Chapter 21
Chapter 21
When I woke up the morning of the 2002 World Championships final, I was sure it would be the best day of my life.
The free dance wasn’t until the evening, so Bella suggested we spend the day pampering ourselves. She’d invited her brother and Heath too. Garrett declined in favor of touring some local Shinto shrines with a group of other skaters. Heath simply declined.
“How much does this spa cost anyway?” he’d asked me as I dressed in the gray morning light. He was sprawled across the thin futon bed on the floor; to wrangle a room to ourselves at the official event hotel, we’d had to settle for the Japanese-style accommodations none of the other Westerners wanted.
“I don’t know. Bella’s paying for it.” I was already late to meet her, and my phone kept buzzing with her texts.
“Of course she is.” He leaned back against the buckwheat pillows and picked up his Walkman. Nine Inch Nails bled through the headphones. “Better get going. Wouldn’t want to keep Her Royal Highness waiting.”
The Lins were staying at a four-star establishment a few blocks away. I met Bella in the library hush of the lobby, and she snuck me into the breakfast buffet so I could fill my plate with fresh soba noodles and Shinshu apples. Then a private car whisked us to a hot spring spa in the countryside, where we spent several hours cycling between chilled and steaming pools that left my muscles supple and my skin luminous.
“You have a real chance at the bronze,” Bella told me on our way back to Nagano City. We were tucked together in the backseat, both smelling of the spa’s signature blend of seasonal plant essences handpicked in the same mountain ranges that blurred past our tinted windows.
“You think so?”
She nodded. “Maybe even silver, if the Russians screw up again.”
Heath and I were in fourth after the original dance, a scant point behind the French, and well ahead of the Canadian couple we’d beat at Skate America. The Russians had come into the championship expecting to dominate the podium the way they had at the Olympics, but a few uncharacteristic errors knocked one team out of the running and left Yelena Volkova and her partner—fresh off a bronze medal in Salt Lake and favored to take the world title—in second place below the Lins.
“Arielle and Lucien have been struggling with their combination lift all season,” Bella said. “Plus they have zero chemistry, which’ll be even more obvious when they skate right after you and Heath. You skate clean, you can beat them.”
At the time, I was flattered. Looking back, though, I understand what she was really telling me: Heath and I might have a chance at a medal, but the gold was out of our reach. Because there was no way in hell we were going to beat her and Garrett.
In fairness, we never had before. Heath couldn’t understand why it bothered me so much. He enjoyed winning, but he didn’t feel the same gnawing ache of ambition, the bottomless pit inside me that got exactly what it wanted and then demanded more, more, more.
With Bella, I didn’t have to explain. She felt the exact same ache. And that meant she knew me in a way Heath, despite all our history, never could.
—
Bella had made post-spa lunch reservations at a restaurant famous for their tender cuts of beef from cows fed on the same sweet local apples we’d enjoyed for breakfast. Heath had—grudgingly—agreed to join us.
When the car dropped Bella and me off near the Zenkoji Temple, Heath was already waiting at the curb, hunched against the wind. I barely sensed the cold. I felt like I had a small sun trapped inside my core, suffusing my whole body with a warm glow.
“How was the spa?” Heath asked, reaching for me.
“Amazing!” I kissed him; his lips felt like cold marble. “They had all these pools filled with special minerals, and—”
“I’m starving, ” Bella groaned. “I swear I could eat a whole cow.”
She linked her arm with mine and dragged me away. Heath fell in step behind us. The restaurant was on a side street off the main tourist drag leading up to the temple gate. Nagano was a strange mishmash of ancient and modern, steel-and-glass office blocks and fast fashion stores intermingled with pagoda-roofed shrines and carefully cultivated meditation gardens. There was even a traditional Zen garden tucked right behind our hotel, the entrance guarded by smiling stone lions. Heath had been eager to explore it, but I told him we should wait until after we’d finished competing.
Bella picked up speed, weaving around the slow-moving sightseers, and I let her pull me along at the same pace—until I spotted something that made me stop, mouth agape.
“What?” she said. Then she saw it too.
A billboard, on the side of a building ahead of us, featuring a towering photo of two models posing together in skintight black clothing.
Garrett Lin. And me.
When Garrett told me the clothing brand was more popular in Asia, I had imagined our ad printed in the glossy pages of South Korean fashion magazines, maybe plastered at a bus stop or two in Beijing. Nothing like this.
“Bitch!” Bella gave me a playful backhand on the bicep. “You look hot. ”
Heath’s footsteps behind us had been hurried, trying to catch up. Suddenly, they stopped.
“What the hell is that?” he hissed through his teeth.