Chapter One
Henry
That saying about the exception proving the rule was true. As a rule, I didn’t hate my competitors. Like most athletes, I hated losing, especially when my performance should have been better. But sometimes, I admired my rivals. Sometimes, I was jealous of them. Sometimes, I would have liked to be friends if I had time for friendship.
Not Theodore Sullivan.
I hated him. Loathed. Despised. Detested. Abhorred. I could have gone on—I had an excellent vocabulary. When I was a child, people said it was ironic I loved words since I spoke so little. (I’d quickly given up trying to correct the rampant misuse of the word “ironic.”) What they didn’t understand was that the less you spoke, the safer you were from saying the wrong thing.
Manon was still talking, and I tried to focus through the red haze of resentment. I must not have heard her correctly over the rush of blood in my ears.
I blurted, “Pardon?”
Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the love seat in the corner of their office, Manon and Bill shared a glance. Even for married people, my coaches had impressive silent communication. I didn’t always know what they were thinking, but I recognized the wary expression that meant: Henry isn’t going to like this.
The knot in my stomach tightened. I sat frozen on the mismatched couch across from them, my socked feet gripping the shaggy throw rug I liked to use for strengthening toe scrunches. My throat had gone dry, but I couldn’t even move enough to grab my water bottle off the ring-stained coffee table between us. The lack of coasters had always baffled me, but the wood was too far gone now anyway.
“Theo wants to join our training center.” In Manon’s Quebecois accent, the name sounded like “Teo,” and for a moment I let myself dream that perhaps she was talking about another figure skater. Any other skater.
But it could only be Theodore Sullivan, especially judging by the little grimace creasing Manon’s face. She seemed to be waiting for me to react badly.
She said, “We know it’s last minute and probably a bit of a shock, and of course we’re having this sit-down with you before we give him an answer.”
“Sit-downs” always happened in this corner of the cramped office in the arena basement. Manon sounded calm and measured, her hands clasped loosely in her lap. Her nails were glossy with a deep purple polish that matched the big hoops in her ears.
She had dark brown skin and kept her afro short, and she must have owned hundreds of pairs of earrings. Even in her usual black leggings and hoodie, she looked far too glamorous for the saggy leather love seat and ugly red rug.
And too glamorous for Bill, if I were being honest, but they worked somehow. His blond hair was almost gray and in need of a cut. While Manon made workout gear look elegant, Bill reminded me of my dad puttering in the garage on weekends. He’d gotten too much sun; his nose was burned a distracting red. He really needed to use sunscreen.
Bill smiled in the encouraging way he did when I was about to try my shaky quad Lutz. “It could be the best thing for you to train with one of your biggest competitors.”
Incorrect. The best thing for me was Theodore Sullivan on the other side of the continent. “But he trains in California. It’s too late for such a big change.”
“Making this move at the end of September isn’t ideal,” Bill said, holding his meaty hands out wide. “But we have more than four months until the Olympics.”
“A hundred and twenty-nine days,” I said automatically. “He can’t change coaches now.”
I swiped at my bangs impatiently. My hair was sweaty from my morning jump drills, and it flopped into my face. When I styled it, my bangs made a neat swoop, but I was due for a cut.
I was fortunate to have thick hair, and my grandma still mentioned how naturally black it was. Obaachan grew up in Japan and had always dyed her brown hair jet black.
“We wouldn’t even consider taking on Theo if we thought this would harm your training. It’s going to fuel you.” Manon’s brown eyes lit up as she leaned forward. “This is the final key in your Olympic preparation. It won’t be easy, but this will make you stronger.”
“You know how many recent world and Olympic champions trained with their fiercest rivals,” Bill said. “Look at the Russians. That daily motivation and competition is powerful stuff. I wish like hell I’d had it back in my day.”
Bill had once been Canadian men’s champion, although he’d be the first to admit he only won that year because the favorites messed up. Still, he’d gone to Worlds a few times and had made an Olympic team. He’d become known as one of the best jump technicians in coaching, second perhaps only to the legendary Walter Webber, who’d been his coach.