I thought I’d frozen to death, but maybe I’m still alive.
42
Deep Inside, We Always Hope
Knox
Twenty-four missed calls. Eighteen messages. Every single one of them from Cameron. I grab my iPhone, take a sip of my beer, and watch his name blink. I put the bottle back down on the table with a smack. I lunge and toss my phone into the snow.
I didn’t go to training. What’s the point? It’s pointless now anyway. No idea what scares me more: the fact that everything’s over or my feeling of liberation.
Paisley was right. It wasn’t her. Four other snowboarders I often train with wrote in the WhatsApp group that they, too, received unannounced visits and piss tests. All of them right after the X Games. I feel like shit. I’m an ignorant dumbshit. I was so deluded that I thought those kinds of tests didn’t just happen. Now I’m sitting under a blanket on the sofa outside, next to the fire, waiting for Paisley to come back from training so I can talk to her. I wanted to raid my candy, but she’d thrown everything out. I had to laugh when I saw it. That’s Paisley.
I tear the label off the beer bottle and toss it into the fire in pieces as the terrace door slides open. My eyes wander across the floor, see gray Panama Jacks, black jeans, a Canada Goose parka. Dad’s handsare stuck in his pockets, and he’s looking down at me. He’s just come back from the hairdresser. He’s had his salt-and-pepper hair shaved on the sides and styled up on top, like me. I take one look at him and know he knows. He and Cameron are old friends.
“Is there something between you and Paisley?”
I turn my head and look into the gray sky. “Nope.”
“Knox,” he says. I don’t react. “Knox, look at me.” The couch’s rattan fabric scratches my neck as I turn my head. Dad leans against the sliding door, looking like some kind of film star. “Why weren’t you at training?”
I go through a thousand excuses in my head, but Paisley’s voice winds through every one of them.“You’ve got to tell him, Knox. He should hear it from you. Well, get on with it, tell him.”
I sigh, sit up, and wrap my hands around the beer bottle like it’s a life preserver. My heart is racing, and that’s rare outside of cases that have to do with Paisley. “Something happened, Dad.”
“Between you and Paisley?” He pauses. “Please, tell me she’s not pregnant.”
“No. God, no. Not with Paisley.”
My father seems to recognize that he has to be serious because he pushes off the window and sits down across from me in the chair. Snow falls off the soles of his shoes as he puts one leg over the other. “What happened, Knox?”
I can’t look at him. I simply can’t, so I watch the hypnotizing flicker of the flames instead as they grow smaller, then larger, then smaller again.
“The USADA was here.”
Dad removes his leg from his upper thigh. He bends forward. “When?”
“Four days ago.”
“Four days ago. And you’re just telling me now?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
I look up. “I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“You didn’t know how to tell me that the USADA had been here?”
“No.” I’m holding onto the brown beer bottle so tightly my fingers go numb. “I didn’t know how to tell you that the tests will be positive.”
He finally opens his mouth. “Are you kidding me, Knox?” Pause. “Are you kidding me?”
“No.”
“What were you taking?” His voice is soft but in an unsettling way. As soft as the ocean at night, still and black, right before a storm breaks.
“Testosterone. Androstenedione. Now and again Tren.”
