Do-Over by Niki Burnham

run. Not gracefully (and probably not quietly, since I think I screamed when I got going too fast on one steep part), but at least with all my bones intact.
    “Yes!” Georg shouts as we sail down the very bottom of the run, heading toward the ski racks outside the base lodge.
    Once we finally stop, I use my poles to release my bindings, then keel over and do an over-the-top act of grabbing my quads.“The pain! The pain! Somebody call an ambulance!”
    He just smiles and shakes the snow off his hat, like he wonders how I could possibly be sore. Probably because he cruised down the run like it was no big thing. He even skied backward on one of the not-so-steep sections, just so he could face me and see if I was doing okay.
    Show-off.
    “You did just tine,” he assures me once our skis are locked and we’re clonking along like Abominable Snowmen in our heavy boots, doing the same heel-to-toe walk into the lodge everyone else is doing. (Someday, someone will invent ski boots a person can actually walk in. And they’re going to make a kazillion dollars on the patent, too. If I had better science skills, or anything close to real ski skills, I’d be all over it.)
    “Use lunchtime to rest up; then we’ll take a few of the intermediate runs when we’re done,” Georg says. “We can try that black run again later. Now that you’ve done it once—”
    So not happening. “Do you know how much snow I got up the back of my jacketwhen I fell on that really icy part? I don’t even want to risk it.”
    “But you know where the ice is now. And you’re not that sore. You could go dancing right now, I bet, and you wouldn’t be able to tell you’ve been skiing for a day and a half.”
    I spy Dad and The Fraulein in the concession line at the same time Dad sees me. He points to a table near where we were yesterday that’s covered with his stuff. I pull Georg over, shoving Dad’s hat and gloves out of the way as we sit down. “That reminds me,” I say, speaking quickly because I’m afraid we won’t have much time to talk, “you know there’s the dance at school next weekend, right? Ulrike’s working on it for Student Council.”
    “Sure.” He yanks off his gloves and tosses them into the pile with Dad’s and The Fraulein’s.
    “Well, I volunteered to help set up. Ulrike was talking about it at lunch a few days ago and she sounded like she really could use the help.”
    “Will Steffi be helping out too?”
    His voice is completely polite as he saysit—years of having “polite” drilled into him by his parents, I’m sure—but we both understand what kind of person Steffi is, and I know that’s why he’s asking. To watch out for me.
    “Nah. She didn’t seem interested. I actually told Ulrike I’d help after Steffi and Maya both turned her down.” I give him a guilty grin. “I wasn’t all that interested either, honestly. But I felt bad for Ulrike, trying to round up help and getting no takers.”
    “You like her, don’t you?”
    “Yeah, I do. She tries hard, you know?” I can tell he’s about to say something about how it’s cool I’m finding a new group of friends here in Schwerinborg, but I cut him off. I don’t want to go down the whole road of why I should like it here as much as I liked living in Virginia. Plus, I have a more pressing issue to discuss. “But that’s not why I brought it up. It’s a girls-ask-guys dance. And I was hoping, since I have to be there and all anyway, that you’d come with me.”
    “An official date?”
    Official? “I guess. I mean, I don’t think it has to be government-sanctioned or anything.”
    Oh, somebody smack me. Bad, bad joke. It probably does have to be government-sanctioned, since we’d have to tell Dad and Georg’s parents. I bet The Predator would want her say, too, since the public-relations people at the palace are always worried about Georg’s image. We’d be coached on how to behave, how to answer questions if anyone asks . . .
    Okay,