Racing Storm Mountain, page 1
RACING
STORM
MOUNTAIN
TRENT REEDY
NORTON YOUNG READERS
An Imprint of W. W. Norton & Company
Independent Publishers Since 1923
This book is dedicated to Ammi-Joan Paquette,
my wonderful literary agent and dear friend. Ten books, Joan!
Working with you has been one of the greatest joys of my life.
Here’s to the next decade and many more books.
CHAPTER 1
KELTON FIELDING SHIVERED IN THE BITING COLD, HIS worn sneakers pushing through the two inches of last night’s new snow on the sidewalk. He tried to warm his hands by holding the breakfast burrito in his pocket. Two blocks from home, he stopped and muttered a curse. “Come on, man.” The crusty old dude who lived on that corner in an ancient, rusted Airstream camper never shoveled his sidewalks. It had snowed a little every day since the opening of McCall’s Winter Carnival last Friday, a great gift for the carnival, but not for Kelton. He would either have to go half a block back down the sidewalk to a cleared driveway and then walk in the street or walk through the thick snow here, trying to step in his partially filled footprints from yesterday, snow falling down into his sneakers, leaving his feet cold and wet all morning.
OK, maybe it wasn’t really that much of a hassle to go all the way around, but thing was, the guy kept this scrawny dog chained to a tree on a dirt patch in the backyard. Now the dog made a dirty snow circle with his chain, running around, constantly barking. At least until Kelton approached the rickety wooden fence plastered with ugly orange NO TRESPASSSING signs. As soon as the dog saw him, he quieted down and rushed as close to Kelton as his chain would allow, deep into the weed patch about six inches from the fence.
“Hey, Scruffy,” Kelton said quietly. One time the old man had burst out of his trailer, threatening to call the cops on Kelton for trespassing. Kelton glanced around to make sure nobody was watching him. Last thing he wanted was to get in trouble or be made fun of for hanging around a place like this.
He reached through a gap in the fence to pet the dog. “How you hanging in there?”
Scruffy wagged his matted tail and sniffed Kelton’s fingers. Kelton laughed. “Wha’? You hungry again?”
Scruffy whined a little. Kelton scratched behind the dog’s ears. There weren’t a lot of human footprints behind the trailer. When did the old man ever feed this dog?
Kelton pulled the burrito from his pocket, his mouth watering just looking at the thing. Mom had splurged on the good brand, the larger ones that would keep him full through most of the morning. He tore off a big steaming chunk from one end, careful not to drop any egg or ham. “OK, here you go, buddy.”
The first time Kelton had fed Scruffy like this, he’d been worried the dog would bite his fingers off to get the food, but Scruffy was careful. He was a real nice dog. In a second, the dog had eaten his chunk and was licking Kelton’s fingers. “You’re always hungry, aren’t you?” Kelton’s stomach growled as he took the first bite of his breakfast. Scruffy tilted his head, staring at the food. “Yeah, I know the feeling.”
He was sure that, once again, he’d know that hollow emptiness later that morning as he waited for lunch. He handed the burrito to the desperate dog, who devoured it in seconds. Kelton petted Scruffy more, feeling his ribs. “We’re finally living in a place that allows pets, but I can’t be sure we’re staying. Otherwise, I’d take you with me. Just steal you. I don’t care.”
Kelton had thought about taking Scruffy home lots of times. Just grab the bolt cutters from the garage, hide them under his coat until he reached the fence, lean down, snip the little chain, and carry that dog home where he could be happy. It would be stealing. Fine. But the old man didn’t pet that dog or nothing. Scruffy was stuck out there all alone all the time. And it wasn’t right.
Snow had melted into Kelton’s shoes again. “See ya, Scruffy. I gotta go to school now.” Kelton shivered, and Scruffy shook himself, rattling his chain. “Hang in there, buddy.” Kelton rubbed his itchy eyes and continued toward school.
Inside, Kelton did his best to scrape the snow from his sneakers on the big doormat. His old worn-out wet shoes squeaked on the shiny school floors, but even with his lightly squeaking footsteps, nobody paid attention to him that morning. Same as a lot of mornings.
He tried to nod at Seth Remmings and Milo Tanner, a couple of guys from the band and science fiction crowd that always hung out in the commons even after the bell rang to allow people to go down the hall to their lockers. Sometimes those two were pretty cool. But today they were too wrapped up talking to each other about a figure-based tabletop game they were always playing. At first it had looked fun, but each of the little plastic medieval warrior figures cost about fifteen bucks, and that was new out of the box. Rare figures on the collector market could sell for as high as $50 or $100. Forget it. He didn’t even want to play the stupid game. For real.
“Hey!” Morgan Vaughn squeaked as she rushed up to Swann Siddiq. Morgan flipped her hand back through her sandy blond hair. “What do you think?”
Swann flashed her bright smile, the same smile that had lit up the cover of People magazine only last year. At first nobody had believed the rumor, but then someone had found the cover image online and printed the happy family picture of Swann with her famous-actor parents.
“It looks great,” Swann said.
It wasn’t that great, Kelton knew. He’d never say so around anyone, but he knew way more about women’s hairstyles than most guys, on account of his mother working at the Color & Cut Cowgirl salon. Ever since Swann Siddiq’s family had moved to McCall from Hollywood, at least four girls—five, counting Morgan—had shown up asking for this special swept look. The problem, Mom had tried to explain, was that certain hair-care products and special curling irons or something were very expensive. To do the style right, a girl would have to pay hundreds of dollars to a stylist who had the right products and really knew the technique.
“Did you get it done at Color & Cut Cowgirl?” Swann asked.
Morgan and Swann kept talking in that super-excited way girls had, and neither of them noticed McKenzie Crenner messing with her books at her locker while she pretended she hadn’t seen her best friend and number one disciple cozying up to Swann.
Kelton watched it all. He often noticed things about other people, never being noticed himself.
McKenzie Crenner had always been the most popular girl in the sixth grade. She was beautiful, wore all the newest clothes with the labels everybody cared about so much, and she was super good at volleyball and basketball. When McKenzie thought something was neat or important, so did most of the rest of the girls. Then a lot of the guys would act like they cared too, because they wanted to impress the girls.
When Swann arrived, she blew up the whole system. Her famous parents had recently purchased a $3 million mansion they called a log cabin right on the lake. They’d had a housewarming party not long after they moved in. Kelton hadn’t been invited, of course. It was for the Populars only. But nothing had been the same after that party. McKenzie Crenner acted like she thought Swann was great and all the Populars were close friends, but Kelton knew that was a load of crap. He didn’t get the best grades, but he wasn’t dumb enough to fail to notice the trouble behind those beautiful smiles and fake hugs.
It wasn’t assigned seating in science, so Kelton always grabbed a stool at one of the two-person black lab-table desk things in the back. He was less likely to get made fun of back there, and if he was, at least he’d see it coming.
From his backpack, he produced his three-ring binder that his mom had from when she was a manager at the local Gas & Sip a few years ago. He’d cut out the cover insert picture so that it was plain and black. Not the coolest binder, but people didn’t make a big deal about the dumb Gas & Sip corporate logo anymore. Packed inside, taking up all the room on the metal rings, were the key sections of the 1,308-page service manual for his 2006 Ski-Doo Summit 800 snowmobile, just the pages he needed to help him finally get the machine running. His mom’s ex-boyfriend Darren had purchased the manual online and downloaded it on his work laptop, printing it at home back when the printer worked.
When Darren was still living with them, before he and Mom broke up, the guy used to take Kelton zipping across the white, both on trail and off. Kelton had laughed the whole time Darren had cranked it up full throttle on an easy downhill run. Nobody believed Kelton when he talked about it, but he and Darren had been up to a hundred miles per hour. Off a little snow bump, and they’d had that 445-pound beast in the air. It was old, but that sled used to be able to really move. It would again.
Of course, for a long time Kelton had been too afraid to even touch Darren’s snowmobile. He’d never been allowed to mess with it when Darren wasn’t around. But now Darren was never around, and Mom had made it clear he was never coming back. “Whatever junk he left behind is up to us to dispose of now,” she’d said. That’s when Kelton figured the Ski-Doo might as well be his own.
Laughter echoed from the hallway, and a moment later Hunter Higgins, Hunter’s cousin Yumi, and Annette Willard entered the room.
Barrett Wilson flopped onto a stool next to Hunter. “How many wolves did you shoot today?”
Kelton sighed. Barrett asked Hunter that every single day. Just because Hunter took a lucky shot a few months ago and brought down a wolf, people acted like he was so great.
Hunter chuckled. “Dad says the wolf should be ba
“Cool,” said Barrett. “I gotta see that.”
“Great match last night, Barrett,” said McKenzie Crenner from the front of the room. “A pin in the first period. So cool.”
“Yeah, I’d never been to a wrestling game before,” Swann cut in. McKenzie’s smile turned just a little stale. Swann pushed back a strand of her midnight-black hair. Kelton tried to focus on his snowmobile schematics, but Swann Siddiq did have pretty hair. For real. Swann continued, “My old school only had tennis, golf, track, and gymnastics. It was more arts-focused. But you looked super-tough, Barrett.”
Swann was beautiful. But she was rich, and came from Hollywood and an expensive rich-kid private school, and she rarely went through a day without reminding people of that fact.
“Thanks,” Barrett replied. Kelton raised an eyebrow. A couple of years ago, he had tried to congratulate Barrett on a good job in a wrestling “game.” The guy had done his half-laugh, half-grunt thing and corrected him. That’s how he learned that wrestlers did not like to call their sports contests games.
“It’s called a wrestling meet, silly.” McKenzie laughed. “Not a wrestling game.”
“Whatever. Barrett still did great,” Swann said. Then she added, to Tannin Gravin, “So did you.” The two wrestlers in the class thanked her. McKenzie couldn’t even fake a smile after Swann had once again seized the attention.
Milo Tanner sat down on the other stool at Kelton’s table, hiding behind his curtain of long dark curly hair as usual.
“Hey, Milo,” Kelton said, surprised the guy had joined him before he realized the seat next to him was the second-to-last available, the other being next to one of the Populars. If it were up to Milo, he would have grabbed a stool next to his buddy Seth.
“Hi,” Milo said quietly. He said everything quietly. “Get your snowmobile going yet?”
With time running out the way it was, Milo’s question somehow drew even more nervous energy from deep in Kelton, like twisting a wet rag draws out water. “Not yet. Still waiting for the part to come in. Everything’s ready. Got it started. Got the nine million strings from the old shredded belt finally cleaned out of the primary and secondary clutches.” Oh, Kelton hoped that belt would arrive today. If it showed up tomorrow, he might be able to get it installed and hurry down in time for the start of the Winter Carnival Snowmobile Fun Race, although he wouldn’t have time to run the sled at slower speeds to seat the new belt, to work it in before he had to go full-throttle in the race. Kelton had spent countless hours after school at the public library, watching YouTube videos about snowmobiles. The mechanics and pro snowmobile guys all said topping the sled out right after a belt change would really shorten the life of the belt.
“Basically, if that new belt shows up today, I should be set,” Kelton said.
“That’s cool,” said Milo.
Kelton was pretty sure Milo didn’t know the difference between the primary clutch and the skis, but he at least pretended to be interested. Milo was a good guy like that.
“Still trying to get that old Ski-Doo running, Fielding?” Bryden Simmons said as he entered the room.
“I got it running,” Kelton said sharply. Just because Simmons’s dad owned McCall Max Motorsports and had simply handed him a brand-new Polaris 850 Switchback Assault didn’t mean the guy was master of the snow. “Just need a new belt and it’s ready to go.”
“Oh great,” Bryden said. “So you can start the engine. Just can’t actually make the snowmobile move. Awesome.” He walked on by as though Kelton had ceased to exist. “Hunter, I know you have real sleds. You racing tomorrow?”
“Not really my snowmobiles,” Hunter said. “But yeah. I’ll be racing. Don’t think I’ll have much of a chance of winning, especially against your new sled, but I’ll give it a try.”
Kelton snorted a little. The guy’s family had a huge hunting lodge on a private hunting preserve, where they kept a whole fleet of snowmobiles, four-wheelers, and everything else. He acted so humble with his “I don’t have much of a chance” and “I’ll give it a try,” but the truth was his family had great sleds and his rich lawyer daddy had paid the race entry for him.
“You racing, Yumi?” Bryden asked.
“I’m not so big on the winter sports,” Yumi said. “Some skiing once in a while. No race for me.”
“How about you, Swann?” Morgan Vaughn asked. “Your dad is donating that awesome snowmobile, after all.”
“A custom Yamaha Sidewinder SRX LE,” Bryden said with amazement in his voice. He was right to be impressed. It was the fastest production snowmobile in the world, an $18,000 machine. Some of the guys online talked about driving theirs at speeds around 120 miles per hour. With the modifications done for Swann’s daddy’s action movie Snowtastrophe III, it was said to push speeds up near 150, plus it had been fitted out with cool lights that made it seem to hover over the snow.
“Father won’t buy me a snowmobile,” Swann explained.
Kelton was truly shocked. Her dad’s films had made a ton of money, and the guy could easily swing a few thousand bucks for a snowmobile, not like Kelton, who was in big trouble if he didn’t win the race and Mom’s boyfriend Steve found out how he’d raised the money for the race entry fee and for the new belt for his Ski-Doo.
“Is it really the one he rode in the movie?” Bryden asked Swann.
Swann’s smile faded a bit. “That’s what they say.” She waved away his question, as if she were done talking about it.
“An awesome snowmobile and half-a-grand prize money?” Bryden rubbed his hands together. “It’s mine! I’m winning this thing.”
Kelton turned to the last two pages in his binder for proof that Bryden was wrong. He wouldn’t win tomorrow’s race, Kelton would. At the library, he’d printed a complete copy of the official race rules. The course consisted of a trail seventy miles long, looping around the base of Mount McCall, or Storm Mountain, as some people called it. Thing was, Kelton had read all the rules at least ten times. Racers were required to clock in at each of four checkpoints. Except the rules listed no requirement for racers staying on the trail. From the back pocket of his binder he pulled and unfolded a topographical map of McCall and the surrounding area. Something useful that Mom’s new boyfriend Steve had brought when he moved in this last summer, it was the kind of map with contour lines to mark elevation, like the Army uses. Steve had a big thing about how he had always wanted to join the Army, would have enlisted and become a Special Forces sniper except for this legal violation that wasn’t his fault.
Kelton printed out an online course map and compared it to his own. Checkpoints one and two were pretty far apart. Racers would reach the first flags on the straight path about halfway from the starting line to the first curve that led around to the north side of the mountain. The second checkpoint was a few miles down the more or less straight path on the north side.
On his map, Kelton had drawn his path to victory. Mount McCall wasn’t much of a mountain, and it consisted of two peaks, Big McCall to the west and Little McCall to the east, with a high valley between them. There was a defunct gold mine somewhere up there, with the rough remains of the old road over the mountain. After hitting the first checkpoint, instead of going way around the mountain, Kelton would cut many miles off his race by going through the pass over the mountain directly to checkpoint two. It had taken the better part of a day to measure the distance on the map against the likely speed of the fastest sleds to figure out he’d hit checkpoint two before the rest of the chumps were even halfway between the first and second.
Kelton smiled as he looked over the map and reviewed his route again. It was a great plan, completely allowable by the rules, and the perfect way to compensate for all the advantages the Populars had with their rich parents and more expensive and powerful snowmobiles. When Kelton won the custom-mod Yamaha Sidewinder SRX LE, he’d sell it, and with that and the $500 prize have more than enough to avoid any trouble with Steve. He took a deep, satisfied breath. For once, things would work out for him.
The bell rang, and Mrs. Wittinger stood up from her computer. “Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Friday, the beginning of the end of the chaos of the Winter Carnival. I overheard some of you talking about Saturday’s snowmobile race, and I hope you will all be very careful. It is supposed to be a cold and snowy weekend.”
