Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Here’s what it was really like at Sheila Lin’s elite skating school.

Eyes on us all the time—coaches and choreographers and dance instructors and personal trainers and photographers and reporters and most of all our fellow athletes, always watching, waiting for us to fall, to fail. Every moment a competition. Every day a series of victories and defeats, highs and heartbreaks.

So many hours on the ice, walking on solid ground felt unnatural. Running noses, chapped lips, cracked heels, bleeding toenails. My body aching like one big bruise. Feeling sunshine on my skin only through panes of glass, because we started before dawn and ended well after dusk. Passing out the moment my head hit the pillow at night.

A gnawing, constant hunger—not only because of the nutritionist-controlled portions of organic greens, lean proteins, and probiotic smoothies, but because I was closer than ever to the thing I wanted most, and I longed to finally sink my teeth into it. To savor the taste—and to clench my jaw so tight it could never escape.

No days off. No breaks. No excuses. Some days, I thought I might not make it through.

But every day, I felt happier than ever before in my life.

Unfortunately, Heath didn’t feel the same.

He did his best to hide it, but I knew him too well. I knew he was putting up with all of this—the rigid schedule and the constant scrutiny and the endless list of seemingly arbitrary rules and unspoken expectations—because he loved me. I knew the only times he wasn’t miserable were the middle-of-the-night hours we managed to steal together, whenever his legs weren’t too spent to make the climb up to my window.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care he was unhappy. I just thought he would get over it. Once we started winning, he’d see all the long days and hard work and sacrifice had been worth it.

—

As for me, I had only one complaint about the Lin Ice Academy.

Sheila Lin was hardly ever there.

One day, she’d be standing steps from the ice, analyzing our every move. The next, she was walking in a runway show in Seoul or filming a champagne commercial in Paris or waving from the step-and-repeat at a Manhattan movie premiere.

We were in good hands with the rest of the coaching staff. But I’d come to California to work with Sheila, and after more than a month, the closest I’d come to her was passing by the trophy case in the entryway. Even when she was present, she spent most of her time working with the twins. Feedback for the rest of us was passed through a telephone game with the other coaches and technical specialists.

I said no days off, but they did give us a single day off that summer: the Fourth of July. Though there would be no formal practice sessions on the holiday, the facilities remained open for anyone who wanted to train. It felt like a test. Who among us was dedicated enough to forgo the patriotic pleasures of day-drinking and fireworks in favor of extra ice time?

Heath wanted to spend the day at the beach. He’d been talking about it for a week already: swimming in the Pacific, watching the sun set over the water. A whole day, just us.

It sounded lovely. It also sounded like a waste of our already limited time.

Despite our lackluster training regimen back in Illinois, we were managing to keep up with the other skaters. Heath and I weren’t the best—not yet—but we weren’t the worst either. An extra day of practice might not give us an edge. Skipping it, though, could leave an opening for some other team to surpass us. There weren’t official rankings at the Academy, but we all knew exactly where we stood in the pecking order.

And Bella and Garrett Lin were at the top. During the final practice session before the Fourth, most of the skaters had gone a little distracted and delirious, counting down the minutes until that precious twenty-four hours of freedom. The twins, though, were laser-focused as ever.

They spent a full hour fine-tuning the twizzle sequence for their original dance, then took over the rink for a punishing series of program run-throughs. They both wore white spandex, the crisscross back of Bella’s top showing off her toned shoulders. She always had her hair up in a complicated crown of braids, and even after skating all day, not a strand was out of place. Meanwhile, my own topknot had gone from artfully messy to mushroom cloud, and Heath and I had sweated through our clothes hours ago.

We waited our turn, completing an off-ice session with Sigrid, the Academy’s Cirque du Soleil–trained lift specialist, on a crash pad set up next to the rink. The Academy didn’t have to share rinks with hockey players or speed skaters, so the facilities had been designed especially for figure skating—no boards, only a pristine white expanse that seemed to flow into the horizon like an infinity pool.

“Engage your core!” Sigrid kept shouting at us, her harsh Scandinavian accent slashing through the Lins’ smooth jazz program music. “Again!”

Up to that point in our career, we’d stuck to relatively basic lifts. If we wanted to be competitive at the international level, though, we needed to step it up—which meant Heath had to do far more than simply pick me up and put me down again without falling.

The lift we were practicing that day involved me performing a backbend while standing on Heath’s thighs. Doing it on solid ground was hard enough; pulling it off while moving at breakneck speeds across the ice seemed almost impossible. The longer we worked, the more Heath’s hands kept slipping against my sweat-soaked leggings. Every time I came crashing down, his noble efforts to catch me ended with both of us on our asses.

But I was determined. And having the Lins sailing through their foxtrot a few feet away only motivated me more. I couldn’t understand how they made it look so goddamn easy. They were somehow fast and slow at the same time, the staccato scrape of their blades picking up every pluck of the strings, while they flowed over the ice in time with the languorous vocals. When they finished their program, I had to curl my hands into fists to keep from applauding.

Then it was our turn. Our original dance, created by one of the resident choreographers, was set to a Cole Porter medley. The concept had us playing celebrities at a Golden Age Hollywood soirée. Heath hated it—all that fussy footwork and formal posture, with little space for our natural chemistry to shine through. We were used to selecting our own music, spending hours sprawled on the floor listening to song after song until we heard a beat that made us want to get up and move. But that wasn’t how things were done here.

Whenever he grumbled, I told him to trust Sheila. Nothing happened at the Academy without her approval, and she knew what she was doing. I hoped it would be easier to get into character once our costumes were finished. Heath’s was a tux with tails, rendered in a movement-friendly fabric, while mine was a knee-length gown with a high halter neck. Even in the muslin mock-up I’d tried on for the Academy’s in-house designer, I felt like a movie star—until the sizable down payment reminded me I was a middle-class Midwestern nobody.

As we took the ice, I tried to imagine how we’d look in competition: Heath, the sharp lapels of his tuxedo setting off the line of his jaw. Me, wearing lipstick the same color as the sequins on my dress, my hair swept up into a sophisticated twist. We assumed our starting positions—facing each other, my hand pressed to his chest as if I were torn between pushing him away and dragging him closer—and met each other’s eyes. Focused, calm, ready.

Our music started, and the fantasy fell away. We were an exhausted, wrung-out mess, behind the beat for the first few measures, nearly tripping over each other as we rushed to catch up. We made it through the foxtrot pattern without disaster—though my knees were too stiff, and Heath kept looking down at our fast-moving feet. Then came the lift.

I knew we were in trouble from the moment my blade touched Heath’s leg. He didn’t have a solid grip on me, and I couldn’t stand up in time to execute the backbend properly. My knees started to buckle. I engaged my core, squeezed my calves, clenched my teeth—anything I could think of to save it. But it was too late. I was going down.

Heath bailed out of the lift, skidding to a halt with his arms lashed around my waist. I braced myself for us both to slam into the ice, but miraculously we stayed upright.

“Are you okay?” His breaths came fast and shallow. “I’m so sorry, I thought I—”

“Why did you stop?”

Sheila. She was there. Standing right beside the rink, watching us.