Chapter 5
The blaring of an ambulance siren jolts me out of a dead sleep.
My hand shoots out from beneath the covers and slaps around on my nightstand before finding the right bit of phone screen to make it stop.
That obnoxious sound is literally the only thing that will get me up and out of bed before the sun comes up every morning.
I’m not a morning person.
At all.
Figure skating is a morning sport, though. There’s only one rink at Kellynch, and even though it’s only the Junior Worlds team using it, ice time is still limited.
As I slide out from underneath the covers, the textbook I fell asleep reading falls to the carpeted floor, the thick hardcover barely missing my toes.
With the amount of training we do, regular school isn’t really an option.
I’ve been homeschooled since the eighth grade and it’s one of the only things that sucks about having an Olympic dream.
Back then I thought it was cool to not have to go to class every day when all my friends did, but over the years I lost track of most of them.
Now I’m that ice skating girl they used to go to school with.
No junior prom for me this year or senior prom next year or homecoming court.
Is that even a thing anymore? I wouldn’t know.
The one nice thing is not having to be in class super early after skating.
Now it’s just skating and then falling asleep in the middle of reading a chapter on the rise of industrial capitalism after the Civil War.
It’s worth it, though. Completely and totally. There are some days I question that I’m even a Russo, and I barely recognize anything of myself in my dad or sisters, but when it comes to skating, I’m a Russo through and through. I can’t imagine my life without it and I don’t even want to try.
That being said, I’m barely human at this hour. I need coffee and to forget about how much of an idiot I made of myself yesterday and focus on the mission for today, perfecting the programs for Worlds.
Trudging down the stairs, I can already smell a pot brewing, which means Camille is here.
Which means I don’t have to cook breakfast today.
Part of me is thrilled to not have to do it, but most of me is terrified of what my kitchen is going to look like afterward since she’s not exactly a master chef.
Cooking was my mom’s thing and we used to do it together before she died.
I love it almost as much as skating. There’s something so satisfying about putting a bunch of random ingredients together to make the perfect dish.
And sometimes, when I’m really into a recipe and the time crunch of getting everything just right, I can hear her in my head talking me through the steps while we made her sauce or giambotta or pasticcio.
When she got sick, I used to sneak food to her so she could avoid hospital food as much as possible.
A couple of years ago that memory would have hurt, but now it’s warm and almost comfortable, knowing we still have this connection all these years later.
“Caffeine now, please,” I say, going straight for the mug cabinet and then the coffeemaker on the big island at the center of kitchen. I’ve been running on caffeine and a prayer for days now.
“Made a fresh pot,” Camille says from her spot at the stove. “Scrambled egg whites or,” she says, glancing down at the pan, “scrambled egg whites?”
“Can you even make egg whites not scrambled? Like, all the ways you make eggs are about the way the yolk is, right?”
“You are so weird,” Maria mutters as she takes a seat at the island, then folds her arms on it and rests her head against them.
The coffeepot is finally full, and I pour myself a cup, black. It’s the closest I can get to injecting it right into my body. The second it passes my lips, my brain responds. I mean, it’s impossible that the caffeine is already working, but my body knows it’s coming.
“Where did you go after the lesson yesterday?” Maria manages to say through her arms. “Everyone was asking about you.”
“Everyone?” I ask, taking a seat and smiling at Camille when she shoves a plate of egg whites and toast at me.
“When Freddie and Ben came back from the rink, they said you finished your lesson, but then you never showed up after. I was going to come and find you, but I didn’t want to miss anything. Also, I didn’t remember Freddie being that hot.”
“You were like twelve when he left, Maria; hot wasn’t in your vocabulary yet.”
“Uh, yes, it was, but he definitely was not this hot.”
She’s right.
He wasn’t.
The last two years had been very, very good to Freddie O’Connell.
He’s grown, sure, but it’s not just that he’s broader at the shoulders and narrower at the hips.
Or that his forearms are muscular and defined, strong enough to lift my five feet, eight inches on the ice if he had to.
It’s that he looks grown-up, his skin clear of the spots we’d both had a couple of years ago, and his jawline carved sharp instead of a soft baby face. Maria’s right. He got hot.
It’s not that I haven’t seen him in the last two years; of course I have. I just haven’t really let myself look. It hurt too much, and it was too damn awkward.
The last time I really looked at him and he looked at me was the day he left.
The day I told him to leave. He showed up for practice like normal, ready to run through our routine, a routine without any lifts that would make us competitive at Nationals the next year.
The night before I’d cried myself to sleep.
My eyes were still red and raw when I found him lacing up his skates on the bleachers just outside the rink, the same spot he found me in yesterday.
And the memory comes back full force, and this time there’s nothing to distract me from remembering every little detail.
He’d stood, only one skate on, hands reaching for mine.
He’d asked if I was okay, squeezing my hands gently and listening while I stumbled and stuttered through the speech I’d rehearsed over and over again the night before.
We had to call it. I was too tall. He was too short.
We couldn’t skate together anymore. We couldn’t be partners anymore.
It was the only way. He had to find another partner. I did too.
He dropped my hands and without another word, still only one skate on, he walked away, taking years of friendship and…well, the dream of anything more than that with him, on the ice or off it.
There’s a lot of that boy still left in him now. He’s just more now, and he became more without me.
And it still hurts, less now than it did then, but also…he really is wildly and unfairly hot.
My stomach flips and it has nothing to do with the slightly charred egg whites Camille tried to pass off as breakfast.
Oh. This is not good.
I cannot crush on Freddie. There is nothing good down that road. It would be even worse than crushing on Brayden. Riley clearly likes him, and it almost sounds like Maria is ready to give up her completely hopeless crush on Charlie in favor of my former partner.
Crap. This is very, very not good.
“Anyway,” Maria’s still talking, and she breaks into my thoughts, “he was kind of rough on you.”
“What did he say?” I ask a little too quickly, suddenly very awake, but Maria doesn’t notice.
“He said that you looked tired.”
“Well, he’s not wrong.”
Here I am thinking about how he grew up to look like a Greek god and he thinks I look tired.
Wow. That stings.
Camille turns to me and twists her mouth into a frown. “You do look a little tired,” she says. “Are you getting enough sleep?”
“Eight hours every night,” I say, shrugging, pushing the egg whites around the plate.
That’s a lie, but she hums her approval. “Well, I hate to break up this party, but you and I have the ice in less than an hour.”
“When do Charlie and I have it?” Maria asks.
“Noon,” Camille says.
Almost instantly, Maria is out of her chair, across the kitchen, and headed toward the stairs and I assume back to bed.
“I’m gonna go shower and I’ll meet you at the rink,” I say, taking one last bite of the egg whites, making a mental note that I should cook breakfast tomorrow.
· · ·
The pop beat of the Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” pounds through Kellynch’s speakers, but not loud enough to drown out Georgia O’Connell-Croft’s directions from the edge of the ice while Riley and Freddie skate through their free dance.
Every ice dance couple has two routines.
The rhythm dance is the shorter of the two, where the dance style and the beat of the music are picked out for us by the sport’s governing body before the season even starts, though we do get to choose the actual song.
This year we have to skate a Westminster Waltz.
It sounds super stuffy—because it is—but as long as you’re doing the right choreography and formations, it’s easy enough to disguise that with your musical choices.
The second program is the free dance, where we can really let our personalities and strengths shine through, both in the choice of music and choreography.
This program is exactly why Riley and Freddie work together so well on the ice.
They’re both so high energy, constantly bouncing off the walls, they need something the crowd can clap along to, and it’s a little bit retro with the synthesizers playing in the background, almost like it sampled a song from the eighties.
“Watch your footwork there, Riley!” Georgia calls out. “Another millimeter and your skate would have tangled with Freddie’s and splat.”
I make my way over to some of the empty space beside the rink to start stretching and warming up. They should be finishing up soon and Brayden should be here any second. He’s never late, but never early, either.