Chapter 17

Chapter 17

I blinked at Bella. “ You told her to ask me? Why?”

“Because you’re good.”

The way she said this, it didn’t sound like flattery. She was simply stating a fact: grass was green, water was wet, and I was a good skater.

“Not as good as me,” she continued. “But you could be.”

“Thank you?”

“You’re welcome.” She slid off the wall, walking toward the pool. Even barefoot, she moved as if she were balanced on blades.

“So you wanted me here…to be your rival?”

Bella nodded. “You push me, I’ll push you, we’ll both get better.”

“Like your mother and Veronika Volkova.”

“I’d rather you refrain from sticking razor blades in my skates, but otherwise, yeah.”

“That actually happened?”

“Oh, that’s the least of it,” Bella said. “The stories I could tell you…”

In the lead-up to the 1988 Games, the press had made the most of the Lin vs. Volkova rivalry, turning it into a full-blown spectacle with feverish speculation about sabotage attempts and secret love affairs. I’d assumed most of the reports were media spin, the usual obsession with pitting powerful women against each other.

Since her retirement, Veronika had trained ice dancers for Russia—and only Russia. Unlike most top coaches, she refused to take on international skaters, no matter how deep their parents’ pocketbooks. Her star pupil was her niece, Yelena, who skated with the eldest son of Veronika’s former partner. People were already salivating over when Yelena and Bella would meet in competition, hoping for a next-generation Battle of the Ice Queens to bring high drama (and high television ratings) back to ice dance.

Maybe Bella saw competition with me as a lesser battle to help prepare her for that all-out war. I didn’t care. All I heard was: you could be as good as me.

That wouldn’t be enough, of course. I’d have to be even better. Better than Yelena Volkova too. But it was a place to start.

Bella sat by the edge of the pool, and I lowered myself beside her.

“So.” She folded her hands on her knee, like she was interviewing me for a talk show. “Tell me your goal.”

“My goal?”

“The thing that, when you achieve it, will make all this worth it.”

“Well…” I knew my answer, but I felt foolish saying it out loud. Then again, a few months earlier, I would have considered training with Sheila Lin to be a pipe dream too, and there I was in her backyard. “I want to go to the Olympics. I know Salt Lake’s a long shot, but Torino in 2006 maybe.”

“That’s all?”

For her and Garrett, making it to the Olympic Games wasn’t a lofty goal. It was the bare minimum expected of them.

“No,” I said. “That’s not all. I want to be national champion, and world champion, and I want an Olympic gold medal.”

Bella smirked, and for a second I thought she was going to laugh at me—that this had all been a trick, to get me to confess my delusions of grandeur so she could knock me back down to the bottom where I belonged.

But then she said, “Of course you do. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

No one had ever spoken to me like that before. My father, even at his most supportive, seemed to consider skating a childish pastime I’d eventually outgrow. As for my brother, he took my ambition as a personal attack.

Arrogant bitch. You think you’re better than me? You’re worthless. You’re nothing.

“What about you?” I asked Bella. “What’s your goal?”

“Me? I want all that too—except why stop at one Olympic gold?”

“You want two, like your mother?”

“I want my mother to be a footnote on my page in the record books.”

If someone had called Bella an arrogant bitch—to her face, that is; plenty of people called her that and worse behind her back—she would have smiled and said You’re damn right.

And if she wanted me to push her, I’d push her.

“Want to go for a swim?” I asked.

“Are you serious?”

I stared at her, unblinking, a spark of challenge in my eyes.

“It’s freezing,” she said.

“You think this is freezing? Where I come from, we consider this bikini weather.”

The wind had picked up, and it actually was a little chilly so close to the ocean. But I wasn’t going to back down now.

Neither was Bella. She stood up and pulled her dress off over her head, revealing a strapless bra and underwear in a matching eggshell hue. Then she turned and dove into the water, so smooth she hardly made a splash.

She flipped her hair back like a mermaid. “All right, your turn, Shaw.”

I removed my dress the opposite way, shimmying it past my hips. Bella watched me the whole time, and I couldn’t help feeling embarrassed by my less glam undergarments: a cheap black push-up bra and cotton panties grayed from too much washing.

I dove in headfirst too, but not with nearly as much grace as Bella had.

As soon as I’d gotten over the shock of it, though, I realized.

“It’s heated?”

Bella laughed. I heaved some water at her head, and she ducked under the surface, so she was a shimmering shape drifting among the pool lights.

Of course the swimming pool was heated. Only the best for the Lins.

She emerged again, and we floated in silence for a few moments. The pool was relatively shallow, so the tips of my toes skimmed the bottom.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked. “Before tonight?”

“No offense, but you’re not the most approachable. You’ve barely said a word to anyone besides Heath since you got here.”

I wanted to argue, but she was right. We were so used to only having each other.

“How long have you two been together?” Bella asked.

I wasn’t sure whether she meant our skating partnership or our relationship. We met when we were ten, and started skating together shortly thereafter, but as far as our romance…there wasn’t a clear demarcation, an obvious before and after. Even our first kiss had been on the ice: a brush of the lips during a choreographed position change, the contact so fleeting I thought it might have been accidental—until we did it again during the next run-through, lingering long enough that we botched the beginning of a diagonal step sequence. I loved Heath Rocha before I knew what love was.

“We’ve been skating together for about six years.” That seemed like the simplest answer. Six years. It felt like forever, and like no time at all.

Our coach Nicole thought I was oblivious to Heath’s presence when he’d started staying after hockey practice. But from the first day, I’d felt his eyes on me and a pull between us, even if I didn’t understand what it meant.

I kept expecting him to come talk to me—to say hello, at the very least. Finally, I got impatient. The next afternoon, I waited by the doors, intercepting him before he had a chance to retreat to his usual seat at the back of the stands.

“Why are you always sitting up there watching me?” I demanded.

He didn’t answer right away. He looked a bit frightened of me. We were about the same height even then, but in my skates and blade guards I had a couple of inches on him.

“Your music,” he said finally. “It sounds like…like a thunderstorm or something.”

I shrugged. “I guess.”

The piece was a section of “Summer” from The Four Seasons —chosen by Nicole, after she’d rejected my suggestion of skating to Paula Abdul. Despite my father’s attempts to educate me, all classical sounded the same to my young ears. Heath was the one who eventually taught me to appreciate the endless shades and textures of emotion an orchestra could evoke. I liked how fast I got to skate, though, my footwork timed to match Vivaldi’s vigorous strings.

“Well,” Heath said, “you’re really good.”

I tossed my hair—which must have looked ridiculous. I used to wear it in pigtails for practice, one always bigger than the other, pieces falling out.

“Yeah, I know,” I told him. “So if you’re gonna watch me, at least get a better seat.”

Heath had smiled—and then sat down in the front row.

“You two are super cute together,” Bella said. “But a word of advice? You might want to be a little more discreet.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but Bella stopped me with an arch of her eyebrow.

“Your room is right next to Gemma’s. And Gemma’s best friends with Josie.”

Well, shit. “So everyone knows?”

Bella nodded.

“Does your mother know?”

“I find it best to assume my mother knows everything.”

“Do you think…” I didn’t even want to say it.

“Oh, don’t worry. She’s not going to kick you out. Not for that. If it were to start affecting your skating, though—”

“It won’t.” At the time, I couldn’t see how our connection could be anything other than an asset on the ice.

“So are you in love ?” Bella’s voice went all gooey and mocking. “Or just fucking?”

I was so taken aback by her bluntness, I didn’t know what to say. I should have told her Heath was my boyfriend; that was true enough. But the word boyfriend seemed insufficient to describe our relationship. No matter how annoyed I was with him for running off in a sulk, he was my best friend, my family, my favorite person in the world.

“It’s complicated,” I said.

Bella laughed—less dignified this time, with a little snort that made me like her even more. “Yeah, I bet. Be careful, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mixing skating and romance can be tricky.”

“You have a lot of experience with that?”

This fucking fifteen-year-old, dragging me about my relationship, trying to give me sage advice. She’d probably never even been kissed. She certainly couldn’t fathom what Heath and I felt for each other. We were soul mates.

“No. Ew.” Bella sounded exactly her age for once. The pool water had started to wash away her makeup, making her look even younger. “I don’t have time for boys. I’m going to be an Olympic gold medalist by the time I’m twenty-two; I can’t afford distractions.”

“I guess that’s one good thing about skating with your brother.”

“Believe me, it comes with its own set of problems.”

I couldn’t imagine what they were. I was jealous of Bella, but not because of the money or the mansion or even her talent on the ice. What I envied was her confidence —the firm belief she’d been born with that, yes, she deserved the best, and she was destined to be the best.

There was a sound from the shadows at the side of the house. Footsteps. Bella and I both whirled around in the water.

“Katarina?” Heath called out.