Shooting for the Stars Read Online Free PDF

cards, in part because it wasn’t a good year for snow. “You’re not missing much,” Hank would say after a Saturday spent at the hill while Stella was bedridden. “The gladed trails aren’t even open.”
    But Stella knew a white lie when she heard one. Even bad snowboarding was better than no snowboarding, and Hank knew it. Most everything stunk for Stella that winter. There were long hours spent at the hospital. She threw up into a weird little plastic tray they provided during her chemotherapy treatments. When her hair finally did fall out, in terrifying chunks onto the shower drain, her mother’s sobs echoed against the bathroom tiles.
    Stella did not dare look in the mirror. Instead, she put her favorite ski hat on her head, pulling it down to cover her embarrassingly bald scalp. When Bear thumped into the room that afternoon, chucking a wooden case down on the bed, he didn’t give her head a second glance. “Have you played this?” he asked.
    The box read Backgammon on its side. “I can figure it out,” was her reply.
    “Okay.” He flipped open the latch and began to explain how the little pieces were supposed to move around the board. While they played, Stella studied the furrow between his brows when he was trying to decide something. Sometimes he ran a hand absently through his thick hair. Even at ten years old, there was something irresistibly sturdy about Bear. That ugly year, he was her favorite person. Even when she was cranky and nauseous, she always looked forward to the afternoons he turned up for dinner or a quick game. Some days they didn’t get to play, because Hank and Bear would be in the middle of some epic video game battle in the den. But Stella felt calmer when Bear was around.
    It had only taken Stella two rounds of chemo to beat back her childhood cancer. So the next winter found her back on the ski hill, frustrated that she couldn’t get as much air off the jumps as Hank and Bear. Yet .
    But she’d never stopped loving Bear. It would be years before she would begin to look at Bear that way. But when he was in eighth grade, and she was in sixth, the girls began to swarm around Bear. Stella was instantly jealous. She just knew in her gut that he was meant to be hers.
    Bear, unfortunately, didn’t know it. There had been a steady stream of girlfriends, and Stella had been gritting her teeth for fifteen years now.
    Worse, after Hank left to compete out west, Bear had taken over the big brother role, spending a great deal of effort ruining teen-aged Stella’s fun. He threw away the joint that she’d managed to score at a gravel pit party. “You are too young for that,” he’d said. And Stella’s cheeks had burned with embarrassment.
    And then? When she finally had a boyfriend of her own (one not quite as hot as Bear, because nobody was) he took the boy’s car keys away from him at parties. When the boyfriend complained, Bear would just stare him down. “I don’t trust you,” he’d say. Once he’d added, “She’s precious cargo.”
    Not only was it totally infuriating to be treated like a baby, it was confusing, too. Stella loved Bear precisely because he hadn’t babied her when everyone else had. Their relationship changed during her teen years, and not for the better. The competitive part of their friendship was still alive and well. They’d put away the Uno deck long ago in favor of poker. They were well matched at the card table. But they’d found it was possible to be competitive about many things: Snowboarding (Bear could outdo her in the terrain park, but Stella now ruled the steeps and the glades.) Rock climbing (Stella could climb faster, and Bear insisted that her smaller frame was the reason. He was probably right, but she never admitted it.)  
    So at least they still had that. But Stella lost to Bear sometimes out of sheer distraction. He’d only grown more attractive every year she knew him. He’d always been a fairly big boy, but at seventeen he shot