It was a long ride up a steep mountain on a cold, sun-splashed morning. I started slowly, asking him how he was.
    â€œOkay,” he said.
    â€œI love to ski, don’t you?”
    â€œIt’s cool,” he said.
    â€œYour skis are really nice.”
    â€œThey’re rentals,” he said.
    â€œMy mom wanted me to wear a helmet today, but I said no.”
    â€œYou should,” he said, knocking the hard plastic of the helmet on his own head.
    â€œYeah, but I didn’t want it to squish my hair, because then it gets all flat and stuff.”
    To that, Forrest had nothing to say. What could he say, really? What does a guy know about helmet hair? We spent the rest of the ride in silence, as I searched the landscapedesperately for something to talk about. But there was nothing to say about the tops of trees or the few clouds in the sky. We climbed higher and I could feel the temperature fall. The soft snow cushioned what little sound there was from other skiers and snowboarders below. My ears popped. Then the lift stopped, as it sometimes does when a little kid can’t get on or someone drops a pole. We bobbed together on the thick cable. The quiet hung there with us, and I was sure that I was blowing my one chance with Forrest. I thought about what Kate and Piper would do in the same situation.
    Kate was good at telling stories, and she would have reminded Forrest of something funny that happened when we were younger. There were tons of possibilities. The Halloween in kindergarten when our moms made us dress as a bride and groom. The time we had a wiener roast while camping and ate hotdogs that were charred black on the outside and icy in the center. (We called them “hotdogsicles.”) I actually had plenty