The Favorites: A Novel(17)
Garrett Lin: It might seem strange, training alongside our competitors. But if every day felt like a competition, real competitions would feel like a regular day.
Kirk Lockwood: Sheila wanted to train her kids in her own way, on her own terms.
Garrett Lin: That was the whole idea for the summer intensive. My mother wanted to motivate us, to surround us with world-class skaters and coaches and specialists, to give us everything we needed to become the best.
Sheila watches her children fall, then turns her back to the ice and walks away.
Garrett Lin: But she also wanted to remind us how easily we could be replaced.
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!”