The Favorites: A Novel(4)
The media likes to make my younger years with Heath out to be some sordid Flowers in the Attic shit: the two of us raised together as siblings (we weren’t), left unsupervised to explore our undeniable passion for each other (I wish).
The truth, whether you want to believe it or not, is that Heath and I were both still virgins at sixteen. Sure, we kissed, we touched each other, we slid aside clothing so we could press skin against skin. We knew how to make each other gasp and groan and shudder with pleasure. I knew he wanted to go further. So did I.
In some ways, it seemed absurd to wait. After all, we were already intimate in ways even adults in years-long relationships find difficult to comprehend. We went to school together, skated together, spent practically every waking moment together—and our sleeping moments too, when we managed to sneak past my brother.
Despite that, the upcoming trip to Nationals would be the first time the two of us were truly on our own. We still technically had a coach, though we could barely afford to pay Nicole. My father’s will divided everything equally between Lee and me, including the property, but I couldn’t access my half of the estate until I turned eighteen.
Nicole helped Heath and me out as much as she could—arranging part-time jobs at the rink to subsidize our ice time, assisting with choreography since hiring a professional was out of reach—but asking her to give up days of paid lessons to travel with us for free was out of the question. So we were going it alone, staying several nights in a shabby motel we’d booked because the official event accommodations were too expensive.
Any normal teenage girl would have been eager to take advantage of the lack of chaperoning. But I wasn’t a normal teenage girl. I was going to be an Olympic champion, and I wasn’t about to do anything stupid to jeopardize that. Like stabbing my brother, no matter how much he might deserve it. Or getting myself knocked up and having to spend our dwindling training funds on an abortion.
Everyone thinks Heath Rocha was my first love. He wasn’t.
My first love was figure skating.
It started in February 1988—the Winter Olympics in Calgary. I was four years old, and up way past my bedtime, watching the last night of the ice dance competition.
Lin and Lockwood were the final couple to take the ice. As they posed in the center of the rink, awaiting the first note of their program music, the camera zoomed in—straight past Kirk, with his skintight costume and slicked-back hair, to focus on Sheila’s face alone.
The skaters who’d gone before had looked as if they were swallowing their nerves, hoping and praying to whatever god they believed in that all those years of grueling work would pay off with Olympic glory.
Not Sheila Lin. A smirk played across her lips, which were painted the same ruby hue as the jewels shining in her black hair. Even as a kid with no knowledge of the sport, I was sure she would win. Sheila looked like she’d already won—like she had the gold medal around her neck and her blade firmly planted on the still-twitching corpse of her competition.
I didn’t become a skater because I harbored some childish fantasy of wearing sequins and spinning around like a pretty little top. I became a skater because I wanted to feel like that.
Fierce. Confident. A warrior goddess covered in glitter. So sure of myself, I could make my dreams come true through sheer force of will.
Skating was my first love, but in the intervening years it had become so much more. It was the only thing I was good at—my best hope for survival, for escape from that dark and crumbling house, from my brother and his rages. And if I worked hard enough, if I got good enough…one day I might become as invulnerable as Sheila Lin.
Nationals was the first step, the beginning of everything. Soon, I told myself, staring into the shadows beyond my bedroom window, Heath and I would be free of this place.
And no matter what, we would be together.
Chapter 4
The sun was rising by the time I managed to sneak out of the house.
Lee lay facedown on the sofa in the parlor. The fireplace hearth was scattered with cigarette butts, and liquor bottles left rings all over the original hardwood floors. My brother’s idea of a quiet night in.
Outside, the morning was crisp and calm, silent aside from the gentle lap of the waves and the crunch of my shoes on the gravel driveway. I picked up my pace, jogging past Lee’s mud-spattered pickup truck to follow the path I knew Heath had taken in the dark.
My childhood home is in a far-flung Chicago suburb closer to the Wisconsin border than to the city, dubbed The Heights due to its very slight elevation over the pancake-flat landscape surrounding it. Most of the area was populated in the late 1800s, following the fires and labor riots that sent all the richest assholes fleeing downtown Chicago for the relative safety of Lake Michigan’s northern shore. The Shaws had already been there for decades.
My some-number-of-greats-grandfather bought a big patch of lakefront property back when the area was nothing but dirt and sand and black oaks bent double by the winds that whipped across the water. A generation after him, another Shaw built a house right on the lakefront, leaving plenty of forest to block the view of future prying neighbors.
The house itself is relatively simple: a modest flagstone farmhouse with a few Gothic revival flourishes. It’s the land that’s valuable. Every decade or so, developers come sniffing around, offering stacks of cash, and whichever Shaw is currently in residence tells them to fuck off, sometimes with Midwestern passive-aggression, other times with the barrel of a shotgun.