Chapter 46

Chapter 46

I gnore them. That was Sheila’s sage advice.

When paparazzi camped outside the rink and our apartment and my physical therapist’s office and the drugstore where I was just trying to buy some fucking tampons, she told us to pretend they weren’t there.

When reporters and sports agencies and event promoters called us at all hours of the day and night offering interviews and feature articles and endorsement contracts worth more than a whole Olympic quad’s worth of prize money, she said we should let the phone ring.

Don’t get distracted. You have work to do.

And when Lee got parole and started making the talk show rounds, toting our childhood photo albums and an increasingly embellished sob story about how I’d broken up our happy family to chase glory in California, Sheila said responding would only encourage him.

Focus on your training. That’s the only thing you can control. Soon enough, this will blow over and they’ll forget all about you.

I didn’t want to be forgotten. I wanted to be remembered for the right reason: because I was a great athlete. Not because I looked lovely while bleeding all over the ice, or because my brother was white trash with a big mouth.

But I did what Sheila said, and Heath followed suit. We kept our heads down. We trained harder than we ever had before. Most mornings, I woke up so stiff Heath had to massage my legs for at least twenty minutes before I could make it across our tiny bedroom to the shower. I didn’t complain; I just set our alarm earlier so we could still be on the ice by seven.

Sometimes my body cooperated, and I could skate the same way I used to. Other times, it felt like the connection between my mind and my muscles had been severed. I had to learn to trust myself—and to trust Heath—all over again.

We were back to working with assistant coaches most of the time, while Sheila focused on whipping the twins into shape. Being sidelined stung, but I couldn’t blame her. Heath and I were skating so inconsistently, we were lucky Sheila was willing to work with us at all.

Pulling out of our first two events made me that much more determined to make it to the French Grand Prix. Our withdrawal from Skate America meant we were out of the running for the Grand Prix Final in December, but I couldn’t let the entire autumn go by without competing. That would mean showing up for the next National Championships untested—and, most likely, handing Garrett and Bella the title.

They were skating in the Cup of China a few days prior to our event in France. Sheila waited until the night before they left for Nanjing to drop the bombshell: due to promotional commitments for several sponsors headquartered in Asia and Australia, she wouldn’t be able to make it to Paris in time, and all the assistant coaches had their own scheduling conflicts. Heath and I were on our own.

The competition got off to a promising start with our compulsory waltz, but the last time through the pattern dance, my blade hit a rut in the ice and knocked us both off balance. We ended up in second place behind Yelena Volkova and her new partner. Dmitri Kipriyanov was descended from a Bolshoi dancer and (rumor had it) a Russian mafia princess. With his boy-band hair and pillowy pink lips, Dmitri was even prettier than Yelena. Unfortunately, his skating was just as stunning.

The original dance was later the same day, leaving us barely enough time to run back to our Latin Quarter hotel for a restless attempt at a nap. As we took the ice again, I tried to swallow a yawn and smeared lipstick all over the back of my hand.

During our months in Illinois, Heath and I worked through my parents’ old record collection, and he had the idea to skate to Kate Bush for our original dance. We’d pushed the furniture to the edges of the parlor so we could test out the tango steps, and he was right: it fit surprisingly well, both to the music and to our unconventional style. The rules had been tweaked to allow female skaters to wear pants for that event, and I’d envisioned us in androgynous costumes that, along with my close-cropped hair, would make us look like equals on the ice.

Sheila had other ideas. She advised a more traditional tango—“La Cumparsita,” a black suit for Heath and a red dress for me, a rose pinned behind my ear. The same thing so many other teams would be doing, which meant we would have to be all the more perfect to stand out.

That evening in Paris, we were far from perfect. Heath mixed up his cross steps and nearly tripped me, then I tore a hole in his trousers with my toe pick doing a leg wrap. Our scores slipped to third place, below the French team of Moreau and Emanuel—not Arielle Moreau, who had retired several years ago, but her little sister, Genevieve.

Maybe we would have done better if Sheila had been there to coach us. But I was glad she wasn’t. When we left the kiss and cry area, I didn’t want to speak to anyone. Not even Heath.

“This is our first event back,” he reminded me as we swapped our skates for sneakers backstage. Yelena and Dmitri were out on the ice, bringing the crowd back to life with their dramatic dance to the music of Russian tango singer Pyotyr Leshchenko. “No one’s expecting perfection.”

The season before, Garrett and I had won this event by a sizable margin. Now I was sitting in bronze medal position below a pair of teenagers who were très excitée to be competing in their first senior Grand Prix series. Perfection might have been out of reach, but that didn’t mean I was willing to accept humiliation.

Heath drew me into a hug. “We’ve still got the free tomorrow. It’s not over yet.”

Our free dance was all Sheila’s doing too—a classical, ballet-inspired piece, to a Mozart serenade so sedate I almost drifted off to sleep the first time I heard it. The program wasn’t us, and the more we practiced, the worse we seemed to get. But Sheila insisted. I know what the judges want, she’d say any time we made a peep of protest. You need to show them another side of you. I cast aside my doubts and chose to trust her. After all, she’d always been right before.

“I think I need a minute,” I told Heath. “Before the press conference.”

“Sure.” Heath started walking, pushing me along. “I saw a lounge this way, we can—”

“Alone.”

He stopped. His hand dropped from the small of my back. “Whatever you need.”

I kissed him, then turned away with my eyes still closed so I wouldn’t have to see the hurt on his face. The Russians had reached the end of their program, and the applause was so loud the arena shook like an earthquake.

I kept moving until the noise faded enough for me to shut it out. I was somewhere in the bowels of the building, a long corridor lined with identical steel doors and industrial ductwork.

It was the farthest I’d been from Heath since he carried me off the ice in St. Louis.

I leaned my head back against the cinder blocks, crushing the artificial rose I’d forgotten was still there. My hair wasn’t long enough to pull back, so I had to attach the flower with an elaborate grid of bobby pins. They scratched at my scalp, tugging strands out from the root every time I turned too fast.

With an exasperated growl, I seized the rose and ripped it free, pitching it to the floor. Then I stomped on it—once, twice, three times, the impact shuddering through my knee. I wished I still had my skates on so I could shred the petals into—

“What are you doing?”

The voice interrupting my tantrum was female, harsh and smoky.

With a Russian accent.