Chapter 6
Fire.
That’s my only thought when I step into Kellynch House and the acrid smell of smoke fills my nose and makes my eyes sting and water.
“No!” a desperate voice shouts somewhere inside the house. Panic floods through me. I take off at a sprint toward the kitchen, Maria right behind me. With every step, the scent gets stronger, but as soon as I make it through the archway, I let out a sigh of relief.
There’s no fire, at least not one I can see.
There is, however, a gigantic mess. Bowls and ingredients everywhere, flour and eggs and sugar in splotches on the countertops and a massively burned something in a pan on the counter.
Riley has a streak of flour in her dark hair and is staring at the thing like it insulted her skating technique.
“Um, Riley?” I ask, biting my lip. “What is that?”
“I was making us a cake for after dinner and…” She gestures at the mess as pounding footsteps from upstairs get closer and closer.
Most of the team spills into the kitchen, led by Ben Woo, Freddie, and the other male singles skater, Jimmy Harville, hot on his heels.
Jimmy, with his straw-blond hair and light brown eyes, looks like he’s been imported directly from a cornfield, but he’s from suburban Detroit, and like most male singles skaters, he’s about Ben’s height.
He’s almost toppled over by Katya Belikova and Gillian Azarian, the two ladies’ singles skaters, both of whom barely reach the boys’ shoulders, and for the first time since everyone arrived, the entire US Junior World Championships team is in one room.
Silence reigns and no one knows what to say to Riley. Her eyes are wide and she’s frozen in horror.
“Last I checked, being able to make a cake isn’t a category on the judge’s scorecard, so I think we’re still good, Riles,” Freddie jokes, coming around the counter to stand next to his partner and give the charred cake a closer examination. “Yeah, it’s dead.”
Riley laughs at that before leaning toward Freddie and bumping her shoulder against his bicep. It’s a sweet moment and the tension in the room disappears almost entirely.
“Yeah,” Katya says. Her mousy brown hair is in a tight bun, like she wears it at training, and she has huge ice packs wrapped around the lower parts of her legs.
Her pale skin stands out even more starkly against the beige wraps.
“It’s fine. Let’s get this cleaned up and get dinner going.
I’m starving. Practice was rough today.”
“For sure,” Gillian agrees, pulling back her frizzy, jet-black hair into a ponytail. “But I ate so much ice on my triple axel today, I’m not sure if I can stomach anything for dinner.”
We all laugh, but Katya winces as she shifts her weight from one leg to the other. She’s been nursing injuries to her ankles all year long even though she made it onto the team after a second-place finish at Nationals to Gillian.
I set to work wiping down the counters and for once, Maria helps without being asked, probably because Charlie and the rest of the group did. A few minutes later with the kitchen windows wide open to let out the smell of charbroiled cake, the room is clean and ready for dinner prep.
“What are we having?” Ben asks, taking a seat at one of the stools and leaning against the stained hardwood of the massive butcher-block island.
“Besides flambéed chocolate rock cake?” Jimmy jokes, poking at it with his finger, but stops when Freddie shoots him a withering glare.
“We always have massive amounts of food in the pantry,” Maria says, grabbing Charlie’s hand and pulling him toward the huge sliding door that leads to where everything is kept.
The pantry normally has to hold food for an entire camp’s worth of kids for a week, which is about the same amount of food as feeding the ten of us and our coaches until we leave.
“How about zucchini pasta? I know we have a ton of it.”
“We could do an assembly line,” Brayden chimes in, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt, “and I bet if we all ask really nicely, Adriana would make us some of her famous sauce.”
“Your mom’s sauce?” Freddie asks, and my eyes fly to him.
Those are the first real words he’s said to me since he got here, and for the briefest moment our eyes meet, but then he looks away, frowning at something.
Me, I guess? He used to come over for dinner every Sunday when we were little.
My mom and I did the whole Italian thing, sauce and pasta and meatballs and sausage.
At some point, when he became a semipermanent fixture at our house, Freddie and I were put in charge of the sauce, adding the spices and herbs, letting it simmer and stirring it when necessary, and most importantly, taste testing. It was a sacred responsibility.
The entire group turns to me, and my cheeks flush at their focus.
“Yeah, but it takes too long,” I say. “It has to simmer for hours.”
“You can shorten it though, can’t you?” Gillian asks. “It doesn’t have to be perfect. We need something to make zucchini taste like…not zucchini.”
Everyone chuckles at this and I nod. “Yeah, sure, I can pull together something like that, I guess.”
“Perfect!” Brayden says. “We’ve got pasta—sort of—and sauce. What else?”
“Garlic bread?” Jimmy suggests, hopefully.
“There’s some bread in the pantry,” I say, with a nod toward it.
“Sweet!” Jimmy heads in that direction as Charlie and Maria emerge with armloads of zucchini, and a few moments later Jimmy reappears with four loaves of bread.
I quickly take stock of the kitchen and our supplies, sliding around everyone to get out the ingredients and tools we’ll need while they get to work. And after I’m sure Riley isn’t looking, I dump her failed attempt at dessert into the garbage.
“We need music,” Riley suggests while she and Freddie set up the spiralizer to make the zucchini into something at least resembling pasta. Everyone else hums in agreement.
“I got this,” Ben says, pairing his phone with the speaker in the corner of the kitchen.
Soft, mournful music starts to play, like the kind of instrumental that would accompany a tragic death on a TV show, and I wrinkle my nose.
“Anything more cheerful?” I ask. “We’re celebrating.”
“What? This is relaxing,” Ben protests, but everyone else groans.
“Yeah, it’d be great for, like, a really relaxing funeral procession,” Freddie says.
“I’ll have you know this playlist got me through my recovery from knee surgery and an abandoned broken heart.” Everyone stares at him. That’s exactly what the music sounds like. “Ugh, fine!” he concedes, and flips to another song, which sounds almost exactly like the one before it.
“Ben. C’mon,” Jimmy says from where he’s slicing up the bread. “I know you’re still moping over Sawyer, and I’ll admit, my brother is awesome, but it’s been six months since you guys broke up. He’s at Michigan State, not dead. And your knee is fine now. No more whiny music.”
I knew Jimmy and Ben trained together at a rink in Michigan, but I had no idea that Ben dated Jimmy’s older brother. Sawyer’s a hockey player. Jimmy’s a figure skater. Ben’s bi, Sawyer’s gay, and Jimmy’s straight. So much for stereotypes.
“Let me see,” Charlie says, patting Ben on the shoulder and taking the phone from him, his thumb swiping over the screen. “Okay, here we go.”
The peppy sounds of a song I recognize from the radio station we play at the rink, but that I couldn’t name to save my life, filter through the kitchen, and a murmur of approval follows from almost everyone.
Ben rolls his eyes but settles at the counter again, crushing up the garlic cloves I put in front of him.
It’s not exactly a gourmet meal, but it’s not bad for a bunch of teenagers who mostly don’t actually cook for themselves, ever, Riley’s ruined cake notwithstanding. As we finish up the prep work, the kitchen starts to smell way better and my stomach growls in response.
“Hungry?” Brayden asks, checking over my shoulder as I sprinkle a handful of basil into the sauce and turn down the heat on the stove.
“Yep,” I say, stirring the pot and then putting the lid over it so it can simmer.
I lean back against the counter, watching the rest of the team bustling around the room, and I grin.
I’ve never been on a real team before. I mean, me and Brayden and Camille are a kind of team, I guess.
And even if it sometimes feels like I’m dragging them kicking and screaming into it, my family is a team too.
But this feels different. This is sort of cool. We’ve been to Junior Worlds before, and while we were always technically a team, it never really felt nice like this. It’s still a little bit weird, to be honest. But by the time we leave for Paris, nights like this one will hopefully feel normal.
“I’m gonna go set the table,” I say, pushing off the counter and sliding by Brayden, who moves out of the way to let me by, but I can still feel him there. I don’t actually mind it. At all. It’s nice, having him close. Comforting and soothing and easy.
“I’ll help,” he says as I open a cabinet and reach toward the top shelf.
I’m tall, but these cabinets are huge, and the drinking glasses are actually out of my reach.
Before I can move out of the way, his hand is on my hip as he balances against me to reach over my head and grab the stack of glasses.
It’s not as if his hand has never been there before.
In fact, his hand might have touched my hip more than anyone else’s in the world, including my own, but there’s something about it right now, with everyone else in the room—oh, who am I kidding?
—with Freddie in the room, that makes it matter.
I hold my breath until he lets go and steps away and then exhale slowly before I turn and glance back at the rest of the room.
And yeah, he saw. Most of them did, if the eye rolls are any indication, but I can’t control my gaze settling on him. Freddie’s face is entirely passive, nothing in his eyes, not one flicker of jealousy or, really, anything at all.