The Favorites: A Novel(24)

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.