“Your waywon’t work,” Harper hisses as she pushes past us out onto the ice. “It never does, Gwen.”
“Not like your wobbly Rittberger yesterday,” Gwen fires back with a bittersweet smile.
Harper glares at her but doesn’t say anything. I watch her glide across the ice, elegant and graceful. She is beautiful, like a model, and I wonder what it is about me that Knox likes when he didn’t want someone like her.
“She’s gone,” Gwen says. “Out with it.”
“What?”
We set off backward, parallel, not looking at each other, but I know Gwen’s rolling her eyes. It’s as if I could hear it.
“What happened last night? All of a sudden Gargamel’s gone and you’re walking around like the happiest little thing.”
“Paisley!” Polina’s voice cuts across the ice and takes in the whole rink. “Tension!”
I imagine being pulled into the air by an imaginary little man, chin up, chest out, farther and farther until Polina gives me her slight nod.
“Well done, Watson,” I say, get ready to perform a double Lutz, jump and land clean with my blades on the ice. Gwen follows my example. Then I say, “Something has come up between…Knox and me.”
Gwen squeals and it feels like everyone in the rink casts us a glance. Polina doesn’t look particularly impressed, but, then again, she never does, so I don’t give it a second thought and quickly perform an axel to make her happy.
Gwen and I turn and skate on, when Levi and Aaron come toward us, skating backward so that they can look at us. Aaron is wearing a new outfit. It’s pale green and goes wonderfully with his red hair. Before either of them can say anything Gwen repeats, “Something hascome upbetween Knox and Paisley!”
Levi mimics Gwen’s squeak and Aaron asks, “What exactly has come up?”
“Something real?” Levi asks.
“What wouldn’t be real?” I ask. The cold wind cuts my face.
Gwen spins backward, forward, backward, forward. Watching her makes me a feel a little dizzy, but Gwen does it regularly. She needs all the movement because she’s got too much energy.
“Well, if he got you on your back and now you’re reading too much into it like every other girl before you, then you go back to the resort and he ghosts you.”
“Or if he got you on your back and now you’re reading too much into it like every other girl before you, then you go back to the resort and he gets you on your backagainbefore ghosting you,” Levi says.
“Has he ever done that?” Aaron asks. He truly sounds interested, as if it had to do with planning his program and not Knox’s sex life. “I mean, laid someone twice?”
“Good question,” Gwen says. “I’ve never heard of things ever lasting more than one night.”
“Then Paisley would be the first,” Aaron says. “And maybe that means that somethingrealindeed did come up.”
“There it is again, that word,” Gwen says. “Maybe, maybe.”
“People.” I stretch out my leg, go deeper and deeper, pull it in and spin, which turns everything around me into a swirl of color before I stand back up and continue skating with clean movements. “He didn’tlayme. And anyway, that soundssodemeaning. Why are you even using that term?”
“It’s Knox,” Gwen and Levi say in unison, while Aaron shrugs as if there wasn’t anything he could do to counter their words. “He does that kind of thing,” he adds.
Gwen, Levi, and Aaron look at me as if I had told them I was giving up figure skating and leaving Aspen.
“Ooooookay,” Levi says. “That doesn’t fit.”
“What doesn’t fit?” I’m a bit out of breath after executing a Biellmann—grabbing my free blade and pulling the heel of my boot behind and above the level of my head.
“Knox and the wordreal,” Gwen says. “But keep on talking, bestie, keep on talking. I’m curious.”
Those butterflies again. Gwen just called me herbest friend. I can feel my head begin to whirl a little. It could have to do with my spin, but I think my body today is overproducing serotonin, and it’s not used to it. Not at all.
“He said that I was his girlfriend.”
